Nazism
National Socialism, more known as Nazism, is the ideology and practices associated with the Nazi Party – the National Socialist German Workers' Party – in Nazi Germany, of other far-right groups with similar aims. Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology's disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but incorporated fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, eugenics into its creed, its extreme nationalism came from Pan-Germanism and the Völkisch movement prominent in the German nationalism of the time, it was influenced by the Freikorps paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's "cult of violence", "at the heart of the movement."Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race. It aimed to overcome social divisions and create a German homogeneous society based on racial purity which represented a people's community.
The Nazis aimed to unite all Germans living in German territory, as well as gain additional lands for German expansion under the doctrine of Lebensraum and exclude those who they deemed either community aliens or "inferior" races. The term "National Socialism" arose out of attempts to create a nationalist redefinition of "socialism", as an alternative to both Marxist international socialism and free market capitalism. Nazism rejected the Marxist concepts of class conflict and universal equality, opposed cosmopolitan internationalism, sought to convince all parts of the new German society to subordinate their personal interests to the "common good", accepting political interests as the main priority of economic organization; the Nazi Party's precursor, the Pan-German nationalist and antisemitic German Workers' Party, was founded on 5 January 1919. By the early 1920s the party was renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party – to attract workers away from left-wing parties such as the Social Democrats and the Communists – and Adolf Hitler assumed control of the organization.
The National Socialist Program or "25 Points" was adopted in 1920 and called for a united Greater Germany that would deny citizenship to Jews or those of Jewish descent, while supporting land reform and the nationalization of some industries. In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined the anti-Semitism and anti-Communism at the heart of his political philosophy, as well as his disdain for representative democracy and his belief in Germany's right to territorial expansion; the Nazi Party won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, making them the largest party in the legislature by far, but still short of an outright majority. Because none of the parties were willing or able to put together a coalition government, in 1933 Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany by President Paul Von Hindenburg, through the support and connivance of traditional conservative nationalists who believed that they could control him and his party. Through the use of emergency presidential decrees by Hindenburg, a change in the Weimar Constitution which allowed the Cabinet to rule by direct decree, bypassing both Hindenburg and the Reichstag, the Nazis had soon established a one-party state.
The Sturmabteilung and the Schutzstaffel functioned as the paramilitary organizations of the Nazi Party. Using the SS for the task, Hitler purged the party's more and economically radical factions in the mid-1934 Night of the Long Knives, including the leadership of the SA. After the death of President Hindenburg, political power was concentrated in Hitler's hands and he became Germany's head of state as well as the head of the government, with the title of Führer, meaning "leader". From that point, Hitler was the dictator of Nazi Germany, known as the "Third Reich", under which Jews, political opponents and other "undesirable" elements were marginalized, imprisoned or murdered. Many millions of people were exterminated in a genocide which became known as the Holocaust during World War II, including around two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe. Following Germany's defeat in World War II and the discovery of the full extent of the Holocaust, Nazi ideology became universally disgraced.
It is regarded as immoral and evil, with only a few fringe racist groups referred to as neo-Nazis, describing themselves as followers of National Socialism. The full name of the party was Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei for which they used the acronym NSDAP; the term "Nazi" was in use before the rise of the NSDAP as a colloquial and derogatory word for a backwards farmer or peasant, characterizing an awkward and clumsy person. In this sense, the word Nazi was a hypocorism of the German male name Ignatz – Ignatz being a common name at the time in Bavaria, the area from which the NSDAP emerged. In the 1920s, political opponents of the NSDAP in the German labour movement seized on this and – using the earlier abbreviated term "Sozi" for Sozialist as an example – shortened NSDAP's name, Nationalsozialistische, to the dismissive "Nazi", in order to associate them with the derogatory use of the term mentioned above; the first use of the term "Nazi" by the National Socialists occurred in 1926 in a publication by Joseph Goebbels called Der Nazi-Sozi.
