Is Fascism Back?

0:01 I keep hearing this word: "fascism."- Fascism.

0:04 Fascism.

0:05 Fascism.

0:06 Fascist.

0:07 He's a fascist.

0:08 Fascist.

0:09 Fascism.

0:09 And I have a confession to make, which is, I don't totally understand it.

0:13 I feel kind of naive.

0:15 When I think of fascism, I think of World War II.

0:17 I think of the Nazi regime committing some

0:19 of the most horrendous atrocities in human history.

0:22 And I think of their ally, Italy.

0:24 But "fascist" has also become this generic insult that people use in politics.

0:29 A weird kind of arbitrary fascism.

0:31 This is what fascist leaders do.

0:33 She's a Marxist, communist, fascist.

0:35 Reject Donald Trump's fascism!

0:37 They're the ones acting like actual fascists.

0:39 Look up the definition of "fascism."- But it's also used

0:41 as an insult in things that have nothing to do with politics.

0:44 This guy's being a total fascist.

0:46 Free expression.

0:47 Not fascist moves.

0:48 What kind of a fascist hash foundry are you running here?

0:53 But lately, I'm hearing the word used more seriously.

0:56 Fascism.

0:57 Experts, historians, scholars,

0:58 some of them are warning that we are seeing the rise of fascism again.

1:04 Are we?

1:10 (book pages flicking) This took us deeper than expected,

1:15 deeper than I can remember going on a video in a long time,

1:18 into books and documents and speeches,

1:21 deep into the research and scholarship on fascism and its history.

1:25 And we got to talk to a whole range of top experts on fascism.

1:29 People who know a lot about this but don't

1:31 actually agree with each other on everything.

1:33 I'm a historian of fascism, populism, and dictatorships.

1:37 The question is, is fascism real and abroad in the world?

1:40 It's very important not to abuse the concept.

1:42 To be a fully-fledged fascist,

1:44 you need a vision of an alternative political system.

1:48 (book pages flicking)- A quick note about what I'm trying to do here.

1:55 I am not the person to give you the correct interpretation of fascism.

1:59 What I can promise you is clarity.

2:02 Clarity on the story of fascism, on the features of fascist regimes.

2:06 And my hope is that that clarity arms you

2:09 with the tools you need to evaluate what's happening today for yourself.

2:12 And I hope to hear from you in the comments,

2:14 to have a good-faith, respectful debate about how you interpret all of this.

2:18 But before you comment, let me show you what I've learned.

2:21 What is fascism?

2:22 How do we define it?

2:23 And how do we start to evaluate if it's happening again today?

2:29 There's a handful of countries that have had what scholars

2:32 might call some kind of fascist regime over the years,

2:35 but in the research we did,

2:37 it has become clear that, to really understand fascism,

2:39 you have to go into its source code,

2:41 the root of it, how it started, how it became so successful.

2:45 So we are going to focus in on these 25 years,

2:48 the years between the two big wars.

2:50 And specifically, we're going to focus on these two men.

2:53 (light thoughtful music)- Before the First World War,

2:58 it's an age of extraordinary technological achievement.

3:01 You get this extraordinary explosion of transport, you know, trains and cars.

3:06 It was a time of mind-bending new machines that were rewriting

3:09 the rules of life itself faster than anyone was ready for.

3:13 It promised everything, but soon it threatened to destroy everything, too.

3:20 In 1914, you get this horrific First World War with absolute carnage.

3:25 Millions dying, millions.

3:27 New mass-produced ways of killing lots of people,

3:31 like machine guns and dropping bombs, et cetera.

3:34 And trench warfare is horrendous.

3:37 (tense uneasy music)- In these four violent years, societies were ripped apart.

3:48 (light pensive music) Italy was actually on the winning side,

3:52 but their allies had promised them all sorts

3:55 of territorial gains that didn't actually pan out.

3:58 Italy felt cheated.

3:59 They lost hundreds of thousands of men.

4:01 It was, in their words, a "mutilated victory," a bad deal.

4:05 But not as bad of a deal as the losers got.

4:08 Especially Germany.

4:09 Who lost over two million soldiers, half a million civilians,

4:13 13% of their territory, which contained 10% of their population.

4:17 Add to this the money that they borrowed to fight

4:19 this war that they now had to pay back: a tremendous amount of debt.

4:23 And on top of all of this, the peace deal

4:26 required them to pay back the victors for this war.

4:29 Half a trillion dollars in today's money,

4:32 something that they actually just recently finished paying off.

4:35 Which led them to borrow more money.

4:37 I mean, it was terrible.

4:38 It scrambled this once very advanced, thriving economy.

4:42 Their money lost 99.9999999% of its value.

4:48 It's wheelbarrows full of cash and an economy in crisis

4:52 that creates a sense of widespread anger and resentment,

4:55 and humiliation among these people.

4:57 So Italy and Germany, they're both feeling cheated and angry.

5:01 And, like, a lot of Europe,

5:02 they're in a sort of a fork in the road with their government.

5:05 They're figuring out what kind of society they want to have.

5:08 (tense thoughtful music) Italy still had a king,

5:12 but they were also doing democracy.

5:14 They had a parliament.

5:16 Germany had parliament and voting.

5:17 Women could vote in Germany.

5:19 They had individual rights enshrined in law.

5:22 But these democracies were fragile, and increasingly they were in crisis.

5:28 So people start wondering if they need to rethink the system entirely.

5:33 It is that sense of total breakdown which generated

5:37 extraordinary enthusiasm about the possibility of a new socialist,

5:41 communist world, or a new ultra-nationalist, racist world.

5:45 One rising option in people's minds was to do what workers,

5:48 soldiers, and peasants had just done in Russia.

5:50 Led by a revolutionary named Vladimir Lenin,

5:53 Russians had just overthrown their government, promising a new way, communism,

5:58 where land and industry would be seized from the elites

6:01 and put under the control of the people, the workers, the peasants.

6:05 At least that was the idea.

6:07 This revolution would create the Soviet Union,

6:10 and the Soviet Union would eventually become a brutal

6:13 dictatorship that would kill millions of its own people.

6:16 But that's not what this video is about.

6:19 And anyway, not yet.

6:20 For now, right after World War I,

6:22 this communist revolution in Russia is looking like

6:26 a desirable option to some of these reeling countries.

6:29 (ominous uneasy music)- [Roger] That inspired

6:34 a lot of extremist Marxists to believe

6:36 that they were on the verge of causing a revolution in their country.

6:40 So this was one revolution on offer.

6:42 And more and more people in Italy and Germany start embracing communism.

6:46 They're going on strike.

6:48 They're occupying factories.

6:49 But communism wasn't the only revolutionary idea

6:52 promising a solution to this postwar misery.

6:55 And that's where we're gonna turn to this guy: Benito Mussolini.

