Revolutionary Movements

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Revolutionary Movements

With the 20th century, many new revolutionary movements have come into

the focus of world politics. Of these, fascism is one of the most

difficult to put into a proper context. Many scholars through the

years have tried to place fascism and answer the seemingly simple

question of "What is Fascism?" It can be described in several versions

depending on the scholar. The most familiar version is the right/left

idea, while the democratic/non-democratic and

industrialized/non-industrialized models are increasingly popular in

the understanding of fascism. All of these models need to rely on a

concise set of criteria for it's analysis, as well as how these

criteria can be proven. According to the primary evidence, the

democratic/non-democratic and industrialized/non-industrialized models

distinguished fascism, and it provides a paradigmatic example for

revolutions in the 20th century by its descriptive characteristics and

dynamic characteristics of the movement.

The first problem with classifying the revolutionary movements as

right or left tends to fall victim to the term itself. According to

James Gregor, he quotes Laqueur to make this point true. "Laqueur, for

example, has maintained that 'The terms right and left, although not

altogether useless, become more problematical as one moves away in

time and space from nineteenth-century- Europe (Gregor, Phoenix pg.

8).'" With this inadequate definition of what makes a regime left or

right, we are left with this conclusion, "Communists, in effect, have

become increasingly like the fascists on the 'radical right' or

perhaps they had always been of the 'radical right...

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...ammad's Black Muslims. Thanks to the "failure" of Marcus Gravy, a

new order was necessary to the formation of an abnormal religious

fundamentalism. This fundamentalism relied of a very different

interpretation of the Koran, so although it is not a decay of fascist

doctrine, and the movement itself was not fascist, an ideological

decay can be seen through the specter of the Black Muslims.

Although there are many theories on what the changes were in the

"fascist" regimes through the 20th century, the idea of ideological

decay seems to happen in almost all of these regimes, even the ones

that only slightly resemble fascist, such as the Black Muslims. The

use of violence as a political tool, and the fall of grand ideological

claims seem to be a hallmark of "half-baked" and "imported" fascist

regimes throughout the world.

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