The fasces, the bundle of sticks tied together, from whence fascism gets its name. Used here on the logo of Benito Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party)

Eia, eia, eia, alalà!

Be honest, you don’t know what that means. Don’t worry, nobody does. It’s meaningless. It’s a phrase that was often shouted at a man named Gabriele D’Annunzio, who went out in 1919 to the city of Fiume and laid the groundwork for what we now call fascism. Bear with me, please, as I give you a little history lesson.

Fiume, now known as Rijeka, is a city in Croatia, but for a long time, it had a powerful minority of Italians running the show. As David Gilmour puts it in his book The Pursuit of Italy, “an Italian bourgeoisie dominated a Croatian working class to such an extent that none of the schools taught in Croatian.” When the First World War came to a close, with Italy on the winning side, they had desired greater prizes than they were given. Fiume was among that which they desired, and a great many nationalists called for a war to conquer it. Among them was Gabriele D’Annunzio, a “saturnine poet and some-time politician,” and a war hero to boot. Angered by the inactivity of his country, he led 2,000 men into Fiume and seized it without a fight.

Gabriele D’Annunzio, saturnine poet and some-time politician

They demanded that all British and French troops within the city leave immediately, and they called for Italy to annex the city at once. The government back in Rome considered the affair a national embarrassment and refused to do anything of the sort. In response, like any rational adult, D’Annunzio declared the city to be an independent state, ‘The Regency of Carnaro’, with himself at its head. He made himself dictator and cared little for what the people of the city thought. While the poor Croats continued to suffer, the Italians loved him. Hence the strange, meaningless chanting. Eia, eia, eia, alalà, indeed.

Why do we need to know about D’Annunzio? Because you can draw a straight line from him to the man that forced the world to take fascism seriously, Benito Mussolini. Before Mussolini, fascism had been an idea, but it was shapeless. Even after he took power, it still was, but it gained iconic characteristics through his extravagant speeches from high balconies above the cities. People cheered Il Duce, as they called him (as he wanted them to call him), and cheered as he railed against the failures of democracy and liberalism.

The banner of the Regency of Carnaro

Mussolini didn’t exist in a vacuum, however. He got his ideas by watching D’Annunzio closely. The balcony speeches? D’Annunzio did it first. Calling yourself Il Duce? D’Annunzio started it. Marching on a city to scare the government into letting you take control? D’Annunzio’s march, the Impresa di Fiume, was famous all around Europe. Co-opting religious symbolism, having your supporters throw up the ‘Roman Salute’, dressing your supporters in black shirts, and all the rest of it? D’Annunzio tried it all. Mussolini publicly supported this all, writing glowing portrayals of the man in the newspaper he was editing at the time, Il Popolo d’Italia. In his book The First Duce, Michael Ledeen describes D’Annunzio as the “John the Baptist of Italian Fascism”, as the man who first designed the rituals of the strange and formless set of ideas that Mussolini would champion in 1922.

From its inception, fascism has been about performance. The problem with most people’s introduction to the topic is that they encounter Mussolini, a violent man with an army and a police force supporting him. Therefore, people think of it as being a powerful thing, when in fact it is, like all ideologies, powerless by itself. Only by studying D’Annunzio can we see this. He had armed men with him, but not enough to defend himself in the end. When the Italian Army finally turned up to force him out of Fiume, he was forced out after a single bombardment. D’Annunzio also held limited power over his own people. He wanted to be a totalitarian, but he didn’t have the support needed to be one.

Benito Mussolini, Il Duce to his followers

Going back to Mussolini, we can now see just how hollow his fascism, like all fascism, truly is. It cannot control people without human action. That seems obvious, stupidly so, but the way we talk about it makes it sound like fascism is a living, breathing thing. The BBC warns us of “rising fascism” in India, CNN proclaims “American-made fascism” to be a threat to democracy, and everywhere we see warnings that this dangerous ideology is coming to destroy us. The fact is, however, fascism is not a force in and of itself. It’s not even an ideology, really. Madeleine Albright argues, quite rightly, that it’s “a process for taking and holding power.”

That is the true core of fascism. Power won through performance. Like D’Annunzio, all fascists lack real substance behind what they say. Fiume was never going to be annexed by Italy. But it was wonderful to believe that it would be, and D’Annunzio, the prototype fascist, exploited that desire, and the fear of losing the city, to hold power. His performative speeches from up high would have made him seem like a messiah to his people, and he would have loved this image. Mussolini too, though an ardent anti-clericalist, was happy to be seen as the God-given restorer of his country’s glory, and to invoke the name of the divine in all his speeches.

Mussolini (sitting, right) signed the Lateran Treaty, creating the sovereign Vatican State. Regardless of his own beliefs, he made many such populist appeals to the deeply Catholic Italian public

Fascists need to seem powerful. If they do, people will believe in that power, and enough of them will be attracted to it. Remember that the original fascists didn’t come to power in Italy by violent revolution, but by marching on Rome and demanding that their leader be appointed Prime Minister. The threat of twenty-thousand blackshirts amassing in the capital broke the will of the King, Victor Emmanuel III, and democracy was surrendered. State-sponsored violence and murder grew exponentially worse from then on, when the army was fully under fascist control.