In Goebbels' pamphlet, the word "Nazi" only appears when linked with the word "Sozi" as an abbreviation of
Dimitrije Ljotić
Dimitrije Ljotić was a Serbian nationalist politician and ideologue who established the Yugoslav National Movement in 1935 and collaborated with German occupational authorities in the Territory of the Military Commander in Serbia during World War II. He joined the Serbian Army with the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, fought on the Serbian side during World War I and remained in active service until 1920, when he decided to pursue a career in politics, he joined the People's Radical Party that year and became regional deputy for the Smederevo District in 1930. In 1931, he was appointed to the position of Yugoslav Minister of Justice by King Alexander I but resigned following a disagreement between him and the king over the layout of the Yugoslav political system. Ljotić founded Zbor in 1935; the party received little support from the anti-German Serbian public and never won more than 1 percent of the vote in the 1935 and 1938 Yugoslav parliamentary elections. Ljotić was arrested in the run-up to the latter elections and sent to an insane asylum after the authorities accused him of having a "religious mania".
He voiced his opposition to the Cvetković–Maček Agreement in 1939 and his supporters reacted to it violently. Zbor was soon outlawed by the Yugoslav government, he remained in hiding until April 1941. Ljotić was invited by the Germans to join the Serbian puppet government of Milan Aćimović and was offered the position of economic commissioner, he never took office because he disliked the idea of playing a secondary role in the administration and because of his unpopularity. He resorted to indirectly exerting his influence over the Serbian puppet government through two of his closest associates whom the Germans had selected as commissioners. In September 1941, the Germans gave Ljotić permission to form the Serbian Volunteer Detachments, which were renamed the Serbian Volunteer Corps. Ljotić was publicly denounced as a traitor by the Yugoslav government-in-exile and Chetnik leader Draža Mihailović in July 1942, he and other Serbian collaborationist officials left Belgrade in October 1944 and made their way to Slovenia, from where they intended to launch an assault against the Independent State of Croatia.
Between March and April, Ljotić and Mihailović agreed to a last-ditch alliance against the Communist-led Yugoslav Partisans and their forces came together under the command of Chetnik General Miodrag Damjanović on 27 March. Ljotić was buried in Šempeter pri Gorici, his funeral service was jointly conducted by Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović and Serbian Orthodox Patriarch Gavrilo Dožić, whose release from the Dachau concentration camp Ljotić had secured the previous December. In early May, Damjanović led the SDK–Chetnik formations under his command into northwestern Italy, where they surrendered to the British and were placed in detainment camps. Many were extradited to Yugoslavia, where several thousand were executed by the Partisans and buried in mass graves in the Kočevski Rog plateau. Others immigrated to the west, where they established émigré organizations intended to promote Zbor's political agenda; the antagonism between these groups and those affiliated with the Chetniks continued in exile.
Dimitrije Ljotić was born in Belgrade on 12 August 1891 to his wife Ljubica. His father was a prominent politician in the port town of Smederevo and served as the Serbian government consul to Greece; the Ljotić family was descended from two brothers, Đorđe and Tomislav Dimitrijević, who hailed from the village of Blace, in Greek Macedonia. The origin of the surname Ljotić rests with Đorđe, who went by the nickname "Ljota"; the two brothers settled in the village of Krnjevo in or around 1750 and relocated to Smederevo in the latter half of the 18th century. The Ljotićs were connected with the Karađorđević dynasty, which had ruled Serbia several times throughout the 19th century. In 1858, the rival Obrenović dynasty seized power in the country and forced Prince Alexander Karađorđević into exile. Ljotić's father was forced out of the country in 1868 after being implicated in a conspiracy against the Obrenović dynasty and its head, Prince Milan, he did not return to Serbia until Milan's abdication on 6 March 1889.
