By Adam Watson

From the moment of its publication in 1995, Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt has enjoyed remarkable influence. Its appeal is immediately clear: instead of treating fascism as a historical development, Eco proposes a set of underlying features that allow it to surface in different guises across time and place; a series of traits, dispositions, and rhetorical habits that together form the template of an eternal threat, a spectre wandering perpetually across epochs. The essay is structured almost as a scholastic exercise, and the structure is elegant—fourteen points, each sketched with narrative ease—with a reassuringly simple promise: understand the essence, and one might recognise the threat before it matures. Eco’s personal recollections of Fascist Italy further anchor the essay, lending it the authority of lived experience rather than mere abstraction. But the analytic ambition is unmistakably universalist.

Yet the very clarity that gives Ur-Fascism its charm also conceals a fragile architecture. In Eco’s hands, fascism becomes elastic, almost atmospheric, a phenomenon that permeates cultures rather than emerges from specific historical landscapes. The result is a strange paradox: the more universal fascism becomes, the less intelligible its particular manifestations appear. Eco begins with the symptoms and works backwards, treating history as an echo of an already-formed template rather than a terrain where new forms arise out of conflict and crisis. This universalist gesture allows Eco to craft a moral vocabulary capable of travelling widely, but it raises unavoidable questions. When the historical specificity of fascism is thinned out in order to make it recognisable everywhere, what else is thinned out with it? What falls away when we move from fascisms to Fascism? And what remains hidden when a political phenomenon is abstracted into an “eternal” one?

This study of fascism begins by unpacking the architecture of Eco’s definition: the choices he privileges, the distinctions he collapses, and the analytic reach he claims for a model meant to apply everywhere and nowhere in particular. It then engages with approaches that situate fascism within the real pressures of its time, and which thereby illuminate what a transhistorical framework too easily renders invisible.

Anti-communist Anti-fascism

It is true that the Communists exploited the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different colors. […] Liberation was a common deed for people of different colors.¹

Eco’s discussion of the Italian Resistance exposes a constitutive tension in his project: a need to acknowledge the decisive communist component of anti-fascism while simultaneously neutralising its analytical implications. He concedes that communists played a “prime role,” yet he hastens to broaden the tableau, evoking partisans “of different colours” to recast the struggle as a pluralist civic awakening rather than a conflict motivated by class antagonisms. In doing so, he prepares the ground for a conception of fascism detached from its historical setting—unmoored from imperialist ambitions, capitalist crisis, and the panic of threatened elites. Only by abstracting fascism from these conditions can Eco elevate it into a timeless essence, an “eternal” threat that transcends material causation.

Eco bolsters his argument with the paradigmatic example of Italian aristocrat Edgardo Sogno (1915–2000), an ideological monarchist who ostensibly opposed fascism and was “such a fervent anti-Communist that after the war he joined an extreme right-wing group and was accused of having collaborated in a reactionary coup.”² In Eco’s telling, the aristocratic monarchist who opposed fascism becomes a proof-text for a peculiar figure: the ‘anti-communist anti-fascist,’ whose ideological breadth allegedly undermines any claim that class struggle anchored the Resistance. Sogno’s trajectory is meant to demonstrate that anti-fascism could exist independently of political economy.

Yet Sogno’s ‘anti-fascism’ was never a moral reckoning, but a pragmatic realignment. By the time he joined the Resistance in 1943, fascism’s strategic value had already evaporated following a series of catastrophic military defeats on all fronts. Its North African forces had surrendered in May 1943, virtually the entire ARMIR had been captured or annihilated at Stalingrad, and Sicily fell to Allied forces in just thirty-nine days that summer. The regime’s authority had eroded so dramatically that Mussolini himself was deposed by the Fascist Grand Council two months before Sogno joined the Resistance. With fascism in freefall, Sogno was forced to recalibrate. His sole lifelong commitment was not to democracy or liberty, but anti-communism—an allegiance he carried through every organisational form available to him, shedding and adopting these forms as circumstance demanded. In 1933, at just 18 years of age, he joined the fascist Italian military; in 1938 he volunteered as a soldier for Franco’s forces in Spain; in 1943 he accepted the patronage of U.S. intelligence networks; and in the Cold War he became a key player in CIA-backed groups like Pace e Libertà, which collaborated with ex-fascists and plotted an anti-communist coup. It was Sogno and some of his closest associates who, during a February 1975 rally in Rome, proclaimed that Italy was in the midst of a crisis, that the country’s institutions were on the brink of dissolution, and that the Italian Parliament was utterly ineffectual. In these circumstances, Sogno urged, the only remedy was an unconstitutional emergency government tasked with implementing a host of anti-communist measures. Foremost amongst these was Sogno’s plan to rewrite the Italian constitution, revise the command hierarchy of the Italian armed forces, and enforce a highly ambitious policy of economic liberalisation.³

