Fascism

A highly malignant political ideology, movement, and governmental practice, on the extreme right of the political spectrum, that stands in pathological opposition to democracy that first rose to national prominence in Nazi Germany, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. It combined cultist worship of leaders, millenarianism, jingoism, militarism, totalitarianism, virulent ethnicism/racism, and capitalism into one ideological package (and which saw the use of violence and terror as legitimate instruments for achieving its ends), symptomatic of which was the Second World War and all the horrors that ensued, including the Nazi Holocaust. It may be noted that considered generically, a modified form of fascist ideology existed in South Africa and the Jim Crow South in the United States (which may be labeled as proto-fascism). Interestingly, fascism as an ideology has increasingly come into vogue in recent years among deeply ignorant and misguided young white supremacists in the U.S., in Europe, and elsewhere.