If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck (even if that duck claims that it's an elephant and keeps saying that everyone else is a duck).
I mean... objectively Russia ticks pretty much all of the boxes, just compare it with Mussolini's Italy.
> I mean... objectively Russia ticks pretty much all of the boxes, just compare it with Mussolini's Italy.
Is Putin's ideology a form of "fascism"? Some scholars say "yes", others say "no".
Since you already seem to have a good awareness of the "yes" case, let me share with you some of the "no" case [0]:
> “Snyder is wrong,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Russia researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera.
> Russia doesn’t meet the criteria of a fascist state – there is no ideological party, no hysterical cult of the leader, and no revolutionary new regime juxtaposed to the old one.
> Instead, in Russia, “there is an aggressive, imperialist, authoritarian state with a ruling junta”, Mitrokhin said.
I'm not a fan of Putin – I have always been cheering for Ukraine in the present war, and I think it is disappointing it has not gone better for the Ukrainians, but I suppose hope springs eternal – but I also think the word "fascism" is overused nowadays, and I prefer narrower definitions like that of Mitrokhin – the broader definitions miss significant aspects of what Mussolini was actually on about.
Authoritarian+, and ultranationalist+, ... dictatorial leader+, centralized autocracy+, militarism+, forcible suppression of opposition+, belief in a natural social hierarchy (+ as far as regime goes), subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation+ or race, and strong regimentation of society+ and the economy+
It doesn't tick the most important one, though. Fascism isn't merely conservative totalitarianism; it positions itself as new and revolutionary, the "third way".
But Putin's Russia isn't "third way" at all, neither ideologically nor in practice. It's a classic traditional authoritarian conservative dictatorship.
But revolutionary fascism is but one variant within a broader palette, is it not?
If we substitute "The West and its degenerate values" for the usual enemies, then Stanley's definition seems to describe Putin's regime quite succinctly:
In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism thusly:
[A] cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation ... The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.
I would agree that Putin is not an archetypal fascist in all categories - but he does seem be on the spectrum.
This is the point where there's a lot of disagreement. The OG Italian fascism is explicitly revolutionary, as were its contemporary offshoots like NSDAP, Iron Guard, Arrow Cross, Ustashe etc.
My personal take is that if you remove this requirement, there's no clear distinction between fascism and other forms of right-wing authoritarianism, with the two getting conflated.
We need to better language to describe the new breed of postmodern terror-driven autocrats like Putin, and post-truth / antidemocratic Western leaders like Trump.
But at the end of the day, it's academic. The real question is, what to do about them.
> Historian Ian Kershaw once wrote that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall."[28] Each group described as "fascist" has at least some unique elements, and frequently definitions of "fascism" have been criticized as either too broad or too narrow. According to many scholars, fascists—especially when they're in power—have historically attacked communism, conservatism, and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support primarily from the far-right.[30]
So, rather than purporting to define "fascism", the article acknowledges it has many definitions and it is contested which one is right. Read in the context of the whole section "Definitions", I don't think the opening sentence should be read as a definition, except in a very vague ballpark sense, which isn't meant to be used in decisively answering the question of whether any particular thing is an instance of it.
Furthermore, it mentions key elements of historical fascism – anti-communism, anti-conservatism, and anti-liberalism – whose presence in Putin's Russia is debatable. Putin has criticised communism, but he tends to go for nuanced and qualified criticism rather than the demonisation of it which was historically found in Mussolini's Italy, Hitler's Germany or Franco's Spain. He isn't anti-conservative either. Nor is he rhetorically opposed to parliamentary liberalism – he is accused of undermining the substance of it, but he pays it lip service, unlike Mussolini and Hitler who demonised it.
The first actual definition it gives in the "Definition" section is this:
> Historian Stanley G. Payne's definition is frequently cited as standard by notable scholars,[31] such as Roger Griffin,[32] Randall Schweller,[33] Bo Rothstein,[34] Federico Finchelstein,[35] and Stephen D. Shenfield,[36] [37] His definition of fascism focuses on three concepts:
And the first of those three concepts is:
> "Fascist negations" – anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism.
I say Putin lacks all three – he isn't anti-liberal (you can say he is in a contemporary sense, but not in the historical sense that Mussolini was, which is I believe the sense Payne means), he isn't anti-communist (again, not in the sense Mussolini/etc were), and he isn't anti-conservative.
You are trying to align a governance type with a political spectrum.