7:01 Mussolini will one day be Italy's fascist dictator, but not yet.

7:06 His path to power is going to have to pass through some very important steps.

7:11 And for that, we made something.

7:13 (gentle pulsing music) We're gonna use this to track the rise of Mussolini

7:18 and Hitler because these steps can help teach us how fascism operates.

7:25 Before World War I, Mussolini was a rising star in Italian socialism.

7:30 He ran an Italian socialist paper.

7:33 He advocated for workers' rights.

7:35 But once World War I started, Mussolini breaks with the socialists because he

7:39 thinks that Italy should join the war, and the socialists are firmly anti-war.

7:44 So they kick him out of the party.

7:45 And this is where he pivots hard.

7:48 He starts his own pro-war nationalist newspaper,

7:52 all about pride and sacrifice and putting the nation above class struggle.

7:56 Italy does enter World War I, and the 32-year-old Mussolini enlists to go fight.

8:02 He gets wounded in a training exercise, and he comes home from the war even

8:06 more resolved in his vision of a strong Italy.

8:09 But now with a new set of beliefs that he gained while in the trenches.

8:14 And he starts to share his beliefs.

8:16 (gentle contemplative music) He starts a club with a small group of other guys,

8:23 a lot of them ex-soldiers like him,

8:26 men who also feel humiliated and are looking for someone to blame.

8:30 And he tells them that Italy's problems are not only

8:34 because of the war and the betrayal from their so-called allies,

8:37 that "mutilated victory," but also because

8:40 of what's happening inside Italy itself,

8:43 where all of these "isms" are poisoning the country.

8:46 Communism and socialism were threatening

8:48 to transform Italy with these worker revolutions.

8:51 And even democracy itself, or liberalism,

8:54 was to blame for all of these problems.

8:57 Italy's democracy had, in his words,

8:59 "gone drunk with compromise." They couldn't get anything

9:02 meaningfully done because they're accommodating all these different viewpoints.

9:06 He says, Guys, this is Italy.

9:08 We're the historic home of the Roman Empire, the foundation of Western society.

9:13 And now we've been betrayed and humiliated.

9:15 But Mussolini says that he has a solution.

9:18 He says that Italy must be ruled by men

9:21 who had just fought in this traumatizing industrial war.

9:25 Men who had been purified by violence and sacrifice and discipline.

9:29 In his eyes, these were a new kind of man,

9:32 a new kind of elite, created not by aristocratic birth but by combat.

9:37 And now these veterans had an obligation to replace the weak,

9:42 entitled elites that had been created by liberal

9:44 democracy and to replace it with a, quote,

9:48 "trenchocracy," the aristocracy of the trenches.

9:50 (light gentle music) So this is like our origin story here.

9:53 It's the spring of 1919 in Milan, Italy.

9:56 Not even a year after World War I has ended.

9:59 And Mussolini is rallying his club of ex-soldiers and sympathizers,

10:04 telling them that violence is actually sacred.

10:06 It's a stamp of nobility.

10:08 Fascism always involved violence and the militarization of politics.

10:12 Violence is glorified.

10:14 Violence is presented as what makes men men.

10:19 This is about men being aggressive, violent, dominant, and strong.

10:22 And that that's a good thing.

10:23 That's the key to restoring the greatness of the nation.

10:26 Not the soft, weak intellectuals that democracy had created.

10:30 And for his new group, Mussolini adopts this symbol.

10:33 It's a symbol that had been used way back

10:35 in ancient Rome and many times over the years,

10:38 including in the French Revolution.

10:40 You see this in the American Capitol building as a symbol of unity and order.

10:47 A stick by itself can be a weapon, but it's also easily broken.

10:52 But gather many sticks into a uniform bundle,

10:56 or a "fascio," in Italian, and suddenly it's a lot harder to break.

11:00 Add an axe to this bundle,

11:01 and you have a kind of indestructible tool of punishment.

11:05 Mussolini is telling his listeners that, under his direction of trenchocracy,

11:11 Italians must become a unified bundle, a fascio.

11:16 Fascismo.

11:18 Fascism.

11:21 Learning the origins of this word has been really

11:23 useful for me to approach this whole story with curiosity.

11:28 Curiosity is the antidote to so many of the problems plaguing our media.

11:32 It's the reason why videos like this are not easy to make.

11:36 And this is why we're building a platform

11:37 and a community to bring curiosity back into journalism.

11:40 It's called Newpress.

11:41 It is live now.

11:42 You can go sign up for free and start contributing to our journalism.

11:47 See what we're working on, ask your questions, and we listen.

11:51 Every story that I'm doing this year,

11:52 I am letting you all in on, and I'm getting your curiosity,

11:55 your expertise, and your insights to help make the story stronger.

11:59 I think that's what we need right now.

12:00 So newpress.com, go check it out.

12:02 Totally free to contribute.

12:04 You can also support us there, too, if you wanna see more of this work.

12:07 So at its very root, fascism begins as a nationalist movement founded by a bunch

12:14 of war veterans set on restoring Italy's greatness,

12:17 and they glorify violence as the key to making this happen.

12:21 (tense thoughtful music) What should be the focus of their violence?

12:25 Well, Mussolini's former friends.

12:28 One of the key aspects of fascism is crushing the socialists.

12:32 (tense uneasy music)- They start hunting for socialists and communists,

12:39 arriving to their meetings, smashing their printing presses,

12:43 beating up the leaders of these worker strikes and protests.

12:46 And more and more Italian men, many of them fellow veterans, join.

12:49 These violent squads, or squadristi, eventually get a new name, the Blackshirts,

12:56 a group somewhere between a gang of street thugs and a private militia.

13:00 And soon their ranks swell to a quarter million people.

13:03 Their acts of violence escalate.

13:05 Soon, they're raiding and burning down

13:07 headquarters of the socialist and communist movements.

13:10 They destroy the office of the socialist newspaper

13:12 that Mussolini once had been the editor for.

13:15 They even murder socialist party members.

13:17 And the violence includes humiliation.

13:19 They would routinely kidnap their enemies and force-feed

13:22 them huge amounts of laxatives, like, just brutal.

13:26 (books thudding) This is a book from while all of this is happening.

13:32 20 fascists arrive in a lorry.

13:34 They attack a club, beat the workers, and set the place on fire.

13:37 Fascists assault a funeral party.

13:39 Make their way into a cafe and seriously

13:42 wound an employee by stabbing him in the chest.

13:45 A band of fascists who are armed and masked attack several citizens,

13:48 including socialists, left on the ground, senseless and bleeding.

13:52 Setting fire to a socialist headquarters.

13:53 Burning banners and furniture.

13:55 Attack a socialist cooperative.

13:56 A doctor is beaten by fascists.

