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Notes -
Fascism actually has something of a defined political doctrine. Mussolini even wrote a book about it during his rise to power in Italy. In the early 20th century, elements of it were debated hotly by people sympathetic to its beliefs and there were disagreements, but it isn’t a “catch all” phrase the way it’s used to describe generic, top-down systems, or a every different close integration between the state and economic life. Fascist “corporatism,” isn’t just an agglomeration of public-private partnerships between SOE’s (which every Chinese business is a de facto part of), just because they operate it as a competitive enterprise in the market.
Germany and the Nazis were altogether a more interesting case. They fawned over agricultural life in a lot of ways and disliked what the program of industrialization does to social values and communal living. They had a doctrine they tried promulgating to more or less “phase out” religion that they called “Positive Christianity,” but it never really took with the rest of society. In Franco’s case, it’s a pity his federated system didn’t last, and by the time the rest of the larger theater of WW2 had clearly been decided for the Allies, whatever pockets remained of those ideologies were just going to be a matter of time before they dissolved into nothing. You had people like Leon Degrelle try and keep it alive in Belgium with the Rexist Party, but they weren’t going to overcome the historical trend moving against them by that point.
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