Can Fascism Be Stopped Peacefully? History vs Myth

They look similar because the stories all end in violence. Mussolini hung upside down in Milan. Hitler dead in a bunker. Franco outliving his enemies but ruling over mass graves. If you only follow those headlines, it is easy to believe a simple claim: once fascists win elections, peaceful resistance has a success rate of zero.

That is the punchline of the viral essay the Redditor asked about. The author says he “researched every attempt to stop fascism in history” and found that none worked without violence. The question is not about current politics. It is whether that sweeping historical claim holds up.

To answer that, we have to compare two things that look similar from far away: violent endings to fascist regimes, and the much messier story of how those regimes rose, stalled, or were contained. They look similar because most fascist projects are authoritarian, contemptuous of law, and willing to use force. But their origins, methods, outcomes, and legacies are not identical, and that is where the “0% success rate” line falls apart.

Fascism is a revolutionary, ultra‑nationalist, authoritarian movement that rejects democracy and glorifies violence. It often uses elections to gain power, then dismantles the system that elected it. That definition matters, because how you define fascism and “success” decides your answer before you look at a single case.

Where fascism came from vs where it failed to take root

Start with the cases everyone knows. Italy in 1922. Germany in 1933. Spain in 1936. In each, fascist or fascist‑adjacent movements rose out of crisis.

Italy had a shattered post‑World War I economy, mass strikes, and veterans who felt cheated of victory. Mussolini’s Fascist Party rode a wave of elite panic over socialism. In October 1922, after years of squadristi violence against leftists and unions, Mussolini threatened a “March on Rome.” King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign a decree of martial law and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. The fascists had used street violence, but the decisive step into power was legal. The state handed them the keys.

Germany’s Nazis followed a similar arc. The failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 showed that a straight coup would not work. Hitler shifted to a “legal” strategy. The NSDAP built a mass party, exploited the Great Depression, and by January 1933 conservative elites pushed Hitler into the chancellorship, thinking they could control him. Within months, using the Reichstag Fire and emergency decrees, the Nazis dismantled the democratic system that had elevated them.

Spain is messier. The Spanish Civil War began in 1936 as a military coup against the elected Popular Front government. It failed in part of the country, which is why it became a civil war instead of a quick seizure of power. Franco’s coalition included monarchists, conservatives, and the explicitly fascist Falange. The Republic fought back, but the conflict was violent from day one.

If you only count these as your “every attempt,” then yes, fascism looks like an unstoppable force once it reaches a certain point. But that is a selection bias problem. You are only looking at where fascism won or where it produced war, not where it was blocked from becoming a regime in the first place.

Between 1919 and 1940, self‑described fascist or Nazi parties existed in almost every European country and in parts of the Americas. Most never took power. Some were small and marginal. Others were serious contenders that got stopped short of government, or that entered government but were contained.

France had powerful far‑right leagues in the 1930s. On 6 February 1934, a mass demonstration by right‑wing veterans and leagues in Paris turned violent. It looked, to many contemporaries, like a fascist attempt to topple the Third Republic. The government fell, but the regime did not. A new center‑right cabinet formed. Over the next two years, the left reorganized, and by 1936 the Popular Front, a coalition of socialists, radicals, and communists, won elections. French fascism never captured the state.

In Britain, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists held rallies, wore black shirts, and imitated Italian style. They never won a single parliamentary seat. A mix of public hostility, press scrutiny, and state action, including the Public Order Act of 1936 that restricted political uniforms and paramilitary marches, boxed them in.

In the United States, there were homegrown fascist‑style movements in the 1930s, from the German‑American Bund to Father Coughlin’s radio empire. They thrived on antisemitism and anti‑New Deal sentiment. They also ran into a wall of public revulsion, investigative journalism, and federal scrutiny, especially as war loomed. None came close to state power.

The so‑what: if you define “attempts to stop fascism” only as cases where fascists already rule, you miss the earlier, often nonviolent, ways societies prevented fascist movements from ever becoming regimes.

Methods: coups and war vs law, coalitions, and isolation

They look similar because every successful overthrow of a fascist regime involved violence. Nazi Germany fell in a world war. Mussolini was ousted in 1943 by a combination of military defeat and a palace coup by the king and conservative elites, then killed by partisans in 1945. Franco’s Spain survived until his death in 1975, but his regime was born in a brutal civil war.

If you define “stopping fascism” as “removing an entrenched fascist regime,” then yes, history is brutal. Fascist regimes do not retire peacefully. They are built on violence and repression. They criminalize opposition. By the time they are fully in place, legal and peaceful methods are almost gone. The remaining tools are coups from within the elite, foreign invasion, or armed resistance.