The programmatic content of the Golpe Bianco thus revealed the full arc of Sogno’s anti-communist commitments. Sogno drifted from fascism to liberalism not because his principles evolved, but because the institutional hosts of anti-communism changed. When fascism functioned as the sharpest instrument against the left, he did not hesitate to wield it. When that blade dulled, he adopted new ones—liberal, Atlanticist, or conspiratorial—as circumstances required. Even his proposed coup was conceived as a ‘bloodless’ transition, an echo (however unintentional) of Mussolini’s relatively nonviolent March on Rome. Yet the underlying objectives hardly differed between the two men: strengthening state power against the working class, expanding and entrenching private property, and reorganising national institutions for a more decisive ideological struggle.

Eco’s treatment of Sogno is not an unfortunate case of poor judgement, but a deliberate attempt to fashion a type. The staunch monarchist becomes a figure of spontaneous moral radiance, his late turn recast as if it emerged from some inner reservoir of civic purity rather than from the constantly shifting pressures of the political landscape. In this telling, Sogno is not a product of his era but a free-standing emblem of conscience. That such a transfiguration is possible, even effortless, reveals the narrative architecture upon which Eco’s framework quietly rests. For this architecture to perform its function, fascism must stand apart from the world that nurtured it. If Sogno can be lifted out of his milieu and suspended as a symbol of reborn virtue, then fascism, too, can be abstracted from the historical forces that animated it. Detach the figure from the structure, detach the structure from the crisis, and detach the crisis from the social and political landscape that produced it. In this purified space, the past can be arranged like pieces on a mantel, each labelled according to the moral resonance it is meant to inspire.

Eco’s argument seeks to maintain two claims simultaneously: first, that communists undeniably formed the backbone of the Resistance; second, that anti-fascism was nonetheless a broadly pluralist endeavour. The effect is ambivalence and confusion. If the communists were, as Eco admits, the most consistent and organised force confronting fascism, then any historical account must eventually reckon with what that implies about fascism’s social content and its primary opponents. This carries implications that are uncomfortable for certain dominant narratives, particularly those that present fascism and communism as symmetrical threats to liberal society.

Eco briefly gestures towards the matter of fascist funding, noting that Mussolini’s movement was “financed by the most conservative among the landowners” who sought a “counter-revolution.”⁴ But instead of foregrounding this, Eco dismisses it as simply an inexplicable quirk of fascism, one oddity amongst many in what he shrugs off as a “tangle of contradictions.”⁵ The resulting ‘philosophical incoherence’ thesis blunts the significance of a fact that speaks directly to fascism’s early patronage and the interests it served. By reducing capitalist sponsorship of fascism to a bizarre piece of trivia, Eco deliberately evacuates it of its explanatory power.

Totalising the Enemy

If by totalitarian we mean a regime that subordinates all individual acts to the state and its ideology, then Nazism and Stalinism were totalitarian regimes.⁶

To understand why Eco must depoliticise fascism, we must turn to the conceptual apparatus that makes such depoliticisation appear natural: the liberal doctrine of ‘totalitarianism.’ Though it is presented as a neutral defence of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights,’ the paradigm of totalitarianism serves to universalise the liberal capitalist order by treating its historically specific values as self-evident truths. In doing so, it converts political conflict into moral drama: a struggle between civilisation and barbarism, freedom and tyranny, reason and fanaticism. But behind this moral theatre lies a strategic function: to render the property relations of capitalism untouchable by equating all revolutionary transformation with moral bankruptcy, with ‘totalitarianism.’ The vocabulary of liberal universalism becomes the ideological armour of capital, protecting its foundations even as it pretends to judge all systems impartially.

