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Fascism
Fascism, pronounced /ˈfæʃɪzəm/, is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to organize a nation oncorporatist perspectives; values; and systems such as the political system and the economy. Scholars generally consider it to be on the far right of the conventional left-right political spectrum, although some scholars claim that fascism has been influenced by both the left and the right.
Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong leadership, collective identity, and the will and ability to commit violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. Fascists identify violence and war as actions that create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.Fascists claim that culture is created by collective national society and its state, that cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus rejectsindividualism. In viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, fascists claim that pluralism is a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety. Fascism rejects and resists autonomy of cultural or ethnic groups who are not considered part of the fascists' nation and who refuse to assimilate or are unable to be assimilated. Fascists consider attempts to create such autonomy as an affront and threat to the nation.
Fascists advocate the creation of a single-party state. Fascist governments forbid and suppress openness and opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement. Fascists oppose class conflict, blame capitalism and liberal democracies for its creation, and accuse communists of exploiting the concept.
In the economic sphere, many fascist leaders have claimed to support a "Third Way" in economic policy, which they believed superior to both the rampant individualism of unrestrained capitalism and the severe control of state socialism. This was to be achieved by establishing significant government control over business and labour (Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini called his nation's system "the corporate state"). No common and concise definition exists for fascism and historians and political scientists disagree on what should be in any such definition.
Following the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and the publicity surrounding the atrocities committed during the period of fascist governments, the term fascist has been used as a pejorative word, often referring to widely varying movements across the political spectrum
Definitions
Historians, political scientists, and other scholars have engaged in long debates concerning the exact nature of fascism.[34] Since the 1990s, scholars like Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell, Roger Griffin and Robert O. Paxton have begun to gather a rough consensus on the system's core tenets. Each form of fascism is distinct, leaving many definitions as too wide or too narrow.[35][36]
Griffin wrote:
[Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence.
Paxton wrote that fascism is:
a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy 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
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Position in the political spectrum
Many scholars consider fascism to be on the far right of the traditional left-right political spectrum. Some scholars, however, argue that fascism has been influenced by both the left and the right — incorporating ideas from revolutionary syndicalists and proponents of workers' interests on the left, and ideas of conservatives and opponents of class conflict on the right. Writers on the subject have often found placing fascism in a conventional left-right political spectrum difficult. Roger Eatwell sees terminology associated with the traditional “left-right” political spectrum as failing to fully capture the complex nature of the ideology. Many political scientists have posited multi-dimensional alternatives to the traditional linear left-right spectrum.
Emilio Brodrero in 1927 claimed it is difficult to place fascism on a particular position in the political spectrum because the ideology did not firmly connect itself to a succinct theory, and was constantly altering itself to adapt to political circumstances.Brodrero states that from 1919 to 1921, fascism was self-identified as a syndicalist movement, with Mussolini claiming to be the heir to syndicalist Georges Sorel. From 1921 onward, however, fascism decisively turned to the political right, with nationalism dominating its agenda. Fascists acknowledge this constant transition as intentional, claiming that movement and correction of flaws in ideas is the only means to renew the ideology and keep it from becoming corrupt or outdated.
Fascists attempted to create internationally-accepted definitions and principles through a "Fascist International" at the 1934 Montreux Fascist conference. At the conference, Italian Fascist Eugenio Coselschi promoted the position that all fascist movements were unique, but that the common denominators were "national revolution", totalitarianism, corporatism, the regeneration of Europe and institutions for youths. The position of fascism's corporatism on the left-right spectrum remained ambiguous at the conference.
Benito Mussolini's Doctrine of Fascism regards fascism as right-wing and collectivist, but it also declares that fascism is sympathetic to ameliorating the conditions that brought about the rise of left-wing political movements — such as the labour movement, socialism and liberal democracy — while simultaneously opposing the egalitarianism associated with the left.
The historians Eugen Weber, David Renton, and Robert Soucy view fascism as on the right. Rod Stackelberg argues that fascism opposes egalitarianism (particularly racial) and democracy, which according to him are characteristics that make it an extreme right-wing movement. Stanley Payne states that pre-war fascism found a coherent identity through alliances with right-wing movements. Roger Griffin argues that since the end of World War II, fascist movements have become intertwined with the radical right, describing certain groups as part of a "fascist radical right".
Walter Laqueur says that historical fascism "did not belong to the extreme Left, yet defining it as part of the extreme Right is not very illuminating either", but that it "was always a coalition between radical, populist ('fascist') elements and others gravitating toward the extreme Right". Payne says "fascists were unique in their hostility to all the main established currents, left right and center", noting that they allied with both left and right, but more often the right. However, he contends that German Nazism was closer to Russian communism than to any other non-communist system.
