Some People Have a Certain View of Fascism

I didn't hear all of the video. At 3:27 in I decided to take a look at her preferences in a way I'll explicitate in my one comment below it:

History Professor Answers Dictator Questions | Tech Support | WIRED
WIRED | 18 March 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK6fALsenmw

I copied the transscription. I took a few F searches.

Francisco Franco gets exactly two mentions in the same passage:

There is no sense of fascism without violence. 1:02 Fascists truly believe, whether it's Hitler or Francisco Franco in Spain or Mussolini, that violence is the way you change the world. 1:10 They declare one category of person as an enemy. Could be a racial enemy, as in Nazi Germany. 1:15 It could be a political enemy, as it was in Italian fascism and for Francisco Franco in Spain. 1:21 But that enemy must be exterminated. So the state organizes itself around the practice of violence, 1:28 and regular people are trained to become vigilant and informers 1:33 and use violence themselves. So violence is at the very core of fascism.

No more discussion of Franco.

Totally absent are Salazar, Dollfuss, Schuschnigg and Horthy. A few Fascist dictators that, like Franco, I certainly place over Hitler (whom, like Chesterton, I consider a parody of Fascism) and in many ways over Mussolini as well.

So, if you want to argue that an informer system like that in the Soviet is essential to Fascism, somehow there are a lot of Fascist dictators you don't really discuss. Mussolini gets quite a few mentions. More than Stalin and Mao who get two and three. Lenin and Trotsky get no mentions at all. Meanwhile, Mussolini gets ten and so does Xi Jinping and Hitler sixteen. Only topped by Putin who gets eighteen.

I think you have shown your political leanings pretty clearly. Dictatorship is morally corrupt if one asks you, and Fascism plus Chinese Communism with Putin between the two is the archetype.

For Xi Jinping, Putin and on lots of topics Hitler, I'd agree with you. For Mussolini, not quite. I'd agree that the Corporazioni were the only allowed trade unions and obviously also that they were state controlled and they included both employers and employees. The so called "Successful Socialism" in Sweden actually copies this, so on this economic side, Sweden is more like a Successful Fascism. When trade unions in Sweden were founded, they were Social Democrat, and both party and unions were out of power. Other unions for employers existed independently of or in reaction to that. However, when Social Democrats got into power, there was an overlap between Social Democrats and Swedish Fascists (Nysvenskar, they should not be confused with Neo-Nazis, they are two different things and the Nysvenskar took a distance from Hitler after hearing about the camps). And this entry-way modified the unions-wise landscape, laws were passed for the state (government) being able to call in both parties of the unions' negotiations for compulsory mediation, and also, for the classic period, there were lots of voluntary meetings in cordiality, in the conference centres in Saltsjöbaden ("the salt lake baths", a suburb of Stockholm which is no longer in the Mälar lake but a bay of the Baltic Sea that has higher salinity). All based on the very Fascist idea that workers and the companies that employ them are actually allies.

You said that Mussolini and Franco declared a certain category of person enemies for political reasons. It's not as if the Biennio Rosso or the people around Caballero had actually behaved as enemies to lots of more traditionally minded countrymen?

I would say, your approach to Fascism is sloppy and your approach to Communism is sloppy. Sloppily condemning in the one case, sloppily exonerating in the other. It's as if people under Lenin and Khrushchev weren't living in a much more brutal dictatorship than Mussolini's Italy.

[tried to add:]

In fact, the comments on abortion show the Communist bias fairly clearly.

Or, if you prefer, Jewish bias. It's anyway as anti-Fascist as it is anti-Christian. Most Communist dictatorships (Romania being part time at least an honorary exception) have legalised and promoted abortion. Often in the name of "responsible" parenthood.