What is a “fascist”? This term is often misused to describe figures who are authoritarian, or the supporters of such figure. This is not entirely true because a lot of authoritarian leaders explicitly identifies themselves as anti-fascists, for example Stalin. “Fascists” refers to a person that believes that the state is much more important than the individual and also thinks that the traditional values of the group they belong to (religion, culture, race, nation, etc.) should be conserved and any external influence that attempts to change it should be resisted. This note will discuss four parameters that can be used to identify fascists. (Of course, this parameter is not absolute).
1. Strong sense of attachment to the community that they belong to. This “community” can be defined as race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, etc. The sense of attachment is so strong that fascists perceives someone not belongs in their community as inherently inferior. (Ex: Adolf Hitler thinks that the Aryan race is the best and all other races is sub-humans).
2. Rhetoric based on the romanticization of the communities’ glorious past. Fascists often refers to the past where their community is “glorious” to convince people that what everyone needs is to go back to their traditional values. Note though, that fascists always turns a blind eye to the bad side of the “communities’ glorious past”. For example, people who think that “the world is much better 200 years ago” because then economies are stable clearly doesn’t recognize the fact that the world in the past is full of injustices such as patriarchy, colonization, slavery, etc.
3. Having a certain group to blame as scapegoats for the communities’ decline. This one is self-explanatory. For example Hitler blame Jews for the bad things that happens to Germany, Donald Trump irrationally blames Mexicans for the economic downturns of US, etc.
4. Shuts down voices of dissent (of people who disagrees with their views). This can be done when the fascist is in power (Ex: By censoring news medias, kidnapping journalists and critics of the regime, etc.) and when they’re not in power by delegitimizing the counter opinions directed towards them. For example, Donald Trump always use the term “fake news” to refer medias that don’t agree with him and tries to convince his supporters that the “fake news medias” always lies.