A number of historians have regarded fascism either as a revolutionary centrist doctrine, as a doctrine which mixes philosophies of the left and the right, or as both of those things.The position that fascism is neither right nor left is regarded as credible by a number of contemporary historians and sociologists, including Griffin. and Seymour Martin Lipset. Griffin argued, "Not only does the location of fascism within the right pose taxonomic problems, there are good ground for cutting this particular Gordian knot altogether by placing it in a category of its own "beyond left and right."
A number of fascist movements described themselves as a "third force" that was outside the traditional political spectrum altogether. Mussolini promoted ambiguity about fascism's positions in order to rally as many people to it as possible, saying fascists can be "aristocrats or democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarians and anti-proletarians, pacifists and anti-pacifists". Mussolini claimed that Italian Fascism's economic system of corporatism could be identified as either state capitalism or state socialism, which in either case involved "the bureaucratisation of the economic activities of the nation." Mussolini described fascism in any language he found useful. Spanish Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera was critical of both left-wing and right-wing politics, once saying that "basically the Right stands for the maintenance of an economic structure, albeit an unjust one, while the Left stands for the attempt to subvert that economic structure, even though the subversion thereof would entail the destruction of much that was worthwhile".
On economic issues, fascists reject ideas of class conflict and internationalism, which are commonly held by Marxists and international socialists, in favour of class collaboration andstatist nationalism. However, Italian fascism also declared its objection to excessive capitalism, which it called supercapitalism. Zeev Sternhell sees fascism as an anti-Marxist form of socialism. In some two dimensional political models, such as the Political Compass (where left and right are described in purely economic terms), fascism is ascribed to the economic centre, with its extremism expressing itself on the authoritarianism axis instead
Racism and racialism
Fascists are not unified on the issues of racism and racialism. Mussolini, in a 1919 speech to denounce Soviet Russia, claimed that Jewish bankers in London and New York City were bound by the chains of race to Moscow, and claimed that 80 percent of the Soviet leaders were Jews. In his 1920 autobiography, he said: "Race and soil are strong influences upon us all", and said of World War I: "There were seers who saw in the European conflict not only national advantages but the possibility of a supremacy of race". In a 1921 speech in Bologna, Mussolini stated that "Fascism was born... out of a profound, perennial need of this our Aryan and Mediterranean race". He said in 1928:
[When the] city dies, the nation — deprived of the young life — blood of new generations — is now made up of people who are old and degenerate and cannot defend itself against a younger people which launches an attack on the now unguarded frontiers[...] This will happen, and not just to cities and nations, but on an infinitely greater scale: the whole White race, the Western race can be submerged by other coloured races which are multiplying at a rate unknown in our race.[208]
Many Italian fascists held anti-Slavist views, especially against neighbouring Yugoslav nations, whom the Italian fascists saw as being in competition with Italy, which had claims on territories of Yugoslavia, particularly Dalmatia.Mussolini claimed that Yugoslavs posed a threat after Italy did not receive the territory along the Adriatic coast at the end of World War I, as promised by the 1915 Treaty of London. He said: "The danger of seeing the Jugo-Slavians settle along the whole Adriatic shore had caused a bringing together in Rome of the cream of our unhappy regions. Students, professors, workmen, citizens—representative men—were entreating the ministers and the professional politicians. Italian fascists accused Serbs of having "atavistic impulses", and of being part of a "social democratic, masonic Jewish internationalist plot".The fascists accused Yugoslavs of conspiring together on behalf of "GrandOrient masonry and its funds".
In 1933, Mussolini contradicted his earlier statements on race, saying: "Race! It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. ... National pride has no need of the delirium of race."
At the 1934 Fascist International Congress, the issue of anti-Semitism was debated amongst various fascist parties, with some more favourable to it, and others less favourable. Two final compromises were adopted, creating the official stance of the Fascist International:
[T]he Jewish question cannot be converted into a universal campaign of hatred against the Jews[...] Considering that in many places certain groups of Jews are installed in conquered countries, exercising in an open and occult manner an influence injurious to the material and moral interests of the country which harbors them, constituting a sort of state within a state, profiting by all benefits and refusing all duties, considering that they have furnished and are inclined to furnish, elements conducive to international revolution which would be destructive to the idea of patriotism and Christian civilization, the Conference denounces the nefarious action of these elements and is ready to combat them.
Relation to religion
The attitude of fascism toward religion has run the gamut from persecution, to denunciation, to cooperation, to embrace. Stanley Payne notes that fundamental to fascism was the foundation of a purely materialistic "civic religion" that would "displace preceding structures of belief and relegate supernatural religion to a secondary role, or to none at all", and that "though there were specific examples of religious or would-be 'Christian fascists,' fascism presupposed a post-Christian, post-religious, secular, and immanent frame of reference."
