The search for neofascism in the Middle East reveals a great deal about the general character of the search itself, as well as its putative content. It makes evident the prevailing notions that shape the inquiry, making clear the uncertainty of many of its underlying premises. The consequence is reflected in the tortured results one finds in the contemporary analyses devoted to what has come to be known as “Middle Eastern fascism,” and its more recent incarnation, “Islamofascism.”

There is a loosely structured argument that identifies some of the secular Arab regimes in the region as “fascist-style dictatorships,” and contemporary radical Islamist groups as somehow representing its “religious variant.” Some have suggested that historic Fascism was intrinsically “fundamentalist” and, as a consequence, shared some of the most negative properties of the religious fanaticism of contemporary Islamism.

The identification of Middle Eastern political movements as neofascist did not simply arise as a consequence of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Towers on 11 September 2001. Academicians early employed the notion in their efforts to understand something of the first independent political responses made by those “decolonized” peoples in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East following the end of the Second World War. Amid those responses, certain political features appeared with some impressive regularity.

Immediately following the decolonization of those sectors of the less-developed world that had previously been subject to the control of nations more industrially advanced, one witnessed the advent of industrializing and modernizing movements led by self-proclaimed revolutionary “anti-imperialist vanguards.

There are many reasons why so many academics have spent so much time in the search for neofascism. For some it simply involved a pursuit of an old enemy. Their number includes all those proper thinkers who as liberals and democrats have made it their purpose to expose all who would violate the civil and human rights of others. It includes all those who still suffer the memory of the mass murders done for political reasons – and who seek to foreclose any possibility that such horrors might befall humanity again. All of these reasons are entirely understandable and commendable. The difficulty is that the focus of such inquiry is much too narrow. If the object of the enterprise is to identify those forces responsible for the carnage and violation of human rights that have darkened the twentieth century, limiting our scrutiny to Fascism, generic fascism, or neofascism would hardly serve the purpose.

Commencing with the Armenian genocide at the turn of the century, the entire twentieth century has witnessed the mass murder of innocents at the hands of a variety of revolutionary governments, all attended by grievous violation of civil and political rights. Neither Mussolini's Fascism, generic fascism, nor neofascism could possibly be made responsible for all that.

If the motive behind the search for neofascism is the desire to preclude the advent of antidemocratic, antiliberal, and xenophobic political forces in the modern world, the scope remains too narrow, for even the nonexistence of Mussolini's, or Hitler's, regimes would have neither saved the lives of millions upon millions of innocents lost in our time nor preserved democracy.

In the course of the closing decade of the twentieth century, a dedicated minority of journalists and academics decided that the rise of “neofascism” posed a serious threat to public decency and political integrity in the Western industrialized democracies. One consequence was that by the first years of the twenty-first century, literally hundreds of books and articles dedicated to some sort of treatment of the subject had appeared. Their intended purpose was to warn society of the insidiousness of the peril.

For these works to have accomplished their purpose, one would have expected some indication of what “neofascism” meant, followed by a serious treatment of the candidate neofascisms that constituted the menace. Unhappily, little of the former is to be found in many if not most works – and without even lexical definition, it is difficult to isolate the proper objects of concern.

It often appears that however “neofascism” is defined, its relationship to Benito Mussolini's Fascism remains, at best, obscure. Often an unspoken assumption functions as part of the sorting criteria in identifying neofascism. Most of the authors who have surfaced within the past two decades choose to fuse fascism, national socialism, and the political right together into a single subject category, usually identified as either “fascism,” “neofascism,” or “right-wing extremism,” as though all constituted a single reference class. The consequence has been considerable confusion, with uncertainty concerning the class of political movements and/or ideologies that constitute the proper objects of scrutiny.

