The content explores the historical origins and defining characteristics of fascism, examining its rise in interwar Italy and Germany, and discusses the complexities and disagreements among experts regarding its potential resurgence in contemporary times.
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- I keep hearing this word: "fascism."
- Fascism. - Fascism.
- Fascist. - He's a fascist.
- Fascist. - Fascism.
- And I have a confession to make,
which is, I don't totally understand it.
I feel kind of naive.
When I think of fascism, I think of World War II.
I think of the Nazi regime
committing some of the most horrendous atrocities
in human history.
And I think of their ally, Italy.
But "fascist" has also become this generic insult
that people use in politics.
- A weird kind of arbitrary fascism.
- This is what fascist leaders do.
- She's a Marxist, communist, fascist.
- Reject Donald Trump's fascism!
- They're the ones acting like actual fascists.
- Look up the definition of "fascism."
- But it's also used as an insult
in things that have nothing to do with politics.
- This guy's being a total fascist.
- Free expression.
Not fascist moves.
- What kind of a fascist hash foundry are you running here?
- But lately, I'm hearing the word used more seriously.
- Fascism.
- Experts, historians, scholars, some of them are warning
that we are seeing the rise of fascism again.
Are we?
(book pages flicking)
This took us deeper than expected,
deeper than I can remember going on a video in a long time,
into books and documents and speeches,
deep into the research and scholarship
on fascism and its history.
And we got to talk to a whole range
of top experts on fascism.
People who know a lot about this
but don't actually agree with each other on everything.
- I'm a historian of fascism, populism, and dictatorships.
- The question is, is fascism real and abroad in the world?
- It's very important not to abuse the concept.
- To be a fully-fledged fascist,
you need a vision of an alternative political system.
(book pages flicking)
- A quick note about what I'm trying to do here.
I am not the person to give you
the correct interpretation of fascism.
What I can promise you is clarity.
Clarity on the story of fascism,
on the features of fascist regimes.
And my hope is that that clarity
arms you with the tools you need
to evaluate what's happening today for yourself.
And I hope to hear from you in the comments,
to have a good-faith, respectful debate
about how you interpret all of this.
But before you comment, let me show you what I've learned.
What is fascism?
How do we define it?
And how do we start to evaluate
if it's happening again today?
There's a handful of countries
that have had what scholars might call
some kind of fascist regime over the years,
but in the research we did, it has become clear
that, to really understand fascism,
you have to go into its source code, the root of it,
how it started, how it became so successful.
So we are going to focus in on these 25 years,
the years between the two big wars.
And specifically, we're going to focus on these two men.
(light thoughtful music)
- Before the First World War,
it's an age of extraordinary technological achievement.
You get this extraordinary explosion of transport,
you know, trains and cars.
- It was a time of mind-bending new machines
that were rewriting the rules of life itself
faster than anyone was ready for.
It promised everything,
but soon it threatened to destroy everything, too.
- In 1914, you get this horrific First World War
with absolute carnage. Millions dying, millions.
New mass-produced ways of killing lots of people,
like machine guns and dropping bombs, et cetera.
And trench warfare is horrendous.
(tense uneasy music)
- In these four violent years, societies were ripped apart.
(light pensive music)
Italy was actually on the winning side,
but their allies had promised them
all sorts of territorial gains that didn't actually pan out.
Italy felt cheated.
They lost hundreds of thousands of men.
It was, in their words, a "mutilated victory," a bad deal.
But not as bad of a deal as the losers got.
Especially Germany. Who lost over two million soldiers,
half a million civilians, 13% of their territory,
which contained 10% of their population.
Add to this the money that they borrowed to fight this war
that they now had to pay back: a tremendous amount of debt.
And on top of all of this, the peace deal required them
to pay back the victors for this war.
Half a trillion dollars in today's money,
something that they actually just
recently finished paying off.
Which led them to borrow more money.
I mean, it was terrible.
It scrambled this once very advanced, thriving economy.
Their money lost 99.9999999% of its value.
It's wheelbarrows full of cash and an economy in crisis
that creates a sense of widespread anger and resentment,
and humiliation among these people.
So Italy and Germany,
they're both feeling cheated and angry.
And, like, a lot of Europe,
they're in a sort of a fork in the road
with their government.
They're figuring out what kind of society they want to have.
(tense thoughtful music)
Italy still had a king, but they were also doing democracy.
They had a parliament.
Germany had parliament and voting.
Women could vote in Germany.
They had individual rights enshrined in law.
But these democracies were fragile,
and increasingly they were in crisis.
So people start wondering
if they need to rethink the system entirely.
- It is that sense of total breakdown
which generated extraordinary enthusiasm
about the possibility of a new socialist, communist world,
or a new ultra-nationalist, racist world.
- One rising option in people's minds
was to do what workers, soldiers,
and peasants had just done in Russia.
Led by a revolutionary named Vladimir Lenin,
Russians had just overthrown their government,
promising a new way, communism,
where land and industry would be seized from the elites
and put under the control of the people,
the workers, the peasants.
At least that was the idea.
This revolution would create the Soviet Union,
and the Soviet Union would eventually become
a brutal dictatorship
that would kill millions of its own people.
But that's not what this video is about.
And anyway, not yet.
For now, right after World War I,
this communist revolution in Russia
is looking like a desirable option
to some of these reeling countries.
(ominous uneasy music)
- [Roger] That inspired a lot of extremist Marxists
to believe that they were on the verge
of causing a revolution in their country.
- So this was one revolution on offer.
And more and more people in Italy
and Germany start embracing communism.
They're going on strike.
They're occupying factories.