It’s a category error.
Fascism has nothing to do with the policies, and everything to do with whatever is necessary to retain power, given the society fascists intends to rule.
He can’t be a monarchist, he doesn’t advocate for mercantilism!
> Will they end the system that empowered them once in power?
This is one of a couple of points where the lack of a precise definition causes the perspective to fall apart. Liberals would do exactly that by instituting democratic liberalism in a country after coming to power.
Changing a system isn't fascistic. Even replacing isn't characteristic of fascism (although what is beyond self-identification), the French are up to Republic #5 and republics generally aren't fascist. It is necessary to evaluate the change and impacts of the change in context to work out what the nature of a political thing is.
Fascists may participate in a peaceful transition of power in order to gain power, then do not allow for peaceful transitions of power in the future. Jan 6 was an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the peaceful transition of power. Just like the Beer Hall Putsch. Unsuccessful, but totally unambiguous.
Yes, obviously, changing a system isn’t fascism.
Doing so in a way that prevents any other future system change or peaceful transfer of political change is Fascism.
How is this even complicated?
We all come up with rules. Everyone follows the rules. We can all decide to change the rules, but again everybody decides what those rules are, and those rules allow for future changing of rules and actively support the peaceful transition of power. Sometimes there’s somebody who says rules don’t apply to me and I’m the only person who gets to make the rules forever and if you disagree with me I’ll kill you. One activity is not fascist, the other is.
The difficulty is fascists never say they are fascists. they don’t advertise it. They will swear up and down that they’re following the rules, and will abide by the rules right up until they’re powerful enough, that they can just kill everyone who opposes them.
> Doing so in a way that prevents any other future system change or peaceful transfer of political change is Fascism.
Instituting a monarchy isn't fascism, so that definition doesn't work either. Dictatorships aren't automatically fascism; communism for example was explicitly in opposition to fascism. The fascists in fact inflicted huge casualties on the communists despite both ideologies being authoritarian dictatorships. You're running in to the major problem in defining fascism - if a group of people don't say "we are fascists!" then there isn't anything unique that identifies the fascists.
> The difficulty is fascists never say they are fascists. they don’t advertise it.
I swear I drafted my comment before I got to this part. That is literally the only way of identifying fascism. It is a self-identification. It is like being part of a club - the only way of knowing who is in the club is talking to the people/club management. Or if they otherwise identify themselves with a funny hat or something. They didn't actually stand for any particularly clear cut ideologies.
So, when Ian Kershaw, the esteemed historian of Nazi Germany, said that "trying to define 'fascism' is like trying to nail jelly to the wall", you are telling me he was wrong? Because you seem to think it is much more of a clearcut question than he does.
Yes, Ian Kershaw is precisely right! It is very difficult to define because it is a means by which one, either a person, a party, an ethnicity, whatever, pursues and attempts to preserve power regardless of the will or interests of the people they intend to have power over.
The difference here is that anti-fascists have ethical and moral standards, create and support political systems that make it possible for them to loose, celebrate those losses.
It’s difficult to define a barbarian, but you definitely know it when they come to your town.
No, you are putting forward one particular definition as the "right" one, and arguing all contrary definitions should be ignored, even when proposed by esteemed scholars in relevant fields – which is the complete opposite of Kershaw's point.
Ahh, so we lack a definition, no one is fascist, and killing political dissidents is equivalent to fair and legal elections.
Good is equivalent to evil, because both are hard to define.
He can’t be a monarchist, he doesn’t believe in mercantilism, which random authority says is an essential part of monarchism. Plus, how do you define monarchism? You can’t.
Humanity is so fucked.
(Btw, this problem has been decisively solved by the paradox of tolerance, and was solved in the 40’s, when the apparently undefinable, thus never repeatable, original fascists did their thing.)
> Ahh, so we lack a definition, no one is fascist, and killing political dissidents is equivalent to fair and legal elections.
No. One can condemn a regime even if one doesn't agree with labelling it "fascist".
I'm sure we both agree that North Korea is a brutal and inhuman dictatorship, but I wouldn't call it "fascist" and I doubt you would either. Because "brutal and inhuman dictatorship" is what really counts here, not whether it is "fascist" or something else.
Putin's regime is closer to some Middle Eastern or Latin American military dictatorship than to 1930s/1940s fascism. 1930s/1940s fascism was highly ideological, Putin's regime is post-ideological (Putin doesn't care what your ideology is so long as he gets to stay in charge)
> You are making a distinction without a difference.
