History of fascism (1945–present)

Fascism emerged throughout the 20th century as a diverse, and evolving synthesis of reactionary and revolutionary ideas, rather than a single, coherent system.

Fascism, neofascism and postfascism after World War II (1945–2008)

Europe

In the aftermath of World War II, the victory of the Allies of World War II over the Axis powers led to the collapse of multiple fascist regimes in Europe. The Nuremberg Trials convicted multiple Nazi leaders of crimes against humanity, involving the Holocaust. However, there remained multiple ideologies and governments that were ideologically related to fascism.

Francisco Franco's Falangist one-party state in Spain was officially neutral during World War II, although Franco's rise to power had been directly assisted by the militaries of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany during the Spanish Civil War. The first years were characterized by a repression against the anti-fascist ideologies, deep censorship and the suppression of democratic institutions (elected Parliament, Spanish Constitution of 1931, Regional Statutes of Autonomy). After World War II and a period of international isolation, Franco's regime normalized relations with the Western powers during the Cold War, until Franco's death in 1975 and the transformation of Spain into a liberal democracy.

Historian Robert Paxton observes that one of the main problems in defining fascism is that it was widely mimicked. Paxton says: "In fascism's heyday, in the 1930s, many regimes that were not functionally fascist borrowed elements of fascist decor in order to lend themselves an aura of force, vitality, and mass mobilization." He goes on to observe that António de Oliveira Salazar "crushed Portuguese fascism after he had copied some of its techniques of popular mobilization". Paxton says: "Where Franco subjected Spain's fascist party to his personal control, Salazar abolished outright in July 1934 the nearest thing Portugal had to an authentic fascist movement, Rolão Preto's blue-shirted National Syndicalists. ... Salazar preferred to control his population through such 'organic' institutions traditionally powerful in Portugal as the Church. Salazar's regime was not only non-fascist, but 'voluntarily non-totalitarian,' preferring to let those of its citizens who kept out of politics 'live by habit.'" However, historians tend to view the Estado Novo as para-fascist in nature, possessing minimal fascist tendencies. Other historians, including Fernando Rosas and Manuel Villaverde Cabral, think that the Estado Novo should be considered fascist.

The term neo-fascism refers to fascist movements that generally originated after World War II. According to Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, the neo-fascist ideology emerged in 1942, after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR and decided to reorient its propaganda on a Europeanist ground. In Italy, the Italian Social Movement led by Giorgio Almirante was a major neo-fascist movement that transformed itself into a self-described "post-fascist" movement called the National Alliance (AN), which has been an ally of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia for a decade. In 2008, AN joined Forza Italia in Berlusconi's new party The People of Freedom, but in 2012 a group of politicians split from The People of Freedom, refounding the party with the name Brothers of Italy. In Germany, various neo-Nazi movements have been formed and banned in accordance with Germany's constitutional law which forbids Nazism. The National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) is widely considered a neo-Nazi party, although the party does not publicly identify itself as such.

South America

In Argentina, Peronism, associated with the regime of Juan Perón from 1946 to 1955 and 1973 to 1974, was strongly influenced by fascism. Between 1939 and 1941, prior to his rise to power, Perón had developed a deep admiration of Italian Fascism and modelled his economic policies on Italian fascist policies. However, not all historians agree with this identification, which some considering it debatable and others believing it is simply used as a pejorative. Historian Raanan Rein argues that Perón was not a fascist and that this characterization was imposed on him because of his defiant stance against US hegemony. Paxton writes that Perónism seemed to have much in common with fascism and so may have looked like a form of it to the Western contemporaries, but writes that it operated differently: lacked "the diabolized internal/external enemy" or Other and was directed against a narrow military oligarchy instead, was not interested in expansionism, increased civilian participation, and had a more proletarian social base.

Africa

The South African government of Afrikaner nationalist and white supremacist Daniel François Malan was closely associated with pro-fascist and pro-Nazi politics. In 1937, Malan's Purified National Party, the South African Fascists and the Blackshirts agreed to form a coalition for the South African election. Malan had fiercely opposed South Africa's participation on the Allied side in World War II. Malan's government founded apartheid, the system of racial segregation of whites and non-whites in South Africa. The most extreme Afrikaner fascist movement is the neo-Nazi white supremacist Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB) that at one point was recorded in 1991 to have 50,000 supporters with rising support. The AWB grew in support in response to efforts to dismantle apartheid in the 1980s and early 1990s and its paramilitary wing the Storm Falcons threatened violence against people it considered "trouble makers".

