On Fascist Ideology
Federico Finchelstein

Comprendere e saper valutare con esattezza il nemico, significa possedere gi` una cona dizione necessaria per la vittoria.

Antonio Gramsci1 Fascism is a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism and, in the German case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Fascism, in its many forms did not hesitate to kill its own citizens as well as its colonial subjects in its search for ideological and political closure. Millions of civilians perished on a global scale during the apogee of fascist ideologies in Europe and beyond. In historical terms, fascism can be defined as a movement and a regime. Emilio Gentile – who, with Zeev Sternhell and George Mosse,2 is the most insightful historian of fascism – presents fascism as a modern revolutionary phenomenon that was nationalist and revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist. Gentile also presents fascism as being typically organized in a militaristic party that had a totalitarian conception of state politics, an activist and antitheoretical ideology as well as a focus on virility and anti-hedonistic mythical foundations. For Gentile a defining feature of fascism was its character as a secular religion which affirms the primacy of the nation understood as an organic and ethnically homogenous community. Moreover, this nation was to be hierarchically organized in a corporativist state endowed with a war-mongering vocation that searches for a politics of national expansion, potency and conquest. Fascism, in short, was not a mere reactionary ideology. Rather, fascism aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.3 The word fascism derives from the Italian word fascio and refers to a political group (such as the political group lead by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the time of Italian unification.) Fascism also refers visually and historically to a Roman imperial symbol of authority. Its place of birth as a