Beyond Europe
Treating fascism as a purely European story is factually wrong and analytically costly: it hides the evidence about which soil the phenomenon grows in. The non-European record includes one giant movement, several small ones, and one enormous contested case.
Brazil: the largest fascist movement outside Europe
Brazilian Integralist Action (Ação Integralista Brasileira), founded by Plínio Salgado in 1932, grew to hundreds of thousands of members, with green-shirted uniforms, salutes, a spiritualist-nationalist doctrine, and paramilitary organization, making it the largest fascist movement outside Europe.claim type: fact Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo dictatorship banned it in 1937, and crushed it after the Integralist putsch attempt of 1938, a trajectory that mirrors the European pattern of authoritarian regimes suppressing their fascist rivals.claim type: fact The movement’s afterlife in Brazilian far-right politics is part of the record too, and is covered in the contemporary section.
Japan: the great contested case
Imperial Japan mobilized totally, built a political religion around the emperor, and waged eliminationist colonial war. Whether that makes it fascist divides the field cleanly enough that this site gives the case a full page in the regime catalog.
The smaller cases
The Ossewabrandwag in South Africa organized tens of thousands of Afrikaners on explicitly pro-Axis, anti-parliamentary lines during the war, complete with a paramilitary wing that carried out sabotage.claim type: fact In China, the Blue Shirts Society operated inside the Kuomintang in the 1930s as a secretive nationalist formation that admired European fascist methods, though how far the Kuomintang itself was fascistized remains debated.claim type: fact Middle Eastern and South Asian movements of the era borrowed fascist forms as well, and the documented Italian influence on early Hindutva organizing is treated at the Hindutva debate page.