What is a Fascist?

Dan Snow's History Hit

History Hit

History

4.7 • 12.9K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is everything you ever wanted to know about fascism. Are the British government's new proposals to stop refugee boats arriving fascistic? Were the 2021 insurrectionists at the Capitol building fascists? Is Muslim persecution in India today fascism in action? They're certainly attacks on democracy but can they accurately be described as fascism?

Dan puts that question to a world-leading expert in today's episode, Roger Griffin, Emeritus Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University. They get into the deep history of fascism's origins, and the true definitions of terms like 'authoritarian' and 'populism' and look to distinguish the difference between the technical meaning of fascism and the colloquial term we tend to invoke in daily conversation.

Produced by James Hickmann and edited Dougal Patmore

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're at it again. We're calling each
0:06.2	other fascists. Is it fascist to incite and then celebrate an insurrection at the US
0:13.8	capital? Is it fascist to speak out, to try and interdict small boats of refugees and
0:20.5	migrants coming to the UK? Is it fascist to invade eastern Ukraine or clamp down on Muslim
0:27.9	civil rights in India? Well, we're going to get into it. Roger Griffin is an emeritus professor
0:33.9	of modern history, Oxford Books University. He is the world's leading expert on the historical,
0:40.6	the ideological dynamics of fascism, the toponomy of fascism. And he joined me at short notice
0:47.4	after one of Britain's best known TV presenters, a former England football soccer captain,
0:52.2	Mary Linnecker spoke out against government immigration policies last week and was temporarily
0:58.6	suspended from his duties at the BBC. He said those policies were reminiscent of the language
1:03.8	used in the 1930s. And that led to another upsurge of historians and people ringing their
1:10.1	hands, talking about this historical parallels and thinking about fascism. What it meant when
1:16.0	it started, and what it still means today. So here is everything you ever wanted to know
1:22.0	about fascism. He might have heard. The top
1:42.7	pleasure of all the political brands ever launched. This has to be one of the most durable.
1:47.9	Everyone's always calling each other fascists. Who were the first fascists? It gets actually
1:53.2	quite complicated. The fascist-y. It basically just means people belonging to a fascist. Now,
1:58.8	one of the great misapprehensions in history, and it goes into history books as well, is that
2:03.6	the fascists named themselves after what was called rather confusingly the Lictus Rod, which
2:09.8	is the symbol of authority in ancient Rome, which is those sticks bound around an ax head
2:15.4	is called in fashies in Rome. And it became the symbol of the fascist party. It's the sort of
2:21.6	pun because fascia originally just meant to league or a group. And when there were people trying
	...

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