by David J. Lobina
For someone who grew up in the South of Europe but has lived in the UK for the last 20 or so years, and who, moreover, is a sort-of linguist, the recent proliferation of the word “fascism” to refer to certain political events and tendencies in the English-speaking world, especially in the US, is not a little surprising. After all, the people we used to refer to as fascists when I was growing up in Italy and Spain certainly bore a resemblance to classical fascism – some were the descendants of actual fascists, in fact – whereas the guys who get called fascist all the time these days, especially in the US, are nothing like them. And in any case, it was the 1990s then and it is 2023 now, is the term “fascism” still relevant today?[i]
Who were these fascists from my youth, then? If you lived in Italy or Spain in the 1990s and were politically active, you would most certainly run into them sooner or later and there were a couple of dates in the calendar that you needed to look out for, as neo-fascists, to employ a perhaps more appropriate nomenclature, tended to come out to commemorate events such as the so-called March on Rome, on the 27th of October, in Italy, and Francisco Franco’s death, on the 20th of November, in Spain.[ii]
As mentioned, some of these people were the descendants of real fascists, and this is perhaps clearest in the case of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, or MSI (The Italian Social Movement), a political party founded in 1946 by veterans from the so-called Republic of Salò – more properly, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana (The Italian Social Republic), a Nazi puppet state nominally led by Benito Mussolini in his nadir days – and which, in 1994, and under the name of Alleanza Nazionale (The National Alliance), entered the government of Silvio Berlusconi, the business magnate turned politician.[iii] This is to some extent also true of the many offshoots of the original Falange Española (The Spanish Falange), a party that was founded in the 1930s on the model of Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (the National Fascist Party), the latter created in 1921. In its latest iteration, the Falange goes by the name of the Falange Española de las JONS.[iv]
The modern versions of these organisations, however, differ greatly from classical fascism, by which I mean Italian fascism from 1922 to 1943 (roughly), as well as from each other, and these differences become a chasm when it comes to US politics. And yet seemingly every other week there is an article out there about how the Republican Party is becoming a fascist party, or about how Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, or Ron DeSantis are all fascists. Read more »