What's in a name?

"What must it be like to live under a totalitarian regime? And what, exactly, is fascism?," asks columnist Mark Nayler

Mark Nayler

Malaga

Friday, 10 January 2025, 14:47

What must it be like to live under a totalitarian regime? And what, exactly, is fascism?

These are just two of the questions to ponder throughout this year, as Spain celebrates fifty years since the death of fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Pedro Sánchez inaugurated the ... year-long series of events with a speech in Madrid this week; but instead of pointing to Spain's ideologically varied congress as proof of just how far the country has come since the dreary, brutal days of Francoism, he declared that "the fascism we thought we'd left behind is now the third political force in Europe".

Fascism is the third political force in Europe? Of course Sánchez doesn't actually mean that. He is referring to parties with right wing ideologies which, for the European left, apparently makes them fascist. The Spanish right is equally loose with language when it refers to anything left of the PSOE as communism. But Sánchez's remark is not only historically inaccurate; it also undervalues the freedom in which we live today by implying that fascist forces are on the brink of propelling everyone back to the 1930s.

My Mum was a language student in Bilbao in the early 1970s, during the last few years of Franco's rule. One evening, as she drank with friends in a bar on the Alameda de Urquijo, a gang of the dictator's armed thugs burst in. They raided the rooms upstairs and hauled several people out with force - probably leftist students deemed 'subversive' by the regime.

That's fascism: living with the knowledge that the state might come to get you and your family at any moment, for any or no reason at all. I feel safe in saying that nobody (and obviously I include myself in this) who hasn't lived under such a regime has any idea of how frightening and stultifying it must be.

Fascism originated in Benito Mussolini's Italy. As an ideology it is hard to define, but in every country in which it has dominated, three particularly pernicious elements can be identified: contempt for and militaristic suppression of ideological plurality, democratic and legal institutions and individual liberty.

Comparing modern-day Europe to Franco's Spain, Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy (or any of the South American military dictatorships of the 1980s), we see clearly that none of its right- wing parties, no matter how repugnant their policies might be to some, can accurately be described as 'fascist' - although if one insists on doing so, their opposite numbers on the left must also be regarded as harbouring totalitarian intentions, for the sake of consistency.

It's striking, though, that the political forces which today advocate hardest for censorship and ideological uniformity - especially if they align themselves with the intellectually vacuous trend of 'wokism' - are, at least in theory, left, not right, of centre.

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