As has been suggested, in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War, lay persons, journalists, and academics began to speak of “neofascism” to identify those small groups of individuals, formerly National Socialists or Fascists, who had survived the carnage of the conflict and who continued to identify, in some sense or other, with their past loyalties. Given the propaganda conveniences afforded by the practice, we have seen that it had become standard, in the course of the Second World War, simply to refer to both National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy as “fascist.” The manifest differences between the two movements and regimes notwithstanding, the practice continued after the war. As a result, in the years immediately following the Second World War, any individuals and their political activities that could be directly or indirectly associated with either Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy were spoken of as representing a generic “neofascism” – a characterization that generally meant little more than that the individuals and/or groups involved showed some real or presumed sympathy for the Nazism and/or Fascism of their respective nation's past. In general, the term was applied to such individuals and the disjointed, fragmentary and transient associations in which they collected themselves. Little concern was devoted to the coherence, integrity, or fascist quality of their individual or collective belief systems. They were all simply neofascists, indelibly identified by their individual histories and connected by the most casual of associations.

Before the 1960s, when both the Black Power movement and Elijah Muhammad's Lost-Found Nation of Islam became political powers to be reckoned with, white and black liberals were quick simply to condemn any movement characterized by “fierce chauvinistic nationalism and strongly centralized leadership” as “fascist.” Muhammad's “Black Muslims,” the heir to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), could be, and generally were, so depicted. Muhammad's Black Muslims were seen part of the “black fascist tradition” begun by Marcus Garvey. The continuity has been traced without much difficulty.

With the eclipse of Garvey's UNIA in the late 1920s, a number of candidate substitutes either made their appearance or achieved increasing prominence. They responded to the evident demands of blacks who still suffered all the disabilities common to the race – at a time when those disabilities were exacerbated by the Great Depression.

The United African Nationalist Movement and the National Movement of People of African Descent were among those organizations. The appearance of such movements was accompanied by a number of specifically religious organizations such as that of Father Divine, who announced that he was “the Son of God” – the “Messenger” to a sinful world – and Charles Manuel, “Sweet Daddy Grace,” who sometimes claimed to be God, and who established “Houses of God” along the entire Atlantic seaboard of the United States. Blacks who felt orphaned by the passing of the UNIA had a choice of options in their search for its alternative.

One of the more curious features of the search for neofascism after the termination of the Second World War is the insistence, on the part of some of the most widely known researchers, that Julius Cesare Andrae Evola, born in Rome on the 19 May 1898, scion of an ancient aristocratic family, provided the neofascism of post–World War II Europe its ideology. Evola has been seen as the source of neofascism's ideological rationale. It was his ideas that lent neofascism its substance. Umberto Eco, who identifies “traditionalism” as essential to the “Ur Fascism” that he argues serves as the core of generic neofascism, cites no one other than Evola as its critical exponent.

Others have identified Evola's thought as quintessentially fascist, as “creative” and “original.” For still others, he is spoken of as a “post-war fascist,” insisting that, after the passing of historic Fascism, his thought provided the inspiration for a resuscitated European neofascism. Together with that, we are confidently told that Evola became a source of neofascist ideological thought because Mussolini's “Fascism had few true believers who could … write articles and books.” Because so few Fascists of the time of the Ventennio were capable of writing articles or books, Evola, as one of the few, provided the texts that became one of “the most important” sources for the neofascism that arose out of the ruins of the Second World War.

Of all the efforts that make up the contemporary search for neofascism, academic discussions devoted to the politics of the People's Republic of China have been among the most disappointing. For an extended period of time, particularly during the long years of the Second World War, a number of important Anglophone journalists and academics somehow chose to distinguish the “fascism” of Chiang Kaishek's Kuomintang from the “progressive” politics of Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party. It was a distinction that was to persist doggedly for decades after the war.

Edgar Snow was perhaps the most notable among those who convinced Americans of the benignity of Mao Zedong. In the years immediately preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Snow devoted his time and considerable talent to providing his readership with informed conjectures concerning what a communist revolution might bring to China. His work was considered so credible that it was recommended by some of America's most informed Sinologists. We were told that Snow was, in some real sense, “prophetic” – that he had accurately foreseen China's future. After a successful revolution undertaken by the Communist Party, that future would be one that included a “brief period” of “controlled capitalism” in which the “bourgeois democratic revolution” would be a preamble to the final “heroic democracy” to follow. According to Snow, the Chinese communist revolution was inspired by the “democratic Socialist ideas” for which so many Chinese had sacrificed themselves – ideas that presumably included the “rights of freedom of speech, assembly, [and] organization” that had previously been denied them by Chinese “fascism” and its agents.

