How fascist is the “brand identity” of your country’s leader?
(If you are familiar with these ideas, click here to go straight to the survey…)
Umberto Eco was born in 1932, in Fascist Italy. He lived the first 13 years of his life under Fascism, memorizing the speeches of Mussolini in the classroom by day, and listening in a darkened room to the forbidden Radio London by night. In 1995, he published an essay in The New York Review of Books in which he attempted to clarify the meaning of meaning of “fascism.”
Here are some excerpts:
Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.
Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist.
I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.
UR-FASCISM (link to PDF version) is a long discursive essay, of more than 5,000 words, in which Eco wanders from personal reflections to political and philosophical analysis. The core of the essay is a list of 14 features which Eco believes to be the underlying characteristics of fascism.
As an introduction to the survey below, here is presentation that condenses Eco’s argument into 14 slides. If you watch it on auto-play, it takes 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
Now it’s important to point out that Eco’s 14 points do not measure the level of oppression in a given country. Eco wasn’t trying to quantify the violations of human rights in a despotic regime (that’s incredibly important work, and there are organizations that undertake that charge with great professionalism); instead, he was a semiotician, an analyst of signs and symbols, of rhetoric and messages. He was trying to identify what he called “a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives.”
In the language of contemporary marketing, in other words, he was describing the “brand identity” of fascism.
Here is the survey. Please take it honestly and thoughtfully.