The three legs of fascism are said to be a patriarchal relgiious establishment, monied interests (oligarchs in ancient fascism, corporations in modern), and, most importantly, a powerful military and paramilitary. The general population has to respect and even revere these things.
So, it is basically impossible to have fascism without really snappy military and police uniforms. Having your military and paramilitary dress impressively is not in itself a sign of fascism, but if your uniforms are more informal, or nonexistent, you're not going to have fascism. Ideally, you have awesome-looking dress uniforms AND really cool battle dress, but I think one or the other would be okay, too.
In the United States, our military mainly dresses for comfort, which is a good sign. However, our police departments in various places are dressing more and more Terry-Gilliam's-BRAZIL-like every year, which is not such a good sign. Islamist militias don't have uniforms at all, so they CAN'T be fascist.
Most of the potentially-worrisome Islamic groups have the patriarchal religious establishment; Saudi Arabia has the "control by money", but nobody's got all three. So there isn't enough centralized control anywhere to really count as fascistic.
We can argue that different groups have fascism as a goal -- but they're not there right now.
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Date: 2013-04-18 05:13 pm (UTC)The three legs of fascism are said to be a patriarchal relgiious establishment, monied interests (oligarchs in ancient fascism, corporations in modern), and, most importantly, a powerful military and paramilitary. The general population has to respect and even revere these things.
So, it is basically impossible to have fascism without really snappy military and police uniforms. Having your military and paramilitary dress impressively is not in itself a sign of fascism, but if your uniforms are more informal, or nonexistent, you're not going to have fascism. Ideally, you have awesome-looking dress uniforms AND really cool battle dress, but I think one or the other would be okay, too.
In the United States, our military mainly dresses for comfort, which is a good sign. However, our police departments in various places are dressing more and more Terry-Gilliam's-BRAZIL-like every year, which is not such a good sign. Islamist militias don't have uniforms at all, so they CAN'T be fascist.
Most of the potentially-worrisome Islamic groups have the patriarchal religious establishment; Saudi Arabia has the "control by money", but nobody's got all three. So there isn't enough centralized control anywhere to really count as fascistic.
We can argue that different groups have fascism as a goal -- but they're not there right now.