13:57 A socialist lawyer is beaten by fascists.

13:59 Workers are taken to the hospital having been beaten by fascists.

14:02 Strikes a 10-year-old child who is singing "The Red Flag." You get the point.

14:08 These guys were all over the country,

14:09 committing really heinous acts of violence.

14:13 Fascists believe that violence is the source of power,

14:16 and that source of power increases when violence is unleashed.

14:21 Like, how are they getting away with all this stuff?

14:22 They don't actually control the country.

14:24 They aren't an army; they aren't the police.

14:27 They're just a bunch of angry men

14:29 committing violence on behalf of this ultra-nationalist group.

14:33 So why is no one stopping them?

14:35 Like, where is the government in all of this?

14:37 (gentle pensive music) Well, that's the thing.

14:40 Italy's democratic government at the time is divided and weak.

14:44 And the people who did have power in the country were

14:48 actually kind of okay with what Mussolini and his thugs were doing.

14:52 And here I'm talking about the rich people,

14:55 who, like Mussolini, hate communists.

14:58 Remember?

14:59 The communist revolution?

15:00 They're threatening to take away their wealth and distribute it to the workers.

15:04 These business elites are terrified.

15:06 Some members of the ruling group saying,

15:08 Should we fool around with and try and, you know,

15:11 think about a fascist way to resolve these problems?

15:14 So these land and business

15:15 owners actually start funding Mussolini's Blackshirts.

15:18 Over and over, the Blackshirts are even hired

15:21 to break up strikes and to beat up striking workers.

15:25 The first mission of fascism is to crush

15:28 anti-capitalist resistance from the working classes from below.

15:31 So the rich people are letting it happen.

15:33 They're funding it.

15:34 Okay, but what about the army and the police?

15:37 Well, turns out many among their ranks are actually fascist sympathizers.

15:41 Like, Mussolini is talking to these guys.

15:43 He's appealing to these guys.

15:45 Even though his tactics of violence are quite extreme,

15:49 more and more of the population is realizing they

15:52 like the fascist vision of what Italy should be,

15:56 including the way the fascists punish their enemies.

15:59 And then something happens that changes everything.

16:02 (lively pulsing music) Socialists and communists

16:05 are gaining some traction in the parliament,

16:08 and the prime minister, who's like a centrist,

16:11 doesn't want to invite them into his coalition.

16:14 So he turns to Mussolini's fascists,

16:16 knowing that they're kind of becoming a force that can't be ignored.

16:21 He asks them to be a part of his coalition,

16:23 maybe bringing them into the official democracy,

16:26 can tame them and their violent ways.

16:28 They believe that they can control them.

16:31 Because they see them, rightly, as vulgar, as idiotic,

16:36 as narcissistic, and ignorant, they believe they can control them.

16:41 Mussolini's fascists are now an official political

16:43 party that was just invited into the mainstream.

16:46 And this is the next step on this path.

16:48 The fascists have now been accepted, legitimized, first by the business elites,

16:54 and now by the political system, the democracy.

16:56 Mussolini is now a politician in parliament

17:00 along with 35 other fascist politicians.

17:03 But this doesn't solve anything for Italian democracy.

17:05 The new political coalition falls apart almost immediately.

17:09 Italy's government continues to be paralyzed by infighting.

17:11 And all over the country,

17:13 Mussolini's fascist fighters continue to use this dysfunction

17:17 as an opportunity to take their violence to the next level.

17:20 They take over entire cities,

17:22 places with elected socialist leaders, occupying government buildings,

17:28 chasing out the socialist city government, and imposing their own policies.

17:32 Often while the police just look the other way,

17:35 or even help them out in some cases.

17:37 They start marching on the big cities in Italy, like Bologna and Ferrara.

17:41 And eventually, Mussolini directs tens of thousands

17:45 of his Blackshirts to march on the capital, Rome.

17:49 (tense dramatic music) (footsteps marching) Mussolini's movement,

17:56 which started as a club of, like,

17:59 100 men in Milan, now, 3 1/2 years later, was a force that couldn't be ignored,

18:05 gathering in huge numbers just outside the capital,

18:08 preparing to march on the city,

18:10 daring the country's king to use his army against them.

18:14 So the king sizes up his options.

18:15 He likely knows that a lot of the ranks

18:18 of his army probably sympathize with the fascists.

18:21 So instead of standing up to Mussolini and risking a civil war,

18:25 he makes a deal with him.

18:27 He invites him to become the prime minister.

18:33 (footsteps marching) He has real power now.

18:44 He's addressing the parliament.

18:46 And he claims, at first, that he, quote,

18:49 "does not intend to deviate from the Constitution."

18:52 He's going to keep the democracy, he says.

18:54 But over the next four years, he dismantles the Italian democracy from within.

18:59 He says that the parliament and the entire

19:02 political system are wholly unworthy to guide us.

19:05 Now, not everyone's buying this.

19:07 Like, he's not universally popular among the citizenry.

19:10 A lot of people do like him, but a lot of people don't.

19:13 But in the next election, his Blackshirts intimidate and suppress voters,

19:18 which helps the fascists win a huge majority in the election.

19:23 Soon, he's censoring the press.

19:24 He's shutting down newspapers.

19:26 He's creating a secret police.

19:28 You abolish all liberal freedoms.

19:30 You get rid of all freedom of the press, freedom of speech.

19:33 And then he abolishes all other political parties.

19:35 You have a totally alternative system of a single-party state,

19:40 charismatic leader, an alternative legal system.

19:43 And then finally, he abolishes elections themselves.

19:47 This is a revolutionary rebirth.

19:49 And what that means is, you destroy the democratic system.

19:53 It's 1925, and Mussolini has done away with all

19:58 democratic mechanisms that could be used to challenge him.

20:00 And he completes the last step on the fascist path to absolute power.

20:05 (tense uneasy music) As the absolute ruler,

20:08 he rallies the people with slogans like "Believe,

20:13 obey, fight." We know what "fight" means.

20:15 He's been doing that since he started his combat league.

20:18 But these other ingredients, "believe" and "obey," are really important too.

20:22 Mussolini demands belief and submission not just to him but to his story.

20:27 The story that he says will, quote, make "Italy great, respected,

20:31 and feared," restoring it to the glory of an imagined past, the Roman Empire.

20:37 What you're pointing towards is not actual history.

20:40 What you're always pointing to is some kind of beautiful plastic moment.

20:49 (crowd cheering) (crowd cheering)- And Mussolini would

21:04 be the singular voice for the entire nation.

21:06 And as ever, his story glorifies soldiers and the, quote,

21:10 "bloody sacrifice of war," and reimagines the country as a giant military,

21:16 a uniform bundle of sticks, which many Italians will become willingly.

21:21 And for those who don't, their descent will be violently snuffed out.

