Today I want to talk about the 14 characteristics of fascism.

Hi, everyone. I’m back for another installment of Today I Want to Talk About… (TIWTTA), a series where I take a hot topic and break it down. Today’s topic, as always, is a relevant one.

“Fascism” is a buzzword today. Out of curiosity, I typed “fascism” into Google News. Of the first 10 results, nine of them were about contemporary topics rather than historical instances. And it’s not partisan: both left- and right-wing sources referred to their counterparts as fascist. So, who’s being truthful?

I’m not here to say.

That’s why we’re here to talk about the 14 characteristics of fascism: because I have biases too, and as Internet discourse has taught us, practically any governmental action can be spun as “tyranny” or “fascism.” To avoid stepping on any toes, any references to real-life governments (and there will be a lot of them) will be historical rather than current. So, here we go.

Who came up with the characteristics?

The 14 characteristics were brainstormed by Umberto Eco (1932-2016), an Italian medieval scholar, semiotician, philosopher, author, critic, and political commentator. His 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” outlined 14 points that, should a government check off, may not be a fascist government yet, but they’re on their way there. In 2003, political scientist Lawrence W. Britt came up with his own 14 characteristics. I’m going to focus on Eco’s 14 characteristics, but if you want to see what Britt has to say, click here.

What are the characteristics, and what are examples of them?

The cult of tradition.

In fascist systems, the focus is always on the past. Citizens fall under the sway of the ruler because the leader promises to take them back to some kind of golden age, whether or not that golden age ever happened. The cult of tradition is usually very syncretistic, incorporating ideas from all kinds of religions and political theories into the leader’s platform to make it more enticing to the citizenry.

The easy example is Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. Hitler entered German politics during one of the worst economic depressions in the history of any country. Hitler accrued power by promising to restore Germany back to its pre-WW1 status. And, as Eric Metaxas detailed in his fantastic biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Third Reich made their own theology that appealed to the strong Christian culture of 20th-century Germany and associated Christian faith with Nazism. (It’s important to know that this was an act: while no one knows for sure if Hitler was religious, many of his underlings weren’t, and made that clear behind closed doors.)

The rejection of modernism.

In keeping with this theme of obsessive traditionalism is a rejection of modernism. I don’t know how to talk about this without using an example, so example!

When the Khmer Rouge won the Cambodian Civil War, Pol Pot made a concerted effort to start the country over. He renamed Cambodia to Democratic Kampuchea and forced the population to move into the countryside and work hard labor. He also came down hard on anything “Western,” which translated to anything having to do with non-Cambodian culture or the previous government. Libraries and religious institutions were destroyed, ethnic and religious minorities were executed en masse, and intellectuals and workers in the pre-Khmer Rouge government were hunted down and killed.

Rejection of modernism also fueled the Nazi ideal of blut und boden (“blood and soil/earth”). The Third Reich held up rural workers as superior to German city slickers and closely tied Aryan ideals to rural life. This not only made the draw to Nazism stronger to the rural working class hit hard by the post-WW1 depression, it also deepened nationwide anti-Semitism. Propaganda taught that Jews had bought up the countryside and forced Aryans to move into cities.

Action for action’s sake.

I’m going to quote Eco directly here because he says it better than I ever could:

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from [Hermann Göring, second-in-command to Hitler] alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.”

Umberto Eco, “UR-Fascism”

Fascists are always anti-intellectual. There are many reasons for it, both intellectual and practical: the ability to sow division by painting intellectuals as patronizing elites; because intellectuals by nature poke hole in the idealized past that fascists present as a goal; because campuses are a breeding ground for resistance movements; and because any political movement lives or dies through young people, so it’s imperative that fascist forces recruit as many young people as possible, and intellectual work prevents that.

Pol Pot, who executed intellectuals by the truckload, is one example of fascist anti-intellectualism. Another is Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain who ruled Spain with an iron fist from 1939 to 1975. His nacionalista forces perpetrated El Terror Blanco, political violence against groups Franco considered undesirable and critics of Franco’s rule. Intellectuals were chief among them: newspaper editors, college professors, and writers. (The most famous victim of El Terror Blanco is Federico García Lorca, a Spanish poet whose body has never been found.)

Disagreement is treason.

Tying closely to point #3 is the idea of disagreement as treason. The reasons for this are hopefully clear by now: fascist thought can’t withstand critical analysis. And questioning the actions of a fascist government is how rebellions start. So, they must be nipped in the bud.