But communism wasn't the only revolutionary idea
promising a solution to this postwar misery.
And that's where we're gonna turn to this guy:
Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini will one day be Italy's fascist dictator,
but not yet.
His path to power is going to have to pass through
some very important steps.
And for that, we made something.
(gentle pulsing music)
We're gonna use this to track the rise
of Mussolini and Hitler
because these steps can help teach us how fascism operates.
Before World War I,
Mussolini was a rising star in Italian socialism.
He ran an Italian socialist paper.
He advocated for workers' rights.
But once World War I started,
Mussolini breaks with the socialists
because he thinks that Italy should join the war,
and the socialists are firmly anti-war.
So they kick him out of the party.
And this is where he pivots hard.
He starts his own pro-war nationalist newspaper,
all about pride and sacrifice
and putting the nation above class struggle.
Italy does enter World War I,
and the 32-year-old Mussolini enlists to go fight.
He gets wounded in a training exercise,
and he comes home from the war
even more resolved in his vision of a strong Italy.
But now with a new set of beliefs
that he gained while in the trenches.
And he starts to share his beliefs.
(gentle contemplative music)
He starts a club with a small group of other guys,
a lot of them ex-soldiers like him,
men who also feel humiliated
and are looking for someone to blame.
And he tells them that Italy's problems
are not only because of the war
and the betrayal from their so-called allies,
that "mutilated victory,"
but also because of what's happening inside Italy itself,
where all of these "isms" are poisoning the country.
Communism and socialism were threatening to transform Italy
with these worker revolutions.
And even democracy itself, or liberalism,
was to blame for all of these problems.
Italy's democracy had, in his words,
"gone drunk with compromise."
They couldn't get anything meaningfully done
because they're accommodating
all these different viewpoints.
He says, Guys, this is Italy.
We're the historic home of the Roman Empire,
the foundation of Western society.
And now we've been betrayed and humiliated.
But Mussolini says that he has a solution.
He says that Italy must be ruled
by men who had just fought
in this traumatizing industrial war.
Men who had been purified by violence and sacrifice
and discipline.
In his eyes, these were a new kind of man,
a new kind of elite,
created not by aristocratic birth but by combat.
And now these veterans had an obligation
to replace the weak, entitled elites
that had been created by liberal democracy
and to replace it with a, quote, "trenchocracy,"
the aristocracy of the trenches.
(light gentle music)
So this is like our origin story here.
It's the spring of 1919 in Milan, Italy.
Not even a year after World War I has ended.
And Mussolini is rallying his club
of ex-soldiers and sympathizers,
telling them that violence is actually sacred.
It's a stamp of nobility.
- Fascism always involved violence
and the militarization of politics.
Violence is glorified.
Violence is presented as what makes men men.
- This is about men being aggressive, violent,
dominant, and strong.
And that that's a good thing.
That's the key to restoring the greatness of the nation.
Not the soft, weak intellectuals that democracy had created.
- And for his new group, Mussolini adopts this symbol.
It's a symbol that had been used way back in ancient Rome
and many times over the years,
including in the French Revolution.
You see this in the American Capitol building
as a symbol of unity and order.
A stick by itself can be a weapon,
but it's also easily broken.
But gather many sticks into a uniform bundle,
or a "fascio," in Italian,
and suddenly it's a lot harder to break.
Add an axe to this bundle,
and you have a kind of indestructible tool of punishment.
Mussolini is telling his listeners
that, under his direction of trenchocracy,
Italians must become a unified bundle, a fascio.
Fascismo.
Fascism.
Learning the origins of this word
has been really useful for me
to approach this whole story with curiosity.
Curiosity is the antidote
to so many of the problems plaguing our media.
It's the reason why videos like this are not easy to make.
And this is why we're building a platform
and a community to bring curiosity back into journalism.
It's called Newpress.
It is live now.
You can go sign up for free
and start contributing to our journalism.
See what we're working on, ask your questions,
and we listen.
Every story that I'm doing this year,
I am letting you all in on, and I'm getting your curiosity,
your expertise, and your insights
to help make the story stronger.
I think that's what we need right now.
So newpress.com, go check it out.
Totally free to contribute.
You can also support us there, too,
if you wanna see more of this work.
So at its very root,
fascism begins as a nationalist movement
founded by a bunch of war veterans
set on restoring Italy's greatness,
and they glorify violence as the key to making this happen.
(tense thoughtful music)
What should be the focus of their violence?
Well, Mussolini's former friends.
- One of the key aspects of fascism
is crushing the socialists.
(tense uneasy music)
- They start hunting for socialists and communists,
arriving to their meetings, smashing their printing presses,
beating up the leaders of these worker strikes and protests.
And more and more Italian men,
many of them fellow veterans, join.
These violent squads, or squadristi,
eventually get a new name, the Blackshirts,
a group somewhere between a gang of street thugs
and a private militia.
And soon their ranks swell to a quarter million people.
Their acts of violence escalate.
Soon, they're raiding and burning down headquarters
of the socialist and communist movements.
They destroy the office of the socialist newspaper
that Mussolini once had been the editor for.
They even murder socialist party members.
And the violence includes humiliation.
They would routinely kidnap their enemies
and force-feed them huge amounts of laxatives,
like, just brutal.
(books thudding)
This is a book from while all of this is happening.
20 fascists arrive in a lorry.
They attack a club, beat the workers,
and set the place on fire.
Fascists assault a funeral party.
Make their way into a cafe and seriously wound an employee
by stabbing him in the chest.
A band of fascists who are armed and masked
attack several citizens, including socialists,
left on the ground, senseless and bleeding.
Setting fire to a socialist headquarters.
