Umberto Eco's 14 common features of Fascism

In 1938, Govind Vallabh Pant, Premier of U.P, described Mahatma Gandhi as the Duce & Fuehrer of India. He meant the country was united behind one man whose status was super-human.

A few years later, Subhas Chandra Bose was a plausible candidate for a Fascist leader of India- indeed he declared himself the first Premier of 'Azad Hind'-  though he was a doctrinaire Socialist. Nevertheless, Bose had allied himself first with Hitler and then with the Japanese.

In the mid-Seventies, in India, D.K Barooah, President of the Congress Party, said 'India is Indira, Indira is India', but Indira herself, who indulged in occultism, described sections of the Opposition, which she jailed, as 'Fascist'. This did not prevent her Home Minister (later President), Zail Singh, praising Hitler a few years later.

The Congress Party- which is now wholly dynastic- has a history of attributing magical, super-human, qualities to its hereditary leader. By contrast, the BJP is a cadre based party. A politician who is ineffective will be unceremoniously discarded just as happens in other large democracies.

Does this mean the I.N.C, or its dynastic, Caste based, 'Samajwadi' rivals, are Fascist organizations? It is certainly the only party which has ever suspended the Constitution and jailed the Opposition.

Most people would say, no, Congress, or other dynastic outfits, may want to be Fascist but Assassination is a great curb on Autocracy. Furthermore, Indian voters are no respecters of persons and, sensing this, the Judiciary is increasingly activist.

 However, if there is a genuine threat to the Polity- an insurgency of a sub-nationalist or a Maoist type- the people are perfectly prepared to tolerate widespread extra-judicial killing of a sort which disintermediates mainstream politicians. Political Fascism is unnecessary because the State has sufficient para-military capacity to contain and bottle up insurgencies.

Indeed, historically speaking, Fascism was a reaction to the possibility of Red Terror. Where there was no Communist menace, the thing devolved by itself into its constituents.

Umberto Eco, took a different view. According to an article at the Open Culture website-

While Eco (in his essay 'Ur-Fascism', published in 1995) 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.” 

This is silly. After the defeat of the Axis powers, the game changed completely- expansionary war was off the table- Franco's Spain stopped talking of conquering Portugal and decided that Capitalism was perfectly compatible with Falangism.  Peronism, too, had a Leftist component- though this was purged in the Seventies.
More generally, there were plenty of right wing, one party, Polities some of which were economically successful and transitioned to Social Democracy.

Eco was a great writer and had lived through actual Fascism. Was he wholly wrong about this political phenomenon? Let us see-

Eco reduces the qualities of what he calls “Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism” down to 14 “typical” features. “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. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.”

So, these are sufficient, not necessary, conditions- Eco is setting the bar very high for himself. Will he fall at the first hurdle?

The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”

Freemasons had a 'cult of tradition' of a wholly made-up type. But Freemasonry in Anglo Saxon countries has never been Fascist. Italian Freemasonry may had some bizarre elements during the 'years of lead' but Italy produced the utterly bizarre Berlusconi.  It is scarcely a role-model.

In France, Guenon was a traditionalist. He ended up converting to Sufi Islam. Theosophy had 'syncretic, occult, elements' but its leader in India, Annie Besant, who became President of the Congress party, was a Feminist and a Trade Unionist.

Ataturk's regime was considered similar to that of Mussolini. It imposed Romanization, banned the veil and traditional male attire and headgear, and had no truck with Sufism. Iran pursued similar policies under an usurping Shah. Spain, under Franco, was strongly Catholic- occultists and Freemasons and so forth got short shrift. Ba'aathist or Nasserite party's in the MENA area weren't interested in 'Tradition' (which would have been local, not Pan Arab) or the occult.

In the short run, there may be a 'Fascist gnosis' featuring nutters spouting Occult nonsense but those guys soon fuck up and get disintermediated. Syllabuses only matter to third rate pedagogues but pedagogues scarcely matter in the grand scheme of things.

American Liberal Arts Colleges were hospitable to ex Fascists like Paul de Man and Mircea Eliade. The Green movement was willing to borrow from the work of Evola and Savitri Devi. Ambassador Serrano's books featured on many a 'New Age' bookshelf. But, this had no political consequences whatsoever.

The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

Everything can be defined as irrationalism. Amartya Sen defines traditional Welfare Economics as the science of 'rational fools'- i.e. rationalism is itself the greatest folly.

The Enlightenment was about removing the countervailing power of the Church so fucking over the poor, or the colored, could turn a bigger profit and permit the accumulation of Capital.

The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”

Fuck does this mean? Everybody agrees that only deeds count. Even third rate pedagogues, who have to pretend otherwise, stop doing so if they don't get paid or get dosed with castor oil. Thoughts which result in more effective deeds get rewarded. Without deeds, Thought is a dickless wonder.

Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

Pure horsehit. Fascism commends disagreement with anti-Fascism. It cultivates a critical spirit which distinguishes between itself and its opponents.

Eco says 'to distinguish is a sign of modernism'. Thus dinosaurs evinced signs of modernism because they distinguished between rocks and stuff they could eat. In modern culture, the scientific community condemns disagreement if Bayesian priors are the same. It commends Aumann agreement.

Building consensus is a feature of 'flat' organisational structures. Tolerance of dissent is a feature of atomized social spaces. The former reduces preference diversity so as to make possible Pareto improvements based on correlated equilibria. The latter suffers a 'tragedy of the Commons'.

Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”

So the French Resistance was Fascist or prematurely Fascist. Had Eco been a few years older, he'd have been a Partisan shooting German 'intruders'. Thus, he'd have been an 'Ur-Fascist'. The proper course of action, of course, is to blow kisses to intruders of a different race or to their compradors with whose views you may disagree. But you mustn't punish those treasonous vermin. That would be Fascist.

Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

Thus any democratic party in an advanced country, where the median voter is middle class, is Ur Fascist. Wonderful!
By contrast Saddam Hussein did not have to appeal to 'a frustrated middle class'. His goons could rape and kill anyone they liked. Does Eco really think Hitler triumphant would have kowtowed to the Bourgeoisie? What's the point of becoming a big bad Dictator if you have to worry about what your tailor or your dental hygenist thinks of you?

The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”

The problem with xenophobia is that it can be appeased simply by protecting the borders and enforcing immigration laws. Absent such measures, obsessing with plots is too obviously a waste of time. It isn't enough to demonize Soros, you have to kick in the head of a couple of dusky folk.

The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

But all rhetoric does that. It's just the way we talk. Mummy loves baby. Sometimes she describes its doings in despairing terms as something elemental and overpowering and fundamentally malign. His Highness, the Baby, is a cruel despot. The very next moment, he's Mummy's cuddly wuddly itty baby- so endearingly weak and pathetically vulnerable.  As for Daddies, we whimperingly obey those whom, otherwise, we'd eat.

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”

The Scientist's struggle for a bigger research grant is not, she would like us to believe, part of her struggle for sustenance. Rather, unless it is Social Science shite, it is a struggle for the sort of knowledge which can make life better for other people and thus endow her own life with meaning.

Pity, this makes her an Ur Fascist. She should take up Eco Feminism, like Vandana Siva, instead.

Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

Good to know! So Trumpistas are in the clear. Oh dear. That means Jason Stanley is the Fascist.

Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”

Well, that lets Franco off the hook. He brought in Morrocans to do the systematic raping and Germans and Italians to do the daredevil stuff.

Eco may think Mussolini educated his people to become heroes. Hence the Italian army's penchant for running away.

Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”

So, all ten year old little boys are Ur-Fascists.

Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”

That was our past. We are now skeptical of TV or internet populism precisely because real time data analysis has improved. The Law is closing in on those who manipulate public opinion by using 'bots'.

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Buffy the Vampire slayer had an impoverished vocabulary and an elementary syntax. However, the Valley girl's artful deployment of 'upspeak' and 'vocal fry' made their idiolect more, rather than less, richly communicative. In the finale of the series, Buffy shares her super-powers with all the potential Slayers- a democratic outcome.

Meanwhile, academic feminism had turned to shit because its vocabulary and syntax kept getting more and more arcane and convoluted.

Eco himself wrote books on 'semiotics'. They were meaningless. 'The Name of the Rose' was the precursor to the 'Symbology' of the Da Vinci code as Steven Johnson points out in his article 'I was an Under-Age Semiotician'. Explaining his own trajectory towards popular writing about Science and Technology, he writes-

Embracing semiotics came with certain costs. In my own case, I spent most of my mid-20s detangling my prose style. (It got younger as I got older.) I now spend more time learning from the insights of science than deconstructing its truth claims. I slowly killed off the desire to impress with willful obscurity. During my grad school years, I took a seminar on Derrida to which Derrida himself paid a surprise visit, modestly answering our questions with none of the drama I had imagined reading his written words on the page. He seemed, amazingly, to be saying something, rather than just saying something about the impossibility of saying anything. In one cringe-inducing moment, a peer of mine asked a rambling, self-referential question that began by putting “under erasure” the very nature of an answer. I remember breaking into a broad smile when Derrida responded, after a long pause, “I am sorry, but I do not understand the question.” It seemed like the end of an era: Derrida himself was asking for more clarity.

Sadly, if clarity was what Semiotics was asking for, it was because it had been poisoned by its own mystifications. It couldn't be a bulwark against Fascism any more than it could be a bulwark against the Spanish Inquisition. Socio-Proctology, on the other hand, is Humanity's last defense against the auto da fe.