FASCISM

In the first episode, we speak with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University and author of Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, about the inception of fascism in Benito Mussolini’s interwar Italy.

1. FULL EPISODE: Italy: Fascism’s Violent Birth
2. EXCERPTS: Fascist Modernities by Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Anti-Semitism in Italy, Mussolini’s Ethiopian War / "Is This Fascism?" by Kevin Passmore / From Ordinary Violence in Mussolini’s Italy by Michael R. Ebner

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We discuss what happened in Spain, where a fringey fascist movement without much political power got folded into one of the longest-lasting dictatorships of the 20^th century. Brian Bunk, historian at UMass-Amherst and author of Ghosts of Passion: Martyrdom, Gender, and the Origins of the Spanish Civil War, helps us sort through the many twists and turns of this history.

1. FULL EPISODE: Was Franco’s Spain a Fascist Dictatorship? Our Fascism Reading Group Has Questions.
2. Spain’s “Semi-Fascism”
3. Forging a Dictatorship in Spain

Following our discussions of fascism in Italy and Spain, Fascism: A Slate Academy arrives at an eastern example: Romania, where the movements of the 1920s and 1930s were particularly bloody, mystical, and anti-Semitic. We turn to Radu Ioanid, historian and archivist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and author of The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania, to try to understand the difference.

1. FULL EPISODE: Romania: Bloody, Mystical Fascism From the East
2. “A Unique Death Cult”
3. Codreanu’s Alternative Facts

We arrive at the fascism that looms above all others: Germany’s National Socialism. We talk to Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, about the ideological underpinnings of the Nazis’ particular brand of fascism.

1. FULL EPISODE: Germany: Fascism’s Terrible Apogee
2. Hitler’s American Dream
3. Did the Muslim World Really Fall for Hitler?

In our fifth installment, we look at the small, but significant, smattering of fascist movements that took root in the United States and the mother country in the time before World War II. We interview Nancy MacLean, historian at Duke University and author of Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan, to find out more about fascism’s hold on the American mind in the 1920s and 1930s.

1. FULL EPISODE: The Small, but Significant, Fascist Movements of the U.S. and Britain
2. America's Brush with Fascism
3. The Posh Voice That Broadcast Nazi Propaganda Into Millions of British Homes
4. When Fascist Heroes Took Over the Movies
5. Fascism's Warning Signs
6. Why Former Suffragettes Flocked to British Fascism

In this final episode, we pull together all of the histories we’ve read, and try to determine how much we can, or can’t, use history’s example to understand what’s happening today. NYU historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in Fascist Italy and our guest for our first episode, rejoins us, to help sort through comparisons and implications.

1. FULL EPISODE: Fascism Today: Where Are We Now?
2. A Dangerous Definition
3. Are You Prepared for an American Reichstag Fire?
4. Fascism Doesn’t Die. It Takes on New Forms.
5. The Origins of Anti-Intellectualism
6. The Necessity of Memory
7. Fascism, Rebranded

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