This ideological armour is visible in its purest form in Umberto Eco’s liberal moralism. Eco’s uncritical usage of the term totalitarian and his equation of Nazism with communism exemplify not scholarly confusion but an inherited Cold War reflex. His framework reproduces the central gesture of all bourgeois ideologies: to secure capitalism’s legitimacy by dissolving material antagonisms into an abstract moral binary. In Eco’s schema—as in mainstream capitalist historiography—fascism and communism are not concrete social formations but moral types, twin incarnations of ‘totalitarian evil,’ whose opposition to liberal democracy serves to reaffirm its self-image as the only rational and sustainable political order.

Though often uncritically deployed as an objective and concrete political category, totalitarianism originated not as a neutral descriptor but as a contested polemical tool in the ideological struggles of the 20th century. Prior to Hannah Arendt’s seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and before the Cold War canonised totalitarianism as an anti-communist weapon, the term functioned as a floating epithet deployed by disparate actors—critics of colonialism, anti-Soviet intellectuals, Zionist opponents, and even fascists themselves—to brand their enemies with an aura of unbounded menace. Some of the more notable early uses of the term illustrate this fluidity.

Influential anti-Soviet writers Horkheimer & Adorno used ‘totalitarian’ not as a political category but as an adjective to describe the systemic violence and social death inflicted by capitalists upon colonised peoples and the working class. Simone Weil, another anti-Soviet writer with a similar perspective, used ‘totalitarian’ primarily to characterise imperialism and colonialism, asserting that “the analogy between the systems of Hitler and of ancient Rome is so striking that one might believe that Hitler alone, after two thousand years, has understood correctly how to copy the Romans.”⁷

Hannah Arendt (1948) herself used ‘totalitarian’ to denounce the “terrorist” methods that expelled the Arab population of Palestine and established the state of Israel, a use that is conspicuously absent from later Cold War reinterpretations.⁸ Even her seminal Origins of Totalitarianism initially reflected a broader critique. Historians such as Domenico Losurdo have long noted a glaring rupture in Arendt’s work: the first two-thirds of Origins trace the genealogy of totalitarianism to European imperialism and anti-semitism, identifying material and ideological developments in France and particularly the British empire as prefiguring the Third Reich’s ‘racial imperialism.’ In these first two-thirds, Arendt convincingly portrays Nazism as a culmination of Western imperialism, utilising imperialist methods and employing its racist rationalisations.⁹ Yet the third and final part of the book, written as Cold War tensions solidified, abruptly discards this genealogy and declares that totalitarianism is a “novel form of government,” framing it as a uniquely Soviet and Nazi pathology and completely erasing its roots in European imperialism.¹⁰

The disjunction in The Origins of Totalitarianism is not simply a scholarly inconsistency but a historical symptom: the book’s final section bears the imprint of a rapidly consolidating Cold War, in which imperial violence could no longer serve as the genealogy of Nazism because doing so risked implicating the very powers now styling themselves defenders of ‘freedom.’

Even sympathetic liberal historians recognised this abrupt discrepancy. Henry Stuart Hughes, hardly a Marxist and himself deeply embedded in the Cold War academy, praised The Origins of Totalitarianism as a “remarkable book” and “a magnificent effort of creative imagination,” but lamented Arendt’s ignorance of Russian and Soviet history:

On the other hand, this unitary view of the totalitarian phenomenon causes Dr. Arendt to slur over the differences between German and Soviet totalitarianism. Obviously, she knows more about Germany than about Russia, and we get the impression that she not infrequently extrapolates from Nazi to Bolshevist experience.¹¹