Burning banners and furniture.
Attack a socialist cooperative.
A doctor is beaten by fascists.
A socialist lawyer is beaten by fascists.
Workers are taken to the hospital
having been beaten by fascists.
Strikes a 10-year-old child who is singing "The Red Flag."
You get the point.
These guys were all over the country,
committing really heinous acts of violence.
- Fascists believe that violence is the source of power,
and that source of power
increases when violence is unleashed.
- Like, how are they getting away with all this stuff?
They don't actually control the country.
They aren't an army; they aren't the police.
They're just a bunch of angry men committing violence
on behalf of this ultra-nationalist group.
So why is no one stopping them?
Like, where is the government in all of this?
(gentle pensive music)
Well, that's the thing.
Italy's democratic government at the time
is divided and weak.
And the people who did have power in the country
were actually kind of okay with what Mussolini
and his thugs were doing.
And here I'm talking about the rich people,
who, like Mussolini, hate communists.
Remember? The communist revolution?
They're threatening to take away their wealth
and distribute it to the workers.
These business elites are terrified.
- Some members of the ruling group saying,
Should we fool around with and try and, you know,
think about a fascist way to resolve these problems?
- So these land and business owners
actually start funding Mussolini's Blackshirts.
Over and over, the Blackshirts are even hired
to break up strikes and to beat up striking workers.
- The first mission of fascism
is to crush anti-capitalist resistance
from the working classes from below.
- So the rich people are letting it happen.
They're funding it.
Okay, but what about the army and the police?
Well, turns out many among their ranks
are actually fascist sympathizers.
Like, Mussolini is talking to these guys.
He's appealing to these guys.
Even though his tactics of violence are quite extreme,
more and more of the population is realizing
they like the fascist vision of what Italy should be,
including the way the fascists punish their enemies.
And then something happens that changes everything.
(lively pulsing music)
Socialists and communists
are gaining some traction in the parliament,
and the prime minister, who's like a centrist,
doesn't want to invite them into his coalition.
So he turns to Mussolini's fascists,
knowing that they're kind of becoming a force
that can't be ignored.
He asks them to be a part of his coalition,
maybe bringing them into the official democracy,
can tame them and their violent ways.
- They believe that they can control them.
Because they see them, rightly, as vulgar, as idiotic,
as narcissistic, and ignorant,
they believe they can control them.
- Mussolini's fascists are now an official political party
that was just invited into the mainstream.
And this is the next step on this path.
The fascists have now been accepted, legitimized,
first by the business elites,
and now by the political system, the democracy.
Mussolini is now a politician in parliament
along with 35 other fascist politicians.
But this doesn't solve anything for Italian democracy.
The new political coalition falls apart almost immediately.
Italy's government continues to be paralyzed by infighting.
And all over the country, Mussolini's fascist fighters
continue to use this dysfunction
as an opportunity to take their violence to the next level.
They take over entire cities,
places with elected socialist leaders,
occupying government buildings,
chasing out the socialist city government,
and imposing their own policies. Often while the police
just look the other way, or even help them out in some cases.
They start marching on the big cities in Italy,
like Bologna and Ferrara.
And eventually, Mussolini directs
tens of thousands of his Blackshirts
to march on the capital, Rome.
(tense dramatic music) (footsteps marching)
Mussolini's movement, which started as a club
of, like, 100 men in Milan, now, 3 1/2 years later,
was a force that couldn't be ignored,
gathering in huge numbers just outside the capital,
preparing to march on the city,
daring the country's king to use his army against them.
So the king sizes up his options.
He likely knows that a lot of the ranks of his army
probably sympathize with the fascists.
So instead of standing up to Mussolini
and risking a civil war, he makes a deal with him.
He invites him to become the prime minister.
(footsteps marching)
He has real power now.
He's addressing the parliament.
And he claims, at first, that he, quote,
"does not intend to deviate from the Constitution."
He's going to keep the democracy, he says.
But over the next four years,
he dismantles the Italian democracy from within.
He says that the parliament and the entire political system
are wholly unworthy to guide us.
Now, not everyone's buying this.
Like, he's not universally popular among the citizenry.
A lot of people do like him, but a lot of people don't.
But in the next election,
his Blackshirts intimidate and suppress voters,
which helps the fascists
win a huge majority in the election.
Soon, he's censoring the press.
He's shutting down newspapers.
He's creating a secret police.
- You abolish all liberal freedoms.
You get rid of all freedom of the press, freedom of speech.
- And then he abolishes
all other political parties.
- You have a totally alternative system
of a single-party state, charismatic leader,
an alternative legal system.
- And then finally,
he abolishes elections themselves.
- This is a revolutionary rebirth.
And what that means is, you destroy the democratic system.
- It's 1925, and Mussolini has done away
with all democratic mechanisms
that could be used to challenge him.
And he completes the last step
on the fascist path to absolute power.
(tense uneasy music)
As the absolute ruler, he rallies the people
with slogans like "Believe, obey, fight."
We know what "fight" means.
He's been doing that since he started his combat league.
But these other ingredients, "believe" and "obey,"
are really important too.
Mussolini demands belief and submission
not just to him but to his story.
The story that he says will, quote,
make "Italy great, respected, and feared,"
restoring it to the glory of an imagined past,
the Roman Empire.
- What you're pointing towards is not actual history.
What you're always pointing to
is some kind of beautiful plastic moment.
(crowd cheering)
- And Mussolini would be the singular voice
for the entire nation.
And as ever, his story glorifies soldiers
and the, quote, "bloody sacrifice of war,"
and reimagines the country as a giant military,
a uniform bundle of sticks,
which many Italians will become willingly.
