Fascism or Whatever You Want to Call It: Confronting the Beast Locally and Globally

Fascism or Whatever You Want to Call It constructs a crucial framework for diagnosing and exposing fascist ideologies and movements in whatever historical and geographical circumstances or disguises they may appear. At no point in history have so many people been subjected to the rule or threat of fascist movements. Nor have power and privilege ever been so concentrated in the hands of a few. We are living in the age of the decline of bourgeois liberalism and the rise of something much less democratic, something sectarian, extremist, militaristic, and exclusionary, which should be called fascism. Because fascism deploys endless camouflaging strategies, a critical theory for diagnosing and analyzing it is desperately needed. That is what this book offers. Arguing against conventional approaches that use the European model of the 1930s as a yardstick, Bahozde conceptualizes fascism as a form, rather than a system, of power and ideology.

Saladdin Bahozde, aka Saladdin Ahmed, is a philosopher and critical theorist. He is a Senior Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Asian University for Women and an Associate of the Institute of the Humanities, Simon Fraser University. He has taught courses in the areas of philosophy, political science, and several other areas of the humanities and social sciences. The author’s other books include Exile and Spatiality (De Gruyter, forthcoming), Fascism in the Middle East (Routledge 2025), Elsewhereness (Daraja Press 2024), The Death of Home (De Gruyter 2024), Critical Theory from the Margins (SUNY Press 2023), Revolutionary Hope after Nihilism (Bloomsbury Academic 2022), and Totalitarian Space and the Destruction of Aura (SUNY Press 2019). Some of his articles have been translated into several other languages, including Chinese, Korean, French, Turkish, Hungarian, Spanish, Persian, and Portuguese.