For Nazism she provides a full ideological background. But in the case of Bolshevism we are left with a near void of a quarter of a century between the agitation of the Pan-Slavists and the triumph of Stalin. We are suddenly confronted with Soviet communism as the totalitarian equivalent of Nazism, without any adequate account of how it got to be that way. The fate of classic Marxism in Russia, the complex process by which Pan-Slavism transformed it by fusing with it in the Stalinist credo — this is telescoped into a few sentences.¹²

In a twist of irony for liberal capitalists like Eco and Arendt, even the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists themselves denounced their enemies as ‘totalitarian.’ As early as the 1930s, Italian Fascists were using ‘totalitarian’ pejoratively to describe the British Empire, while Wehrmacht General Franz Halder used it in August 1941 as a smear to denigrate the Soviet Union, seething at how the USSR had “consistently prepared for war with that utterly ruthless determination so characteristic of totalitarian states.”¹³

The protean history of ‘totalitarianism,’ from its early use as a condemnation of everything from Zionist paramilitaries to anti-imperialist movements, to its Cold War canonisation as a tool for disciplining dissent, exposes its fundamental role as an ideological weapon masquerading as theory. Its celebrated semantic elasticity is not evidence of conceptual richness but of political expediency: a term that stretches, shrinks, and mutates to satisfy the ideological needs of the ruling class while obscuring the material processes it purports to describe. Like ‘Jewish Bolshevism,’ or its contemporary iteration ‘Cultural Marxism,’ terms such as ‘totalitarian’ function not to illuminate political structures but to foreclose analysis, collapsing contradictory social formations into one undifferentiated moral category that ratifies liberal capitalism as the only permissible horizon.

Numerous other terminologies perform this same ideological work. ‘Authoritarianism’ and ‘dictatorship’, clothed in the sober language of political science, are exemplary. They fulfil almost exactly the same ideological function as totalitarian, operating as floating signifiers whose purpose is to thwart investigation rather than facilitate it. Once invoked, they pigeonhole entire social formations under a morally tainted label and absolve the speaker of any obligation to interrogate the class character of a state, the historical forces that shaped its institutions, the advancements it has made, the contradictions it seeks to resolve, or the social forces contending within it. The label performs all the labour. Instead of an analysis, we are presented with a verdict. Instead of history, an epithet—one that seamlessly elicits our consent for imperialist sanctions and wars against the enemies of empire.

The Cold War redeployment of ‘totalitarianism’ exemplified by Arendt, engineered to fuse communism and fascism into a single monstrous abstraction, served to formalise this tendency and bestow it with a veneer of academic rigour. This then enables the rhetorical sleight of hand whereby every breach in liberal hegemony is cast as a “backslide” towards ‘authoritarian’ government and ‘totalitarian’ policies. Every socialist project is subsequently reduced to a caricature that shields liberalism’s adherents from confronting its concrete achievements and contradictions.

The very imprecision of these terms is why they are so enduring and valuable: they collapse antagonisms, erase context, and obstruct the path to any materialist inquiry into power. Such is their niche. Their history is convoluted precisely because they have been seized, reshaped, and redeployed by forces far removed from their birthplace, each time retaining the same moral architecture beneath the altered façade. To extract them from that niche would be to drain them of the very substance that keeps them alive. They are categories so fluid that they can be applied across radically different social orders, and so morally loaded that they foreclose all investigation. For analysis they offer nothing; for ideology they offer everything. That is why they survive, and why they cannot be redeemed.

The Mortality of Liberalism

The tendency to declare all enemies fundamentally identical and merge them into a singular, convenient phantom reflects not analysis but its abdication. It is the refuge of those who would profit more from condemnation than comprehension, and it springs from the fear of engaging with the real motion of one’s ideological adversaries. To recognise distinctions is to recognise contradictions; to recognise contradictions is to confront history as process rather than morality tale. Across history, ruling classes and their ideologues have resorted to this conceptual flattening whenever the actual map of forces proved too unruly, or too revealing.

• Fascist movements throughout the 20th century routinely claimed that liberal democracy and communism were merely two sides of the same decadent materialist coin—a democratic horseshoe theory, whereby all paths outside fascism converge upon communism.

• Anarchists frequently dismiss rival ideologies as merely aesthetic variations of statist or coercive governance, generating an authoritarian horseshoe theory in which virtually all forms of political organisation are treated as identical in essence.

