FascismPub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10044
Demetra Tzanaki
{"title":"Libido, Psychic Eugenics and Abnormality","authors":"Demetra Tzanaki","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10044","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10044","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article attempts to resituate the Greek regime of 4th of August 1936 within the wider context of interwar fascism in Europe and address it as fascist ideology and practice. It does so by pointing to the ways in which the biomedical discourse on gender and sexuality was pivotal in Ioannis Metaxas’s project in terms of playing a crucial role in normalising ideas of racial, class, sexual and gender hierarchy. The article has two areas of focus. The first approaches the eugenic discourse developed in Greece and Europe under liberal governments. This relied on the premise that the mental or psychic disorders it accounted for, identified mainly among the lower classes, were diagnosed as diseases of the ‘libidinous libido’ when it came to criminality, poverty, strikes, psychic diseases and brutal deaths. The second area of focus reveals how, once trained to detect biological and psychical anomalies, Metaxas’s regime managed to perform something that now gives the impression of a magic trick: by waving the wand of psychiatric technocracy over a scene of profound economic inequality, it cultivated an authoritarian, patriarchal, biomedical discourse on psychic normality.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43232124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10048
Aristotle Kallis
{"title":"International Fascism and the Allure of the ‘Third Way’ in Interwar Greece","authors":"Aristotle Kallis","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10048","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10048","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The rise and victory of Italian Fascism in the first half of the 1920s passed Greece by. Yet soon afterwards the international experience of ‘fascism’ found more receptive audiences within the prodigious dissident ‘third spaces’ where more and more mainstream Greek political actors chose to operate in the interwar period. This article explores the dynamics of the ideological and political formation of ‘third ways’ in interwar Greece, paying attention to the interplay between international stimuli and local contextual singularities. In these thirding spaces ‘fascism’ was understood and operationalised in very different, subjective, and ever-shifting ways by each of these actors. It was regarded mostly as a potential component of diverse thirding processes/solutions and rarely as the desired outcome thereof. This explains why fascism came to inform a range of very different thirding projects in interwar Greece—from pursuing rupture and renewal to aspiring to status quo-affirmation; from liberal to conservative to authoritarian visions; from searching for a short-term ‘remedy’ to envisioning a long-term radical transformation.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43963440","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10045
G. Souvlis
{"title":"Genuine Fascist Theory or Non-Systematic Conceptualisations of the New Authoritarian Order?","authors":"G. Souvlis","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10045","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article analyses legal texts written by Nikolaos Koumaros that were foundational to the 4th of August regime in Greece. It demonstrates the regime possessed an ideology that did not differ substantially from other authoritarian regimes of the period. In particular, the choice of Koumaros as the central legal theorist of the regime can be explained by his familiarity with anti-liberal theories of the time. His engagement with these theories was linked with his studies in France and Italy during the interwar period, exposing him to fascist ideals. A detailed examination of the conceptual transfers that informed the main legal texts of the regime demonstrated their reasoning followed closely the theoretical developments of the time. Mussolini’s doctrine of fascism and a specific reading of Rousseau functioned as the basis for the legitimisation of a new, anti-liberal political order. These ideas became key analytical pillars of the legal texts that gave shape to the regime’s normative and political foundation, demonstrating that explicit fascist theories informed the political physiognomy of the regime.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49362930","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10051
Yannis Stamos
{"title":"What’s in a Name?","authors":"Yannis Stamos","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10051","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The ‘Third Hellenic Civilisation’ was the principal propaganda innovation of the 4th of August regime and the core myth underpinning its ideological hegemony. Though regularly referred to as the central ideological slogan of the regime, there are no extensive discussions of its meaning and uses. This article attempts a comprehensive analysis of the term and the ways this futural discourse was employed as an instrument of legitimacy. By declaring the connection of the Third Hellenic Civilisation to art, literature, and culture in general, and granting the cultural field relative independence, Metaxas enabled intellectuals to assay their own interpretations of its meaning and proposals for its attainment. The article approaches the Third Hellenic Civilisation as a compound construct that was intended to act as a new ‘sacred canopy’, presenting the dialogue between official and intellectual discourses on its central aspects.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47362963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10046
