You'd figure that no one would quarrel with a description of Saddam Hussein's regime as fascist. It may not have been a corporatist state like Hitler's or Mussolini's regimes, but it had a lot of the features of classical fascism: the militaristic nationalism, a secular religion of the state, and a government by secret police terror -- and that's not to mention the grandiose monuments and the silly high-peaked officers' hats like the ones the Germans and Italians used to wear.
But Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi stirred up a controversy recently when he complained to some British journalists that labeling Saddam a fascist disparaged Mussolini's regime, which he called comparatively benign. "Mussolini never killed anyone," he said, not quite accurately. "Mussolini used to send people on vacation in internal exile." A Berlusconi spokesman later acknowledged that the fascists had been guilty of some crimes, but insisted that the their regime "can't in any way be compared to Nazism or communism."1
Those fine distinctions are apt to be lost on Americans, who don't have any intimate historical memories of fascism with a capital F. "Fascist" is a word that we throw around as easily as "bastard," and with no more heed to its literal meaning. That lower-case use of the word began with the sixties radicals, who borrowed it from the international left. It was a moment when "polarizations were the common syntax [and] extremities were ordinary," as Todd Gitlin has put it, and the charge of "fascism" became a way of distancing yourself from the tired civilities of liberalism; the word stood in for all the forms of social control that disinclined people to work on Maggie's farm no more.
By then, the word had lost most of its historical resonances. When William F. Buckley brought a defamation suit against the author of a 1969 book for calling him a fascist, the court ruled that the word was too vague to be actionable.
The collapse of the radical movements of the sixties temporarily bleached "fascist" of its tone of rage, and left it as a jocular term for anyone who was trying to impose a rigid pattern of behavior. There are fashion fascists and wine fascists, fascistic anti-smoking ordinances and those fascistic seat belts that lock you in automatically when you close the car door.
But lately, "fascist" has been making a comeback as a political epithet. The anger stirred up by the Iraq war and domestic anti-terrorism programs has leftists pulling the word out of the closet along with tie-dye T-shirts and chants of "hey hey ho ho." You don't see the word used as an epithet much in publications like The Nation or the American Prospect, but the Web is full of it -- an AltaVista search turns up more than 7500 pages where "fascist" or "fascism" appear within ten words of "Ashcroft" or "Bush."
True, the left uses the word more selectively now. Anti-war demonstrators may call Bush and Ashcroft fascists, but you rarely hear them yelling "fascist pigs" at the police -- a sign of the restraint that both protesters and cops have learned since the bloody confrontations of the sixties.
But this time around, the right has adopted the epithet as well. Granted, it's appropriate when supporters of the Iraq war describe Saddam Hussein's regime as fascist, but even there, it's striking that not many people were making that comparison at the time of the first Gulf War. In the past year there have been 102 stories in American newspapers where someone described Saddam's regime as fascist; over the corresponding period surrounding the Gulf War in 1990-1991 there were just 22.
It's more of a stretch when people use phrases like "Islamo-fascist" to describe Islamic fundamentalists. The Taliban government may have been a nasty and repressive theocracy, but it didn't try to make religion subordinate to the state, the way Hitler and Mussolini did -- quite the opposite. It's as if the evils of the Taliban or Osama bin Laden aren't sufficient to the day. We can't go after anyone now without comparing the campaign to the "good war" against Hitler, and bringing the old rhetoric of "appeasement" into play.
In fact the right has taken to using "fascist" with a reckless brio that we used to associate with Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. Rush Limbaugh has described Dick Gebhardt's health care program as fascist, and a while ago the director of the American Conservative Union attached the label to Tim Robbins. When Jerry Springer was considering a run for the Senate in Ohio in July, the National Review's Jonah Goldberg likened him to a fascist demogogue. And the irrepressible Ann Coulter compared Katie Couric to both Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels, a hermaphroditic mix of images that testifies to Coulter's impressive powers of visualization.
The right's new enthusiasm for "fascist" has a lot to do with the fall of Communism, which left old epithets like "pinko" and "communistic" sounding quaint and retro. There was a time when the right would routinely refer to the ACLU as communist sympathizers or a communist front. That association was implicit when the elder George Bush described Michael Dukakis as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU," in an echo of the phrase that Senator McCarthy used for members of the Communist Party.
Nowadays, though, Bill O'Reilly describes the group as a "fascist organization," which "uses their legal clout to terrorize various school districts and individuals." That doesn't make a lot of historical sense. Real fascists didn't try to litigate their way to power -- if they did, they wouldn't have been fascists.
But then few of the Americans who use "fascist" nowadays have much interest in dotting their historical i's. Like "Big Brother" or "Orwellian," it's a spandex specter that you can stretch over anything that smacks of excessive control and surveillance, whether it's coming from the left, the right, or the seat-belt makers.
The loose use of "fascist" comes particularly easy to Americans. For most of the peoples of Europe, the word still conjures up a shameful episode that has to be lived down, or in Berlusconi's case, excused away.
But we can toss the "fascist" label around with easy abandon, secure in the conviction that really "it can't happen here," as Sinclair Lewis ironically entitled his 1935 novel about a fascist takeover of the US. Americans may not have a vivid sense of history, but we react viscerally against anything that someone can get us to picture in leather boots and a high-peaked hat.
Notes:
1. According to an article in La Stampa (September 18, 2003), Berlusconi later said that he had been tricked by the journalists into making the remarks while drinking a bottle of champagne "at the end of a long day, when I was very tired." He didn't withdraw the remarks, however. return
