Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 542, The Heart of Darkness.

Fascism is one of those terms that looms large in our conception of history.

Outside of a few circles, made up primarily of the sort of folks, people of sense, generally try to avoid,

fascism is an ideology that is pretty universally reviled.

There are certainly apologists for it.

Arguably, the last few years of public discourse have revealed that there are many more than a lot of

us had thought, but I do still think it's fair to say

that on balance, if a person goes around saying that they are a fascist, it will not do wonders

for their social life. Maybe that's just me being aspirational, but I like to think it's true.

And yet, despite a, to put it mildly, rather unpopular reputation, fascism as an ideology is remarkably hard to pin down,

which presents us with something of a challenge in intellectual terms when we talk about modern history,

because from a certain perspective, fascism is kind of central to the creation of the world as it exists today. After all, from a certain

perspective, the history of the 20th century is the history of an ideological battle between the three

major strands of modern global ideology, with fascism being on the losing side. And yet, if you think of the other two ideologies that dominated the 20th century,

communism, or more specifically Marxism-Leninism, and liberalism,

they are pretty well defined as systems of thought.

What I mean by that is that regardless of what you think of those ideologies in themselves,

they represent coherently defined worldviews.

If you ask ten different liberals what liberalism is,

you probably won't get completely identical answers,

but you'll get similar ones that deal with notions like individual liberty,

limited government, the importance of human

...