Managing chaos: fascism and anti-fascism

Another illustrious victim of the average (mediocre) individual's inability to accept and manage chaos is the debate on fascism and antifascism. Or rather, on fascism and non-fascism. The distinction will be clarified at the end.
Those who feel they belong to socio-political groups accused of crypto-fascism deny the existence of fascism out of convenience. Conversely, those who identify with factions dedicated to antifascism accuse the aforementioned en masse of apologising for fascism.
I am forced, as usual, to prove everyone partly right and partly wrong: it is the destiny of those who are comfortable managing chaos and are called upon to evaluate the positions of those who, being unable to appreciate the extreme complexity of reality, need to use simplified models to facilitate its understanding, ultimately ending up not understanding a damn thing.
The former are wrong to deny the existence of fascism. On the other hand, they are right to reject the polarized explanation that rests on traditional political camps: "fascism is all on the right and antifascism is all on the left" (the use of these terms has the same effect on me as fingernails screeching on a chalkboard). The others, of course, are wrong and right in reverse.
Well, what then is the non-simplified explanation? Here it is. Fascism as a well-defined political force no longer exists. Instead, it exists, and very much so, as an attitude.
What today makes sense to call fascism is actually an atavistic, creeping, and transversal cultural trait of Italian society. A trait that predates the twentieth century, probably already present at the time of the Renaissance, and perhaps even earlier. The twenty-year fascist regime embodied it as the distinctive mark of a specific political movement, gave it a name, and mixed it with other components, personalizing it.
This is the source of all misunderstandings, equivocations, and confusion. And those who are not naturally able to grasp the nuances of a complex reality, instead of accepting their own limitation, try to bypass it through simplified interpretations. Simple therefore, but unfortunately wrong.
If you stop considering fascism as a political force and instead identify it with an intolerant, overbearing, aggressive, sly, opportunist, and cowardly attitude, you will realize (unless you are hopeless cases) that first of all fascism is alive and well, and furthermore, while sometimes appearing more frequently within certain socio-political groups than others, it is nevertheless a transversal phenomenon.
Absolving oneself — by denying its existence in one case or declaring oneself antifascist in the other — is not enough, my dears. To be sure you are not fascists, you must make sure you truly aren't. And the only way to do that is to behave like non-fascists.
Always.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.