Chis time, fascism is back in the West, and if the public conversation has a little difficulty taking note of it, it is undoubtedly as much out of pusillanimity and an unconscious desire to ward off the obvious as because it is It is difficult to precisely define what a fascist leader, movement or regime is.
Not content with instigating the assault on the Capitol in 2021, in Washington, Donald Trump campaigned with videos proclaiming the coming of a “Unified Reich”he promised that he would lead “mass deportations”compared immigrants to a “vermin” Who “poison the blood of the United States”declared that it was enough for him to win the election so that American citizens would no longer have to vote in the future, etc.
However, he continues to be presented by a number of commentators, implicitly or not, as a somewhat radical and fanciful conservative, a simple, uninhibited reactionary who wishes to revive the American economy, etc.
This difficulty in identifying fascism, and therefore in naming it, is the subject of a conference given in New York in 1995 by Umberto Eco (1932-2016), and republished in January under the title Recognize fascism (Grasset, 64 pages, 7.90 euros, digital 6 euros). Umberto Eco says of fascism that it is a set of archetypes, that it is a rhetoric, a style. By nature it is ” vague “according to him, because it is not backed by a doctrine, but rather serves as a vehicle for other ideologies.
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« Take away imperialism and you have Franco and Salazar; remove colonialism and you will have Balkan fascism, dit Umberto Eco. Add radical anti-capitalism to Italian fascism (…) and you will have [l’apologue américain d’Hitler] Ezra Pound [1885-1972]. Add the cult of Celtic mythology and the mysticism of the Grail (totally foreign to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, [le poète et idéologue de l’extrême droite italienne] Julius Evola [1898-1974]. »
A libertarian ideology
At the end of the 1990s, Umberto Eco identified fourteen fundamental characteristics of fascism: nationalism and xenophobia, virilism, irrationalism and anti-intellectualism, destruction of the complexity of language, instrumentalization of the frustration of the middle classes, etc. A fifteenth marker could be added today: all-out war on the environment and environmental defenders.
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