21:26 Everyone must get in line.

21:28 (tense uneasy music) (footsteps marching) For life is conquest, warfare.

21:33 At first, directed at home against his enemies:

21:37 socialists, communists, liberal democrats.

21:39 But that war must eventually be brought abroad.

21:42 He starts conquering parts of Africa, imposing his "new civilization" on others.

21:54 Okay, so we have our first answer on what fascism is.

22:00 It is a movement started by Benito Mussolini in 1919.

22:05 One that glorifies violence,

22:06 specifically violence against communism and socialism.

22:11 It finds democracy itself as weak and contemptible,

22:15 in need of not just reform, but total destruction and revolution.

22:20 And it tells a story of a superior nation that has been humiliated,

22:24 and that needs to be restored.

22:26 A mythologized past, whose decline they blame on their enemies,

22:31 and whose rebirth they promise under the rule of one charismatic, strong leader.

22:37 And crucially, they gain support from mainstream elites.

22:42 Rich people.

22:43 Politicians.

22:44 That allows them to gain control of the country,

22:46 after which they dismantle the democracy from within,

22:49 and then demand total submission to the state.

22:52 Which allows them to mobilize huge numbers of people with a ton

22:56 of propaganda and then begin a program of conquest and expansion.

23:00 Today, we call that thing fascism.

23:02 And we call it fascism, not because it has some, like,

23:05 Latin root in some, like, philosophy or worldview,

23:08 but because Benito Mussolini chose the fascio,

23:11 the bundle of sticks with an axe on it,

23:14 as his logo when he was making his combat club in 1919 in Milan.

23:17 If somebody else had done this first,

23:20 we would probably call it something different today.

23:22 (dark ominous music) And in fact,

23:25 these ingredients that we just talked about weren't just happening in Italy;

23:29 they were happening in a lot of places in Europe after World War I,

23:33 especially in the countries that lost.

23:35 Which brings us to another angry World War I vet.

23:39 This one in Germany.

23:40 Someone who was watching Mussolini very closely, admiring his rise to power,

23:45 and who will one day take Mussolini's strategy to a whole new level.

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25:23 Let's get back to our story.

25:24 (light thoughtful music) Okay, enter Adolf Hitler to the story.

25:33 He's about 10 years behind Mussolini on his own path to power.

25:37 And remember what we talked about earlier:

25:39 Germany is in a terrible place after World War I.

25:42 They have been crushed militarily, politically,

25:44 economically, and way worse than Italy.

25:47 Germany had been one of the most advanced economies on Earth before the war,

25:51 and now they're in the dumps.

25:52 And a lot of Germans are wondering, "What happened?

25:56 How do we fix this?" And once again, one of the answers was,

26:00 Maybe we need a radically new system,

26:02 like communism, like they're doing over in Russia.

26:05 So lots of Germans are joining communist parties and worker councils.

26:08 They're striking, they're occupying factories,

26:10 they're launching armed uprisings.

26:12 And in some places, they're even trying to overthrow the government.

26:15 But there were many Germans, especially returning humiliated war veterans,

26:20 who looked the other way, feeling like they had been betrayed.

26:24 Many Germans had been hearing this narrative that their civilization,

26:28 and even perhaps their race, was superior.

26:32 It was pure.

26:33 And that their art and their music

26:35 and their engineering are more than just a culture,

26:38 that it actually comes from their bloodline.

26:39 They've been hearing stories about

26:42 Germanic people connected to ancient cultures,

26:44 stories that are essentially a misreading of real science.

26:49 Notably, in the relatively new field of linguistics,

26:52 where researchers were discovering that many

26:55 world languages share a common ancestor,

26:58 a group of languages that some 19th-century linguists were calling "Aryan,"

27:03 a name that came from the Indo-Iranian people, an old culture.

27:07 Iran, Aryan.

27:08 And so here we are in the 19th and 20th century,

27:10 and some creative Germans start to imagine

27:13 that actually Aryan isn't just a group of languages.

27:16 Aryan was an actual race.

27:18 An original master race from which all great civilizations sprang.

27:22 And they start to imagine that maybe this master

27:26 race actually started in where Germany is today, North and Central Europe.

27:32 And that all other cultures actually come from us.

27:35 We are the origin of all good cultures.

27:38 The pure starting point.

27:40 The idea was that it was actually the Germans who created

27:42 ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia and ancient Greece, and ancient Rome.

27:46 And so they start to see all other races

27:48 as impure and some races as really impure, as we'll see.

27:52 Now, to be clear, these ideas have no basis in real evidence or science.

27:58 They pull from things like linguistics,

28:00 but then make a lot of really big leaps to create a story of superiority,

28:04 of racial superiority and purity.

28:07 And a link to some ancient pure culture,

28:10 which some Germans start to represent with a symbol,

28:14 an ancient symbol that they adopt from the East.

28:17 It's one that's appeared across many cultures.

28:19 It's a hooked cross, which they would call an ancient Aryan rune,

28:24 an emblem of their mythical Aryan past,

28:27 a symbol that they believed connected Germany back to a noble ancient race.

28:32 (gentle sparse music) This was intoxicating stuff for a lot of Germans,

28:37 especially after the war, when soldiers came home humiliated,

28:42 looking for answers, looking for an explanation on how their great

28:46 economy and civilization was now on its knees.

28:48 And this fantasy of the Aryan race gave them an explanation.

28:53 It allowed them to believe that they actually didn't lose the war,

28:56 that instead they had been stabbed in the back,

28:59 a "Dolchstoß" in their words, a betrayal at home,

29:03 a betrayal by the weak politicians in their democracy

29:06 who had signed this bad peace deal, a betrayal by the communists who had

29:10 sabotaged the war effort with their strikes.

29:13 And the ultimate betrayal, the ultimate group that they could blame,

29:17 was the impure race that was quietly pulling the strings on all of these groups,

29:23 engineering the downfall of the invented Aryan race.

29:29 So this is all happening around the same time

29:30 that Mussolini is starting his combat club in Milan.

29:34 Groups similar to Mussolini's are forming in Germany.

29:37 They're fringe radical nationalist groups.

29:40 At first, they have no presence in actual politics,

29:43 like in the government and the parliament.

29:45 They're just groups of angry men with an obsession on an imagined nation,

29:50 a focus on their current humiliation, and an appetite to commit violence.

29:56 And one of those men was a 30-year-old World War I veteran, Adolf Hitler.

30:05 At the end of the war,

30:06 Hitler joins one of these small, obscure nationalist groups.

30:10 He rises in the ranks of this little group to become the party leader.

30:14 He implements a militia.

30:16 They'd soon be named the Brownshirts, echoing Mussolini's Blackshirts,

30:21 though their official name was the Sturmabteilung,

30:23 the stormtroopers, named after the real German

30:26 Army's elite assault unit in World War I.

