Get to know fascism as a system

Published at: 13/09/2024 04:22 PM

Fascism is a political movement, an ideology and a form of government that is totalitarian, anti-democratic, ultra-nationalist and extreme right.

Countries such as Israel, the United States, Argentina and Chile have set aside democracy to establish fascism as a system of government. Since Benito Mussolini coined the term in 1919 to describe his political movement, the fasci di or combat groups that seized power in Italy in 1922.

There are clear peculiarities associated with this ideology. Robert O. Paxton, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia University who is known as the father of studies on fascism, defines it as a movement that, to wash its face, the Foundation for Economic Education of Spain, presents it as a form of political practice that awakens popular enthusiasm through sophisticated propaganda techniques for an anti-liberal, anti-socialist, violently exclusionary and expansionist nationalist program. As a mass nationalist movement, it seeks to restore a country through expansion, violent attacks on enemies, both internal and external, to finally replace democracy.

One of the distinctive attributes of fascism, in its original conception and in its contemporary contextualization, is the extermination, disappearance or suppression of the “other”, from which the fascist is “different”. This is the root of discriminatory practices, for example, during the Holocaust against Jews, communists, gypsies, homosexuals and others during the Second World War.

Also, Spanish politician Ana Montes, a Master in International Relations and Diplomacy at the Diplomatic and Political School, explained in 1998 that “fascism as an ideology is present among the population, and it has the same enemies of yesteryear, as a result of its violent racism. For example, white supremacy in the United States attacks African Americans, in Central Europe, extreme right-wing political groups and parties target Muslims, immigrants, and in Eastern Europe they target Jews and Westerners.”

As in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, their common features continue to be capitalist corporatism, ultranationalism, racism, feelings of genetic superiority, classism, the exaltation of conservative ideals such as religion, the exercise of power through repression, the destruction of democratic meaning, the annihilation of social rights, persecution of social democratic and communist ideas or those that make up the spectrum of the left.

But these practices have been reproduced in many ways in other contexts through the “elimination”, “disappearance” or “eradication” of political antagonists by the extreme right, as in Argentina with Videla or in Chile with Pinochet, where they applied actions to annihilate or suppress those they considered “different” for reasons ideological, in this case the ideologies of the left.

A New Variety of Fascism: The “Libertarians”

In a research carried out by Misión Verdad , called “Fascism: Its Origins and Contemporary Denominations”, he explains that “the cross-cutting political crisis of traditional political representation systems, which includes the loss of credibility in models, government offers and responses to crises by parties and conservative, social democratic and traditional left leaders is generating a new milestone: the emergence of disruptive extreme rights, represented by self-described libertarian leaders”.

The phenomenon of political representation has had specific political actors such as Donald Trump in the US, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Javier Milei in Argentina and other groups of political factors that have contested places in international politics under the name of the “alternative right”.

This new type of right, with openly proto-fascist overtones, with ideologies and direct predecessor movements that influenced and formed the basis of fascism, captures radicalisms from those extremists that include a tremendously sectarian anti-rights agenda.

Now, they present themselves as a right wing with a public narrative linked to characters from the big show, with little or no political knowledge, but who come to public office because of the weariness of the Peoples in the face of the lack of solutions based on traditional proposals.

However, it is a deceptive and extremely dangerous political offer; we have seen individuals like Trump, Bolsonaro, Milei and even Bukele, who maintain links with political elites, their “libertarian” ideology is based on defending the values of free enterprise and the protection of private property and in practice they reproduce the neoliberal ideology.

The common features between these actors lead to practices and declarations marked by racism, selective anti-migratory measures based on race and origin, classism, aporophobia, elimination of social rights and reduction of the State, moral conservatism, destruction of social rights acquired by diversity, and the application of policies of corporate libertinism with a view to disappearing the regulatory functions of States, among others.

But, in addition, he emphasized the research of Mission Truth, which is about governments that have promoted corporatism in economic life and subservience to the American imperial model, through the cult of war and economic imperialism exercised by the Western elite against the rest of the world.

Therefore, it must be considered that the parties, organizations and political actors of the so-called “new libertarian right” are in reality new, more extreme versions of the traditional right, a current adaptation and more sophisticated mimicry of fascist ideologies in the political contexts of the present time.

Venezuela libertarians Venezuelan people .

AMELYREN BASABE/Mazo News Team