Two examples of this can be found in South America. The first and more famous is the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. After taking power through a military coup, Pinochet, about as extreme a conservative as one can be, outlawed leftist political parties. He took a page from Pol Pot’s book by having his secret police, la Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional or DINA for short, hunt down and execute members of his predecessor Salvador Allende’s administration. And horrific torture awaited anyone arrested for political reasons. And that was assuming Pinochet decided to keep you alive. Many dissidents were treated to a death flight, being dropped from a flying helicopter to either die from impact or drown in the body of water they were dropped into.

In the neighboring country of Argentina, Jorge Rafael Videla ousted President Isabel Perón from power in a military coup. Videla started la Guerra Sucia, state-sponsored terrorism meant to stamp out resistance. Taking cues from his neighbor Pinochet, many of the 13,000-30,000 Argentinians killed or “disappeared” during the Videla Regime did so from the open door of a helicopter.

Fear of difference.

To quote Eco again: “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Fascists always exploit division, turning the populace against some “other.” And the “other” need not be a race: historically, the “other” has included LGBTQ+ people, communists, unionists, journalists, intellectuals, etc.

I’m not going to use the obvious example. Instead, let’s look to Guatemala. From 1960 to 1996, Guatemala was engulfed in a civil war. The Guatemalan government used the unrest to wage a genocide against the indigenous Mayan people. The worst of the violence occurred in the year that Efraín Ríos Montt was president of Guatemala. It’s estimated that 75,000 Mayans were murdered during Montt’s presidency.

Appeal to a frustrated middle class.

Fascism is the logical conclusion of grievance politics, politics centered around resentment of others. You may have noticed by now many fascist leaders don’t come into office democratically. They take leadership by force, by emerging victorious in a civil war or ousting the current leader at the end of a gun barrel. Either during their rise or during their rule, these leaders will fan the flames of division, pitting citizens against one another. Divide and conquer: citizens ready to turn on one another will happily follow a leader who promises victory over the “other.”

Appealing to a frustrated middle class is how the Rwandan Genocide happened. When Belgian colonists were removed from Rwanda, they deliberately installed a government full of Tutsis, an ethnic minority. The Tutsi government oppressed the Hutus, the ethnic majority. And the Hutu citizens directed their resentment at the only people they could: Tutsi citizens. Interahamwe and Impuzamagambi, Hutu militias, exploited this resentment against Tutsis to radicalize Hutu citizens into anti-Tutsi violence. Georges Rutaganda, a higher-up in the Interahamwe, also ran the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines radio station, where he regularly broadcasted anti-Tutsi propaganda and where instructions were issued when the way was cleared for Hutus to kill Tutsis with impunity.

Obsession with a plot.

An unfortunate aspect of human psychology: we easily rally against something. And fascists know this. So, one of the first orders of business is to feed their followers a plot. By convincing their followers it’s them against the world and/or they’re under attack, you have a citizenry whose collective mind is geared towards war. You also see this in cults and hate groups. Doomsday preppers stock food and weapons with the anticipation of the government declaring war on its citizens. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the Aryan Brotherhood rally because they fear what minorities would do to white society without the fear of white violence.

Urban legends say that obsession with a plot led to Josef Stalin’s downfall. Stalin, for obvious reasons, was a paranoid guy. That paranoia motivated him to purge his government, wantonly executing people he thought were spies. Because of his hair-trigger, when he suffered the stroke that killed him, his subordinates left his body for hours because they feared for the safety of the people who entered Stalin’s chamber to check on him.

Simultaneous perceptions of the enemy as strong and weak.

Say it with me now: there is no consistency in fascism. And one place where there’s real inconsistency is how the leader and his subjects perceive the “other.” Examples of this cognitive dissonance can be found in anti-Semitic stereotypes. On the one hand, Jews are depicted as sub-humans, as scheming misers with huge noses and beady eyes who perform human sacrifices. On the other hand, Jews are also inhumanly smart and connected, having the resources and strength of community to control the global economy and global media, cause 9/11, falsify the Holocaust, etc.

Similarly contradictory propaganda surrounded slaves in the Antebellum South. Slaves were simultaneously primitive, sexually voracious darkies who would descend into savagery without the structure of the slavery system and conniving schemers who would think up a plan to overthrow their masters with any amount of alone time or education.

This teeter-totter of an inferiority complex and supremacy drags the followers deeper. They’re motivated to back the leader’s human rights violations both by humiliation-induced resentment as well as by the feeling that victory is over the next hill.

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy, and life is permanent warfare.

Another Eco quote:

For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.

This is why so much violence follows a dictator taking power: violence against minorities, political opponents, journalists and any kind of resistance. Even if the resistant forces do so non-violently, in a fascist’s eyes the act of existing is an act of war.