30:29 Hitler also helped his little party rebrand

30:32 to appeal to more people, especially workers.

30:35 In ways that make it seem like they're anti-capitalist.

30:37 They called themselves the National Socialists.

30:39 I never understood this until now.

30:41 The full name of Hitler's party was the National Socialist German Workers Party,

30:45 which sounds super socialist.

30:47 Eventually nicknamed the Nazis.

30:49 He named it this intentionally to attract

30:52 people who were interested in workers' movements,

30:55 like the communists and the socialist movements that he opposed,

30:59 but that he knew had wide appeal.

31:01 Though, to be very clear, these guys were not socialist in any meaningful sense.

31:07 It was just a branding play.

31:08 And soon, Hitler is overseeing a new rendition of the hooked cross,

31:14 this fake Aryan symbol.

31:16 His version would mimic the colors of the old German Empire,

31:20 the Second Reich, a nod to the past.

31:22 This symbol, this flag, this is Hitler's bundle of sticks,

31:27 his version of restoring ancient Rome.

31:30 But now with this extremist racial superiority component.

31:34 (footsteps marching) More and more men start to join

31:40 his political street gang as they go hunt down his enemies.

31:44 Hitler has just taken the first step on the fascist path to power.

31:48 (truck engine rumbling) (gentle contemplative music) And his Brownshirts

31:53 look a lot like Mussolini's Blackshirts, guys with clubs,

31:57 guns, and even grenades storming into communist and socialist meetings,

32:01 smashing chairs, lighting stuff on fire, beating attendees.

32:04 The big difference here is that in Italy,

32:07 Mussolini's group became the kind of dominant, violent nationalist group.

32:11 In Germany, there was tons of these groups that would go down,

32:15 hunt down communists and socialists.

32:17 But again, with the racial component, they're also focusing on minorities,

32:20 and at the top of their scapegoat list, Jewish people.

32:24 Who start to just become synonymous with the communists,

32:29 the traitors who they believe brought about Germany's decline.

32:35 So you see the parallels here with what's going on in Italy, right?

32:37 Like in Italy, all of this violence and chaos shows German

32:41 citizens that the Nazis are actually more powerful than the gridlocked,

32:46 democratic government who can't provide order

32:48 or stability for this wrecked country.

32:50 (tense uneasy music) Now remember,

32:53 Mussolini is further down the path than Hitler.

32:56 And Hitler is actually reading about Mussolini's fascist squads seizing towns.

33:01 And in 1922, when Mussolini marches on Rome

33:03 and pressures the king to hand Mussolini the government,

33:06 Hitler reads about this, and he wants to do the same.

33:11 Hitler wants to do a Mussolini;

33:13 he wants to seize the city of Munich and then march on the capital, Berlin.

33:18 So he and 600 of his Brownshirts surround this beer hall.

33:22 This is a place where politicians would come and give speeches to, like,

33:26 huge groups of people.

33:27 Hitler wants this to be the starting point for his takeover of the country.

33:31 He enters the hall, pulls out a gun, and shoots the ceiling,

33:35 and then he yells out that the national revolution has begun.

33:38 He claims that the government has fallen, which it hadn't.

33:41 He's trying to rally the huge group in this beer hall to join him.

33:44 And it totally fails.

33:47 By the next day, his little coup attempt has collapsed,

33:50 and he, his men are arrested,

33:52 and he finds himself in jail, along with a few of his co-conspirators.

33:57 Though he was in jail,

33:58 he somehow still had access to newspapers and books, and a typewriter.

34:03 Meanwhile, in Italy, Mussolini is now dismantling the democracy from within,

34:07 and Hitler is reading about all of this, and he resolves to not give up.

34:12 He doubles down on his goal to take over the country.

34:15 (gentle chiming music) So in jail,

34:19 he spends a lot of time writing, typing up his story.

34:23 Now there's a lot of sources that say

34:24 that he actually just dictated it and didn't write it,

34:26 and that he wasn't a great writer, whatever.

34:28 But the most recent scholarship concludes that Hitler was writing.

34:31 He was writing his ideas on race,

34:33 what had caused all of Germany's problems in the first place.

34:36 He types it all up into pages that would eventually become a book.

34:40 A book that's part autobiography, part racial manifesto,

34:44 part political blueprint for another attempt at a revolution attempt:

34:48 "Mein Kampf." It's a book full of hate

34:51 and conspiracy theories, and it's his story.

34:54 Much of it invented.

34:55 A simple story that he knew would appeal to the psychology

34:57 of millions of desperate people looking for someone to blame for their misery.

35:01 And for that question of who was to blame for Germany's problems,

35:05 Hitler's book had a very clear answer.

35:08 It all came back to communism and the Jews.

35:12 And really, Hitler concludes, the Jews, which he deems an impure race,

35:18 who are using communism as a weapon

35:21 to undermine and ultimately destroy the German nation.

35:24 All problems come back to this.

35:31 The unseen enemy is the Jew who organizes the international conspiracy.

35:36 And then that story is kind of the master narrative.

35:40 And according to Hitler, to prevent that from happening again,

35:44 he says that the nation would have to be purified.

35:51 This purification would have to be based on blood— a shared

35:55 race— and the reclaiming of the sacred land that gives it life.

36:00 Blood and soil.

36:03 People and race.

36:06 And finally, Hitler's book diagnoses where he, Hitler, went wrong.

36:12 It's basically the only accurate part of the book,

36:14 where he assesses that in trying to take

36:17 over the country in that Munich beer hall,

36:19 his big mistake is that he tried to jump from here, to here.

36:25 Using violence, but without gaining that mainstream acceptance from business

36:29 elites and from the democracy that Mussolini had done.

36:32 Violence alone, he now sees, wouldn't be enough to take power.

36:37 So his book outlines a strategy for how he'll do it next time,

36:41 not a forced takeover, but in his words, a, quote,

36:46 "determined cooperation between brute force and political aims

36:51 wisely chosen." So even though Hitler hates democracy,

36:55 he now understands that he must use the democracy to rise to power,

36:59 so that he can destroy it from within.

37:01 In other words, Hitler is going to have to succeed in politics.

37:07 Fascism never cares about democracy,

37:10 but is willing to use it in order to destroy it.

37:13 He gets out of jail in late 1924, and instead of trying another coup,

37:16 he spends the next few years rebuilding the Nazi Party as a legal,

37:20 competitive political machine.

37:22 Remember, he needs to move from here to here, which means winning votes.

37:26 He runs his party in the 1928 election, the Germans vote, and, nope.

37:31 The Nazis barely get any votes.

37:34 But he's undeterred.

37:35 He continues spreading his message of racial

37:37 superiority and backstabbing by the Jews.

37:39 He'll try again in two years in the next election.

