Ghostbusting Fascism?

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.