List of fascist movements

This page lists political regimes and movements that have been described as fascist.

Whether a certain government is to be characterized as a fascist (radical authoritarian nationalist) government, an authoritarian government, a totalitarian government, a police state or some other type of government is often a matter of dispute. The term "fascism" has been defined in various ways by different authors. Many of the regimes and movements which are described in this article can be considered fascist according to some definitions but they cannot be considered fascist according to other definitions. See definitions of fascism for more information about that subject.

The Axis (1922–1945)

Italy (1922–1943)

The first fascist country was Italy, ruled by Benito Mussolini (''Il Duce''). The Italian Fascists imposed totalitarian rule and crushed political and intellectual opposition, while promoting economic modernization, traditional social values and a rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church.

Italy was a leading member of the Axis powers in World War II, battling with initial success on several fronts. However, after the German-Italian defeats in Africa and the Soviet Union and the subsequent Allied landings in Sicily, King Victor Emmanuel III overthrew and arrested Mussolini, and the Fascist Party in areas (south of Rome) controlled by the Allied invaders was shut down. The new government signed an armistice with the Allies in September 1943. Mussolini was then rescued from prison by German paratroopers, and after his rescue, he was installed as the head of the " Repubblica di Salò" in northern Italy, a state which continued to fight against the allies alongside Germany.

Germany (1933–1945)

The Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, espoused a form of fascism that incorporated fervent antisemitism, anti-communism, scientific racism, and the use of eugenics into its creed. Its extreme nationalism originated in pan-Germanism and the ethno-nationalist '' Völkisch'' movement which had been a prominent aspect of German nationalism since the late 19th century, and it was strongly influenced by the paramilitary groups that emerged after Germany's defeat in World War I, from which came the party's underlying "cult of violence". Nazism subscribed to pseudo-scientific theories of a racial hierarchy and social Darwinism, identifying the Germans as a part of what the Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race.

On 30 January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, the head of government, by the President of the Weimar Republic, Paul von Hindenburg, the head of State. The Nazi Party then began to eliminate all political opposition and consolidate its power. Hindenburg died on 2 August 1934 and Hitler became dictator of Germany by merging the offices and powers of the Chancellery and Presidency. Genocide and mass murder became hallmarks of the regime. Starting in 1939, hundreds of thousands of German citizens with mental or physical disabilities were murdered in hospitals and asylums. ''Einsatzgruppen'' paramilitary death squads accompanied the German armed forces inside the occupied territories and conducted the mass killings of millions of Jews and other Holocaust victims. After 1941, millions of others were imprisoned, worked to death, or murdered in Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps. This genocide is known as the Holocaust.

Japan (1931–1945)

Right-wing elements in Japan, including industrialists, military officers, and the nobility, had long opposed democracy as an anathema to national unity. Military cliques began to dominate the national government starting in the 1930s. A major militarist nationalist movement in Japan from the 1920s to the 1930s was the Imperial Way Faction "''Kodoha''". In 1936, Japan and Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed at countering the Soviet Union and the Communist International. In 1940, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye established the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, or Taisei Yokusankai, to consolidate all political parties under a single umbrella group. That same year, Japan joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact.

Other countries

Austria (1933–1945)

Engelbert Dollfuß's idea of a "Ständestaat" was borrowed from Mussolini. Dollfuß dissolved parliament and established a clerical-fascist dictatorship which lasted until Austria was incorporated into Nazi Germany through the ''Anschluss'' of 1938.

Brazil (1932–1938)

Briefly, the regime of Getúlio Vargas aligned with Plínio Salgado's Integralist Party, a Brazilian fascist movement. Later Vargas launched his own cult of personality, that endures to this day, and took inspiration from Mussolini in a number of areas, such as labor law. The Brazilian Consolidation of Labor Laws, a decree issued by Vargas in 1943, has been described as partly inspired by Mussolini's laws of 1927.

There are debates about whether the Vargas government was fascist or not. Some scholars have argued Vargas's leadership was clearly a version of fascism or drew substantial inspiration from fascism. Others argue against this position from the fact that Vargas followed the Castilhismo ideology, which is strongly Positivist, described as incompatible with Fascism's metaphysical, traditionalist, almost occultist ideas.

China (1940–1945)

The Kuomintang, a Chinese nationalist political party, had a history of fascism under Chiang Kai-shek's leadership. The Blue Shirts Society, a fascist paramilitary organization within the KMT that modeled itself after Mussolini's blackshirts, was anti-foreign and anti-communist, and it stated that its agenda was to expel foreign (Japanese and Western) imperialists from China, crush Communism, and eliminate feudalism. In addition to being anticommunist, some KMT members, like Chiang Kai-shek's right-hand man Dai Li were anti-American, and wanted to expel American influence. Close Sino-German ties also promoted cooperation between the Nationalist Government and Nazi Germany.

The New Life Movement was a government-led civic movement in 1930s China initiated by Chiang Kai-shek to promote cultural reform and Neo-Confucian social morality and to ultimately unite China under a centralised ideology following the emergence of ideological challenges to the status quo. The Movement attempted to counter threats of Western and Japanese imperialism through a resurrection of traditional Chinese morality, which it held to be superior to modern Western values. As such the Movement was based upon Confucianism, mixed with Christianity, nationalism and authoritarianism that have some similarities to fascism.Schoppa, R. Keith
The Revolution and Its Past
(New York: Pearson Prentic Hall, 2nd ed. 2006, pp. 208–209 . It rejected individualism and liberalism, while also opposing socialism and communism.

