How to Be a Fascist

The first and only guide to turning your 21st century democracy into a fascist paradise. Democracy is difficult, flawed and unstable. It involves barely distinguishable political parties taking part in lengthy, overcomplicated and expensive decision-making processes. Trying to engage so many people with political issues seems to lead only to complexity and disagreement. So why bother? Doesn't fascism guarantee a more effective and efficient management of the state? In this short, bitingly ironic mixture of On Tyranny and The Psychopath Test , Italian political activist Michela Murgia explores the logic that is attracting increasing numbers of voters to right-wing populism. Far from its origins in the 20th century, fascism is once again on the rise in an age of increased connectivity and globalism. Murgia shows how many of the elements of our society that we might think would combat closed-mindedness and xenophobia actually fan the flames. Closing with a "fascistometer" to measure the reader's own authoritarian inclinations, How to be a Fascist is a refreshingly direct, polemical book that asks us to confront the fascisim in our governments, in our societies, and in our own political leanings.

“Murgia…exposes the insidious nature of authoritarianism in this tongue-in-cheek guide to remaking a democratic society into a fascist one…Readers will gain new insight into why illiberalism is on the rise.” —Publishers Weekly

Auteur

Michela Murgia

Échantillon de lecture
I write against democracy because it has always been, since its origins, an irredeemably flawed system of government. What Winston Churchill said was false: democracy isn’t the worst form of government except for all others—the truth is that it’s the worst, full stop, but it’s always hard to say it openly, in public, despite all the clear evidence in our daily experiences.

The book you’re holding is born from a desire to demonstrate that democracy is not only useless, but in fact toxic to coexistence, and also to prove that its tried and tested opposite—fascism—is a much better system of state administration: less costly, faster and more efficient. This text aims especially to be a comprehension tool for the more educated classes exhausted by democracy, because it has never been necessary to explain to the masses that fascism is better. Armed 12 with the secret wisdom of the simple mind, the people already know as much, and that is why, tired of the inability of the democratic system to solve their problems, they regularly and almost spontaneously turn towards fascism.

I say almost not by chance, because at times fascism may need some help to take root; at the beginning of their historical cycle, democracies tend to be quite hostile towards it and attempt to organize themselves against it with blatantly crude methods, such as passing laws to make it illegal. Fascism, fortunately, knows how to wait. It’s like herpes—primary organisms are always the ones which teach us the most—able to survive for entire decades within the marrow of democracy, letting everyone believe it has disappeared, only then to pop out, more viral than ever, at the first, entirely predictable weakening of its immune system.

A young democracy, especially one born out of a war or a civil revolution, will be quick to react to fascism, but an older one will have lost most of its memory and will have buried the eyewitnesses who supported its rhetoric. Additionally, it will have faded and be sufficiently corrupted to consider compromises on its principles, increasingly more significant, with other forms of government. At that point, if fascism is quick and able to seize the opportunity, it will be able to rule entire states without ever picking up a single weapon: it will be democracy’s own tools that will allow it to establish itself, and finally prevail.

At this exact moment in history, we have at our disposal an overabundance of tools of mass control that no fascism from the past century ever had, and this allows us to attempt something new: to rise from the heart of an ageing democratic system and dominate it without ever making use of military force, internal or external. By manipulating the tools of democracy, we can make an entire country fascist without ever even mentioning the word fascism, which might still raise some resistance, even in a faded democracy. Rather, we should ensure that fascist language is socially accepted in all spheres of communication, suitable for any topic, like an unlabelled tin—not left, not right—that can be passed from hand to hand without anyone ever touching its contents.

Contents. This is the crucial issue. I can’t hide the fact that yes, they are problematic, and we won’t, at least at the beginning, make them pass unchallenged in a democracy. We no longer live in a time when we can explicitly affirm the superiority of one race over others, or openly say that not all opinions have the right to be expressed, especially if they go against the national interest. You can think it, of course, and even say it in certain circumstances, but to present oneself as a system that openly states it as a political manifesto can be difficult, at the outset. For this reason, you will not find in these pages anything that might define “fascist ideas”. Trying to affirm fascism at the level of ideas is a long process, too complex and contradictory to be worth attempting. Too many years of rhetoric. Too many remembrance days. Too much ideological fluff about the Allied efforts that ensured that everyone remembers their veteran grandad and no one ever remembers the fascist one. Looking into the merit of these ideas isn’t productive; if, instead, we act on the method, the ideas will simply follow.

When it comes to politics, method and contents coincide, and the fascist method holds the power of alchemical transmutation: if applied without any ideological prejudice, it turns whoever makes use of it into a fascist, because—as Forrest Gump would say—fascist is as fascist does. What follows, then, is a manual on the method—specifically, instructions on the language, the most malleable cultural infrastructure we have. Why would anyone need to overthrow institutions if all you need to do in order to seize them is to change the referent of a word, and make sure everyone speaks it? Words generate behaviour, and those who control words control behaviour. That’s the starting point: the names we give to things and the way we talk about them, that’s where fascism can face the challenge of becoming current again. If we can convince even a single person who believes in democracy every day, we can live again. And live greatly.

Faithful to its humble didactic aim, the book includes as an appendix a short test of the understanding reached through reading, and an evaluation of the progress made in adhering to fascism.