• Islamist movements reduce a diverse field of adversaries to various types of unbelief, formulating a theological horseshoe theory that collapses political, cultural, and sectarian distinctions into a single metaphysical antagonism.

• Conservatives compress all their opponents into the spectre of communism or “Cultural Marxism,” producing a communist horseshoe theory wherein every gesture towards social transformation is condemned as a prelude to Bolshevism.

This form of ideological labour is what animates liberal capitalist thinkers like Umberto Eco and Hannah Arendt, who lump all their ideological adversaries beneath the amorphous banner of ‘totalitarianism.’ Their framing is constitutive of their worldview. It arises not from concrete study but from an unexamined liberal-capitalist ontology that divides the political universe into a virtuous ‘us’ (rational, democratic, pluralistic) and a benighted ‘them’ (irrational, coercive, monolithic). For such thinkers, this Manichean schema is not a conclusion reached through historical investigation but a starting axiom—a presupposition that predetermines the categories through which events are interpreted, rendering their analyses circular, moralistic, and ultimately incapable of apprehending the real motion of history and what forces propel it.

The outcome is historical specificity collapsing under the weight of moral abstraction. Communist and fascist projects, despite their utterly divergent class bases, aims, methods, and historical roles, are fused into a single spectral adversary. Anti-imperialist movements are thus equally dismissed as deviations from liberal modernity, and the liberal order itself is rendered organic, neutral, and timeless—a standard against which all other formations are measured and found wanting.

As mentioned earlier, this pattern is not unique to liberalism, though it has been particularly influential. Across ideologies, the same phenomenon recurs. Rival movements are simplified and flattened to render them easily legible and contestable. Whether expressed in liberal, fascist, anarchist, Islamist, or conservative thought, ‘horseshoe’ logic smooths away contradiction, erases context, and elevates polemic over analysis. Its purpose is never to map the material or social reality of its opponents, but to defend a particular vision of social order by delegitimising all alternatives.

This pattern unfolds across so many disparate movements because every ruling class ideology, liberalism no less than any other, is born from a specific historical soil. It grows from the anxieties, ambitions, and imperatives of its historical moment; it is not a mirror of the world, but a lantern that illuminates only those paths which its ruling class wishes to walk. Yet social reality is complex, full of conflicting pressures, competing tendencies, and rival projects. To mobilise a mass base through all this turbulence, an ideology must render that reality easily intelligible, offering a simplified constellation by which its adherents can navigate: who stands with us, who threatens us, what hopes we may cultivate, and which hopes we must bury.

No ideology can afford to describe the sky as it truly is. To name every star—to map the full expanse of historical possibility and show the forces and social orders that exist beyond its own grasp—would strip liberalism of its claim to singularity, exposing it as a chapter rather than a destiny. Other social orders operate, endure, and compel allegiance in ways that make liberalism’s certainty appear laughable, even absurd. Were liberalism ever to depict its rivals with fidelity, it would necessarily concede that its own social order, like all those that perished before it, arises only from historical circumstance rather than necessity. Should that fact be acknowledged, liberalism’s veneer of inevitability would collapse. Rather than viewing it as the destiny of human civilisation, liberalism’s subjects would correctly resituate it as a historically contingent formation—useful in its historical context, perhaps, but now clearly obsolete.

Faced with this threat, liberalism cannot allow coherent alternatives to exist conceptually. To assert itself as the only political horizon, it must discredit all rival projects by mutilating them: disfiguring their philosophies, stripping away their contexts, and contorting their outcomes into fumbling caricatures or thoughtless crimes. Should liberalism accomplish this, it becomes freed from contrast and stands alone as the only rational order, as the only realistic way to organise society. Liberalism appears rational, necessary, and universal not because it is any of those things, but because it denies conceptual space to any coherent alternative. A people that can recognise alternative futures becomes a people capable of making them.