But that is only one side of the comparison. The other side is how states and societies tried to prevent fascist movements from crossing that threshold in the first place. Those methods were often legal and nonviolent, even if they were imperfect or morally compromised.

Some examples:

Austria in the early 1930s. The Austrian Nazi Party grew rapidly, encouraged by Hitler next door. The government of Engelbert Dollfuss, then Kurt Schuschnigg, responded with bans, arrests, and censorship. In 1934, Austrian Nazis attempted a coup and assassinated Dollfuss. The putsch failed, partly because the army and much of the state stayed loyal. Austria slid into its own authoritarian “Austrofascist” regime, which was not democratic, but it did keep the Nazis out until the Anschluss in 1938, when Germany simply annexed the country. That annexation was a foreign invasion, not a domestic electoral victory.

Finland after 1918. The Lapua Movement, a radical right, anti‑communist group with fascist traits, rose in the late 1920s. It used violence and kidnapping against leftists. In 1932, Lapua supporters attempted a coup known as the Mäntsälä Rebellion. The government responded with a mix of firmness and restraint. President Svinhufvud gave a radio address urging the rebels to go home. The army stayed loyal to the government. The coup fizzled, and the Lapua Movement was banned. Finland kept a flawed but real democracy through the 1930s.

France and the Popular Front. After the 1934 crisis, French left‑wing parties that had spent years fighting each other formed a Popular Front. They agreed on a minimal common program to defend the Republic. They used elections, unions, and mass mobilization. When they won in 1936, they passed social reforms and tried to defuse some of the grievances that fed the far right. French democracy still collapsed in 1940 under German invasion, not a domestic fascist victory.

Britain’s legal containment. Parliament passed the Public Order Act 1936 after the “Battle of Cable Street,” where anti‑fascist demonstrators, including many local Jews and leftists, blocked a British Union of Fascists march in London. The law restricted uniforms and paramilitary activity. Combined with police surveillance and public opposition, it helped marginalize the BUF.

These are not heroic fairy tales. Many of the governments involved were authoritarian in their own ways, repressed communists, or restricted civil liberties. But they show that states used legal tools, coalition politics, and targeted repression to limit fascist movements. Sometimes that worked. Sometimes it only delayed disaster.

The so‑what: if you compare methods, violent overthrow is the norm once fascists rule, but nonviolent law, coalitions, and social pressure often mattered earlier, when the outcome was still in doubt.

Outcomes: regimes destroyed vs movements contained or transformed

They look similar because the headline outcomes are dramatic. Fascist regimes end in war, coups, or the leader dying in office. That is true from Hitler to Mussolini to Franco to lesser‑known dictators like Ante Pavelić in Croatia. You rarely see a fascist party lose an election and quietly hand over power.

That is partly definitional. If a movement respects elections and alternation in power, historians usually stop calling it fascist. Fascism, by most scholarly definitions, rejects liberal democracy as weak and corrupt. So any case where a radical right party moderates and accepts democratic rules tends to be classified as “post‑fascist” or “radical right” rather than fascist.

That creates a trap. If you only count as “fascist” those movements that never accept democracy, then of course none of them will be stopped peacefully. The ones that could be contained or transformed drop out of your dataset by definition.

Post‑1945 Europe offers a few instructive cases:

Italy’s postwar neo‑fascists. The Italian Social Movement (MSI), founded in 1946, was explicitly neo‑fascist. It never came close to power during the Cold War. It was kept at arm’s length by most other parties, monitored by the state, and hemmed in by the memory of war and dictatorship. In the 1990s, parts of the MSI rebranded as the National Alliance, shedding some fascist symbols and rhetoric to join center‑right coalitions. Historians argue over how deep that change went, but the point is that a self‑described fascist party was contained and then reshaped by democratic politics, not overthrown in war.

Greece’s Golden Dawn. Golden Dawn, a neo‑Nazi party, entered the Greek parliament in 2012 during the eurozone crisis. Its members were involved in street violence and the murder of the anti‑fascist rapper Pavlos Fyssas in 2013. The Greek state responded with arrests and a long criminal trial. In 2020, a court ruled Golden Dawn a criminal organization. Its leadership received prison sentences. The party lost its parliamentary representation. This was not a full fascist regime, but it was a fascist movement that had electoral success and was then dismantled primarily through legal means.