I think it is obvious that your objectives are very different from mine. What's "without a difference" given one set of objectives is a key difference given another.
> That you do so with such voraciousness, makes it seem like you are keen to defend those labeled fascist/authoritarian/etc.
No. I'm interested in having a historical argument about how to define "fascism" as part of "history for history's sake". You seem by contrast primarily interested in defining words to rhetorically assist you towards some political end.
> Split hairs all day, the gulag doesn’t care.
I've lived my whole life in Australia. I think it is very unlikely that the current or any foreseeable future Australian government is going to start putting people in anything resembling gulags. To suggest otherwise is rather alarmist.
Frankly I don't care for individual quotes taken out of context. I also don't care in this specific scenario for musings of individual researches or small groups. Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute, especially considering it basically matches https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism and https://www.britannica.com/topic/fascism , today's Russia still hitting all checkboxes.
Wiki, Merriam-Webster, and Britannica already made compilations for us, came to the same conclusion, and I don't see any reason not to just use what they ended up with. I doubt the two of us, or even the entirety of remotely interested HN could reasonably claim we can do much better.
I also disagree with claims about Putin's regime that you made, but feel that it is not worth arguing.
> Frankly I don't care for individual quotes taken out of context
Which specific quotes are you claiming I have "taken out of context"? How have I done so?
> Wikipedia definition is good enough for this conversation or basically any public conversation that is not a scholarly dispute
This site is supposed to be about "intellectual curiosity". [0] Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.
> Disinterest in the diversity and detail of scholarly definitions is the very opposite of intellectual curiosity.
Is it? I personally consider research in classification to be of relatively low intellectual value, especially in the already poor sciences of psychology and sociology. So the expectation of value from it, intellectual or not, is extremely low.
I mean, just take "cited as standard by _notable scholars_", "focuses on", and "anti-communism". Then ask yourself: what if the communism did not exist as an idea yet until after 1945, e.g. USSR being just another western democracy, and the holocaust and WWII still went the way they did, would Germany no longer be "fascist"? Somehow I asked myself that question right away, but none of the _notable scholars_ did.
This is why in this thread the fact that masses can be manipulated by wordplay seems more interesting than classification of societies. I'm more intellectually curious about what to do with that problem.
You seem to be using the term "fascist" to mean the same thing as "authoritarian"/"totalitarian"/"tyrannical"/"dictatorial"/"oppressive"/etc.
If you use the word in that way, then the Soviet Union was a fascist state.
But, to someone in the period between the World Wars, that would have seemed nonsensical – the Stalinists and fascists were at war with each other, on the streets of Italy and Germany, in the trenches of the Spanish Civil War. Both may well have been evil but only one was fascist.
Because there's another sense of "fascism", in which it refers to a specific type of authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny/etc devised by Mussolini and his associates, as opposed to just authoritarianism/oppression/dictatorship/tyranny in general. And in that sense, whether anything non-Italian counts as "fascism" is going to depend on which elements it has in common with the Italian archetype, and how significant you think each of those elements are.
I don't know where you got your first statement from (and without it the rest of your comment is meaningless). I gave you the list of criteria from Wikipedia and you pretended that it only had one item for some reason.
Stalinists/bolsheviks hated the Socialdemocrats just as much if not more than the nazis for quite a while. Does that mean that both groups couldn’t be socialist at the same time?
After Stalin decided to (literally) bankroll the the German invasion of France the French communist party openly and directly supported Hitler and Nazi Germany. Until they suddenly become the greatest enemies again purely due to “ideological” reasons after Barbarosa..
When it comes to totalitarianism the actual ideological differences become sort of meaningless. If Stalin tells you that the Fasicsts are the good guys now or that liberals/socialists/anarchists/etc. are just as bad, well.. it means that they are. Any diversion from the (very flexible) party line is just as bad as supporting the opposite side (or occasionally even much worse).
I’m not saying that there is no difference between Fascism, Naziism or [Stalinist/Bolsvhevik] Communism, far from it. However trying to define these as some sort of coherent ideologies based on fixed beliefs and principles is somewhat pointless due to their extremely shapeshifting nature.
If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck (even if that duck claims that it's an elephant and keeps saying that everyone else is a duck).
I mean... objectively Russia ticks pretty much all of the boxes, just compare it with Mussolini's Italy.