Since the 1990s, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP, National People's Party) has emerged as the largest single, and perhaps the most influential, political party in India. Founded in April 1980, the heir of antecedent political efforts, the BJP has steadily increased its appeal among the Indian electorate. In the nationwide parliamentary elections of 1984, of the total of 545 seats in the Lok Sabha (the People's Assembly), the party succeeded in winning only 2. In 1998, it succeeded to an unprecedented victory by winning 180 seats, a commanding 26 percent of total votes cast. Together with its allies, the party controlled 248 seats, supported by 37 percent of total popular votes. “Hindu nationalism” had become a significant, and potentially a determinant, factor in the contemporary politics of the Indian subcontinent.

Commentators have characterized that phenomenal success as the rise of “Hindu fundamentalism,” “religious nationalism,” and “Hindu supremacism.” The BJP is spoken of as the “party of choice of the upper caste conservative Hindus.” Less-constrained critics speak of “Hindutva,” the ideology of the BJP, “as a modern variant of Brahmanism, a virulent ideology of hatred and fascism that seeks to establish an ethnically pure Hindu Rashtra [nation] inhabited only by white-skinned Aryans.” Should such characterization be true, one is clearly speaking not of neofascism, but of neonazism, a lineal descendent of Adolf Hitler's racism.

Julius Evola was always an improbable Fascist. He insisted that the ideas he defended were not Fascist; they were “superior and anterior to Fascism.” The journalists who early sought out “neofascists” after the Second World War should certainly have been aware that Evola was never considered to have been a Fascist during the years of Mussolini's regime. It was known that Giuseppe Bottai, a prominent Fascist gerarch, had dismissed Evola's ideas as a “mass of ill-digested and arbitrarily coupled notions.” Bottai's distain was not unique. Almost every major Fascist intellectual rejected Evola's strange ideas. Evola, in fact, consistently denied he was ever a Fascist. All that notwithstanding, journalists and scholars seeking neofascists and neofascism have consistently argued that Evola was the major source of neofascist ideas in post–World War II Europe. His name still appears regularly in almost every contemporary volume devoted to neofascism.

Conversely, scholars have long been aware that during the interwar years Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), insisted that he and his organization “were the first Fascists,” and went on to claim that “when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still unknown. Mussolini copied our fascism.”

Knowing that, there has been literally no discussion of the “fascism” of Marcus Garvey. Evola, who never claimed to be a Fascist, and whose work was uniformly dismissed by Fascist intellectuals during the years of Mussolini's rule, has been pressed into service as the source of contemporary neofascism for half a century.

Almost every scholar who pretends to a study of neofascism offers a summary account of Fascism – and almost all accounts differ in substantial fashion. Attempting to encapsule a quarter of a century of intense political activity in the relatively brief compass of an expository outline is difficult at best. There is always the exercise of judgment and the influence of bias in the winnowing of the enormous abundance of the historic record. Nonetheless, the work of some of the major historians of the twentieth century permits a stenographic rendering of the entire Fascist sequence that is plausible and in large part unobjectionable. We can now be reasonably confident that we know at least some of the essentials of Italian Fascism.

We know that Fascism arose in a new nation, politically reunited after almost one thousand years of dismemberment, strife, political occupation, poverty, and internecine warfare. We know that the fractured Italic peninsula was also host to almost a thousand years of creativity, episodic ebullience, and commercial expansion. For the purposes of discussion, nonetheless, it is important to recognize that the several hundred years before Italy's reunification were particularly marked by recurrent expressions of individual and collective humiliation to be found in the lamentations of many of the nation's foremost spokespeople.

As early as the beginning of the sixteenth century, Niccolo Machiavelli exhorted the people of the peninsula to make the effort to unite against the depredations of foreigners.