How to Be a Fascist

Author: Michela Murgia

• The book you’re holding is born from a desire to demonstrate that democracy is not only useless but in fact toxic to coexistence, and also to prove that its tried and tested opposite—fascism—is a much better system of state administration: less costly, faster, and more efficient. This text aims especially to be a comprehension tool for the more educated classes exhausted by democracy, because it has never been necessary to explain to the masses that fascism is better. Armed with the secret wisdom of the simple mind, the people already know as much, and that is why, tired of the inability of the democratic system to solve their problems, they regularly and almost spontaneously turn toward fascism. I say almost not by chance, because at times fascism may need some help to take root; at the beginning of their historical cycle, democracies tend to be quite hostile toward it and attempt to organize themselves against it with blatantly crude methods, such as passing laws to make it illegal. Fascism, fortunately, knows how to wait. It’s like herpes—primary organisms are always the ones that teach us the most—able to survive for entire decades within the marrow of democracy, letting everyone believe it has disappeared, only then to pop out, more viral than ever, at the first, entirely predictable weakening of its immune system.

• The book you’re holding is born from a desire to demonstrate that democracy is not only useless but in fact toxic to coexistence, and also to prove that its tried and tested opposite—fascism—is a much better system of state administration: less costly, faster, and more efficient.

• This text aims especially to be a comprehension tool for the more educated classes exhausted by democracy, because it has never been necessary to explain to the masses that fascism is better.

• Armed with the secret wisdom of the simple mind, the people already know as much, and that is why, tired of the inability of the democratic system to solve their problems, they regularly and almost spontaneously turn toward fascism.

• At that point, if fascism is quick and able to seize the opportunity, it will be able to rule entire states without ever picking up a single weapon: it will be democracy’s own tools that will allow it to establish itself, and finally prevail.

• At this exact moment in history, we have at our disposal an overabundance of tools of mass control that no fascism from the past century ever had, and this allows us to attempt something new: to rise from the heart of an aging democratic system and dominate it without ever making use of military force, internal or external. By manipulating the tools of democracy, we can make an entire country fascist without ever even mentioning the word fascism, which might still raise some resistance, even in a faded democracy.

• Why would anyone need to overthrow institutions if all you need to do in order to seize them is to change the referent of a word, and make sure everyone speaks it? Words generate behavior, and those who control words control behavior. That’s the starting point: the names we give to things and the way we talk about them.

• No democracy, in the pursuit of the utopia of all being equal, has ever been able to avoid the contradiction of having to organize its equality through hierarchies. Even those who believe in democracy know that a guiding hand is necessary, but they expect to elect it and control it through so much red tape and bureaucracy that, ultimately, the person supposed to lead them ends up being the least powerful.

• A leader who can be contested has no real power. A real head, on the other hand, never compromises.

• The problem with a democratic leader is that they engage with differences in opinion and give them equal weight, so that—just when a decision needs to be taken—it is delegitimized by those who disagree.

• A second advantage of having a head is speed of action.

• The more a democracy is representative of every single political minority, the slower the executive process will be, and this, in turn, will be seen by the people as insufferable inaction. However, in case the people take too long to understand that democratic slowness is to blame for this inefficiency, we must make use of every situation to belittle parliamentarianism, and its forms of representation, and suggest presidentialism, for example, as the more efficient alternative.

• It is essential that local autonomy be reduced or, even better, removed, so that structural decisions can be taken in a non-confrontational context or at least reduced to the smaller, uninfluential details.

• The more people hear this, the sooner it will seem natural that concentrating all power into the hands of a single strong individual, who knows what needs to be done, is the only logical conclusion, and a lot more efficient than having to listen to a weak country’s opinions.

• Then there is the financial aspect. It’s self-evident that having a single man in charge costs much less than having a guide who is constantly forced to consult the guided.

• If this were the right time to call things by their name, we’d have to recognize that the absolute cheapest form of government is a dictatorship, as only one person gets paid.

• The biggest advantage, however, of having a head rather than a leader is something else: those in power shape those under their power, starting a process that eventually leads to the two parties becoming similar to one another.

• A people with a leader will be loud, dissenting; will demand to be heard, to debate decisions they don’t like; will try making them lose approval; won’t respect authority; will take to the streets and complain; won’t be thankful or obedient. The people who choose a head, on the other hand, will be trusting and rely on him, recognizing the superior vision of the one who makes the decisions; they won’t constantly interfere, and if they do take to the streets, it will be to support and acclaim the man who generously bears the heavy burden of leadership.

• In his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, La Boétie argued that every time we address in the singular a social plurality, we are favoring tyranny.