Apart from being a close friend of Serbia's future king, Peter I, Ljotić's father was the first person to translate The Communist Manifesto into Serbian. Ljotić's maternal great-grandfather, knez Stanoje, was an outlaw, killed in the Slaughter of the Knezes in January 1804. Ljotić finished primary school in Smederevo, he attended gymnasium in Salonika, where his family had relocated in 1907. Ljotić was religiously devoted in his youth and contemplated a career in the Serbian Orthodox Church, he was influenced by Leo Tolstoy's doctrine of Christian non-violence, but rejected this doctrine during World War I. Following his father's advice, he went on to study law and graduated from the Law School of the University of Belgrade. With the outbreak of the Balkan Wars, Ljotić joined the Serbian Army. In the autumn of 1913, he accepted a state scholarship to study in Paris, he stayed in the city for nearly a year, while studying at the Institute of Agriculture he was exposed to the right-wing, proto-fascist ideas of writer Charles Maurras.
Maurras was a French counter-revolutionary who founded the far-right political movement known as Action Française and whose writings went on to influence European fascists and the ideologues of the Vichy Regime during World War II. Ljotić described Maurras as a "rare shining spirit" and cited him as one of his greatest intellectual
José Antonio Primo de Rivera
José Antonio Primo de Rivera y Sáenz de Heredia, 1st Duke of Primo de Rivera, 3rd Marquess of Estella referred to as José Antonio, was a Spanish lawyer, nobleman and founder of the Falange Española Falange Española de las JONS. He was the eldest son of military dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera. Imprisoned before the start of the Spanish Civil War, he was accused of conspiracy and military rebellion against the Government of the Second Spanish Republic and was sentenced to death and executed during the first months of the war; the image of José Antonio was revered during the war by the Nationalist faction and, after the establishment of Francoist Spain, he was regarded as a martyr, his figure being a tool of the Francoist propaganda apparatus. The inscription of "José Antonio ¡Presente!" could be found in many churches all across Spain. José Antonio Primo de Rivera was born in Madrid on April 24, 1903, the eldest son of General Miguel Primo de Rivera, Prime Minister and Dictator under the monarchy of King Alfonso XIII of Spain.
From his father he inherited the title of Marquess of Estella. He never married, his mother died when he was five years old, he was subsequently raised by his father's sister. He was taught at home, learned English and French; when at university, he did not attend lectures until the second year of his undergraduate studies. He spent his summer holidays at the country estate of an uncle, where he practiced horse riding and hunting. Primo de Rivera went on to study law at the University of Madrid between 1917 and 1923, he helped to organize the student union there, Federación Universitaria Escolar, which opposed the higher-education policies of his father. He took undergraduate and graduate courses and he obtained both his Bachelor and Doctor degrees in the same year, 1923. After graduating, he chose the "One-Year Volunteer" option to do his military service while his father was dictator, he served with the Ninth Dragoons of St. James cavalry regiment, stationed at Barcelona, he was court-martialed for punching Brigadier General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano.
Queipo de Llano had written a defamatory letter against an uncle of José Antonio and against the Dictator himself. José Antonio, ready to defend the honour of his family abused by the Republican general, went to the café where the latter used to socialize, after asking whether he was the author of the writing, after receiving the general's affirmative reply, delivered a spectacular punch that made the general roll on the floor, sparking a free-for-all between the companions of José Antonio and the companions of the general. Primo de Rivera became a registered lawyer in 1925, opened an office on a side street of Madrid near the confluence of three principal avenues. In 1931, he was invested "Perpetual Dean of the Illustrious College of Lawyers of Madrid". In 1931, he constituted "Agrupación al Servicio de la República" and paradoxically ran for office under the monarchist banner of "Unión Monárquica Nacional"—he failed to get elected, he was detained in 1932 for collaboration in General José Sanjurjo's attempted coup.