The Origins of Freedom

History, when refracted through the liberal imagination, rarely appears as a landscape of contending forces. It is more often rendered instead as a moral ledger with neat columns of virtue and vice, where the material antagonisms of society are dissolved into a theatre of villains and innocents. Amongst the most revealing habits of this moral arithmetic is the conflation of communism and fascism, a manoeuvre so habitual that it has hardened into liturgy. By grafting every alternative to capitalist property relations onto the moral horror of fascism, liberal discourse forestalls any recognition of the deeper unity between capitalism’s routine violence and its episodic transformations into unvarnished terror. Within the American imperial imagination, this conflation does not merely recur; it operates as a compulsory reflex, structuring both scholarly and popular treatments of the twentieth century.

This is why literature devoted to Nazism contains, almost without fail, ritualistic gestures towards communism’s alleged equal or greater cruelty. A popular history writer such as Paul Roland can open a book on Nazi occultism (itself a highly niche topic) by proclaiming, without evidence, context, and no connection at all to the subject matter, that Stalin “had murdered even more of his own people than had Hitler.”¹⁴ The claim’s abrupt randomness and jarring incongruity is not a flaw but a feature: its very irrelevance discloses its function. It is a libation poured to the sacred mythology of dual totalitarianisms, a reassurance to the liberal reader that no matter what monstrosities fascism committed, communism was worse.

Within this ideological frame, liberal writers need not treat such brazen assertions as hypotheses to be examined. They are presented as simple truths, as though the very act of qualifying them would be pedantic at best and betray a dangerous sympathy at worst. Rather than celebrating the outcome of WWII as an unambiguous moral triumph, the U.S. empire’s intellectual canon subtly depicts it almost as a misfortune. The moral and ideological arithmetic—that fascism constituted the lesser evil, and that the Third Reich’s victory would have been preferable to the Soviet Union’s—is almost never spoken outright but is everywhere assumed, permeating the subtext throughout while remaining carefully unarticulated.

Such readings of history reveal more than just academic prejudice. They expose one of the deepest anxieties of the ruling class. Should history be approached without the suffocating veil of liberal moralism, the structural kinship of fascism and liberalism would become unmistakable. Both serve, in different registers, the same ruling order: one preserving its power through the rhetoric of freedom and markets, the other through open coercion and racial mythologies. One disciplines the worker through precarity; the other crushes them with jackboots. They are not antipodes but alternating currents in the same wire, powering the same capitalist mode of production and deployed to preserve the same material order as it constantly modulates its strategies of survival.

Yet the historical record remains stubbornly indifferent to this liberal narrative. It is full of facts that stand as silent indictments:

• The British Empire’s appeasement was driven not by naïveté but by the hope that Germany might neutralise communism on Europe’s eastern flank.¹⁵

• When the Third Reich collapsed, its officials overwhelmingly fled not to the Soviet occupation zone but to the Western one, where they were quickly absorbed into NATO.¹⁶

• West Germany rebuilt its intelligence and police forces by installing former Gestapo and Sicherheitsdienst officers at the helm, while the Bundeswehr and NATO welcomed Wehrmacht and SS veterans into commanding posts.¹⁷

If communism and fascism were truly equivalent—morally, politically, or structurally—these patterns would be inexplicable. Fascists would not have fled from the socialist East to the capitalist West, nor would a fascist state like Franco’s Spain have been embraced by NATO. The record of history shows fascism and liberalism functioning as complements, with fascism emerging whenever liberal democracy can no longer contain the contradictions of capitalism by gentler means.

Eco’s contributions, for all their erudition, participate fully in the ideological labour of distorting liberalism’s rivals. By distilling fascism into a catalogue of transhistorical traits, he abstracts it from its material base and conceals its intimate alliance with capital. In doing so, he reproduces the very logic that sustains the “totalitarian” smokescreen. His silence on class is not an oversight but the necessary condition for his framework’s coherence. It is through such silences—through these polite avoidances and eloquent omissions—that liberal intellectuals perform their most important service to the ruling class: labouring to ensure that capitalism’s order appears eternal, its crises accidental, and its rivals morally disqualified before they can even be understood.