Asia

Another ideology strongly influenced by fascism is Ba'athism. Ba'athism is a revolutionary Arab nationalist ideology that seeks the unification of all claimed Arab lands into a single Arab state. Zaki al-Arsuzi, one of the principal founders of Ba'athism, was strongly influenced by and supportive of Fascism and Nazism. Several close associates of Ba'athism's key ideologist Michel Aflaq have admitted that Aflaq had been directly inspired by certain fascist and Nazi theorists. Ba'athist regimes in power in Iraq and Syria have held strong similarities to fascism, they are radical authoritarian nationalist one-party states. Due to Ba'athism's anti-Western stances it preferred the Soviet Union in the Cold War and admired and adopted certain Soviet organisational structures for their governments, but the Ba'athist regimes have persecuted communists. Like fascist regimes, Ba'athism became heavily militarised in power. Ba'athist movements governed Iraq in 1963 and again from 1968 to 2003 and in Syria from 1963 to 2024. Ba'athist heads of state such as Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein created personality cults around themselves portraying themselves as the nationalist saviours of the Arab world.

Ba'athist Iraq under Saddam Hussein pursued ethnic cleansing or the liquidation of minorities, pursued expansionist wars against Iran and Kuwait and gradually replaced pan-Arabism with an Iraqi nationalism that emphasised Iraq's connection to the glories of ancient Mesopotamian empires, including Babylonia. Historian of fascism Stanley Payne has said about Saddam Hussein's regime: "There will probably never again be a reproduction of the Third Reich, but Saddam Hussein has come closer than any other dictator since 1945".

Ba'athist Syria under the Assad dynasty granted asylum, protection and funding for the internationally wanted Nazi war-criminal Alois Brunner for decades. An SS officer under the command of Adolf Eichmann, Brunner directly oversaw the abduction and deportations of hundreds of thousands of Jews to Nazi extermination camps during the Holocaust. For decades, Brunner provided extensive training to the Syrian Mukhabarat on Nazi torture practices and re-organised the Ba'athist secret police on the model of the SS and Gestapo. Extreme antisemitic sentiments have been normalised in Syrian society through the pervasive Ba'athist propaganda system. The Assad regime was also the only regime in the world that granted asylum to Abu Daoud, the mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympic Massacre. In his notorious book Matzo of Zion, Syrian Minister of Defense Mustafa Tlass accused the Jews of blood libel and harbouring "black hatred against all humankind and religions".

Antisemitic canards and conspiracies have also been promoted as a regular feature in the state TV shows during the reign of Bashar al-Assad. Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, some neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups have supported the Assad regime, including CasaPound, Golden Dawn, Black Lily, the British National Party, National rebirth of poland, and Forza Nuova. The affinity shown by some neo-Nazis to the leftist-oriented Syrian Ba'ath party is commonly explained as part of the former's far-right worldview rooted in Islamophobia, admiration for totalitarian states and perception that the Ba'athist government is against Jews. British-Syrian activist Leila al-Shamy states this could also be due to doctrinal similarities:

"the ideological roots of Baathism, which definitely incorporates elements of fascism... took inspiration from European fascism, particularly how to build a totalitarian state."

In the 1990s, Stanley Payne claimed that the Indian Hindutva organisation Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) holds strong resemblances to fascism, including its use of paramilitaries and its irredentist claims calling for the creation of a Greater India. Dean McHenry in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia describes the ideology of the RSS as "fascism with Sanskrit characters" – a unique Indian variant of fascism. McHenry notes that there is evidence that the RSS held direct contact with Italy's Fascist regime and admired European fascism, a view with some support from A. James Gregor. However, these views have been met with criticism from some scholars of the field that do not subscribe to the view the RSS is fascist, notably among them Christophe Jaffrelot, A. James Gregor and Chetan Bhatt. They argue this on the basis of an apparent absence of charismatic leadership, a desire on the part of the RSS to differentiate itself from European fascism, and cultural differences between the RSS and European fascists, alongside factionalism within the Sangh Parivar.