Aikaterini (Kate) Papari
{"title":"Ideological Forerunners of Metaxas's Regime","authors":"Aikaterini (Kate) Papari","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10046","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Constitutional change in interwar Greece was prepared for by political figures who, overwhelmed by ongoing political and social crisis and strongly involved in intense political debates on the crisis of parliamentarianism, endorsed the disestablishment of the Second Hellenic Republic. This article focuses on conservative intellectuals influenced by German sociologists, such as Max and Alfred Weber, Italian and Spanish scholars such as Vilfredo Pareto and José Ortega Y Gasset, and neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophers and constitutional lawyers. Claiming to stand above politics, they argued restored nationalism was the only doctrine that could promote the fulfilment of the nation’s ‘mission’. These intellectuals argued democracy and class-based parties, especially the left, undermined the concept of parliamentarianism, weakened the ideal of democracy, and would lead the country to chaos. As a counterbalance, they promoted political ideas that supposedly benefited the state and Hellenism in general. They advocated for charismatic leadership, discussed implementation of ‘controlled democracy’, and proclaimed an idealistic millennialism, a modern Platonic republic of the ‘prime’, led by the ‘philosopher-king’.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47163023","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-11-16DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10052
P. Jackson
{"title":"Beyond the Paranoid Style—Fascism, Radical Right and the Myth of Conspiracy","authors":"P. Jackson","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10052","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Following two years of online events, from the 14 to 16 September 2022 the fifth annual Convention of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies (COMFAS) took place in Florence. The title of the conference ‘Beyond the Paranoid Style: Fascism, Radical Right and the Myth of Conspiracy’ presented a framework for a wide variety of reflections that were both historically grounded and timely. After all, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, many scholars have had new experiences of the impact of conspiracy theory thinking.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48969969","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-05-13DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10041
R. Griffin
{"title":"Ghostbusting Fascism?","authors":"R. Griffin","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10041","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49459884","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-05-13DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10037
Riccardo Marchi, R. da Silva
{"title":"Extreme-Right Violence in the Portuguese Transition to Democracy","authors":"Riccardo Marchi, R. da Silva","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Exército de Libertação de Portugal [ELP; Portugal’s Liberation Army] was one of the most infamous clandestine organizations active during the Portuguese transition to democracy, bringing together far-right militants from the deposed authoritarian regime. This organization has been considered the most dangerous terrorist group fighting for the restoration of Estado Novo’s regime. This article aims to challenge this statement, recurrently defended by international historiography, through an in-depth case study of the ELP, which is assessed in its genesis, structuring, ideological identity, strategy and operative capacity, permeability to repression, and dissolution. This study is based on a qualitative methodology triangulating data dispersed in the existing scientific and journalistic literature with data collected, unprecedently, in private archives and through face-to-face interviews with former ELP militants. Therefore, this paper is of importance to scholarship on the Portuguese transition to democracy, but also on the role of the extreme right in other post-authoritarian contexts, and on political violence in processes of democratization.","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48406325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-05-13DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10040
E. Locher-Scholten
{"title":"Negotiating Racial Politics in the Family: Transnational Histories Touched by National Socialism and Apartheid, by Barbara Henkes","authors":"E. Locher-Scholten","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42503783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
FascismPub Date : 2022-05-13DOI: 10.1163/22116257-bja10042
Gustaf Forsell
{"title":"Making Fascism in Sweden and the Netherlands: Myth-Creation and Respectability, 1931–40, by Nathaniël D.B. Kunkeler","authors":"Gustaf Forsell","doi":"10.1163/22116257-bja10042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22116257-bja10042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42586,"journal":{"name":"Fascism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43012830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}