Yet this abstraction, while elegant on the page, sidesteps the material reality that shaped the war itself. The ideological gesture of equating fascism and communism is mirrored in the historiography of WWII, where idealistic frameworks obscure the concrete stakes and imperatives of capital. To grasp why the Allies aligned themselves with the Soviet Union despite ideological antipathy, it is necessary to reinstate the economic, geopolitical, and strategic forces that liberal narratives quietly subtract. It is only by recovering these forces that the seeming paradox—the simultaneous celebration and demonisation of the USSR—resolves itself into historical logic.

The Allies’ wartime alliance with the Soviet Union is often remembered through a haze of moral sentimentality, as though segregation-era America and colonial empire Britain fought against the Axis because fascism was racist and treated non-white people poorly. In reality, the Allies were cornered by history. That the same capitalist powers who toasted the Red Army in 1945 could describe it as the ultimate civilisational menace by 1947 is not paradox at all, but the predictable motion of an imperialist order reasserting its priorities.

During the war, Washington and London were not free actors choosing a socialist ally out of principle. The fascist states—nurtured and encouraged for years as vicious sentries against revolution—had ceased to play a subordinate role in the imperialist order led by the United States and Britain. German capital, reorganised beneath the Hakenkreuz, sought to resolve its relentless internal crises not by stabilising the Anglo-American order but by supplanting it. To have any hope of survival that did not entail socialist transformation, the Reich needed raw materials, labour, industrial regions, agricultural land, transport corridors, and strategic choke-points already tethered to British and American capital: Romanian oil, Swedish iron ore, Silesian coal, the Danubian grain basin, the industrial belts of Czechoslovakia and Poland, the ports and railways that knit Europe into the world market.¹⁸

A German-centric continental bloc would have remade the world economy on terms hostile to the Atlantic powers. It threatened their trade routes, their investments, their access to resources, and their entire architecture of imperial accumulation. In that moment, the Soviet Union became viewed not only as a less immediate threat but as a potentially monumental ally. Only a centrally planned, industrialised state could possibly succeed in holding firm against the fascist war machine, mobilising on a continental scale, and annihilating the fascist empire. The Allied embrace of the USSR was not moral epiphany but strategic necessity: an alliance forced by the very structure of the global capitalist system, which now faced a rival imperialist project capable of usurping it.

Once the Axis was defeated, however, the configuration of threats changed. German and Japanese capital lay in ruins. The central antagonism was no longer inter-imperialist but systemic: between a restored Anglo-American order and a victorious socialist project commanding immense prestige amongst workers, anti-colonial movements, and nations struggling to break free of empire. The Soviet advance to Berlin, the Chinese Revolution, and the rising tide of anti-colonial struggle threatened to inaugurate a world defined less by imperial extraction than by socialist transformation. The terrain had shifted, and the requirements of capital shifted with it. In dire need of a new ideological narrative to transform yesterday’s indispensable ally into today’s mortal nemesis, the Atlantic bloc was structurally compelled to recast its own opposition to fascism as merely a prelude—the first battle against a greater overarching evil, against the phenomenon of totalitarianism, of which the Soviet Union was now suddenly identified as the prime representative. From this new vantage-point assumed by capital, it was not that the wrong side had won the war, but rather that the wrong side had survived it.

The Limits of Language

The central question that Eco attempts to address—what is fascism?—becomes, within liberal parameters, an exercise fated to collapse into definitional fencing. Liberal thought compels this outcome by treating political phenomena as free-floating abstractions rather than expressions of determinate social relations. Concepts are not rooted in the movement of history but suspended in a realm of normative ideals: ‘freedom,’ ‘democracy,’ ‘authoritarianism,’ and their kin are treated as self-evident essences rather than ideological forms shaped by material antagonisms. Thus the inquiry becomes a ping-pong of terms rather than an investigation of causes. Once politics is severed from its material base, all that remains is lexical taxonomy.