We can return to Rwanda for an example of this. While the Tutsis were the primary target of the Hutu militias, many Hutus were also killed. These were moderate Hutus who either refused to participate in the violence or protected Tutsis. In the eyes of Hutu Power, refusing to butcher Tutsis was an act of treason and was punishable by death.

Contempt for the weak and a popular elitism.

Never be fooled. For all the bluster fascist leaders make about ushering their countries into a golden age, their plan is to always install the same kind of hierarchical society they overthrew or succeeded, with themselves and the apples of their eye at the top. To disguise this, they present a popular elitism to the people, telling them they are a chosen people and residents of other countries pale in comparison to them. At the same time, the leader makes clear that some citizens are more elite than others. Think of the phrase the Seven Commandments are whittled down to by the end of Animal Farm: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

And, as hierarchies are designed to do, those “above” others have deep contempt for those “below” them. The Aryan Race and the Jews, the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, the Hutus and the Tutsis, the Guatemalans and the Mayans…

Everybody is educated to be a hero.

In fascist mythology, the usual heroic archetype is inverted. Whereas a hero is usually an exceptional individual, fascism makes everyone a hero. And whereas with a typical hero, death is the ultimate sacrifice, death, and especially death fighting enemies of the state, is viewed as the ultimate reward.

Eco gave an example in his essay. The falangistas, political devotees of Francisco Franco, had the motto of Viva la Muerte, “long live death.”

Machismo.

With its heroic fantasies, hierarchical structure, love of action and contempt towards peace, fascism could be considered the politics of toxic masculinity. In a fascist society, women in the desired group are, at best, accessories to their men and, at worst, glorified servants meant to cater to men’s every need. Machismo also shows itself as extreme homophobia and an inclination towards sexual violence.

Chilean prisons were already nightmarish under Pinochet’s rule, but the horror ratcheted up to eleven for female prisoners. Not only were female prisoners regularly raped, but reports also emerged of prison guards training animals, dogs and rats, to have sex with inmates. One woman testified that she was forced to have sex with her father and brother.

Jumping up to the Dominican Republic, El Jefe Rafael Trujillo was a notorious womanizer. He was married three times and had multiple mistresses. That’s shady; the rape that took place in Dominican prisons is evil.

Selective populism and standing against “rotten” parliamentary governments.

I had to Google “populism,” because for how frequently it was used during the Trump Administration, I never got a solid definition. Based on that, I’m going to directly quote Eco again:

Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be
their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction.

This conflation of collective and individual is coupled with a conscious effort to erode trust in previous forms of government. Fascists usually come on the scene during an unpopular leader’s reign, and exploit dissatisfaction with the present government to gain popularity. They’ll also use this opportunity to sow distrust in democracy. They may spread rumors of voter fraud or allege that those in power are abusing their power. Of course, the great irony is once the leader takes power, they will do everything they accuse their predecessors of.

It is important to note that populism as a political ideology is not necessarily bad. Populism is defined as “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups.” By this definition, Bernie Sanders is a populist, but you don’t see him dropping people from helicopters or making a personal police force.

But speaking of Bernie, I pored and pored Google, and all examples I could find were modern, so in the interest of not getting death threats, I’m going to move on to the 14th and final characteristic.

The use of Newspeak.

Newspeak, coined by George Orwell in his seminal novel 1984, is “ambiguous euphemistic language used chiefly in political propaganda,” according to Google. The idea of it is thought control. By dressing up unpleasant topics in flowery language or simplifying complex topics down into simple words, the citizen’s mind is conditioned into nodding along with whatever the leader says, even if morally they disagree.

This last example comes from the good ol’ US of A. During the Iraq War, Iraqis suspected of allegiance to al-Qaeda were detained and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” in holding sites like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. Such techniques included things like physical assault, forcing detainees to stay awake to the point of hallucinating, waterboarding, sodomy, and threats to kill detainees’ families. Torture–that’s the point I’m trying to get at. These “techniques” were torture techniques. But with a name like “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Bush administration and US Armed Forces tried to present it to the American people as a necessary evil.

Conclusion

What to take away from all of this? Be smart.

Like I said in the introduction, part of the reason fascism is hard to spot is because the term has been watered down. Because people from the left and right have used it to denigrate leaders’ decisions, the word has lost the punch it should have.

So, use these points as Eco intended you to: as a litmus test. Political leaders are human beings. They can do things for the benefit of the people they represent, but sin doesn’t go away when you’re sworn into office. Making a selfish decision or not thinking through the potential consequences of a law doesn’t make them a fascist. But if they’re consistently pushing rhetoric that falls in line with the 14 characteristics Eco outlined….BEWARE.

Until next time, dear reader.