On October 29, 1933, Primo de Rivera launched the Falange Española, a nationalist party, inspired in part with some ideas, such as the necessity of authority, hierarchical order of society, grassroots populism, that were being expounded in Italy in the Fascist movement. The foundational convention was held in the Teatro de la Comedia of Madrid, he was the keynote speaker and his first address was a criticism of liberal democracy. Since the liberal state was a servant of it became not just the trustee of a nation's destiny but the spectator of electoral contests. What alone mattered to the liberal state was that a certain number of gentlemen be sitting at the polling station, that the voting start at eight o'clock and end at four, that the ballot boxes not get smashed—when being smashed is the noblest aspiration of all ballot boxes—and to respect the outcome of the voting, as if the outcome was a matter of complete indifference to it. In other words liberal governments did not believe in their mission, that theirs was a respectable duty, but rather they believed that anyone who disagreed with them and decided to attack the state, whether with good or ill intentions, had the same right as they did to defend it.
During the speech he made his noted remark on the recourse to fists and guns when needed, And in closing, that if what we want must in some circumstance be attained through the use of violence, that we demur not before the prospect of violence. For who has said, when they say, "Every available means except violence," that the supreme hierarchy of moral values resides in kindness? Who has said that when our feelings are insulted, rather than react like men, we are called upon to reply amiably? Dialogue as a first step of communication is good, but there is no option left except fists and guns when someone offends the precepts of justice or the fatherland. His closing words made explicit his romanticism: In a poetic sweep we will raise this fervent devotion to Spain. In these elections vote the lesser evil, but your Spain will not be born out of them, nor does our frame for action reside there. That is a murky atmosphere, like a tavern's after a night of dissipation. Our station is not there. I am a candidate, but I take part in these elections without faith or respect.
And I say this now. I couldn't care less. We are not going to
Anti-capitalism
Anti-capitalism encompasses a wide variety of movements and attitudes that oppose capitalism. Anti-capitalists, in the strict sense of the word, are those who wish to replace capitalism with another type of economic system. Socialism advocates public or direct worker ownership and administration of the means of production and allocation of resources, a society characterized by equal access to resources for all individuals, with an egalitarian method of compensation. A theory or policy of social organisation which aims at or advocates the ownership and democratic control of the means of production, by workers or the community as a whole, their administration or distribution in the interests of all. Socialists argue for a cooperative/community economy, or the commanding heights of the economy, with democratic control by the people over the state, although there have been some undemocratic philosophies. "State" or "worker cooperative" ownership is in fundamental opposition to "private" ownership of means of production, a defining feature of capitalism.
Most socialists argue that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and profit, among a small segment of society that controls capital and derives its wealth through exploitation. Socialists argue that the accumulation of capital generates waste through externalizations that require costly corrective regulatory measures, they point out that this process generates wasteful industries and practices that exist only to generate sufficient demand for products to be sold at a profit. Socialists argue that capitalism consists of irrational activity, such as the purchasing of commodities only to sell at a time when their price appreciates, rather than for consumption if the commodity cannot be sold at a profit to individuals in need. Private ownership imposes constraints on planning, leading to inaccessible economic decisions that result in immoral production, unemployment and a tremendous waste of material resources during crisis of overproduction. According to socialists, private property in the means of production becomes obsolete when it concentrates into centralized, socialized institutions based on private appropriation of revenue until the role of the capitalist becomes redundant.
With no need for capital accumulation and a class of owners, private property in the means of production is perceived as being an outdated form of economic organization that should be replaced by a free association of individuals based on public or common ownership of these socialized assets. Socialists view private property relations as limiting the potential of productive forces in the economy. Early socialists criticized capitalism for concentrating power and wealth within a small segment of society, does not utilise available technology and resources to their maximum potential in the interests of the public. For the influential German individualist anarchist philosopher Max Stirner, "private property is a spook which "lives by the grace of law" and it "becomes'mine' only by effect of the law". In other words, private property exists purely "through the protection of the State, through the State's grace." Recognising its need for state protection, Stirner argued that "t need not make any difference to the'good citizens' who protects them and their principles, whether an absolute King or a constitutional one, a republic, if only they are protected.