• The days when a duce, a king or a tribune could single-handedly rule an entire population are over. The tendency toward one, however, can be exploited to at least limit pluralism and erode democratic institutions, removing as many players from the field as possible.

• Democracy has the idiotic quality of being a form of government based on dissent rather than consensus: this means, unfortunately, that anyone with an opinion is convinced that everyone else can’t wait to hear it.

• The obstacle that modernity presents to the development of fascism is that everyone—not only the head—has a way of being heard; the best, fascist solution, then, is to let them speak.

• Democracy claims that we’re all equal? Let’s demonstrate it by making sure all opinions are also seen as equal.

• To do so, however, we need to take down the public figures that hold a moral or scientific authority—that is, those who think they know more than others, the so-called experts.

• The result will be that whoever controls the new media will still be the ones in control of the old media, with the new advantage that everyone will be convinced they are expressing themselves, rather than being silenced.

• Social media hides another type of potential, which will be extremely useful to the plotting of a fascist trajectory: it’s a series of platforms, from which the head can speak directly to the people, bypassing the mediators who often distort the meaning of his message.

• All tools, if used in a fascist manner, become useful to fascism.

• Ordinary people, forced to take an interest and engage in a democracy, will live blissfully under fascism, as they’ll be able to tend to their own business and will happily delegate everything else to the head.

• Unlike in a democracy, the aim of fascist communication isn’t to be understood, but to reiterate, so we’re lucky to be fascists in the age of the internet: it’s less effort, because the tools were designed specifically for this.

• At this point, you might think that fascism needs to communicate through social media with simple messages, but you would be mistaken—as are many who believe in democracy. Complexity mustn’t be simplified, it must be trivialized.

• For any given complex situation, there are at least twenty ideas about how to solve it, but there is usually only one, big fear. Finding that fear and making it the message is way more efficient than trying to simplify the twenty different solutions, which no one cares about anyway.

• People want their fear removed, not to debate possible solutions;

• supporters of democracy can’t give up the idea of legitimizing differences of opinion and belief, and keep being inexplicably generous toward dissenters. Thus they don’t call their political antagonist their enemy, but rather their opponent,

• opponent never actually succeeds. The opponent in a democracy, however, remains a pain even after a loss, because they become the opposition.

• The opponent in a democracy, however, remains a pain even after a loss, because they become the opposition.

• All we need to do is cry: “See? You don’t actually believe in democracy! You want to silence dissent, crush differences, pluralism, opinions different from yours,” and the impossible will happen: being a flawed mechanism, a democracy accused of being anti-democratic will short-circuit, and its supporters will even start thinking that they are the real fascists if they don’t let you speak.

• All we need to do is cry: “See? You don’t actually believe in democracy! You want to silence dissent, crush differences, pluralism, opinions different from yours,” and the impossible will happen: being a flawed mechanism, a democracy accused of being anti-democratic will short-circuit, and its supporters will even start thinking that they are the real fascists if they don’t let you speak. This is the beauty of democracy: unlike fascism, it can

• All we need to do is cry: “See? You don’t actually believe in democracy! You want to silence dissent, crush differences, pluralism, opinions different from yours,” and the impossible will happen: being a flawed mechanism, a democracy accused of being anti-democratic will short-circuit, and its supporters will even start thinking that they are the real fascists if they don’t let you speak. This is the beauty of democracy: unlike fascism, it can always be used against itself.

• Unlike an opponent, with its annoying tendency to be recognizable in a person or faction, the enemy doesn’t have a fixed identity, often not even a name, so it can be found in general, vague categories such as “migrants,” “Islamists,” “markets,” “liberals,” “activists,” “globalists,” “anarchists” or “feminists.”

• To make sure people understand that the fascist lexicon isn’t the same as that of a democratic time-waster, we must talk about the enemy as a deformed, even dehumanized entity; for example, comparing them to animals that share the negative aspects of humanity. There are many good word choices, such as parasite, cow, worm, shark, bitch, vulture, pig, vermin, chimp, roach.

• If they’re short, call them a dwarf; if their name lends itself to it, play with its sound or meaning; and if they’re black you can comment on their tan. In the case of public outrage, all you need to do is claim you were joking and that this type of language falls under rightful political or satirical commentary: in a democracy, they’ll drop it.

• The second step, after delegitimization, is blame.

• In this rhetorical game, a white man who rapes a woman will always and forever represent himself, while a black migrant will represent all black people and all migrants, too.

• we must constantly undermine the possibility of a dialogue with the category we have chosen as the enemy.

