But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”
“These features,” writes the novelist and semiotician, “cannot be organized into a system many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. While Eco is firm in claiming “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. But Eco is perplexed “why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements.” For one thing, he writes, fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” Italy may have been “the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country,” and got to name the political system. It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many different cultural manifestations of authoritarianism, across Europe and even South America. As a form of extreme nationalism, it ultimately takes on the contours of whatever national culture produces it. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing-far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” The dark humor of the comment indicates a critical consensus about fascism. One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “ Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.)Įco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland
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