And what is their principle, whose protector they always'love'? Not that of labour", rather it is "interest-bearing possession... labouring capital, therefore... labour yet little or none at all of one's own, but labour of capital and of the—subject labourers"." French anarchist Pierre Joseph Proudhon opposed government privilege that protects capitalist and land interests, the accumulation or acquisition of property which he believed hampers competition and keeps wealth in the hands of the few. The Spanish individualist anarchist Miguel Gimenez Igualada saw "capitalism an effect of government; that which we call capitalism is not something else but a product of the State, within which the only thing, being pushed forward is profit, good or badly acquired. And so to fight against capitalism is a pointless task, since be it State capitalism or Enterprise capitalism, as long as Government exists, exploiting capital will exist; the fight, but of consciousness, is against the State.". Within anarchism there emerged a critique of wage slavery which refers to a situation perceived as quasi-voluntary slavery, where a person's livelihood depends on wages when the dependence is total and immediate.
It is a negatively connoted term used to draw an analogy between slavery and wage labor by focusing on similarities between owning and renting a person. The term wage slavery has been used to criticize economic exploitation and social stratification, with the former seen as unequal bargaining power between labor and capital, the latter as a lack of workers' self-management, fulfilling job choices and leisure in an economy. Libertarian socialists believe if freedom is valued society must work towards a system in which individuals have the power to decide economic issues along with political issues. Libertarian socialists seek to replace unjustified authority with direct democracy, volun
Seigō Nakano
Seigō Nakano was a political leader in Imperial Japan who advocated a fascist regime for Japan to complete the Meiji Restoration. Nakano sought to bring about a rebirth of Japan through a blend of the samurai ethic, Neo-Confucianism, populist nationalism modeled on European fascism, he saw Saigō Takamori as epitomizing the'true spirit' of the Meiji ishin, the task of modern Japan to recapture it. Nakano formed the Kokumin Dōmei with Adachi Kenzō in December 1932, he left this group with a splinter group to form the Tōhōkai in May 1936. In December 1937, Nakano had a personal audience with Benito Mussolini. In the next month, he met with Joachim Ribbentrop. In January 1939, Nakano gave a speech on the need for a totalitarian Japan, he argued against those who "say that neither fascism nor Nazism are appropriate for our nation." He distinguished between old-style conservative despotism, a "Totalitarianism... based on essentials." Arguing against majority rule and "an individualism which shows no concern for others", he calls for a "government going beyond democracy" giving consideration to "the essence of human beings."
With organic unification of individuals "sharing common ideals and a common way of feeling," there can be formed "a perfect national organization." On 16 February 1942, British diplomats secretly proposed a peace deal with Japan. A possible agreement was that if Britain formally recognised the authority of Imperial Japan over North China and Manchuria, the Japanese would return the Malay Peninsula and Singapore to Britain. At the same time as this diplomatic movement, a political confrontation was in progress between Tōhōkai and the Kōdōha party; this was the last internal political power struggle in the government before the Midway and Coral Sea defeats in 1942, which sent the Japanese armed forces reeling. As leader of the ultranationalist Tōhōkai, Nakano had some political influence at the time, he expressed his confidence for the Imperial Japanese Navy. He anxiously awaited the approval of the peace talks, so as to stabilize the recent conquests in Southeast Asia. Nakano wanted to prevent any further sacrifices by the Japanese people towards the war effort, pressured the government to drop what he considered to be the overly-ambitious aim of conquering all of Asia.
