When the movement was first founded, it was called the Nazi-Sozis or some such as in National and Socialist. After 1925, the Sozi was dropped and the nation part remained.

Has the Doughy One’s book made enough of a splash to warrant discussing it, even for the purposes of ridicule, this late in the game?

Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot (to name a few of the most egregious examples), all held at their sociopolitical core the same pseudo-religious tenets that Marx proposed, and the staggering amount of death and torture those monsters precipitate dwarf, by several orders of magnitude, the suffering resultant from any religious beliefs. ( I know, some who are ignorant of history will object and say that Nazism and Fascism were Right-Wing movements. To them, I suggest they read Jonah Goldberg’s seminal book “Liberal Fascism” to learn the truth. The word Nazi was an acronym stemming from the German name for the National Socialist Party!)

Not to say that you’re not right about a better formulation; on that I really couldn’t say. I’m just pointing out that there seems to be a certain degree of unity on what characterizes Fascism. Iow, it’s not just a label to be used as a club to beat opponents, like say, ‘activist judges’, or ‘liberal’.

The NSDAP and the PNF were quite clearly secular movements but the Falange, the Ustasa, the Iron Guard, the South Africa movements, the ZBOR and the OUN ultras were not.

Not really.

3 is so common amongst political movements as to be anodyne. One might as well say ‘fascists live under the earth’s yellow sun

4 is untrue. Hitler hated the traditional military but was forced into alliance with them . The plans of Roehm for a people militia, devoid of Prussian cliques and aristocrats were popular within the wider movement and accorded with a long tradition of rhetoric. Mussolini had a similar attitude, needing the military, lacking the strenght to change it, but deeply suspicious of the whole institution. One more example, Pavelic abandoned the Home guard, the military formed out of the old Croatian element of the Yugoslav army, and looked instead to his party para-military formations in the Ustasa Militia.

5 is again so common as to be heuristically useless. For Jonah’s sake, lets consider the conservatives who controlled the media, Hindenburg, Pitt, the wartime governments of Asquith and Churchill.

6 again, not really a particular. One might say every state that has ever lasted more than a month (and ever a few that did not) has been obsessed by national security.

7 depends. The NSDAP and the PNF were quite clearly secular movements but the Falange, the Ustasa, the Iron Guard, the South Africa movements, the ZBOR and the OUN ultras were. Religion is used as a marker, dividing the ‘healthy’ volk from the ‘sick’. But that merely depends on the particulars of the movement’s rhetoric and circumstance

8 again depends. While in the case of the two most ‘successful’ movements, the NSDAP and the PNF, deals were made (indeed that might be the reason they were able to ‘conquer the state’, big business was very much at the beck and call of the new leadership. Further, other movements, such as the Guard in Romania and the Scythe Cross in Hungary were explicitly anti-capitalist, as in they saw the operation of industrialisation and commerce as unhealthy activities, undermining their precious volk. Lets not forget that big business continued to fund in the main the nationalist parties in Germany till 1932.

9 is common, but with fascism, it had its own reasons. Trade unions and labour power were an affront to the ‘majestic’ unity of the nation. Just as fascists hated the ‘establishment’ for being a nation within the real nation, so unions, with their ‘decadent’ psuedo-marxism and their materialism seemed to seperate rather than unify the ‘healthy’

10 is again untrue. Evola, one of the foremost thinkers in both Mussolini’s Italy and in the post war international fascist movements was his nation’s leading dadaist. Despite it’s presumed innocence from dealing with the Third Reich, Bauhaus architects continued to be commisioned until 1938. How else would one classify Junger or Heidigger or Gentile or Marinetti or Papini or Eliade but as intellectuals. Fascism hatred was reserved for what it preceived as decadent art or intellectual enquiry, a source of disruption and corruption in their shinny new world.

11 is the central plank of most governments since the 17th century. It is barely a fascist trait solely.

12 is a by product of disfunctional civic societies. The CCP manages to be both a horrifically repressive government, not fascist and eye wateringly corrupt at the same time. Remarkable stuff.

There is a fairly recent (last 20-15 years) definition of fascism that has far greater heuristic use. Building on the work of Mosse, Payne, Rogers Griffin and Eatwell and Emilio Gentile, this ‘new consensus’ has a remarkable power in evaluating the fascist movements in both ‘struggle’ and power. Fascism is thus a form of ultra-nationalism, that seeks to ‘save’ the nation from preceived collaspe and decadence by rebirth and political action. While it is easy to doubt, fascists considered themselves revolutionaries, breaking a temporal narrative of decline and regenerating the nation and it’s volk.

This is not of course to say Jonah is in the same parsec to the truth. Fascism, for several very good reasons, is most at home on the right of the political spectrum. The similarities he ‘discerns’ are merely the common ‘solutions’ of 20th centruy politics, taken up across the political spectrum, even those sainted and humble conservatives.

In the history of publishing, perhaps.

1 Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
2 Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
3 Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
4 Supremacy of the Military
5 Controlled Mass Media
6 Obsession with National Security
7 Religion and Government are Intertwined
8 Corporate Power is Protected
9 Labor Power is Suppressed
10 Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
11 Obsession with Crime and Punishment
12 Rampant Cronyism and Corruption

As I understand it, you don’t have to score a 12/12 before you can talk about a movement or state or what have as Fascist.

The controversy is in who to apply the label to, even when it clearly fits. Thus it’s perfectly okay to call ‘liberals’ Commies, or the more popular epithet, Socialists. But it’s not okay to call certain other groups Fascists.