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I mean didn't he literally just get purged for expressing a political opinion?
He doesn't have to read about authoritarian states, he's already living in one!
EDIT: Well that comment didn't last long. Here's the original:
Weren't fascist movements a reaction to erstwhile aristocracy ? They're started by revolutionaries who borrow their power from military and/or church. Both institutions reject blood relations in favor of loyalty to the cause.
Disagreeable people with public platforms are the first go. This guy would've whacked on day 2.
Is there an example of a near-fascist state with significant ethnic diversity that's succeeded ?
P.S: OP deleted their comment, so I'm going off the quote.
Every Fascist movement/government was a little different, "Fascism" as such didn't necessarily have the ideological consistency that the Communism of the time did.
I return over and over to the myth of the Golem when thinking about the rise of Fascism in Germany and elsewhere. Traditional and Capitalist elites saw Hitler as a necessary counter to the threat of Communism, only to see Hitler grow too powerful and start threatening the aristocrats and capital who empowered him.
Equally, Hitler was empowered by continued Communist agitation and the refusal of Communist parties to ally with conservatives to stop Hitler, as part of Stalin's foreign policy choices, on the theory that the capitalist powers would exhaust themselves in war; they would live to see Hitler turn on the Soviets to disastrous effect.
Hitler had a lot of sometime allies on his way up, and a lot of them lived to regret it.
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Mussolini had a large number of aristocrats in his cabinet, and ennobled a bunch of retired WW1-era generals who he didn't have to, as well as his own successful generals and a small number of Fascist politicians. I would say Mussolini had a revealed preference the continued existence of the Italian nobility as a functioning warrior-elite - indeed given the history of the Italian nobility, had WW2 never happened Mussolini would have left Italy with a more functional aristocracy than he found it with. I can't find a list of top people in the Fascist party organisation, so I don't know how many were aristocrats.
The only aristocrat in Hitler's cabinet (after the aristocratic conservatives associated with von Papen were sidelined) was von Ribbentrop, and the aristocracy was notably underrepresented among the Gauleiters. The Weimar Republic had abolished the formal status of nobility, so Hitler didn't have the option of ennobling his generals, but he never came across as someone inclined to do it. Even under Weimar, the German nobility was a functioning warrior-elite, and Hitler was never entirely comfortable with it - arguably the foundation of the Waffen SS is an attempt to establish an alternative warrior-elite on Nazi rather than aristocratic lines.
So I don't think there is a consistent view on fascist-aristocrat relations.
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No, the major ones in the public imagination (Spain, Italy, Germany) were as much or more in reaction to powerful, organized, and street-level-thuggish communist parties in their countries than they were a backlash against old aristocracy. In fact, a major reason the fascists beat the communists was that the old aristocracy lined up behind the fascists, on the theory that anything was better than getting expropriated and lined up against a wall by bolsheviks.
Depends on what you mean by "succeeded", but Getulio Vargas in Brazil comes to mind as a potential example here. And Salazar in Portugal wasn't ultimately successful - his regime didn't outlive him - but lusotropicalism was the opposite of ethnically-exclusive; Salazar envisaged Angola, Mozambique, Goa, Timor, etc. as integral parts of Portugal itself.
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Officially yes, fascists were opposed to the aristocracy in the old sense of “the second estate”. The monarchists viewed the fascists as upstart revolutionaries rather than as conservatives.
But in practice every society has an elite, and this guy was presumably using “aristocracy” as a synonym for “elite”.
The text I quoted was the entirety of the original OP comment.
The distinction matters for promotion patterns.
An aristocracy propagates through blood ties. As a consequence, it develops a from-birth racial identity. Here, power is innate. Additionally, elites maintain power by not-fixing-whats-not-broken. So, rivals arent purged with the same fervor. Send them out as lords of border states, not gulags.
Fascist states revolve around a king-like central individual. But this individual draws power from commitment to some loudly expressed cause that's already taken root among foot soldiers. Blood relatives and visually identical individual arent entitled to power. A lowly commoner who has risen through the ranks will have a better claim to power than the child of the dictator. Additionally, totalitarism and paranoia mean that the new fuhrer will likely purge all rivals with a kind of harshness that aristocracies rarely employ.
In a fascist state, the 2 worst things you can be are 'the othered' and a rival to the eventual winner.
I think that "aristocracy" is covering a lot of ground. Nobility has been around about as long as long as agriculture has. From Ramesses II to Wilhelm II, you have nobles in very different settings, from low-born leaders of troops who managed to conquer something and kill anyone who disputed their nobility to products of dozens of generations of inbreeding.
You have aristocrats who relied on vassalage, Roman patricians, figureheads of some anonymous imperial bureaucracy and centralizers of power.
Still, that I agree that for the most part, the aristocracy was likely very bent on avoiding precedents of "you can simply kill some nobles and take their land". You needed at least a flimsy excuse, like "actually it was rightfully my land all along" or "yes, but the nobles I killed were following an evil religion, they don't count".
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