Are We Attracted to Fascism?

Before one can even consider answering whether humanity is attracted to Fascism, they need to work out: What is Fascism? Well you might think to just Google it or to look in a dictionary, and if one does that they get a rather vague definition, such as this one provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, “An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organisation.” That doesn’t really help us pin down what Fascism actually is, yes, it is authoritarian and nationalistic and usually right-wing, but what is it? Well the next course of action would be to look at the etymology of the word ‘Fascism’, which goes all the way back to the early Roman Republic. The heads of the Republic were protected by bodyguards called Lictors, who waved a stick called a ‘Fasces’ made up of a bundle of birch wood tied together with a red cord. As a metaphorical object the fasces represented the different social classes tide together working towards a common goal. As individual birch rods they were weak, but together they were strong.

Okay so now we are getting somewhere, but we still aren’t totally there. Well thankfully Umberto Eco, an Italian author who lived under Mussolini’s reign, compiled 14 signs of Fascism. Eco agreed Fascism is confusing because there isn’t one unifying principal or ideology, so he tried his best to give 14 general examples of what fascism looked like: fascists do not take kindly to criticism, they appeal to nationalism through Xenophobia, the fascist regime is built on a frustrated middle class, it gains steam through collective populism (minority rights are given up for the larger group), ‘Newspeak’ or simplified digestible ways to communicate rule fascist discourse, the cult of tradition, a rejection of modernism, people are susceptible to the cult of action for action’s sake, thrive off fear of difference and racist rhetoric, a fear of others wealth, permanent warfare, political elitism, reliance on a death cult, and power transfers to sexuality. That is of course a long list, and includes general examples of what Fascism may look like, and that’s the thing, Fascism comes in many different forms — it is not always the same.

But at the end of the day, George Orwell argued in his essay ‘What is Fascism?’ that fascism as a word is pretty much meaningless. Orwell stated that if people could decide on a working…

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