37:42 And this is when something happens that will help him out.

37:44 (tense uneasy music) (crowd yelling) 1929 just hit;

37:49 financial markets around the world crash.

37:52 An economic depression sweeps around the world,

37:55 and Germany, which was already not doing great,

37:57 as we talked about, is hit harder than pretty much any other country.

38:01 Soon, one in three Germans are out of work.

38:04 The fascists in Germany appealed to that suffering,

38:07 basically whipping up a working class through xenophobia, through racism.

38:10 Saying to that working class, "I feel your suffering.

38:13 I see it, I'm going to relieve it,

38:14 and you join me in this fascist project."- It was a powerful rallying cry.

38:18 And indeed, the next year, 1930, there's an election,

38:21 and more people turn out to vote for the Nazi Party.

38:24 They're buying into his message.

38:26 He's getting closer to this step.

38:27 And if you listen to his, like,

38:29 campaign speeches during this time, it's pretty nuts.

38:31 This guy is openly stating his intention of dismantling

38:35 democracy and the party system if he gets power.

38:38 Listen to this.

38:51 (crowd cheering)- He's calling for revolution, which people more and more want,

38:57 but he's mixing in racial superiority

38:59 and the easy scapegoat of Jews and communists.

39:02 All of this found a wider audience during the depression.

39:06 And look what happens in the next election.

39:08 The Nazi Party gets more votes than any other party,

39:11 not quite a majority that would've given him control over the government.

39:15 But this is looking like acceptance,

39:18 not just by the political machine, but by the people.

39:20 But wait, back to that graph.

39:22 Look who else is getting a lot of votes.

39:24 The communists.

39:26 And just like in Italy,

39:27 many of the top elites in business and politics don't like the communists.

39:31 The communists promise to come for their wealth

39:33 and their power and take their land.

39:35 And who's anti-communist?

39:37 Well, Hitler is nothing if not anti-communist.

39:41 So Germany's elected leaders do almost exactly

39:44 what Italy's leaders did in this moment.

39:47 Even though they're a little bit leery of Hitler, they let him in fully.

39:51 They let him become the chancellor, the prime minister, basically,

39:54 thinking that they could maybe use Hitler to keep the communists

39:58 down while also keeping some of his crazier revolutionary ideas at bay.

40:05 Even though we're going to "form a government under the leadership of Hitler,"

40:09 we are going to keep "the utmost restriction" on this guy and his party,

40:13 making sure that he governs, quote,

40:15 "within the framework of the Constitution." He's got some crazy ideas,

40:19 but we've got him under control.

40:20 Boy, that sounds familiar.

40:22 So now it's January 1933, and Hitler is in full-blown mainstream power.

40:27 And from here things start to move fast.

40:29 (tense pulsing music) Less than a month later,

40:32 somebody sets fire to Germany's parliament building,

40:36 and the man found at the scene of the crime is a communist.

40:40 He uses that to say,

40:42 "We have a state of emergency."- State of emergency, very powerful tool.

40:47 Within days, he suspends the Constitution.

40:50 And from then on, the entire Nazi regime was based

40:54 on the suspension of all liberal democratic laws and freedoms.

40:59 Freedom of expression, freedom of the press,

41:01 protections from search and seizures, all suspended.

41:04 Within months, he's abolished all other political parties,

41:07 something he said he was gonna do.

41:09 It's 1934, and Hitler has just

41:13 followed Mussolini's strategy and achieved absolute power.

41:17 (crowd cheering) (light tense music) (crowd chanting) (crowd

41:51 cheering) (footsteps marching) (crowd chanting)- And those old myths,

42:15 those racial fantasies about the Aryan race,

42:18 become official policy of the state.

42:27 And just like Mussolini, Hitler begins his war against the people he

42:33 had been planning for years to purge from society:

42:37 Communists, socialists, Roma, disabled people, homeless people,

42:42 sex workers, queer people, and above all, Jews.

42:48 What the Nazis did in their story about the Jews was

42:51 that they assigned to the Jews everything that they themselves were doing:

42:54 We're only responding to things which Jews have already done.

42:58 We are the victims, and all we're doing is responding.

43:01 So yeah, maybe we want to control the world,

43:03 but that's because the Jews already control the world.

43:06 Maybe we use propaganda, but that's because Jewish propaganda has

43:10 already totally dominated the world information space.

43:13 By 1935, he strips any German Jew of citizenship.

43:18 Strips them of their rights.

43:19 and then, in 1938, he unleashes his armed gangs on them.

43:23 They destroy hundreds of synagogues,

43:26 thousands of Jewish shops and businesses smashed and burned.

43:30 30,000 Jewish men arrested and sent to camps.

43:37 Beaten, terrorized, their property stolen.

43:41 World War II hasn't started yet.

43:43 Hitler is just crushing any group he opposes from within.

43:48 And once complete, by the late '30s, he turns his view outward.

43:52 (footsteps marching)- [News Reporter] Poland, September 1939,

43:57 the German foe begins its ruthless march of conquest

44:01 and sets the stage for World War II.

44:04 [Neville Chamberlain] This country is at war with Germany.

44:07 (gentle somber music) (tank engines rumbling)

44:09 (footsteps marching)- Hitler and his now-ally,

44:18 Mussolini, launch wars of conquest that devastate much of Europe.

44:22 And as a part of those wars,

44:25 Hitler implements a series of systematic mass murder campaigns,

44:29 killing about six million Jews, millions of Poles, Slavs, Roma,

44:34 and other civilians that he marks as racially impure or biologically inferior.

44:40 (wind whistles) (tank engines rumbling)

44:49 (airplane engines whirring) (train rattling)

45:04 (bombs booming) So it's easy to lose yourself in this story,

45:32 especially at this point in the chronology.

45:34 But I want to now summarize what we can learn from the rise of these two men,

45:39 these two regimes, what it tells us about what fascism is.

45:47 Both of these men ended up applying a weirdly similar approach to gaining power.

45:52 Both of them started with small groups,

45:54 groups that glorified violence against political enemies.

45:58 Both of them created narratives that sold a mythologized past

46:02 and blamed their enemies for the loss of that mythical past.

46:06 Both of them promised a rebirth of their superior

46:09 nation under the leadership of a singular, charismatic, powerful man.

46:14 Both of them eventually got invited into the mainstream of a democratic

46:18 system by positioning themselves against the forces that scare rich people:

46:22 communism, socialism.

46:24 And both vehemently called for the end of democracy in any form,

46:29 even while they used democracy to gain power.

46:32 And once in power, both dismantled democracy

46:36 from within so that no one could challenge them,

46:38 creating a government and a society,

46:41 and a press, run entirely by the glorified leader,

46:45 which he then used to flood his people with propaganda and fear,

46:49 getting them to act like a giant army that the leader could mobilize,

46:52 first at home, then abroad in wars of conquest,

46:56 including an industrial-scale genocide in the case of Hitler.

