Suchergebnisse

9/11 and its aftermath demonstrate the urgent need for political scientists and historians to unravel the tangled relationship of secular ideologies and organized religions to political fanaticism.This major new volume uses a series of case studies by world experts to further our understanding of these complex issues. They examine the connections between fascism, political religion and totalitarianism by exploring two inter-war fascist regimes, two abortive European movements, and two post-war American extreme right-wing movements with contrasting religious components.<

Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam of empathetic understanding into the disturbing and murky psychological world of fanatical violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the profoundly human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence

In the tsunami of publications on terrorism which followed 9/11, few have probed effectively into the deeper layers of motivation that enable normal human beings to carry out such unimaginable acts. Terrorist's Creed casts a penetrating beam of empathetic understanding into the disturbing and murky psychological world of fanatical violence, explaining how the fanaticism it demands stems from the profoundly human need to imbue existence with meaning and transcendence. Drawing on sociology, psychology, novels and films, it shows how the need to defend or create a territorial or purely cultural 'home' in an unforgiving universe can precipitate a process of 'heroic doubling' which in extreme circumstances legitimates murder and suicide for the sake of a 'higher' cause.

The Nature of Fascism draws on the history of ideas as well as on political, social and psychological theory to produce a synthesis of ideas and approaches that will be invaluable for students. Roger Griffin locates the driving force of fascism in a distinctive form of utopian myth, that of the regenerated national community, destined to rise up from the ashes of a decadent society. He lays bare the structural affinity that relates fascism not only to Nazism, but to the many failed fascist movements that surfaced in inter-war Europe and elsewhere, and traces the unabated prolifera.

Abstract
This article seeks to exorcise some of fascism's more haunting taxonomic horrors by focusing on the multiple 'phantasmagorical' aspects of comparative fascist studies which thwart attempts to achieve definitive resolutions of such nebulous and contested issues as its relationship to the radical right. It first considers the lasting traumatic effect on collective memories resulting from the catastrophic scale of inhumanity and casualties generated by the Third Reich and the war needed to destroy it. It argues that the dark psychological shadow cast by World War II, along with Marxist essentialism and the speculative component of all conceptualization, has made mapping the relationship between fascism and the contemporary radical right particularly fraught not just with ideological controversy but even subliminal psychological factors that subvert objectivity. It then suggests how the difficulties such issues pose to modelling the relationship can be overcome by the consistent application of widely agreed ideal types of the key phenomena to establish the intricacies of fascism's morphological adaptation to postwar realities and its often subtle interactions with new non-fascist forms of right. On this basis a complex but comprehensible and heuristically researchable relationship between fascism and the radical right looms into view which is spectral in a sense that owes more to natural science than the supernatural.

This paper attempts to dispel with a breath of conceptual fresh air the dense terminological fog that still shrouds discussions of different types of contemporary "right" in the media and social networks, and that also obscures analyses of "populism" in some specialised academic studies. First, it emphasises the now conventional ideal-type distinction between fascism as a revolutionary form of ultra-nationalism, and the radical right, which encompasses illiberal forms of "right-wing populism", as a non-revolutionary force. He then emphasises how the "metapolitical turn" in the New Right has allowed ostensibly non-fascist, non-racist and non-violent variants of ultra-nationalism to have a major impact on the "radical populist right" in its calls for a restored "identity" and its conjectures about an ethnically differentiated "people". This evolution has allowed radical populism to serve "entryist" neo-fascists as a vehicle for infiltrating democratic politics, either through alliances or by forming covert extremist factions within populist movements. What emerges here is a set of premises for analysing the subtle relationship between fascism and illiberal democratic populism in movements such as Spain's Vox with a level of taxonomic consistency and sophistication. The "moral" is that radical right-wing populism should not be equated with fascism, even if it shares with it porous membranes both historically and in its post-war permutations. These membranes allow it to act as a means to infiltrate fascism and accommodate a fascist electorate that would otherwise be "helpless": in this way, both populism and fascism contaminate "liberal democracy". ; Este artículo intenta disipar con un soplo de aire fresco conceptual la densa neblina terminológica que todavía envuelve las discusiones sobre los diferentes tipos de "derecha" contemporánea en los medios de comunicación y en las redes sociales y que también oscurece los análisis sobre el "populismo" planteados en algunos estudios académicos especializados. En primer lugar, hace hincapié en la ya convencional distinción de tipos-ideales entre el fascismo como forma revolucionaria de ultranacionalismo, y la derecha radical, que engloba formas antiliberales de "populismo de derechas", como fuerza no revolucionaria. A continuación, enfatiza cómo el "giro metapolítico" en la Nueva Derecha ha permitido que variantes aparentemente no fascistas, no racistas y no violentas del ultranacionalismo tengan un gran impacto en la "derecha radical populista" en sus llamamientos a una "identidad" restaurada y sus conjeturas sobre un "pueblo" étnicamente diferenciado. Esta evolución ha permitido que el populismo radical sirva a los neofascistas "entristas" como vehículo para infiltrarse en la política democrática, ya sea mediante alianzas o formando facciones extremistas encubiertas dentro de los movimientos populistas. Lo que se desprende aquí es un conjunto de premisas para analizar la sutil relación entre el fascismo y el populismo democrático iliberal en movimientos como el español Vox con un nivel de consistencia y sofisticación taxonómica. La "moraleja" es que el populismo radical de derechas no debe equipararse al fascismo, aunque comparta con él membranas porosas tanto históricamente como en sus permutaciones de posguerra. Estas membranas le permiten actuar como medio para infiltrar al fascismo y dar cabida a un electorado fascista que si no estaría "desamparado": de esta manera, tanto el populismo como el fascismo contaminan la "democracia liberal".

In the entry on 'Fascism' published in 1932 in the Enciclopedia Italiana, Benito Mussolini made a prediction. There were, he claimed, good reasons to think that the twentieth century would be a century of 'authority', the 'right': a fascist century (un secolo fascista). However, after 1945 the many attempts by fascists to perpetuate the dreams of the 1930s have come to naught. Whatever impact they have had at a local level, and however profound the delusion that fascists form a world-wide community of like-minded ultranationalists and racists revolutionaries on the brink of 'breaking through', as a factor in the shaping of the modern world, their fascism is clearly a spent force. But history is a kaleidoscope of perspectives that dynamically shift as major new developments force us to rewrite the narrative we impose on it. What if we take Mussolini's secolo to mean not the twentieth century, but the 'hundred years since the foundation of Fascism'? Then the story we are telling ourselves changes radically.