While I think Eco is generally a muddled thinker with moments of profound lucidity, I really don't think we're ever going to separate fascism from being a euphemism for evil, and Eco's essay elevated it from the woo of theology to something secular critics can tilt at. There's not much to defend about it, it's that the quality of interpretation and criticism of it is never more than an arbitrary litany of its sins. (though he gave it a more than fair treatment before deconstructing it)<p>He's accurate that Mussolini's fascism was something different from Nazi'ism (which just adopted and co-opted the italian aestheitcs, directly), but it was more of a kind of secular anti-clerical republicanism but with all the awe of divinely appointed monarchs.<p>The crux of fascism was the unity of corporate and state power together - where Eco takes it in a few other directions, which I think its disingenuous to de-emphasize this core property of it, because I think he's also an elitist who would be glad to have the reins of a unified corporate state. He's freighted an obsolete political system with the countercases to his own ideology and branded it evil. I was going to suggest Eco should have stuck to fiction, but in this case he has.<p>It was a peculiar reactionary artifact of the nation state, which itself is a modern(ist) post-enlightenment phenomenon as monarchies gave way to republics. It's different from totalitarianism (as Eco notes) in that Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar lacked the imperialist and colonial urges that would define totalitarian movements of Hitler and Stalin (even though the latter two inherited colonial territories). Post war, the word fascism became just a secular version of evil as defined by largely marxist/socialist thinkers, and fascist has become a kind of a catch-all slur against those who assert people should be accountable to principles.<p>It didn't really matter before, as there was nothing to defend about its vague and myriad definitions, and the people who spat the word fascist at others didn't have enough control of institutions for anyone to care what they meant by it. Today, that it is a euphemism for Evil matters because the people wielding it now are still only as sophisticated as a mob of superstitious villagers, but its nebulous definition has come to envelop some things I think regular people actually value, and instead of Evil being presented as witchcraft, it's wrapped in layers of critical theory, but the mob mentality is just the same. Fascism doesn't have much going for it today as it was a moment of 19th century nation states adopting 20th century technology, but I'd say the people indexed on it now are just as much of a mob as they ever were, and whatever they dress it up in, they're the same people, still just hunting witches.