And for those who don't,
their descent will be violently snuffed out.
Everyone must get in line.
(tense uneasy music) (footsteps marching)
For life is conquest, warfare. At first, directed at home
against his enemies: socialists, communists,
liberal democrats.
But that war must eventually be brought abroad.
He starts conquering parts of Africa,
imposing his "new civilization" on others.
Okay, so we have our first answer
on what fascism is.
It is a movement started by Benito Mussolini in 1919.
One that glorifies violence,
specifically violence against communism and socialism.
It finds democracy itself as weak and contemptible,
in need of not just reform,
but total destruction and revolution.
And it tells a story of a superior nation
that has been humiliated, and that needs to be restored.
A mythologized past, whose decline they blame
on their enemies, and whose rebirth they promise
under the rule of one charismatic, strong leader.
And crucially, they gain support from mainstream elites.
Rich people. Politicians.
That allows them to gain control of the country,
after which they dismantle the democracy from within,
and then demand total submission to the state.
Which allows them to mobilize huge numbers of people
with a ton of propaganda
and then begin a program of conquest and expansion.
Today, we call that thing fascism.
And we call it fascism,
not because it has some, like, Latin root
in some, like, philosophy or worldview,
but because Benito Mussolini chose the fascio,
the bundle of sticks with an axe on it, as his logo
when he was making his combat club in 1919 in Milan.
If somebody else had done this first,
we would probably call it something different today.
(dark ominous music)
And in fact, these ingredients that we just talked about
weren't just happening in Italy;
they were happening in a lot of places
in Europe after World War I,
especially in the countries that lost.
Which brings us to another angry World War I vet.
This one in Germany.
Someone who was watching Mussolini very closely,
admiring his rise to power,
and who will one day take Mussolini's strategy
to a whole new level.
Before we go any further,
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Let's get back to our story.
(light thoughtful music)
Okay, enter Adolf Hitler to the story.
He's about 10 years behind Mussolini
on his own path to power.
And remember what we talked about earlier:
Germany is in a terrible place after World War I.
They have been crushed militarily, politically,
economically, and way worse than Italy.
Germany had been one of the most advanced economies on Earth
before the war, and now they're in the dumps.
And a lot of Germans are wondering, "What happened?
How do we fix this?"
And once again, one of the answers
was, Maybe we need a radically new system, like communism,
like they're doing over in Russia.
So lots of Germans are joining communist parties
and worker councils.
They're striking, they're occupying factories,
they're launching armed uprisings.
And in some places, they're even trying
to overthrow the government.
But there were many Germans,
especially returning humiliated war veterans,
who looked the other way,
feeling like they had been betrayed.
Many Germans had been hearing this narrative
that their civilization,
and even perhaps their race, was superior.
It was pure.
And that their art and their music and their engineering
are more than just a culture,
that it actually comes from their bloodline.
They've been hearing stories about Germanic people
connected to ancient cultures,
stories that are essentially a misreading of real science.
Notably, in the relatively new field of linguistics,
where researchers were discovering that many world languages
share a common ancestor, a group of languages
that some 19th-century linguists were calling "Aryan,"
a name that came from the Indo-Iranian people,
an old culture.
Iran, Aryan.
And so here we are in the 19th and 20th century,
and some creative Germans start to imagine
that actually Aryan isn't just a group of languages.
Aryan was an actual race.
An original master race
from which all great civilizations sprang.
And they start to imagine that maybe this master race
actually started in where Germany is today,
North and Central Europe.
And that all other cultures actually come from us.
We are the origin of all good cultures.
The pure starting point.
- The idea was that it was actually the Germans
who created ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia
and ancient Greece, and ancient Rome.
- And so they start to see all other races as impure
and some races as really impure, as we'll see.
Now, to be clear, these ideas have no basis
in real evidence or science.
They pull from things like linguistics,
but then make a lot of really big leaps to create a story
of superiority, of racial superiority and purity.
And a link to some ancient pure culture,
which some Germans start to represent with a symbol,
an ancient symbol that they adopt from the East.
It's one that's appeared across many cultures.
It's a hooked cross,
which they would call an ancient Aryan rune,
an emblem of their mythical Aryan past,
a symbol that they believed connected Germany
back to a noble ancient race.
(gentle sparse music)
This was intoxicating stuff for a lot of Germans,
especially after the war, when soldiers came home humiliated,
looking for answers,
looking for an explanation on how their great economy
and civilization was now on its knees.
And this fantasy of the Aryan race gave them an explanation.
It allowed them to believe
that they actually didn't lose the war,
that instead they had been stabbed in the back,
a "Dolchstoß" in their words, a betrayal at home,
a betrayal by the weak politicians in their democracy
who had signed this bad peace deal,
a betrayal by the communists
who had sabotaged the war effort with their strikes.
And the ultimate betrayal,
the ultimate group that they could blame,
was the impure race that was quietly pulling the strings
on all of these groups,
engineering the downfall of the invented Aryan race.
So this is all happening around the same time
that Mussolini is starting his combat club in Milan.
Groups similar to Mussolini's are forming in Germany.
They're fringe radical nationalist groups.
At first, they have no presence in actual politics,
like in the government and the parliament.
They're just groups of angry men
with an obsession on an imagined nation,
a focus on their current humiliation,
and an appetite to commit violence.
And one of those men was a 30-year-old World War I veteran,
Adolf Hitler.
At the end of the war, Hitler joins one of these
small, obscure nationalist groups.
He rises in the ranks of this little group
to become the party leader.
He implements a militia.