According to Payne, such "would be" religious fascists only gain hold where traditional belief is weakened or absent, as fascism seeks to create new non-rationalist myth structures for those who no longer hold a traditional view.The rise of modern secularism in Europe and Latin America, and the incursion and large-scale adoption of western secular culture in the mid-east leave a void where this modern secular ideology, sometimes under a religious veneer, can take hold.
Many fascists were anti-clerical in both private and public life.Although both Hitler and Mussolini were anti-clerical, they both understood that it would be rash to begin theirKulturkampfs prematurely, such a clash, possibly inevitable in the future, being put off while they dealt with other enemies. Hitler had a general plan, even before the Nazis' rise to power, to destroy Christianity within the Reich.
The leader of the Hitler Youth stated "the destruction of Christianity was explicitly recognized as a purpose of the National Socialist movement" from the start, but "considerations of expedience made it impossible" publicly to express this extreme position. In Mexico, the Red Shirts were vehemently atheist, renounced religion, killed priests, and on one occasion gunned down Catholics as they left Mass.
According to a biographer of Mussolini, "Initially, fascism was fiercely anti-Catholic" — the Church being a competitor for dominion of the people's hearts. Mussolini, originally anatheist, published anti-Catholic writings and planned for the confiscation of Church property, but eventually moved to accommodation. Mussolini endorsed the Roman Catholic Church for political legitimacy, as during the Lateran Treaty talks, Fascist Party officials engaged in bitter arguments with Vatican officials and put pressure on them to accept the terms that the regime deemed acceptable. Protestantism in Italy was not as significant as Catholicism, and the Protestant minority was persecuted. Mussolini's sub-secretary of Interior, Bufferini-Guidi issued a memo closing all houses of worship of the Italian Pentecostals and Jehovah's Witnesses, and imprisoned their leaders.In some instances, people were killed because of their faith.
The Ustaše in Croatia had strong Catholic overtones, with some clerics in positions of power. The fascist movement in Romania, known as the Iron Guard or the Legion of Archangel Michael, preceded its meetings with a church service, and their demonstrations were usually led by priests carrying icons and religious flags. The Romanian fascist movement promoted a cult of "suffering, sacrifice and martyrdom."
In Latin America, the most notable fascist movement was Plinio Salgado's Brazilian Integralism. Built on a network of lay religious associations, its vision was of an integral state that "comes from Christ, is inspired in Christ, acts for Christ, and goes toward Christ." Salgado, however, criticised the "dangerous pagan tendencies of Hitlerism".
Hitler and the Nazi regime attempted to found their own version of Christianity called Positive Christianity which made major changes in its interpretation of the Bible which said that Jesus Christ was the son of God, but was not a Jew; they further claimed that Christ despised Jews, and that the Jews were the ones solely responsible for his death.[citation needed] By 1940, however, it was public knowledge that Hitler had abandoned even the syncretist idea of a positive Christianty.
The Catholic Church was particularly suppressed by Nazis in Poland. In addition to the deaths of some 3 million Polish Jews, 2 million Polish Catholics were killed. Between 1939 and 1945, an estimated 3,000 polish clergy (18 percent) were murdered; of these, 1,992 died in concentration camps. In the annexed territory of Reichsgau Wartheland it was even harsher than elsewhere. Churches were systematically closed, and most priests were either killed, imprisoned, or deported to the General Government.
The Germans also closed seminaries and convents persecuting monks and nuns throughout Poland. Eighty percent of the Catholic clergy and five of the bishops of Warthegau were sent to concentration camps in 1939; in Chełmno, 48 percent. Of those murdered by the Nazi regime, 108 are regarded as blessed martyrs. Among them, Maximilian Kolbe was canonizedas a saint. Not only in Poland were Christians persecuted by the Nazis. In the Dachau concentration camp alone, 2,600 Catholic priests from 24 different countries were killed.
One theory is that religion and fascism could never have a lasting connection because both are a "holistic weltanschauung" claiming the whole of the person. Along these lines, Yalepolitical scientist, Juan Linz and others have noted that secularization had created a void which could be filled by a total ideology, making totalitarianism possible, and Roger Griffin has characterized fascism as a type of anti-religious political religion. Such political religions vie with existing religions, and try, if possible, to replace or eradicate them.
P/S: Sekiranya anda sudah membaca semua artikel ini, cuba anda fikirkan, "Fascism" tidak ada kena mengena dengan musik kan? kita renung-renungkan.... ; )
Sesungguh nya K.I.R hanyalah landasan untuk kita berfikiran positif terhadap musik di bandar Kuching...
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