• The challenge is that many of the useful enemies of fascism don’t seem threatening. They are. Migrants coming in boats from Africa and the Middle East are a threat, but we need to contextualize it.

• The possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: the more people feel victimized and under threat, the more united they will be in their own defense,

• They want to perform an ethnic substitution, and they make use of the fact that we’re having fewer children—as if not having children were a choice, in this unstable modern world!—by sending over hundreds of young men, who start out poor and are only after some food and used clothing, but who will be less poor tomorrow, and will demand the same rights as us, our jobs, our women. They will demand to be us.

• Fascism can protect us because, unlike democracy, it realizes that all of this is a threat.

• Democracies are not predisposed to recognize the fact that human beings, except for those with whom we share blood and soil, are a threat.

• The enemies of a family are those who try to undermine the natural roles of man and woman, or their traditional functions. The two groups who attempt to do so, and have done for decades, are always the same: feminists and gays.

• The supposed emancipation of women has only led to fewer births and increased competition with men in the workplace, leaving at home empty cribs, cold dinners, and mounds of unwashed laundry. The so-called sexual revolution has only created more confusion and has taken women away from men, to the point where we can no longer even compliment or touch a woman without immediate allegations of assault.

• The supposed emancipation of women has only led to fewer births and increased competition with men in the workplace, leaving at home empty cribs, cold dinners, and mounds of unwashed laundry.

• On the flipside, while women no longer want to marry or take care of a family, gays demand to be able to do so as if it were normal.

• Women’s shelters are a useless by-product of feminism, as they encourage women to accuse their partners of criminal acts, rather than solving such conflicts at home and keeping families together.

• Any attempt to normalize homosexuality is a threat to families and the continuation of our species.

• Solving the current issues with the social security system is unfortunately impossible due to super-democratic gender equality, which has allowed women to work, taking away their time and willingness to have and raise children who would pay taxes to care for older generations.

• fascism, even when it’s handing out food, is never not-for-profit—fascism is always political.

• Each time the elderly receive a single bag of supplies from us fascists, they must be reminded that democracy is probably handing out two more to a foreigner.

• A state is a family, where the father is the head and behaves, rightly so, as such; if a single person takes on the responsibility of representing everyone, then that person must also look after everyone.

• Under fascism, everyone must feel safe. No one must think that they are forced to become strong and independent by their own means, because we know that some weaknesses are structural and cannot be solved.

• The weakness of individuals is crucial to the strength of the state, because those who recognize their own weakness rely on the strong.

• Multiple contradictions run through the veins of democracy, and all can be exploited by fascism. The biggest of them all, however, is non-violence.

• And so we arrive at the biggest paradox of them all: if a police officer kills a political protester, they’ll end up in jail and will never be a police officer again; if, on the other hand, a protester kills the police officer, sure, they’ll go to jail, but they’ll also go back to protesting, because in a democracy you can never take away the right to dissent.

• Talk of weapons, however, is already a late-stage fascism topic. The spark for the assertion of necessary violence starts much earlier: language.

• The going gets tough when we shift away from ordinary political discourse into the next stage: verbal violence directed at the enemy.

• It won’t be enough to insult them, calling them stupid or thieves or cowards: it is crucial to point out what is the right thing to do to delegitimize, eliminate, and erase them, because if you are able to say what you’d do to them, you’re already halfway to doing it.

• Fascism needs people with balls of steel, not gay pride-ready metrosexuals who at the very most can choose the color of the walls.

• The glorification of the qualities of the people is the first step to eliciting a sincere fascist feeling in the masses.

• Democracy is popular because it develops among the ruling classes the feeling of being of the people, and among the people the feeling of becoming the ruling class, as if in a family the roles of father and child were interchangeable.

• Have you ever noticed that pussy isn’t democratic either? Not everyone has a chance, only those who go for it. And so, if you want to be a fascist, be a charmer first: look around and find society’s ugly ducklings.

• With the democratic fetishes of public education and literacy schemes, we’ve convinced ourselves that everyone must study—even though some might not want to—just because an education is seen as a sign of virtue.

• Remind them of the wisdom of household remedies, of homemade things, of mothers supporting their country with the gift of their love.

• Tell them that not only do ironing shirts and looking after children and the elderly not make them inferior but they actually make them unique, gifted with the feminine intuition that a man will never be able to comprehend.

• If her man finds a way to make her feel special, no woman will ever feel the need to be his equal.

• The category of being “special” is peak populism: each time you find yourself in the presence of any form of weakness, call it something special, promise to protect it, and those who have it will cease asking you to change their situation.