They'd soon be named the Brownshirts,
echoing Mussolini's Blackshirts,
though their official name was the Sturmabteilung,
the stormtroopers, named after the real German Army's
elite assault unit in World War I.
Hitler also helped his little party rebrand
to appeal to more people, especially workers.
- In ways that make it seem like they're anti-capitalist.
They called themselves the National Socialists.
- I never understood this until now.
The full name of Hitler's party
was the National Socialist German Workers Party,
which sounds super socialist.
Eventually nicknamed the Nazis.
He named it this intentionally to attract people
who were interested in workers' movements,
like the communists and the socialist movements
that he opposed, but that he knew had wide appeal.
Though, to be very clear,
these guys were not socialist in any meaningful sense.
It was just a branding play.
And soon, Hitler is overseeing a new rendition
of the hooked cross, this fake Aryan symbol.
His version would mimic the colors of the old German Empire,
the Second Reich, a nod to the past.
This symbol, this flag, this is Hitler's bundle of sticks,
his version of restoring ancient Rome.
But now with this extremist racial superiority component.
(footsteps marching)
More and more men start to join his political street gang
as they go hunt down his enemies.
Hitler has just taken the first step
on the fascist path to power.
(truck engine rumbling)
(gentle contemplative music)
And his Brownshirts look a lot like Mussolini's Blackshirts,
guys with clubs, guns, and even grenades
storming into communist and socialist meetings,
smashing chairs, lighting stuff on fire, beating attendees.
The big difference here is that in Italy,
Mussolini's group became the kind of dominant,
violent nationalist group.
In Germany, there was tons of these groups
that would go down, hunt down communists and socialists.
But again, with the racial component,
they're also focusing on minorities,
and at the top of their scapegoat list, Jewish people.
Who start to just become synonymous with the communists,
the traitors who they believe
brought about Germany's decline.
So you see the parallels here
with what's going on in Italy, right?
Like in Italy, all of this violence and chaos
shows German citizens that the Nazis
are actually more powerful than the gridlocked,
democratic government who can't provide order
or stability for this wrecked country.
(tense uneasy music)
Now remember, Mussolini
is further down the path than Hitler.
And Hitler is actually reading about
Mussolini's fascist squads seizing towns.
And in 1922, when Mussolini marches on Rome
and pressures the king to hand Mussolini the government,
Hitler reads about this, and he wants to do the same.
Hitler wants to do a Mussolini;
he wants to seize the city of Munich
and then march on the capital, Berlin.
So he and 600 of his Brownshirts surround this beer hall.
This is a place where politicians would come
and give speeches to, like, huge groups of people.
Hitler wants this to be the starting point
for his takeover of the country.
He enters the hall, pulls out a gun, and shoots the ceiling,
and then he yells out that the national revolution
has begun.
He claims that the government has fallen, which it hadn't.
He's trying to rally the huge group
in this beer hall to join him.
And it totally fails.
By the next day, his little coup attempt has collapsed,
and he, his men are arrested, and he finds himself in jail,
along with a few of his co-conspirators.
Though he was in jail, he somehow still had access
to newspapers and books, and a typewriter.
Meanwhile, in Italy, Mussolini is now
dismantling the democracy from within,
and Hitler is reading about all of this,
and he resolves to not give up.
He doubles down on his goal to take over the country.
(gentle chiming music)
So in jail, he spends a lot of time writing,
typing up his story.
Now there's a lot of sources that say
that he actually just dictated it and didn't write it,
and that he wasn't a great writer, whatever.
But the most recent scholarship concludes
that Hitler was writing.
He was writing his ideas on race,
what had caused all of Germany's problems
in the first place.
He types it all up into pages
that would eventually become a book.
A book that's part autobiography, part racial manifesto,
part political blueprint
for another attempt at a revolution attempt: "Mein Kampf."
It's a book full of hate and conspiracy theories,
and it's his story.
Much of it invented.
A simple story that he knew would appeal
to the psychology of millions of desperate people
looking for someone to blame for their misery.
And for that question
of who was to blame for Germany's problems,
Hitler's book had a very clear answer.
It all came back to communism and the Jews.
And really, Hitler concludes, the Jews,
which he deems an impure race,
who are using communism as a weapon to undermine
and ultimately destroy the German nation.
All problems come back to this.
- The unseen enemy is the Jew
who organizes the international conspiracy.
And then that story is kind of the master narrative.
- And according to Hitler,
to prevent that from happening again,
he says that the nation would have to be purified.
This purification would have to be based on blood —
a shared race — and the reclaiming of the sacred land
that gives it life.
Blood and soil.
People and race.
And finally, Hitler's book diagnoses
where he, Hitler, went wrong.
It's basically the only accurate part of the book,
where he assesses that in trying to take over the country
in that Munich beer hall,
his big mistake is that he tried to jump
from here, to here. Using violence,
but without gaining that mainstream acceptance
from business elites and from the democracy
that Mussolini had done.
Violence alone, he now sees,
wouldn't be enough to take power.
So his book outlines a strategy
for how he'll do it next time,
not a forced takeover, but in his words,
a, quote, "determined cooperation between brute force
and political aims wisely chosen."
So even though Hitler hates democracy,
he now understands that he must use the democracy
to rise to power, so that he can destroy it from within.
In other words, Hitler is going to have to succeed in politics.
- Fascism never cares about democracy,
but is willing to use it in order to destroy it.
- He gets out of jail in late 1924,
and instead of trying another coup,
he spends the next few years rebuilding the Nazi Party
as a legal, competitive political machine.
Remember, he needs to move from here to here,
which means winning votes.
He runs his party in the 1928 election,
the Germans vote, and, nope. The Nazis barely get any votes.
But he's undeterred.