There is debate among scholars on whether Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime was fascist. Some historians regard this movement as imitating Nazism and being a neo-nationalistic movement used to elevate Chiang's control of everyday lives. Frederic Wakeman suggested that the New Life Movement was "Confucian fascism". Other historians argue that despite Chiang’s flaws and his authoritarian rule, his regime did not espouse the fascist ideology of totalitarianism and ultranationalism. Chiang repeatedly attacked his enemies such as the Empire of Japan as fascistic and ultra-militaristic. The Sino-German relationship also rapidly deteriorated as Germany failed to pursue a detente between China and Japan, which led to the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. China later declared war on fascist countries, including Germany, Italy, and Japan, as part of Declarations of war during World War II.

During World War II, the Wang Jingwei regime was a puppet state of the Empire of Japan established in 1940 in Japanese-occupied eastern China. The official name of this state was simply the Republic of China, but it is widely known as the "Wang Jingwei regime" so as to distinguish it from the Nationalist government of the Republic of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which was fighting with the Allies of World War II against Japan. Wang Jingwei was a high-ranking former Kuomintang (KMT) official, a rival of Chiang Kai-shek and a member of the pro-peace faction of the KMT. He defected to the Japanese side and formed a collaborationist government in occupied Nanjing in 1940. The new state claimed the entirety of China during its existence, but effectively only Japanese-occupied territory was under its direct control. Its diplomatic recognition was limited to other members of the Anti-Comintern Pact, of which it was a signatory.

Croatia (1941–1945)

''Poglavnik'' Ante Pavelić, leader of the infamous Ustaše movement, came to power in 1941 as the Croatian puppet leader under the control of Nazi Germany. Under the indirect control of Germany, the Ustaše regime was based heavily upon both clerical fascism and the Italian model of fascism, with elements of racial integrity and organic nationalism drawn from Nazism.

France (1940–1944)

The Vichy regime of Philippe Pétain, established following France's defeat by Germany, collaborated with the Nazis. However, the minimal importance of fascists in the government until its direct occupation by Germany makes it appear to seem more similar to the regime of Franco or Salazar than the model fascist powers. While it has been argued that anti-Semitic raids performed by the Vichy regime were more in the interests of pleasing Germany than in service of ideology, anti-semitism was a full component of the " National Revolution" ideology of Vichy.

As early as October 1940 the Vichy regime introduced the infamous ''statut des Juifs'', that produced a new legal definition of Jewishness and which barred Jews from certain public offices. They interned Liberals, Communists, Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals in concentration camps as soon as 1940.

Also, in May 1941 the Parisian police force had collaborated in the internment of foreign Jews. As a means of identifying Jews, the German authorities required all Jews in the occupied zone to wear a yellow badge. On the 11 June, they demanded that 100,000 Jews be handed over for deportation.

The most infamous of these mass arrests was the so-called Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (''Rafle du Vel' d'Hiv'') which took place in Paris on the 16 and 17 July 1942. The Vélodrome d'Hiver was a large cycle track situated on the rue Nélaton near the Quai de Grenelle in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. In a vast operation codenamed "Spring Breeze" (''Vent printanier''), the French police rounded up 13,152 Jews from Paris and its surrounding suburbs. These were mostly adult men and women however approximately 4,000 children were among them. Identifications for the arrests were made easier by the large number of files on Jews complied and held by Vichy authorities since 1940. The French police, headed by René Bousquet, were entirely responsible for this operation and no German soldiers assisted. Pierre Laval, head of Vichy, included the children in the deportations to Auschwitz against general German orders. Most of the deportees sealed in the transports died en route due to lack of food or water. The few survivors were sent to the gas chambers. A few months later, a police operation took place in Marseille, known as the Battle of Marseille, and led to massive raids in the so-called "free zone", administrated by Vichy.

Greece (1936–1941)

The dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas from 1936 to 1941, known as the 4th of August Regime, was partly fascist in its ideological nature, and might hence be characterized as quasi-fascist or authoritarian. It had a National Youth Organisation based on the Hitlerjugend, developed an armaments-centered economy, established a police-state akin to that of Nazi Germany (Greece received tactical and material support from Himmler, who exchanged correspondence with the Greek Minister of State Security Konstantinos Maniadakis) and brutality against communists in big cities such as Athens (communism was not known in the small towns and villages of Greece yet). The Colonel George Papadopoulos' 1967 to 1974 military dictatorship, which was supported by the United States, however, was less ideological and lacked a clear fascist element other than militarism.

Hungary (1932–1945)

By 1932, support for right-wing ideology, embodied by Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös, had reached the point where Hungarian Regent Miklós Horthy could not postpone appointing a fascist prime minister. Horthy also showed signs of admiring the efficiency and conservative leanings of the Italian fascist state under Mussolini and was not too reluctant to appoint a fascist government (with terms for the extent of Horthy's power). Horthy would keep control over the mainstream fascist movement in Hungary until near the end of the Second World War. However, Gömbös never had a truly powerful fascist base of support. Instead, the radical Arrow Cross Party, which gained support in Budapest as well as the countryside, became a powerful political movement, gaining nearly 800,000 votes in the election of 1939. Horthy became paranoid due to his new rival, and imprisoned the Arrow Cross Party's leader, Ferenc Szálasi. However, this action only increased popular support for the fascist movement. In another attempt to challenge the Arrow Cross, Horthy's government began to imitate the Arrow Cross Party's ideology. Starting in 1938, several racial laws, mostly against Jews, were passed by the regime, but the extremist Arrow Cross Party, led by Ferenc Szálasi, was banned until German pressure lifted the law, and until Germany occupied Hungary during Operation Margarethe on 19 March 1944, no Jews were in direct danger of being annihilated. In July 1944, armor-colonel Ferenc Koszorús and the First Armour Division, under Horthy's orders, resisted the Arrow Cross militia and prevented the deportation of the Jews of Budapest, thus saved over 200,000 lives. This act impressed upon the German occupying forces, including Adolf Eichmann

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