• Supporters of democracy—intoxicated by their equality nightmare—would make the same for all, but the fascist knows that it’s better to differentiate, because each social group has to imagine itself to be unique in the eyes of the head.

• The ability of the head to contain each of these identities and to make them feel represented is also seen in his appearance, which must always be populist.

• When he’s talking to those who can’t make ends meet, the head will wear jeans, hoodies: simple, cheap clothes. With the man of the house, he should instead show up in a shirt, smart but casual, letting them see the strength of someone who is self-made, even through all the formalities. With the powerful and professionals there will be a tie, of course, but the attitude will be fresh, young, ready to break protocol, because the energy of fascism is an impatient force and it only follows the rules until it can change them.

• For the populist fascist, fortunately, this distinction doesn’t exist: we can have mass appeal only with the masses, but we can be populists with everyone, because the fear of losing what we have—no matter how much we actually have—is the same for everyone.

• we can have mass appeal only with the masses, but we can be populists with everyone, because the fear of losing what we have—no matter how much we actually have—is the same for everyone.

• If we’re dealing with people who can’t make ends meet, there is little sense in trying to talk about large-scale reforms:

• It’s an interesting story, but to teach someone how to fish (i.e., giving them the means of emancipation) you need several years: in the meantime, they will have died of hunger, and the people want to eat now, and rightly so.

• All policies that act on the here and now are commendable and recommended. It doesn’t take much: all you need is some extra change at the end of the month or the removal of a hated tax, and it’ll be clear that what we really

• Fortunately, the lower middle class are easy to please, as their dreams are as middle-of-the-road as they are.

• All policies that allow the expansion of a property or that promise tax breaks on the sale and purchase of a house are a sure way to win the favor of this social category.

• A populist must treat these people as if they were destitute, because when it comes to protecting their interests, even millionaires behave like the middle class. It might seem like a paradox, but this group is the one most interested in reforms, as it has no urgent needs and can easily wait for their effects. Populism for the rich, therefore, can entail promises of fiscal protection for offshore accounts, though this may also alienate the lower classes, who might feel swindled. It is much better to promise radical reforms that touch the deep structure of the state, such as contractual reforms that will lower the cost of labor, and plans to reshuffle retirement vehicles, removing the requirements of the employer toward its employees.

• A real populist deals with everyone according to their needs: the poor receive some free fish every year; the middle class receive a fridge to store what’s left over; and the upper classes receive the pond where everyone will have to pay to fish. — In all this, the head will be able to lead by example, by showing the people two different aspects of himself: if he is wealthy from his own labor, there is no reason whatsoever to deprive himself of the standard of living that such wealth allows him; in fact, that wealth marks him as a self-made man, and someone we can trust.

• A real populist deals with everyone according to their needs: the poor receive some free fish every year; the middle class receive a fridge to store what’s left over; and the upper classes receive the pond where everyone will have to pay to fish.

• In all this, the head will be able to lead by example, by showing the people two different aspects of himself: if he is wealthy from his own labor, there is no reason whatsoever to deprive himself of the standard of living that such wealth allows him; in fact, that wealth marks him as a self-made man, and someone we can trust.

• All fascists can and should make symbolic gestures that will let simple people understand that we are just like them: you will be able to see the effectiveness of this for yourselves if, for example, after years of official state cars, you use public transport or eco-friendly bikes, or walk instead.

• Economic populism isn’t just constructive: it also helps the destruction of political enemies. In the case of people who question the head’s measures, it will suffice to call them out as privileged snobs, unable to understand the needs of the people, because of their city houses, their jewelry and clothing, their property that no one on an average income would be able to afford—and they don’t even know the cost of a quart of milk.

• These are the moments when—as a fascist—I am grateful to democracy: in a society that has promised everyone the chance to pursue well-being, anyone who feels they haven’t achieved it will be resentful and frustrated, and these feelings can easily be turned into political tools.

• Every time someone criticizes you, reply that it’s easy for them to talk, with their cushy homes in the city, when real life is something very different.

• You will find unsuspecting, unexpected allies for the application of populism among armchair activists (i.e., the democratic middle classes, especially left-leaning ones).

• They’ll march on every street for this or that right to be recognized for the queers, and they’ll chain themselves up to protest against vivisection of the poor baby animals, or against fracking, or the new road that will ruin the view from their window, but they will never do the same against a labor reform or a flat tax that will protect their higher incomes.

• Between courses of a shared meal, the lefties will think that the right has some fine people too, if we overlook their delusion of a right-wing ideology, while the right-wingers will regard the civil struggles of those sharing their meal the way you regard obsessions, tics, or personal quirks.