On the other side was the pro-Imperialist faction, which represented the military interests of Japan and was led by General Hideki Tōjō. They reasoned that the rapid successes in recent campaigns in Southeast Asia should be continued into the rest of Asia and Australia before the Allies could react, to further develop the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. General Tōjō rejected any form of peace processes in the conquered lands and gave authorization for more conquests; this angered and frustrated Nakano and the Tōhōkai, who saw the rejection as a lost opportunity for Japan to maintain and consolidate its new territorial gains in Southeast Asia in the long term, before the United States launched counter-offensives. Verbally critical of the Tōjō regime, Nakano was forbidden to publish articles or make public speeches, he was placed under house arrest, committed seppuku on 27 October 1943. Kita Ikki Japanese militarism Japanese nationalism Japanese fascism Fascism by Roger Griffin, 1995, ISBN 0-19-289249-5 Populist Nationalism in Pre-War Japan: A Biography of Nakano Seigo by Leslie Russel Oates, 1985, ISBN 0-86861-111-5 description "Nakano Seigo and the Spirit of the Meiji Restoration in Twentieth-Century Japan" by T. Najita in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan edited by James William Morley, ISBN 0-226-56803-2 Nakano, Seigo at National Diet Library, Japan
Vidkun Quisling
Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was a Norwegian military officer and politician who nominally headed the government of Norway during the occupation of the country by Nazi Germany during World War II. He first came to international prominence as a close collaborator of explorer Fridtjof Nansen, organizing humanitarian relief during the Russian famine of 1921 in Povolzhye, he was posted as a Norwegian diplomat to the Soviet Union, for some time managed British diplomatic affairs there. He returned to Norway in 1929, served as Minister of Defence in the governments of Peder Kolstad and Jens Hundseid, representing the Farmers' Party. In 1933, Quisling founded the fascist party Nasjonal Samling. Although he achieved some popularity after his attacks on the political left, his party failed to win any seats in the Storting and by 1940 it was still little more than peripheral. On 9 April 1940, with the German invasion of Norway in progress, he attempted to seize power in the world's first radio-broadcast coup d'état, but failed after the Germans refused to support his government.
From 1942 to 1945 he served as Prime Minister of Norway, heading the Norwegian state administration jointly with the German civilian administrator Josef Terboven. His pro-Nazi puppet government, known as the Quisling regime, was dominated by ministers from Nasjonal Samling; the collaborationist government participated in Germany's genocidal Final Solution. Quisling was put on trial during the legal purge in Norway after World War II, he was found guilty of charges including embezzlement and high treason against the Norwegian state, was sentenced to death. He was executed by firing squad at Akershus Fortress, Oslo, on 24 October 1945; the word "quisling" became a byword for "collaborator" or "traitor" in several languages, reflecting the contempt with which Quisling's conduct has been regarded, both at the time and since his death. Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonssøn Quisling was born on 18 July 1887 in Fyresdal, in the Norwegian county of Telemark, he was the son of Church of Norway pastor and genealogist Jon Lauritz Qvisling and his wife Anna Caroline Bang, the daughter of Jørgen Bang, ship-owner and at the time the richest man in the town of Grimstad in South Norway.
The elder Quisling had lectured in Grimstad in the 1870s. The newly-wed couple promptly moved to Fyresdal, where his younger siblings were born; the family name derives from Quislinus, a Latinised name invented by Quisling's ancestor Lauritz Ibsen Quislin, based on the village of Kvislemark near Slagelse, whence he had emigrated. Having two brothers and a sister, the young Quisling was "shy and quiet but loyal and helpful, always friendly breaking into a warm smile." Private letters found by historians indicate a warm and affectionate relationship between the family members. From 1893 to 1900, his father was a chaplain for the Strømsø borough in Drammen. Here, Vidkun went to school for the first time, he was bullied by other students at the school for his Telemark dialect, but proved a successful student. In 1900, the family moved to Skien. Academically Quisling proved talented in humanities history, natural sciences. At this point, his life had no clear direction. In 1905, Quisling enrolled at the Norwegian Military Academy, having received the highest entrance examination score of the 250 applicants that year.