He continues spreading his message of racial superiority
and backstabbing by the Jews.
He'll try again in two years in the next election.
And this is when something happens that will help him out.
(tense uneasy music) (crowd yelling)
1929 just hit;
financial markets around the world crash.
An economic depression sweeps around the world,
and Germany, which was already not doing great,
as we talked about,
is hit harder than pretty much any other country.
Soon, one in three Germans are out of work.
- The fascists in Germany appealed to that suffering,
basically whipping up a working class
through xenophobia, through racism.
Saying to that working class, "I feel your suffering.
I see it, I'm going to relieve it,
and you join me in this fascist project."
- It was a powerful rallying cry.
And indeed, the next year, 1930, there's an election,
and more people turn out to vote for the Nazi Party.
They're buying into his message.
He's getting closer to this step.
And if you listen to his, like, campaign speeches
during this time, it's pretty nuts.
This guy is openly stating
his intention of dismantling democracy
and the party system if he gets power.
Listen to this.
(crowd cheering)
- He's calling for revolution,
which people more and more want,
but he's mixing in racial superiority
and the easy scapegoat of Jews and communists.
All of this found a wider audience during the depression.
And look what happens in the next election.
The Nazi Party gets more votes than any other party,
not quite a majority
that would've given him control over the government.
But this is looking like acceptance,
not just by the political machine, but by the people.
But wait, back to that graph.
Look who else is getting a lot of votes.
The communists.
And just like in Italy, many of the top elites in business
and politics don't like the communists.
The communists promise to come for their wealth
and their power and take their land.
And who's anti-communist?
Well, Hitler is nothing if not anti-communist.
So Germany's elected leaders do almost exactly
what Italy's leaders did in this moment.
Even though they're a little bit leery of Hitler,
they let him in fully.
They let him become the chancellor,
the prime minister, basically,
thinking that they could maybe use Hitler
to keep the communists down
while also keeping some of his crazier
revolutionary ideas at bay.
Even though we're going to "form a government
under the leadership of Hitler,"
we are going to keep
"the utmost restriction" on this guy and his party,
making sure that he governs, quote,
"within the framework of the Constitution."
He's got some crazy ideas,
but we've got him under control.
Boy, that sounds familiar.
So now it's January 1933,
and Hitler is in full-blown mainstream power.
And from here things start to move fast.
(tense pulsing music)
Less than a month later,
somebody sets fire to Germany's parliament building,
and the man found at the scene of the crime is a communist.
- He uses that to say, "We have a state of emergency."
- State of emergency, very powerful tool.
Within days, he suspends the Constitution.
- And from then on, the entire Nazi regime
was based on the suspension
of all liberal democratic laws and freedoms.
- Freedom of expression, freedom of the press,
protections from search and seizures, all suspended.
Within months, he's abolished all other political parties,
something he said he was gonna do.
It's 1934, and Hitler has just followed Mussolini's strategy
and achieved absolute power.
(crowd cheering) (light tense music)
(crowd chanting)
(crowd cheering) (footsteps marching)
(crowd chanting)
- And those old myths,
those racial fantasies about the Aryan race,
become official policy of the state.
And just like Mussolini,
Hitler begins his war against the people
he had been planning for years to purge from society:
Communists, socialists, Roma, disabled people,
homeless people, sex workers, queer people,
and above all, Jews.
- What the Nazis did in their story about the Jews
was that they assigned to the Jews
everything that they themselves were doing:
We're only responding to things
which Jews have already done.
We are the victims, and all we're doing is responding.
So yeah, maybe we want to control the world,
but that's because the Jews already control the world.
Maybe we use propaganda,
but that's because Jewish propaganda
has already totally dominated the world information space.
- By 1935, he strips any German Jew of citizenship.
Strips them of their rights.
and then, in 1938, he unleashes his armed gangs on them.
They destroy hundreds of synagogues,
thousands of Jewish shops and businesses smashed and burned.
30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to camps.
Beaten, terrorized, their property stolen.
World War II hasn't started yet.
Hitler is just crushing any group he opposes from within.
And once complete, by the late '30s,
he turns his view outward.
(footsteps marching)
- [News Reporter] Poland, September 1939,
the German foe begins its ruthless march of conquest
and sets the stage for World War II.
- [Neville Chamberlain] This country is at war with Germany.
(gentle somber music) (tank engines rumbling)
(footsteps marching)
- Hitler and his now-ally, Mussolini,
launch wars of conquest that devastate much of Europe.
And as a part of those wars, Hitler implements
a series of systematic mass murder campaigns,
killing about six million Jews,
millions of Poles, Slavs, Roma, and other civilians
that he marks as racially impure or biologically inferior.
(wind whistles)
(tank engines rumbling)
(airplane engines whirring)
(train rattling)
(bombs booming)
So it's easy to lose yourself in this story,
especially at this point in the chronology.
But I want to now summarize what we can learn
from the rise of these two men, these two regimes,
what it tells us about what fascism is.
Both of these men ended up applying
a weirdly similar approach to gaining power.
Both of them started with small groups,
groups that glorified violence against political enemies.
Both of them created narratives
that sold a mythologized past
and blamed their enemies for the loss of that mythical past.
Both of them promised a rebirth of their superior nation
under the leadership of a singular,
charismatic, powerful man.
Both of them eventually got invited into the mainstream
of a democratic system by positioning themselves
against the forces that scare rich people:
communism, socialism.
And both vehemently called for
the end of democracy in any form,
even while they used democracy to gain power.
