A Word for a Nameless Fascism
American Fascism • noun • / uh-mer-i-kuhn fash-izm /
Definition: America’s culturally specific iteration of fascism that is yet to be named
Origin: American English
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Last week the New York Times published an article about a new word Ukrainians have created to describe the Russian fascism that is attacking their country. It is a fascinating article for many reasons, but the most obvious one is the fact that they created a new word instead of just saying Russian fascism.
This might seem like a minor distinction, but the cultivation of language is essential to identifying and combating fascism.
New language is essential for countering fascism because fascism has unique manifestations based on the specific culture that the fascists are terrorizing and/or the culture that the fascists derive from. Italian fascism will not look exactly like German fascism, so while they both represent fascism, their uniqueness necessitates the creation of specific names.
In Italy, the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini were called “fascists” or fascista in Italian because fascismo and fascista means “bundle or group” and a fasces is a bundle of rods with an ax blade protruding from it. By the early 20th century, Italians started calling members of a fascio, or political group, as fascista. Eventually, Mussolini’s political party the Fasci di combattimento, or “combat group,” were called fascista and when he seized power in 1922, he adopted the fasces as his symbol. Mussolini culturally and linguistically merged politics and violence, and the word fascista perfectly articulates this.
The word fascist derives from a merging of Italian words, history, and culture; so when fascism exists in another country there is an obvious need for the language, history, and culture of this non-Italian country to cultivate a word to describe their manifestation of fascism. Also, the name that a culture creates to describe the fascism that terrorizes them says just as much about the nature of the terror as it does about the culture fighting to survive.
America has an alarming relationship with fascism because we have never created a word for articulating our society’s iteration of fascism, and the absence of this language will incline Americans to believe that fascism does not exist here despite living within a very violent society.
Naming Fascism and Multilingualism
The word Ukrainians have created to articulate Russian fascism is “рашизм” and the best way to write it in English would be “ruscism.” This new word is the creative expression of a multilingual society, and I wonder if the United States’ emphasis on monolingualism impedes our capacity to create similar words.
The Ukrainian language uses the Cryillic alphabet, but many Ukrainians are also familiar with western European languages, especially English, that use the Latin alphabet. Not only can they speak multiple languages, but they can do so using multiple alphabets.
Also, since Ukraine and Russia have a long and interconnected history, many Ukrainians also speak Russian. Ukrainians can easily jump back and forth between both languages, but most Russians cannot. Most Russians cannot speak Ukrainian. The linguistic fluency of Ukrainians has also provided a strategic advantage during this war because it is much easier for Ukrainians to pose as Russians than it is for Russians to pose as Ukrainians.
It is normal for a Ukrainian to speak at least three languages—Ukrainian, Russian, and English—and this fluency enhances their linguistic creativity.
Not only is Pашизм or “ruscism” a combination of both the linguistic structures of multiple languages, it is also a product of the distinct sounds of these languages. Fascism is Italian, and the “rus” sound derives from the English pronunciation of Russia, which is different from how Russia is pronounced and spelled in Cyrillic.
This word is a combination of Italian, English, Ukrainian, and Russian; and this combination has created a new word that will make sense to Ukrainians, but not to anyone else. If an Italian-speaker, English-speaker, or Russian-speaker is shown the word “рашизм,” they will have no idea what it means. At best, they will need an article in the New York Times to explain it to them, but a Ukrainian needs no explainer.
When I read this article and learned about this word, I could not help but think about the United States’ monolingual culture, our inability to articulate what ails us, and the linguistic brilliance of Raphael Lemkin who coined the words genocide and ethnocide.
Much of my work and the work of SCL consists of confronting and filling America’s linguistic void. When I began this work, many people thought it was strange that I wanted to create new words to fill this void. Some people even asked me if we even needed new words and what entity gave me the authority to do so. I found these questions to be incredibly bizarre and I continued to craft new words, but unlike Lemkin, I’m not multilingual.