Transferring in 1906 to the Norwegian Military College, he graduated with the highest score since the college's inception in 1817, was rewarded by an audience with the King. On 1 November 1911, he joined the army General Staff. Norway was neutral in the First World War. In March 1918, he was sent to Russia as an attaché at the Norwegian legation in Petrograd, to take advantage of the five years he had spent studying the country. Though dismayed at the living conditions he experienced, Quisling nonetheless concluded that "the Bolsheviks have got an extraordinarily strong hold on Russian society" and marvelled at how Leon Trotsky had managed to mobilise the Red Army forces so well; when the legation was recalled in December 1918, Quisling became the Norwegian military's expert on Russian affairs. In September 1919, Quisling departed Norway to become an intelligence officer with the Norwegian delegation in Helsinki, a post that combined diplomacy and politics. In the autumn of 1921, Quisling left Norway once again, this time at the request of explorer and humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen, in January 1922 arrived in the Ukrainian capital Kharkov to help with the League of Nations humanitarian relief effort there.
Highlighting the massive mismanagement of the area and the death toll of ten thousand a day, Quisling produced a report that attracted aid and demonstrated his administrative skills, as well as his dogged determination to get what he wanted. On 21 August, he married the daughter of a peddler. Alexandra wrote in her memoirs that Quisling declared his love for her, but based on his letters home and investigations undertaken by his cousins, it appears that there was never any question of romantic involvement between the two. Quisling seemed to ha
Fascism
Fascism is a form of radical, right-wing, authoritarian ultranationalism, characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, strong regimentation of society and of the economy, which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before it spread to other European countries. Opposed to liberalism and anarchism, fascism is placed on the far-right within the traditional left–right spectrum. Fascists saw World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, the state, technology; the advent of total war and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilians and combatants. A "military citizenship" arose in which all citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war; the war had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and providing economic production and logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete and regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society. Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature and views political violence and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascists advocate a mixed economy, with the principal goal of achieving autarky through protectionist and interventionist economic policies. Since the end of World War II in 1945, few parties have described themselves as fascist, the term is instead now used pejoratively by political opponents; the descriptions neo-fascist or post-fascist are sometimes applied more formally to describe parties of the far-right with ideologies similar to, or rooted in, 20th-century fascist movements.
The Italian term fascismo is derived from fascio meaning a bundle of rods from the Latin word fasces. This was the name given to political organizations in Italy known as fasci, groups similar to guilds or syndicates. According to Mussolini's own account, the Fascist Revolutionary Party was founded in Italy in 1915. In 1919, Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan, which became the Partito Nazionale Fascista two years later; the Fascists came to associate the term with the ancient Roman fasces or fascio littorio—a bundle of rods tied around an axe, an ancient Roman symbol of the authority of the civic magistrate carried by his lictors, which could be used for corporal and capital punishment at his command. The symbolism of the fasces suggested strength through unity: a single rod is broken, while the bundle is difficult to break. Similar symbols were developed by different fascist movements: for example, the Falange symbol is five arrows joined together by a yoke. Historians, political scientists, other scholars have long debated the exact nature of fascism.
Each group described as fascist has at least some unique elements, many definitions of fascism have been criticized as either too wide or narrow. One common definition of the term focuses on three concepts: the fascist negations. According to many scholars, fascism—especially once in power—has attacked communism and parliamentary liberalism, attracting support from the far-right. Historian Stanley Payne identifies three main strands in fascism, his typology is cited by reliable sources as a standard definition. First, Payne's "fascist negations" refers to such typical policies as anti-communism and anti-liberalism. Second, "fascist goals" include an expanded empire. Third, "fascist style" is seen in its emphasis on violence and authoritarianism and its exultation of men above women and young against old. Roger Griffin describes fascism as "a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism". Griffin describes the ideology as having three core components: " the rebirth myth, populist ultra-nationalism, the myth of decadence".
Fascism is "a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism" built on a complex range of theoretical and cultural influences. He distinguishes an inter-war period in which it manifested itself in elite-led but populist "armed party" politics opposing socialism and liberalism and promising radical politics to rescue the nation from decadence. Robert Paxton says that fascism is "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion". Racism was a
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