47:00 Okay, now this is not the list that defines fascism.

47:03 There is no "the list." But after being

47:06 really deep in the source code of this history,

47:09 this is the list that we believe summarizes the defining features of fascism.

47:14 But now the hard part, the part that's up to interpretation,

47:17 that everyone watching is gonna have a slightly different read on.

47:20 What happens when we apply this list to today?

47:24 After decades of more and more countries becoming liberal democracies,

47:29 meaning democracies that prioritize individual rights and try

47:32 to ensure that everybody gets treated equally by the law,

47:35 the world has seen a reversal.

47:37 There is a decline in liberal democracies around the world.

47:39 That's what this chart is showing.

47:42 [News Reporter] Fresh concerns about the restriction of rights in Hungary.

47:45 [News Reporter] Israeli lawmakers declaring only

47:46 Jews hold the right to self-determination.

47:48 [News Reporter] Judges say Poland's judicial independence is being violated.

47:52 [News Reporter] Modi has been heavy-handed

47:53 with the Indian media and voices of dissent.

47:56 Pair that with the uptake of the visibility of communities

47:59 who openly embrace the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler.

48:02 [News Reporter] Hundreds of men in Rome making a fascist salute.

48:05 [News Reporter] Openly praising Adolf Hitler,

48:07 making celebratory jokes about gas chambers.

48:10 [protestors chanting] Blood and soil!

48:13 Young white men.

48:15 (audience cheering)- Taken together,

48:21 you start to understand the increase in serious people sounding the alarm

48:25 bell that this is maybe the return of fascism of some form.

48:29 Using it not just as the generic insult,

48:31 but actually saying that we're, like, in some version of the 1930s.

48:35 They're citing modern events-- [News Reporter]

48:37 Angry anti-Muslim mob tore through the town.

48:39 [Johnny] That are concerning to them.

48:40 Greenland should be part of the United States.

48:42 [Johnny] That they say meet the criteria of fascism.

48:44 (door slams)- Police!

48:45 Don't move!

48:46 Hands up!

48:46 Don't move!

48:47 [Johnny] Like the rise of militia groups,

48:50 vigilantes, government death squads, violent ultranationalist groups,

48:54 strongman leaders who invoke an idealized past,

48:58 promising to make their nation great once more.

49:02 Massive displays of loyalty and support for the leader and the regime.

49:07 And, of course, blaming the country's problems on some kind of outsider,

49:11 like radical socialists and communists.

49:14 Foreign, Christian-hating communist Marxists and socialists.

49:18 Immigrants.

49:18 Yes, I use the word: "invasion."- Fake fugitives.

49:23 Freeloaders, criminals.

49:25 Rapist illegal migrants.

49:27 [Johnny] We're even seeing the first expansionist ground war

49:29 happening on the European continent since World War II.

49:32 [News Reporter] A full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

49:37 Okay, so we have this list,

49:39 but a lot of this stuff is in the eye of the beholder.

49:42 Like, you might see this and say, "There are definitely regimes and movements

49:47 that are doing all of these things today."

49:49 Or, "I see some elements of this, but no country checks all of the boxes,

49:54 like Hitler and Mussolini did." Which either means there's no fascism,

49:58 or it means that the checklist by itself has a sort of limited usefulness.

50:03 Can it be fascism unless it checks all the boxes?

50:05 Or are some of these so dire and scary that you

50:09 check one or a couple of these, and that's fascism?

50:12 I asked the experts on this, and it

50:15 turns out they all have slightly different answers.

50:18 And I think we can learn a lot by understanding each one.

50:21 First, Federico Finchelstein,

50:23 who says that what we're seeing today isn't fully fascism, but it's close.

50:28 But that we're still missing some really key pieces.

50:32 There is no fascism without dictatorship.

50:35 The destruction of democracy is central to fascist politics.

50:39 What the fascists did is to use

50:41 democratic means to destroy democracy from within.

50:44 Finchelstein says that in order for it to be fascism,

50:47 it has to oppose not just communism, but democracy itself.

50:51 It might play by the rules of a democratic system at first,

50:54 but ultimately, fascism wants to destroy democracy,

50:58 destroy votes and parliaments.

51:00 And in most of the places that critics use the F-word to describe,

51:04 these nationalist leaders still operate within some kind of democratic system,

51:09 even if it's just in name.

51:21 We will not forget our Constitution.

51:26 Finchelstein's point is that until these leaders start

51:28 calling for the end of voting and constitutions, their regimes remain here.

51:36 Not here.

51:37 And thus, they aren't fascist.

51:40 Yet.

51:42 I think there is a fascist risk.

51:44 They are constantly at the verge of turning democracy into dictatorship.

51:49 And this is why Finchelstein's book is

51:50 called "Wannabe Fascists," because it describes leaders

51:53 who have followed some of this path

51:55 of the interwar fascists that we've talked about,

51:58 but they haven't gone all the way, even if they maybe want to.

52:01 Fascism, according to him,

52:03 takes place only over here, when democracy ends fully.

52:07 Fascism wanted to destroy democracy from within in order

52:10 to create an extremely racist and totalitarian dictatorship.

52:15 Meanwhile, Roger Griffin, one of the top experts in the world on fascism,

52:20 also says that until democracy is totally wiped out, it's not fascism.

52:23 Where he disagrees with Finchelstein is that he

52:26 thinks we should move away from this word altogether.

52:29 That the F-word is not actually useful for today's nationalist regimes.

52:36 Because we're so obsessed with the rise of fascism,

52:38 we are not looking at what is the novelty of what's happening.

52:43 What I believe you are seeing is not the rise of fascism,

52:46 the return of fascism, but the rise of illiberal democracy, illiberal democracy.

52:52 Griffin argues that democracy and fascism aren't the only two options here.

52:56 That there's a third bad thing that we can be,

53:00 where we don't trip the fascism alarm fully

53:02 because we still have democracies with parliaments and votes.

53:06 But leaders, instead of destroying democracy from within, they distort them.

53:11 They get rid of their liberal features.

53:14 And, by the way, quick side note, "liberal" is a kind of confusing word.

53:17 Here in the United States, we use "liberal" to describe a left-of-center

53:21 political leaning that supports things like social programs,

53:24 gun control, higher taxes for the wealthy.

53:26 But in this case, I mean liberal in the way that it was used in, like,

53:30 the 1800s and is used by political scientists today.

53:32 Liberal like liberty,

53:34 like governments that ensure individual rights and freedoms,

53:37 equal protections for everyone regardless of your group under the law.

53:42 You can have a system where there are votes and a parliament and representation,

53:46 but don't have the liberal features that a liberal democracy has.

