A selection from a long interview The most productive way to understand fascism —an approach that allows us to think about both historical fascisms and twenty-first-century neo-fascisms — is to start with fascism’s social and political project, which stems from its worldview (rather than a doctrine per se ). This ideological core is what endures, despite the different strategies used, which represent forms of adaptation to the particular and changing political circumstances and cultural contexts. This worldview can be encapsulated in a set of elements which are in ways also articulated with each other: An obsession with decline, decadence and the decomposition of a community considered to be organic and fixed … A civilisational and/or racial paranoia that makes it possible to connect this decline to the presence on ‘our’ soil of immigrants, minorities and groups considered fundamentally alien… Hatred of equality and of all movements that push for it… The idea that a national...
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51