By Kathleen Kern

April 9 marked the 60th anniversary of theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s execution at the hands of the Nazis. I have often wondered whether I would have shown the same courage that Bonhoeffer did when he left asylum in the United States and returned to Germany because he believed resisting Hitler was a Christian duty.

Several days after this anniversary, I attended a lecture by Daniel Pipes, who is notorious for suggesting that the United States had valid reasons for putting Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II, among other beliefs. He said the United States needed to fight “militant Islam” with the same resolve that it had used to defeat fascism, now that fascism no longer existed.

The first thought I had after he made those comments was, “Has fascism really disappeared?”

Fascism as a movement has never been as well defined as Communism. No fascist philosopher ever wrote a book analogous to Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. People wishing to understand fascism must therefore study fascist regimes and note commonalities.
 
Lawrence Britt took on this task in his 2003 Free Inquiry article, “Fascism, anyone?” He compared Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’ Greece, Suharto’s Indonesia and Pinochet’s Chile and found 14 defining characteristics. (I have reworded some points and added my own comments.)

1) Constant use of patriotic/nationalistic slogans, symbols and songs.

2) Disdain for human rights. Fascist regimes persuade their citizens that human rights must be ignored in order for them to be safe from their enemies. These citizens thus look the other way or even show approval when their governments torture, execute, assassinate or incarcerate people for political reasons.

3) Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. Usually these enemies are ethnic and religious minorities or people who advocate democratic reforms and/or redistribution of wealth.

4) Glamorizing the military and diverting most of the country’s resources to the military establishment. Even when their economies are suffering, fascist regimes allot the military a disproportionate share of government funding.

5) Enforcing rigid gender roles in society.

6) Controlling and censoring the media. Sometimes the government directly controls the media; sometimes it installs people with fascist sympathies as media executives and spokespeople.

7) Using fear as a motivational tool.

8) Using the dominant religion in a country as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Fascist rulers frequently use religious rhetoric, even when the major tenets of the religion they claim to espouse are antithetical to their government’s policies.

9) Protection of corporate power. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini once said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called ‘corporatism’ because it is a merger of state and corporate power.”

10) Suppression of labor movements. After fascist governments come to power, trade union leaders are often the first sector they target politically.

11) Disdain for intellectuals, academia and the arts.

12) Obsession with crime and punishment. National police forces often have unlimited power to enforce laws. People who hold patriotism as their highest value are willing to overlook police abuses and forego civil liberties.

13) Cronyism and corruption. Most fascist regimes are governed by groups of friends who appoint each other to government positions and use this power to protect their interests.

14) Fraudulent elections.

We can pay tribute to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, our brother in Christ, by committing ourselves to resisting trends that bear similarities to fascism in our own time. German Christians did not have the benefit of hindsight when fascists set forces in motion that led to more than 60 million people dying in World War II. We do, and we must not let it happen again.