53:51 And Roger Griffin says that this is the thing we should be worried about.

53:54 That calling it fascism takes our eye off the ball of this new thing,

53:59 illiberal democracy, where these nationalist leaders are

54:02 distorting democratic systems to consolidate power,

54:06 making societies less equal while still running it like a democracy.

54:10 What we have got are new forms of nationalism,

54:14 which are contained within democracy instead

54:18 of calling for the replacement of democracy.

54:22 This was surprising to me.

54:23 When I started researching this story, I was under the impression that, like,

54:27 all the experts agreed that fascism was back in some form, but they don't.

54:33 We are not there yet.

54:35 That is, until you talk to some other experts who say that it is fascism.

54:39 The reason we need to use that term is behind it is a concept that helps

54:42 us understand what is going on right now

54:45 in the third decade of the 21st century.

54:48 We need to see that history does not repeat itself in the same conditions,

54:52 in the exact same circumstances.

54:54 This camp says that our checklists are a distraction.

54:57 That we're reading too much into the specifics of the 1930s.

55:02 You don't need all of that in order to have

55:05 fascist control and push forward with a fascist project.

55:09 But William Robinson says that if you do want a checklist,

55:13 the most important item on it is actually the this one,

55:16 where ultranationalists become accepted into the mainstream by the elites,

55:20 like Mussolini and Hitler were.

55:22 This step, where the people in power decide

55:25 that these nationalist groups that tolerate violence are useful to them.

55:30 That's a form of trying to re-legitimate the system.

55:34 This view says that in order for fascism to actually succeed,

55:37 it needs to bring together a specific alliance, a kind of triangulation.

55:43 First, a vulnerable, receptive population.

55:46 [Robinson] This triangulation then brings together

55:48 the fascist project with a mass social base.

55:50 But the third dimension is the ruling class.

55:52 It controls the economy.

55:54 You see, when Trump gets inaugurated for his second term,

55:57 you see behind him are all of the big tech oligarchs right behind him.

56:00 The capital class in the United States have now come on board.

56:04 And finally, you have a view that says

56:07 that the most important items on this list are these.

56:12 It's the way the leader talks.

56:13 The way that they talk about the past and the future.

56:17 What fascism does is it promises a return to an order,

56:22 and the order, of course, didn't actually ever historically exist.

56:27 You're creating this sort of tabula rasa,

56:29 the smooth surface on which the fascist story

56:32 of "we were always innocent" can then function.

56:36 For people like Snyder,

56:37 fascism starts when politics stops being about the future and starts

56:41 to become about a mythic story of a glorious past,

56:45 a humiliated nation, and a leader who promises rebirth.

56:48 If we could just somehow get the enemy off our screen, off our phone,

56:52 out of our country, then there would be this harmony that would come back.

56:56 There will be love, there'll be prosperity, there'll be happiness.

56:59 There won't be conflict anymore because

57:01 conflict was always brought by the outsider.

57:03 And listen, every one of these experts has a different read.

57:06 I don't see any major movement in the West

57:08 that is trying to replace democracy with a totally different system.

57:12 You can't say that because Hitler came to power in Germany,

57:18 and then almost immediately suspended any and all

57:20 democracy and just became a dictatorship overnight,

57:23 that therefore any fascist project has to follow that same model.

57:26 There's not one road to fascism.

57:29 When you use the list mechanism,

57:30 you're missing a kind of the historical sensibility you

57:33 need to actually recognize that thing for what it is.

57:38 And that is because what we wanna do is, like, we look for the rational core.

57:42 In my view, that has not proven to be predictive.

57:46 More predictive would be to look for the fight, the struggle, the enemy.

57:51 And to dwell on that.

57:53 And you're seeing why the experts disagree here.

57:55 They disagree on how much we should read into the 1930s,

57:58 how much the word "fascism" actually matters.

58:01 Obviously, 21st-century fascism is not going to look like 20th-century fascism,

58:05 but it's going to have that underlying

58:07 essence in common with the 20th-century variant.

58:10 There are important fascist elements here,

58:12 and it would be problematic to deny that there are connections to fascism.

58:18 But if we get too obsessed with fascism,

58:20 it takes attention away from actually looking

58:24 carefully at what is happening to democracy.

58:26 Illiberal democracy, whatever we call it,

58:28 is in many ways more dangerous than fascism.

58:31 Illiberal democracy, I think, is inaccurate,

58:33 but because it's inaccurate, it's sort of pacifying.

58:36 If you think that it is just like, illiberal democracy, then you can say,

58:42 "Oh, we'll have another election,

58:43 and maybe the liberals will win next time," right?

58:46 The question of what is a fascist cannot be answered in simple terms.

58:53 I entered this video really wanting clarity on, is today fascism or not?

58:58 Instead, what I have after this long

59:02 journey are a series of patterns: Glorified violence.

59:06 Elites who think violent groups can solve their problems.

59:11 The destruction of a democracy, A myth.

59:14 A lie.

59:15 A fake history.

59:16 A fake promised future.

59:19 So I guess I now know what fascism isn't.

59:22 It's not any politics that I don't like.

59:25 Instead, it's a kind of method, a kind of view on power.

59:29 Fascism instantly conjures the worst of human cruelty,

59:33 how far we can fall under the right circumstances.

59:36 In that way, it's a valuable reminder, a warning.

59:40 But that same weight also makes it hard and difficult to actually be useful.

59:45 It ends conversations as often as it starts them.

59:48 Still, there are a few things I

59:51 feel sure about after going through this history.

59:54 Domination, violence, hierarchy: those aren't the exception in human history;

1:00:00 they're actually the norm.

1:00:01 For most of our existence, the way that we've organized ourselves in large

1:00:05 groups has relied on force and fear and inequality,

1:00:09 and we'd be foolish to think that the ugly

1:00:13 instincts of control and submission and vengeance,

1:00:16 that those things are just going to go away.

1:00:19 So when we study fascism,

1:00:21 what we're really seeing is those old, ugly instincts coming through.

1:00:26 We'd be naive to think that we're beyond it,

1:00:28 that we're too smart or too modern to fall

1:00:30 into those same patterns of fear and control.

1:00:33 We're not immune.

1:00:34 We never have been.

1:00:37 This video isn't the final word on fascism.

1:00:40 It's just where my understanding starts.

1:00:42 The people I talked to for this story don't even agree.

1:00:45 But there is one area that most of them did agree.

1:00:48 Which is that we don't have to wait for it

1:00:51 to be 1933 again to notice that something is happening.

1:00:54 Because the point of understanding fascism isn't to win arguments or to come

1:00:58 up with some ultimate definition that will solve all of our questions.

1:01:02 It's to recognize the patterns.

1:01:05 To point them out.

1:01:07 And to do something about it while we still have options.