fascist vs. nazi

queeranarchism:

In case you wonder when it is factually accurate to call someone a fascist or a nazi, here’s a handy explanation:

Fascism is an authoritarian hyper-nationalist movement that dates back to Mussolini. It can have many forms but it generally strives to recover a mythical past of national/male/white supremacy, glorifies war, seeks to suppress political enemies and unions and follows a leader figure. Very often minorities become scapegoats. In fascism without any visible nazi influences, the main focus of that scapegoating is cultural and the focus is on the perceived failed ‘integration’ of minorities who need to learn ‘our national values’. It often presents these minorities with an ‘assimilate or leave’ ultimatum and seeks to prevent further immigration into its country.

For the record: fascism in all its forms is bad, it is deadly, it is a threat. It needs to be smashed.

Nationalsocialism is
an authoritarian hyper-nationalist movement

that dates back to Hitler. It has all the same common characteristics of fascism and it is a form of fascism. It also combines scapegoating with scientific racism, the idea that the targeted minority is inherently genetically a threat that can not be removed through re-education, integration, etc. Racial purity, through the exclusion and killing of minorities (perceived ‘lesser races’) and the exclusion and killing of people with disabilities, LGBT people, people with addictions, etc (perceived ‘pollution of the white race’) is a goal of nationalsocialists. For nationalsocialists the assimilation of minorities is not an option. They see assimilation as a threat because it further pollutes their precious ‘white race’.

So a nazi isn’t always someone who openly supports Hitler, most nazis are smart enough not to do that. A nazi is someone who combines fascism with the pursuit of racial purity.

So a modern example of a fascist movement is the identitarian movement, which focusses on the perceived ‘islamisation’ of Europe as a cultural threat, not a racial one. A modern example of a nationalsocialist movement in Blood & Honour, which explicitly names the ‘pure blood’ of ‘the white race’ as the thing it claims to defend. 

Of course fascists and nazis mix and mingle a lot and exchange ideas. Nazism is a form of fascism after all.
A lot of movements start our presenting themselves as ‘nationalist’, become more explicitly fascist over time and eventually openly embrace the basic ideas of nazism.

Mussolini and Hitler influences each other as well.

And in practice, there are hardly any fascists who do not to some extend
believe that some people are inherently racially inferior, even if they
don’t openly admit it.

Many people in the identitarian movement even believe in the myth of ‘white genocide’, which is a classic nazi myth based on the pursuit of racial purity.

But for the record: if you wanna pinpoint the moment when an openly fascist movement becomes an openly national socialist movement: it’s when they start using the word race in their theories, start talking about how many children members of minorities have compared to white people, start arguing that we should ‘rethink eugenics’, start wanting to deport people regardless of how ‘integrated’ they are.

I hope that clears things up.