Fascism facts for kids

Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right), the leaders of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany respectively, were both fascists.

Fascism is a form of government in which most of the country's power is held by one ruler. Fascist governments are usually totalitarian and authoritarian one-party states. Under fascism, the economy and other parts of society are heavily and closely controlled by the government. The government uses violence to arrest, kill, or otherwise stop anyone it does not like.

Three large fascist countries were Italy under Benito Mussolini, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, and Spain under Francisco Franco.

Mussolini invented fascism in Italy in the late 1910s and developed it fully in the 1930s. When Hitler came to power in Germany in the 1930s, he copied Mussolini.

Main ideas
Name
Origins
Fascism vs. other types of totalitarianism
Opposition
20th century
21st century
Quick Facts about fascism
Related pages
Images for kids
See also

Main ideas

Not all scholars agree on what fascism is. Philosopher Jason Stanley of Yale University says it is "a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrantts who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation." This means:

Fascism focuses on one person as a leader.
Fascism says communism is bad.
Fascism says that at least one group of people is bad and has caused the nation's problems. This group could be people from other countries or groups of people within the country.
Fascism promises to fix those problems by getting rid of the group of people it sees as bad.

Under Hitler's fascist Germany, the government blamed Jews, communists, homosexuals, the disabled, Roma and other people for Germany's problems. They arrested those people, and took them to camps to be killed.

In 2003, Dr. Lawrence Britt wrote "14 Defining Characteristics of Fascism:"

Nationalism: saying one's own country is better than other countries
Hate for human rights
Scapegoating: blaming someone else for the country's problems
Putting the military first
Sexism: saying men are better than women
Control of mass media: telling newspapers and other sources of news what they can and cannot tell the people
Focus on national security
Close ties between religion and government
Protection of businesses and corporations
Suppression of labor power: preventing labor unions from becoming powerful
Hate for intellectuals and the arts: telling people not to listen to scientists, scholars, and artists
Focus on crime and crimefighting
Corruption
Fraudulent elections: Even if the people vote, the votes are either not counted or otherwise abused. In some fascist governments, leaders will have their opponents killed.

Name

A fasces

The name fascism comes from the Italian word fascio for bundle. This word comes from the Latin word fasces which was an axe surrounded by a bundle of sticks. In Ancient Rome, leaders carried the fasces as a symbol of their power.

Origins

A journalist named Benito Mussolini invented fascism. He started Italy's fascist party in 1919. He became Italy's prime minister in 1922. He was not elected. His supporters walked into Rome in large numbers, and the king of Italy made him prime minister. Although, officially, the fascist party in Italy was ruled by a "grand council" from 1922 until the end of World War II, Benito Mussolini really had almost all the power in the country.

According to scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Mussolini believed democracy had failed. He had been a socialist but left the movement because he thought it was not good either. He believed democracy failed because of social class. Mussolini said that under fascism, people would focus on the nation and people would not think about social class.

However, Mussolini also believed that to make fascism work, he and his followers had to remove anything that could distract people from the nation. He also believed he should get to decide who in Italy counted as part of the Italian nation and he should get to throw out or arrest anyone he said did not count as a real Italian. He believed it was right to use violence to remove those distractions and those people. Groups of people with weapons would go out into the streets and beat up or even kill people Mussolini did not like.

Mussolini did not allow journalists to write what they wanted.

Mussolini believed that Italy should be made of white people, so he encouraged white women to have more babies and persecuted people who were not white.

Fascism vs. other types of totalitarianism

One of the reasons fascism spread in the early 20th century was because the Russian Revolution had just happened, and people were afraid of communism. Sometimes landowners and business owners would support fascists because they were afraid of what would happen if the country became communist instead.

In her work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, Hannah Arendt compared National Socialism, Stalinism, and Maoism. She does not talk about these regimes being fascist; according to her, they are totalitarian. In 1967, German philosopher Jürgen Habermas warned about a "left-wing fascism" of a protest movement in Germany of the 1960s, commonly known as Ausserparlametarische Opposition, or APO.

Opposition

There is more than one reason why people living in democratic states oppose fascism, but the main reason is that in a Fascist government, the individual citizen doesn’t always have the option to vote, nor do they have the option to live a lifestyle that may be seen as immoral, useless, and unproductive toward society.

20th century

The fascist governments in Italy and Germany were removed after they lost World War II, but fascism continued as military dictatorships under Salazar in Portugal; Franco in Spain; and in some parts of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.

21st century

In the 21st century, fascist political movements exist in many countries.

Quick Facts about fascism

Fascism controls a country's citizens using one ruler.
The economy and other parts of society are also controlled by the government through the powerful ruler. This is different than Communism in that people are still allowed to own property and business, but it is controlled by the State (government).
Fascism was used in the early 1900s by Benito Mussolini in Italy. The term "fascism" comes from the Italian word fascio, which means bundle.
Adolf Hitler (in Germany) and Francisco Franco (in Spain) copied many of Mussolini's ideas in their countries.
Fascism blames something, usually a group of people, for the problems in a country. Fascism becomes accepted because the ruler promises to fix these problems.
Citizens of a Fascist country do not always have the option to vote. Even if voting is allowed, votes are often abused or not counted correctly.
People who oppose the government are often put in jail or even get killed.

Images for kids

Enrico Corradini
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Italian modernist author of the Futurist Manifesto (1909) and later the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto (1919)
Benito Mussolini (here in 1917 as a soldier in World War I), who in 1914 founded and led the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria to promote the Italian intervention in the war as a revolutionary nationalist action to liberate Italian-claimed lands from Austria-Hungary
German soldiers parading through Lübeck in the days leading up to World War I. Johann Plenge's concept of the "Spirit of 1914" identified the outbreak of war as a moment that forged nationalistic German solidarity.
Members of Italy's Arditi corps (here in 1918 holding daggers, a symbol of their group), which was formed in 1917 as groups of soldiers trained for dangerous missions, characterized by refusal to surrender and willingness to fight to the death. Their black uniforms inspired those of the Italian Fascist movement.
Residents of Fiume cheer the arrival of Gabriele d'Annunzio and his blackshirt-wearing nationalist raiders, as D'Annunzio and Fascist Alceste De Ambris developed the quasi-fascist Italian Regency of Carnaro (a city-state in Fiume) from 1919 to 1920 and whose actions by D'Annunzio in Fiume inspired the Italian Fascist movement.
Benito Mussolini with three of the four quadrumvirs during the March on Rome (from left to right: unknown, de Bono, Mussolini, Balbo and de Vecchi)
Nazis in Munich during the Beer Hall Putsch
Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right)
Integralists marching in Brazil
Juan Perón, President of Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and 1973 to 1974, admired Italian Fascism and modelled his economic policies on those pursued by Fascist Italy.
Giorgio Almirante, leader of the Italian Social Movement from 1969 to 1987
Golden Dawn demonstration in Greece in 2012
Members of the Piccole Italiane, an organization for girls within the National Fascist Party in Italy
Members of the League of German Girls, an organization for girls within the Nazi Party in Germany
Hitler and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in Meeting at Hendaye, on 23 October 1940