And once in power, both dismantled democracy from within
so that no one could challenge them,
creating a government and a society, and a press,
run entirely by the glorified leader,
which he then used to flood his people
with propaganda and fear,
getting them to act like a giant army
that the leader could mobilize, first at home,
then abroad in wars of conquest,
including an industrial-scale genocide
in the case of Hitler.
Okay, now this is not the list that defines fascism.
There is no "the list."
But after being really deep
in the source code of this history,
this is the list that we believe
summarizes the defining features of fascism.
But now the hard part, the part that's up to interpretation,
that everyone watching is gonna have
a slightly different read on.
What happens when we apply this list to today?
After decades of more and more countries
becoming liberal democracies,
meaning democracies that prioritize individual rights
and try to ensure that everybody
gets treated equally by the law,
the world has seen a reversal.
There is a decline in liberal democracies around the world.
That's what this chart is showing.
- [News Reporter] Fresh concerns
about the restriction of rights in Hungary.
- [News Reporter] Israeli lawmakers declaring
only Jews hold the right to self-determination.
- [News Reporter] Judges say Poland's judicial independence
is being violated.
- [News Reporter] Modi has been heavy-handed
with the Indian media and voices of dissent.
- Pair that with the uptake
of the visibility of communities
who openly embrace the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler.
- [News Reporter] Hundreds of men in Rome
making a fascist salute.
- [News Reporter] Openly praising Adolf Hitler,
making celebratory jokes about gas chambers.
- [protestors chanting] Blood and soil!
- Young white men.
(audience cheering)
- Taken together, you start to understand
the increase in serious people sounding the alarm bell
that this is maybe the return of fascism of some form.
Using it not just as the generic insult,
but actually saying that we're, like,
in some version of the 1930s.
They're citing modern events-
- [News Reporter] Angry anti-Muslim mob
tore through the town.
- [Johnny] That are concerning to them.
- Greenland should be part of the United States.
- [Johnny] That they say meet the criteria of fascism.
(door slams) - Police! Don't move!
- Hands up! - Don't move!
- [Johnny] Like the rise of militia groups, vigilantes,
government death squads, violent ultranationalist groups,
strongman leaders who invoke an idealized past,
promising to make their nation great once more.
Massive displays of loyalty and support
for the leader and the regime.
And, of course, blaming the country's problems
on some kind of outsider,
like radical socialists and communists.
- Foreign, Christian-hating communist Marxists
and socialists.
- Immigrants. - Yes, I use the word:
"invasion."
- Fake fugitives.
Freeloaders, criminals.
- Rapist illegal migrants.
- [Johnny] We're even seeing the first
expansionist ground war happening on the European continent
since World War II.
- [News Reporter] A full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
- Okay, so we have this list,
but a lot of this stuff is in the eye of the beholder.
Like, you might see this
and say, "There are definitely regimes and movements
that are doing all of these things today."
Or, "I see some elements of this,
but no country checks all of the boxes,
like Hitler and Mussolini did."
Which either means there's no fascism,
or it means that the checklist by itself
has a sort of limited usefulness.
Can it be fascism unless it checks all the boxes?
Or are some of these so dire and scary that you check one
or a couple of these, and that's fascism?
I asked the experts on this,
and it turns out they all have slightly different answers.
And I think we can learn a lot by understanding each one.
First, Federico Finchelstein,
who says that what we're seeing today isn't fully fascism,
but it's close.
But that we're still missing some really key pieces.
- There is no fascism without dictatorship.
The destruction of democracy
is central to fascist politics.
What the fascists did
is to use democratic means to destroy democracy from within.
- Finchelstein says that in order for it to be fascism,
it has to oppose not just communism, but democracy itself.
It might play by the rules of a democratic system at first,
but ultimately, fascism wants to destroy democracy,
destroy votes and parliaments.
And in most of the places that critics use the F-word
to describe, these nationalist leaders still operate
within some kind of democratic system,
even if it's just in name.
- We will not forget our Constitution.
- Finchelstein's point is that until these leaders
start calling for the end of voting and constitutions,
their regimes remain here.
Not here.
And thus, they aren't fascist. Yet.
- I think there is a fascist risk.
They are constantly at the verge
of turning democracy into dictatorship.
- And this is why Finchelstein's book
is called "Wannabe Fascists," because it describes leaders
who have followed some of this path
of the interwar fascists that we've talked about,
but they haven't gone all the way,
even if they maybe want to.
Fascism, according to him,
takes place only over here, when democracy ends fully.
- Fascism wanted to destroy democracy from within
in order to create an extremely racist
and totalitarian dictatorship.
- Meanwhile, Roger Griffin, one of the top experts
in the world on fascism, also says that until democracy
is totally wiped out, it's not fascism.
Where he disagrees with Finchelstein
is that he thinks we should move away
from this word altogether.
That the F-word is not actually useful
for today's nationalist regimes.
- Because we're so obsessed with the rise of fascism,
we are not looking at what is the novelty
of what's happening.
What I believe you are seeing is not the rise of fascism,
the return of fascism, but the rise of illiberal democracy,
illiberal democracy.
- Griffin argues that democracy and fascism
aren't the only two options here.
That there's a third bad thing that we can be,
where we don't trip the fascism alarm fully
because we still have democracies
with parliaments and votes.
But leaders, instead of destroying democracy from within,
they distort them.
They get rid of their liberal features.
And, by the way, quick side note,
"liberal" is a kind of confusing word.
Here in the United States, we use "liberal"
to describe a left-of-center political leaning
that supports things like social programs, gun control,
higher taxes for the wealthy.
But in this case, I mean liberal in the way that it was used
in, like, the 1800s
and is used by political scientists today.
Liberal like liberty,
like governments that ensure individual rights and freedoms,
equal protections for everyone
regardless of your group under the law.