Spain’s transition after Franco. Franco’s regime was born in war and ruled through repression. Its end was not a popular uprising or foreign invasion. Franco died in 1975. His designated successor, King Juan Carlos I, and reformist elites steered Spain toward democracy. There were attempted coups, most famously in 1981, but they failed. The old regime’s party structures were dissolved or transformed. Here, the fascist‑style regime did not get “stopped” nonviolently in the sense of being overthrown, but its system was dismantled through a negotiated transition rather than a second civil war.

These outcomes do not fit neatly into a “0% success rate” slogan. They show a spectrum: from total military defeat, to legal suppression of violent groups, to negotiated transitions where parts of the old elite cut their losses.

The so‑what: if you widen the lens from regime change to movement trajectories, you see that some fascist or neo‑fascist projects are contained, fragmented, or transformed without large‑scale violence, even if their origins are soaked in it.

Legacy: why the “0%” myth is tempting and misleading

They look similar because the emotional memory of fascism is tied to war, genocide, and resistance. The Holocaust. The Eastern Front. Guernica. Partisans in the mountains. That memory shapes how people talk about fascism today, especially when they are scared about current events.

The essay the Redditor asked about taps into that fear. It offers a clean, brutal rule: once fascists win elections, peaceful methods are useless. It sounds tough‑minded. It also simplifies history in ways that historians are wary of.

There are a few big problems with the “I researched every attempt” claim:

1. Selection bias. The essay, by the Redditor’s own description, focuses on Europe and the Americas. It centers on the most famous fascist regimes. It largely ignores the many places where fascist movements existed but never took power, or where they were serious threats but got contained.

2. Definitions that decide the outcome. If you define fascism as “a movement that, once in power, never leaves peacefully,” then you have baked your conclusion into your premise. Any case where a radical right party loses elections or moderates becomes, by definition, “not fascist.” That is circular.

3. A narrow idea of “success.” If “success” means “removing an entrenched fascist regime without any violence at all,” then yes, the historical record is bleak. But that is an odd standard. Most entrenched authoritarian regimes of any kind, not just fascist ones, do not fall without some violence, whether from coups, uprisings, or external war. The more useful question is: at what stages did nonviolent tools matter, and how?

4. Confusing moral lessons with historical patterns. People often want history to give them clear rules for the present. Historians can say that fascist movements thrive on crisis, that they use legal systems to gain power, and that once they control the state, they are very hard to dislodge without force. Those are real patterns. Turning that into a universal law that peaceful resistance has a “0% success rate” is a step too far.

None of this means fascism is easily tamed by polite debate. The interwar record shows that elites who thought they could “use” fascists against the left often ended up destroyed by the monster they fed. It also shows that divided democrats, weak institutions, and economic collapse made fascist victories more likely.

But it does mean that the history is more complicated than “violence or nothing.” Early containment, legal restrictions on paramilitaries, broad coalitions to defend basic rules, and social isolation of fascist movements all played roles in some countries. They did not guarantee safety, but they were not meaningless.

The so‑what: the “0%” myth flattens a messy record into a slogan. That might feel satisfying in an argument, but it obscures how fascist movements actually grew, stalled, or were boxed in.

So can fascism be stopped without violence?

They look similar because most famous fascist stories end in blood. If that is all you count, then yes, nonviolent resistance looks useless. But once you compare origins, methods, outcomes, and legacies across more than just Germany and Italy, the picture changes.

Here is the cleanest way to put it:

Fascist regimes are rarely removed without violence. Fascist movements are sometimes contained or prevented from taking power by nonviolent or limited‑force means.

Nonviolent tools have worked best early, when fascist parties were still competing in elections, when elites had not yet fully thrown in with them, and when state institutions were willing to enforce laws against paramilitaries and political violence. Once fascists control the security forces, courts, and media, the record of peaceful resistance is grim.

So the viral essay is half right in spirit and wrong in detail. It is right that fascism, once entrenched in power, almost never gives up without a fight. It is wrong to say that “every attempt” to stop fascism has a 0% success rate, and wrong to imply that peaceful or legal resistance has never mattered.

The history is not a comforting story of easy victories. It is a warning about how hard it is to put the genie back in the bottle once a fascist project controls the state. It is also a reminder that what happens before that point, in the gray zone of coalitions, courts, and public opinion, has shaped which countries got Mussolini and which got Mosley, which got Hitler and which got Golden Dawn on trial.

The so‑what: history does not support the neat slogan that fascism is “never” stopped without violence. It does support a harsher lesson: the later you wait to take a fascist movement seriously, the fewer nonviolent options you have.