Lemkin grew up in Poland and he spoke many languages including Polish, Russian, German, and English. His comfort and familiarity with many languages empowered him to make words that would change the world. At SCL we aspire to do the same, but America’s emphasis on monolingualism creates a profound impediment.
Despite being a nation with large immigrant populations, America still emphasizes a dependence on English. Therefore, immigrant communities will speak English and their native tongue, but America as a whole does not have a multilingual society where it is expected that all Americans have a basic fluency in the same two to three languages. As a result of this, we then become reduced to using English exclusively for articulating our collective experiences.
This reliance on English could be so reductive and stifling that we may not be able to adequately describe our diverse society.
Fascism, Politics, and History
In addition to the United States’ overdependence on English, America’s unfortunate preference for an ahistorical, propagandized interpretation of history also impedes our capacity to name American fascism.
In Italy, fascism rose out of the name of Mussolini’s political party. In Germany, their iteration of fascism rose out of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist, or Nazi, party, and German fascists are often called Nazis. In Spain, their iteration of fascism derives from the authoritarian dictatorship of Francisco Franco. In many societies, their fascism takes on the name of the political party that operates in fascist ways.
Italian philosopher and writer Umberto Eco, who lived through Mussolini’s fascist regime, coined the term “Ur-fascism” to describe an “eternal fascism” and the universal attributes that all fascist regimes share, but the most important aspect of ur-fascism may be what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein describes as a “family resemblance.”
To be an expression of ur-fascism one does not need to check off every box in Eco’s list of 14 fascist attributes, but you must show a “family resemblance” to what we understand fascism to be. Fascism in one country does not need to be a carbon copy, or identical twin, of Italian fascism, but it should be obvious that they have enough similarities to be considered related and part of the same family.
The family resemblance demonstrates that merely saying “fascist” or “neo-fascist” is inadequate because duplicates are not expected to exist. Instead the expectation is the creation of a new family member within the fascist family tree, and this relative needs their own name.
If you examine Eco’s list of fascist attributes, it is obvious that Donald Trump’s Republican Party fits Eco’s description, but Americans appear incapable of equating a phrase like “MAGA,” or even the Republican Party, as our uniquely American term for our domestic fascism.
(Also, chapter 9 “The Language of American Fascism” in my book The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America further elaborates about America’s troubling relationship with fascism and our linguistic impediments.)
Despite Trump’s attempt to overthrow the government and send a rabid mob to attack the Capitol, our society still seems unwilling to describe these people as fascists. This is a troubling, dangerous, and fascinating problem in American society, and it derives from the normalization of our ethnocidal culture.
The violence of American ethnocide that fueled the transatlantic slave trade, created chattel slavery, launched the Civil War, and created Jim Crow has long been a key feature of the United States’ founding principles. American ethnocide is a dystopian terror that preceded Italian fascism by hundreds of years, and this governmental terror would definitely be described as fascism today.
In 1944, Lemkin coined genocide and ethnocide to describe the atrocities being inflicted upon Jewish people by the Nazis, and now these words are being used to describe how American colonists treated Indigenous and African people for centuries. America’s ethnocidal culture aspires to erase the narratives of people of color, so that the white people who terrorized these people as they built America can be celebrated as heroes. Political parties who celebrate these “heroes,” their violent way of life, and aspire to “Make America Great Again” clearly pose a fascist threat.
When it comes to naming American fascism, our society’s monolingualism creates a creative impediment, but most significantly America’s ethnocidal society has cultivated a discourse that professes that America’s iteration of fascism is good and patriotic. By naming American fascism, we would have to also narratively destroy the myth of countless American historical figures that we have called heroes.
Americans do not know how to live in an America that does not embrace our unique form of fascism. Because of this, American society hesitates to name and condemn our fascism because we are fearful to live in a society without it.
My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released on October 12, 2021 and NPR has picked it as one of the top books of the year!
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