This is why Eco’s methodology falters at its inception. His attempt to distil fascism into fourteen abstract ‘features’—a catalogue he openly concedes is self-contradicting—reflects the assumptions of the liberal-capitalist worldview he inhabits. In that ontology, social systems are understood not through their historical function but through the traits, moods, and rhetorical styles attributed to them. The result is a theory of fascism that floats above the terrain from which fascism actually emerges. Eco notes with puzzlement that “fascism became a synecdoche… for different totalitarian movements,” yet the confusion is of his own making: once fascism is defined as a cluster of attitudes, any movement exhibiting those attitudes becomes potentially ‘fascist,’ regardless of its relationship to capital, labour, or the state. Instead of an examination of each movement’s historical function, we are simply given an arbitrary template.¹⁹

This reductionism typifies liberal historiography, where endless debates fixate on whether fascism’s ‘essence’ lies in nationalism, racism, mythic traditionalism, or some other ideological ornament. But none of these elements are unique to fascism; many predate it, many survive it, and many appear in societies untouched by it. What unites fascist movements is not their aesthetic or psychological texture but their structural role in moments of capitalist crisis:

1. The violent reassertion of capitalist hegemony;
2. The destruction of organised labour and revolutionary forces; and
3. The construction of a legal-political framework that extinguishes working-class power.

Eco’s inability to examine and foreground the function of fascism arises from the conceptual limits imposed by a liberal framework. The questions that actually matter—What crises and antagonisms generated fascism? What forces nurtured it? What tasks did it perform for those who sponsored it?—cannot be asked without forcing a confrontation with capitalism that liberal frameworks cannot accommodate. Eco’s “Eternal Fascism” is therefore not a diagnosis but an evasion, a depoliticised and abstracted spectre that might appear anytime and anywhere, except when and where it actually originates: in the defence of capitalist property relations against the imminent advance of the working class.

Notes

1. Umberto Eco, (2020). How to Spot a Fascist (London: Harvill Secker, 2020), 4-5. (Original work published 1995 as the essay “Ur-Fascism” in The New York Review of Books.) ↩︎
2. Eco, How to Spot a Fascist, 5. ↩︎
3. J.M. Bale, The darkest side of politics, I: Postwar fascism, covert operations, and terrorism vol. 1 (New York: Routledge, 2018), 276. ↩︎
4. Eco, How to Spot a Fascist, 10-11. ↩︎
5. Eco, How to Spot a Fascist, 10. ↩︎
6. Eco, How to Spot a Fascist, 8. ↩︎
7. Simone Weil, Selected essays, 1934–1943 (Oregon: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 101. (Original work published 1962.) ↩︎
8. Hannah Arendt, “To save the Jewish homeland,” in The Jewish writings (New York: Schocken Books, 1948), 390 . ↩︎
9. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Penguin, 2017), 206-10. ↩︎
10. Arendt, The Origins, chapter 13. ↩︎
11. Henry Stuart Hughes, “Review of The Origins of Totalitarianism,” in The Nation March 24, 1951, 280–281. ↩︎
12. Hughes, “Review,” 280. ↩︎
13. Carlo Scarfoglio, Dio stramaledica gli inglesi! L’Inghilterra e il continente (Roma: AGA Editrice, 1999), 22; Franz Halder, F., The private war journal of Generaloberst Franz Halder, Chief of the General Staff of the Supreme Command of the German Army (OKH), 14 August 1939–24 September 1942: Volume VII, The campaign in Russia, part II: 1 August 1941–24 September 1942 (Manuscript, Vol. VII; digitised 2007). Combined Arms Research Library Digital Library, Combined Arms Research Library, Fort Leavenworth, KS. (Document no. N16845-G), 36. ↩︎
14. Paul Roland, The Nazis and the occult (London: Arcturus Publishing, 2021), 7. ↩︎
15. Jonathan Haslam, (2021). The spectre of war: international communism and the origins of World War II. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 258-325. ↩︎
16. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s secret armies: Operation Gladio and terrorism in Western Europe. (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2005). ↩︎
17. Norbert Frei, Adenauer’s Germany and the Nazi past: The politics of amnesty and integration (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2002), 50-51; Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, myth, reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 242-50. ↩︎
18. For an in-depth treatment of the German economy, see Adam Tooze, The wages of destruction: The making and breaking of the Nazi economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006). ↩︎
19. Eco, How to Spot a Fascist, 10. ↩︎