• Between courses of a shared meal, the lefties will think that the right has some fine people too, if we overlook their delusion of a right-wing ideology, while the right-wingers will regard the civil struggles of those sharing their meal the way you regard obsessions, tics, or personal quirks. Both middle-class groups will be useful to fascism: they will both let you carry on with your work, the one because they are in denial about the whole thing, the other because they are uninterested in anything that doesn’t affect them.

• Both middle-class groups will be useful to fascism: they will both let you carry on with your work, the one because they are in denial about the whole thing, the other because they are uninterested in anything that doesn’t affect them.

• Things can change, though, because memory has the quality of fading: if it isn’t preserved it risks disappearing, and this is the risk that supporters of democracy run each time a new generation is born and they forget to spoon-feed it their official but fake notions of history. It’s

• Things can change, though, because memory has the quality of fading: if it isn’t preserved it risks disappearing, and this is the risk that supporters of democracy run each time a new generation is born and they forget to spoon-feed it their official but fake notions of history.

• Partisans, survivors, veterans do not own history, only their own memories, traces of a personal experience that barely belong to those who lived through it. True memory is a different beast: it’s the way in which the dominant group of people chooses some recollection of the events from a specific time period, finds a productive way to use it, and passes it down as if it belonged to everyone.

• The sequence that a fascist will follow, once the time is right, is linear: pollute the memory of others, then destabilize it and, finally, rewrite it.

• Keep repeating that there was “a lot more going on,

• Keep repeating that there was “a lot more going on, too.” Democracy pits young brave men against violent murderers? Tell them that it’s easy to judge in hindsight, but back then everything was so blurred that even Churchill praised Hitler’s qualities as a state leader.

• If believers in democracy recount all the horrors of fascism (and they will), don’t contradict them: set out to remind everyone of how strong we were in quashing them. And most of all, point to roads, infrastructure, monuments in Europe, and say: “They did good things, too.”

• As soon as democracy lowers its guard and starts taking for granted that its version of history is the only one possible, it means the time to destabilize it has come.

• All you need are two generations of kids who haven’t been subjected to the blight of critical thinking, and your path will be clear for you. You’ve already made people doubt that historical facts can’t be taught from at least two perspectives, both true under certain conditions. The next step is to start saying that maybe those perspectives may not be as reliable as they think. Claim that fascism has never killed anyone; at most it exiled people. Remind people that the empire brought civilization to what would otherwise still be savage lands. If you see that no one reacts to this, push a little further: start doubting the existence of major war crimes, including the Holocaust.

• This tweaking of memory is also necessary in order to defend ourselves from the annoying tendency of believers in democracy to make all faults into responsibilities.

• This is the rigged game that memory plays in a democracy: changing the misdeeds of their grandparents into personal sins to forget, and those of ours into a collective responsibility to be remembered for seven generations.

• This is why rewriting memory must be the final step in the reclamation process.

• Only read newspapers that support this vision and only listen to the opinions of those who defend it.

• Don’t waste time trying to debate with those who disagree: rather, get used to mocking them, slowly leaving the field of debate in favor of one of disgust and rejection.

• Keep demanding that the principle of freedom of expression must apply to the fascist method too, just as to any political action, and convince one supporter of democracy every day to treat you with the utmost tolerance.

• Keep demanding that the principle of freedom of expression must apply to the fascist method too, just as to any political action, and convince one supporter of democracy every day to treat you with the utmost tolerance. This way, you will contribute to the realization of what Karl Popper theorized about an open society: “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

• On the political side, you must ask for more direct democracy involving individual citizens, but at the same time ask for diminished collective representation. This way, while still allowing everyone to take part, you’re removing the possibility of lobbying parties, committees, assemblies, associations, and other hubs of interest that enact the organization of political dissent.

• On the financial side, you must support the abolition of collective agreement contracts and promote instead individual, merit-based contracts, rendering corporations and trade unions useless.

• Talk to the poor, but deal with the rich, because financial power supports the wealth of our country, and the latter must see you as a friend and defender.

• Be direct and clear in your positions: as long as you do this in a democracy, you will force them to concentrate their efforts on dealing with you, instead of the country.

• Who the fascists are today is something that is not necessary for me to point out. Those who build walls, those who only offer solidarity with their own, those who pit people against each other in order to control both sides, those who limit civil rights and liberties, those who deny the right to free movement using the weapon of the law and the alibi of responsibility—these are today’s fascists.

• The risk we run is saying: if everything is fascism, then nothing is.

• Not everything is fascism, but fascism has the amazing property, without adequate vigilance, of contaminating absolutely anything and everything.