Russia isn’t fascist

Any serious analysis thrives on precise definitions and dies on loose ones. And if there’s one word that many hacks – including, alas, me from time to time – use loosely, it’s ‘fascism’.

Thus, I’ve occasionally described Putin’s Russia as fascist, which is almost correct. But in the realm of serious analysis, it’s a miss as good as a mile. Almost correct means wrong.

Mea culpa and all that, but now is the time to atone for my sin. So here comes: Russia isn’t fascist. It’s Nazi, which is almost the same thing but not quite. So let’s sort out our definitions.

Umberto Eco famously enumerated 14 distinguishing features of fascism but, being a Leftie, he obfuscated the issue rather than elucidating it.

Eco and his ilk use the words ‘fascist’ and ‘conservative’ interchangeably. Hence all his 14 points spin out of an overarching definition of fascism as: “essentially rejecting the spirit of 1789, the spirit of the Enlightenment. Fascism sees the Age of Reason as the beginning of modern decadence.”

I suggested in an earlier article that we add another redolent spirit to the list, that of the Vendée. Following the 1793 regicide, the revolutionary government slaughtered 170,000 inhabitants of that province (about 20 per cent of its population) who had risen in protest against the closure and robbery of churches.

Thinkers like Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre instantly saw the link between “the spirit of the Enlightenment” and revolutionary violence, leading to a frontal assault on Western civilisation. And later commentators considerably brighter than Eco showed how ‘the Age of Reason’ begat modern savagery – including fascism and Nazism.

Both of them combine totalitarian control over the population with an aggressive foreign policy, corporatist economy and an ideology of national superiority. But their legitimising claims to such superiority differ.

Both fascism and Nazism seek support for that claim in their history as a smithy of national character. However, rather than staying faithful to historical facts, they interpret, pervert and often invent them. For example, Mussolini preached an uninterrupted continuum between the glory days of the Roman Empire and his Italy, which was good propaganda but shabby history.

Yet, though Mussolini and other fascists insisted on national superiority, their claim had no biological component. That’s where the Nazis are different: though they too accentuate their superlative national character, they ascribe it not just to history but also to racial genetics.

The fascists treated their opponents as enemies. The Nazis treated them as sub-humans, a category that included Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.

While the world always boasts a nice complement of fascist regimes, Europe was spared Nazi ones for a period demarcated by Hitler at one end and Putin at the other. That period was so long that it couldn’t last.

Putin and his acolytes routinely claim racial superiority for the Russians who, according to them, boast an extra gene of spirituality in their biological makeup. Conversely, Russia’s enemies, as nominated by Putin, are described as racially inferior – to the point of not being human at all.

As I often do under such circumstances, I let the Putinoids speak for themselves, with me acting only in the humble capacity of translator. So here’s how one of Russia’s leading TV channels responded to the outcry following the deadly attack on a children’s hospital in Kiev the other day:

“Such enemies can’t be regarded as human. We must accept this simple and frightening thought: there are no human beings on the other side. Not a single one. Our missiles aren’t killing people. Not a single person. There are no persons there.

“If we don’t accept this as a given, if we don’t forbid ourselves to consider them human, to pity and protect them – we’ll weaken ourselves. We’ll limit our capacity to save our own children. We’ll complicate our way to Victory.

“Yours truly keeps repeating (and I’m not the only one who talks and thinks this way) that: the only way of defeating terror is to annihilate the terrorists and petrify the nation that produces terrorists. If the aim of the Special Military Operation [Putin’s aggression against the Ukraine. A.B.] is to de-Nazify and demilitarise the Ukraine, then this is how this aim must be achieved: surviving Nazis [Ukrainians. A.B.] and their whole families must panic and flee to the West. Across the Polish border. Away from the shelling. Away from the ruins of their homes and cities. Dropping their yellow-and-blue flags and slippers [? A.B.] along the way.

“So yes – it may be simple and frightening, but we shouldn’t apologise for hitting a children’s hospital. We must say: ‘You want this to stop, friends? So surrender. Capitulate. And then we may spare you’.”

I must emphasise that this isn’t a one-off rant of a madman. It’s the standard fare nourishing the minds of Russians, and it’s cooked by everyone who ever appears in mass media: Putin himself, members of his government, MPs, columnists, talk show hosts and their guests.

Remove references to the Ukraine from that soliloquy, and it wouldn’t have looked out of place in an oration delivered by Adolf Hitler, Josef Goebbels or Julius Streicher, circa 1942. So let’s stop complimenting Putin’s Russia by calling it fascist. It’s even worse than that. It’s Nazi.

When I mentioned that extra Russian gene of spirituality to a friend of mine, he said wryly: “As is evident to everyone.” It is indeed.