I’m not trying to dismiss fascism. It is a truly evil thing, a pure construction of prejudice, greed, and brutality. It wraps itself in lies and contradictions and renders the truth useless by corrupting science, the media, the courts, and every other facet of society. My point is that fascism is a human thing, a movement that lacks any theory. It only has anger. It’s not like other schools of thought. Consider Marxism. Even without any Marxists, it would still exist, it would still contribute to the way we see the world and shape the way others think. It requires no leaders and no dedicated followers. It requires them if it is to become the dominant mode of thought, much like liberalism or conservatism, but they are not necessary.

There exists no ‘Das Kapital’ of fascism. Nor do they have their own Leviathan, or Wealth of Nations

Fascism needs leaders and a dedicated mass of followers. It needs people to be out in the streets, chanting and screaming. Eia, eia, eia, alalà, isn’t a silly part of fascism, it’s the core of fascism, an angry cry that has no substance, and can mean anything people want it to mean. To draw in the followers they need, fascist leaders make broad appeals that struggle to match what even their fellow fascists have said in the past. It differs each time because the situation changes. They might scaremonger about immigration one day, then worry about unemployment the next. Some of them use climate change as a threat, while others focus on the rise of moral ‘degeneracy’. Fascism has no ideas because each fascist needs to call on different worries in peoples’ lives in order to draw them to the cause.

Then the performance begins. The fascists pretend to care about these issues, and people flock to them. Then they bring the fascist leaders to prominence in the national discourse. Next thing you know, you’re forced to confront them, and unlike any other politicians, the fascists call on their supporters to chant and fight and make awful threats to innocent people. Suddenly, the fascists look powerful, and they’ve got charismatic leaders giving powerful, moving speeches, always forcing the twisted narrative that their followers are among a special group of people, a most righteous group of people, who have been downtrodden but are also great, and will continue to be great, but must also reclaim lost glory. Don’t worry about the contradictions. Fascists certainly don’t.

Umberto Eco (pictured here) provided us with great insights into fascism, but arguably even he could not fully define it, something he never claimed he was capable of doing

So what is fascism, really? We can’t answer that question unless we stop thinking of fascism as a single thing. It’s an umbrella term for a wide range of ideas. Umberto Eco’s essay Ur-Fascism is famous for giving us a fourteen-point list defining fascism, and it is useful when attempting to describe certain, more explicitly fascist groups, but I’d argue that you’d still miss a great many types of fascism using any single definite list. Fascism cannot be defined primarily because it has no central tenants. Where conservatism has Thomas Hobbes and Edmund Burke, where liberalism has John Locke and Mary Wollstonecraft, where socialism has Friedrich Engels and Antonio Gramsci, fascism has nothing. There is a literal book called The Fascist Manifesto, but it has little importance among fascists themselves. Neither Hitler, nor Mussolini, nor D’Annunzio left anything clear in writing that they could build their movement around.

The more we move through history, the harder the question of defining fascism is to answer. The groups that fascism has blamed for the problems in the world have differed between groups. While the Nazis focused on blaming the Jews, Italian fascists initially allowed Jews into the party (Mussolini would later deport Jews to Nazi concentration camps upon Hitler’s request) and blamed communists for most of its woes. Over in Spain, anarchists were a particular target for dictator Francisco Franco’s rhetoric. Of course, each of these groups suffered under all fascist regimes, but they received different amounts of attention in fascist propaganda under each separate regime. In modern times, the most common targets are Latinos, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and Muslims.

Hitler met with Amin Al-Husseini (top left), the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, to discuess the issue of Jews in Palestine. He hoped to incite violence against Jews, as well as the British forces in power

Fascists switch allegiances quickly. Where Hitler once believe he could manipulate Muslims into doing his will in fighting the British and French in the Middle East and praised Islam for installing “discipline” in its followers, the religion is now subjected to open hatred by fascists. There are no significant loyalties for fascists. I can’t stress enough that they desire nothing but power, regardless of how they get it, or who they have to blame for keeping it from them. A fascist will happily go to war against anyone who they can crush, even against their own. Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 while it was run by fellow fascist Engelbert Dollfuss, and by the end of the Second World War, he had forced Mussolini into a powerless role as a figurehead of a Nazi puppet state in what little of Italy they still controlled.

Despite these endless complications and the lack of any true substance to fascism, I’m still going to do my best to define it. The conversation we have about fascism is deeply flawed, and moving forward we need to accept that it’s not one clear thing. They don’t have one clear group, they don’t show loyalty to one clear state, they have no central books or thinkers, and when they chant, they make meaningless noises. So what is fascism, then, what does it really mean?

Hitler with his bodyguards

I say fascism means power. Fascism means performance. It is a system of beautiful lies, tailored to the specific place and time in which it rises up, and sold to whatever part of the public is so desperate that they will take any alternative to the political mainstream. Fascism is control exerted by co-operation, as people surrender themselves to the system, and in doing so, justify to themselves their acts that reinforce its power. Fascism is always the last grasp at invented past glory. It is an idea more than an ideology, a concept devoid of theory, or of any wider criticisms about the world beyond the scope of the nation-state. It preys on a minority, to satisfy the majority. Fascism is unequal, and proudly so. Fascism exists only when people allow it to exist and thrives only when people work hard to make it thrive. By itself, it is harmless, and hardly even exists. When it infects people’s thinking, it becomes a threat to democracy, sovereignty, and justice everywhere.