You can have a system where there are votes
and a parliament and representation,
but don't have the liberal features
that a liberal democracy has.
And Roger Griffin says that
this is the thing we should be worried about.
That calling it fascism takes our eye off the ball
of this new thing, illiberal democracy,
where these nationalist leaders
are distorting democratic systems to consolidate power,
making societies less equal
while still running it like a democracy.
- What we have got are new forms of nationalism,
which are contained within democracy
instead of calling for the replacement of democracy.
- This was surprising to me.
When I started researching this story,
I was under the impression that, like,
all the experts agreed that fascism was back in some form,
but they don't.
- We are not there yet.
- That is, until you talk to some other experts
who say that it is fascism.
- The reason we need to use that term
is behind it is a concept
that helps us understand what is going on right now
in the third decade of the 21st century.
We need to see that history does not repeat itself
in the same conditions, in the exact same circumstances.
- This camp says that our checklists are a distraction.
That we're reading too much into the specifics of the 1930s.
- You don't need all of that
in order to have fascist control
and push forward with a fascist project.
- But William Robinson says that if you do want a checklist,
the most important item on it is actually the this one,
where ultranationalists become accepted into the mainstream
by the elites, like Mussolini and Hitler were.
This step, where the people in power decide
that these nationalist groups
that tolerate violence are useful to them.
- That's a form of trying to re-legitimate the system.
- This view says that in order for fascism
to actually succeed, it needs to bring together
a specific alliance, a kind of triangulation.
First, a vulnerable, receptive population.
- [Robinson] This triangulation then brings together
the fascist project with a mass social base.
But the third dimension is the ruling class.
It controls the economy.
You see, when Trump gets inaugurated for his second term,
you see behind him are all of the big
tech oligarchs right behind him.
The capital class in the United States
have now come on board.
- And finally, you have a view that says that
the most important items on this list are these.
It's the way the leader talks.
The way that they talk about the past and the future.
- What fascism does is it promises a return to an order,
and the order, of course,
didn't actually ever historically exist.
You're creating this sort of tabula rasa,
the smooth surface on which the fascist story
of "we were always innocent" can then function.
- For people like Snyder,
fascism starts when politics stops being about the future
and starts to become about a mythic story
of a glorious past, a humiliated nation,
and a leader who promises rebirth.
- If we could just somehow get the enemy off our screen,
off our phone, out of our country,
then there would be this harmony that would come back.
There will be love, there'll be prosperity,
there'll be happiness.
There won't be conflict anymore
because conflict was always brought by the outsider.
- And listen, every one of these experts
has a different read.
- I don't see any major movement in the West
that is trying to replace democracy
with a totally different system.
- You can't say that
because Hitler came to power in Germany,
and then almost immediately suspended any and all democracy
and just became a dictatorship overnight,
that therefore any fascist project
has to follow that same model.
There's not one road to fascism.
- When you use the list mechanism,
you're missing a kind of the historical sensibility you need
to actually recognize that thing for what it is.
And that is because what we wanna do
is, like, we look for the rational core.
In my view, that has not proven to be predictive.
More predictive would be to look for the fight,
the struggle, the enemy.
And to dwell on that.
- And you're seeing why the experts disagree here.
They disagree on how much we should read into the 1930s,
how much the word "fascism" actually matters.
- Obviously, 21st-century fascism
is not going to look like 20th-century fascism,
but it's going to have that underlying essence
in common with the 20th-century variant.
- There are important fascist elements here,
and it would be problematic to deny
that there are connections to fascism.
- But if we get too obsessed with fascism,
it takes attention away from actually looking carefully
at what is happening to democracy.
Illiberal democracy, whatever we call it,
is in many ways more dangerous than fascism.
- Illiberal democracy, I think, is inaccurate,
but because it's inaccurate, it's sort of pacifying.
If you think that it is just like, illiberal democracy,
then you can say, "Oh, we'll have another election,
and maybe the liberals will win next time," right?
- The question of what is a fascist
cannot be answered in simple terms.
- I entered this video really wanting clarity
on, is today fascism or not?
Instead, what I have after this long journey
are a series of patterns:
Glorified violence.
Elites who think violent groups can solve their problems.
The destruction of a democracy,
A myth. A lie. A fake history.
A fake promised future.
So I guess I now know what fascism isn't.
It's not any politics that I don't like.
Instead, it's a kind of method, a kind of view on power.
Fascism instantly conjures the worst of human cruelty,
how far we can fall under the right circumstances.
In that way, it's a valuable reminder, a warning.
But that same weight also makes it hard
and difficult to actually be useful.
It ends conversations as often as it starts them.
Still, there are a few things I feel sure about
after going through this history.
Domination, violence, hierarchy:
those aren't the exception in human history;
they're actually the norm.
For most of our existence,
the way that we've organized ourselves in large groups
has relied on force and fear and inequality,
and we'd be foolish to think
that the ugly instincts of control and submission
and vengeance, that those things are just going to go away.
So when we study fascism, what we're really seeing
is those old, ugly instincts coming through.
We'd be naive to think that we're beyond it,
that we're too smart or too modern
to fall into those same patterns of fear and control.
We're not immune.
We never have been.
This video isn't the final word on fascism.
It's just where my understanding starts.
The people I talked to for this story don't even agree.
But there is one area that most of them did agree.
Which is that we don't have to wait for it to be 1933 again
to notice that something is happening.
Because the point of understanding fascism
isn't to win arguments
or to come up with some ultimate definition
that will solve all of our questions.
It's to recognize the patterns. To point them out.
And to do something about it while we still have options.
