The regime catalog
This catalog is organized by strength of scholarly consensus, not by geography or date. That is the honest structure, and it teaches how classification actually works: some cases are settled, some are genuinely disputed among specialists, and some are popularly mislabeled. Knowing which bucket a case is in is half of knowing the case.
Tier A: strong consensus
Regimes that specialists across every major framework classify as fascist. The Tier A catalog covers Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, the Ustaše state, the Slovak State, Arrow Cross Hungary, Romania’s National Legionary State, and the Italian Social Republic.
Tier B: genuinely contested
Cases on which serious specialists disagree, applying the same evidence to different frameworks. Each gets a full page presenting both sides without resolution:
- Francoist Spain
- Imperial Japan
- Vichy France
- Austria’s Ständestaat
- Metaxas’s Greece
- Antonescu’s Romania after January 1941
- Perón’s Argentina
Tier C: commonly called fascist, classified otherwise by specialists
Cases where the popular label and the scholarly literature diverge. The Tier C page covers Salazar’s Portugal, Horthy’s Hungary, Piłsudski’s Poland, Pinochet’s Chile, the Latin American juntas, and apartheid South Africa, with the reasons the label does not fit, and one rule stated up front: “not fascist” is not a moral defense.
How to read a tier
Tier placement is a claim about the state of the literature, not about how bad a regime was. Several Tier C regimes killed more people than several Tier A regimes. The criteria being applied are those laid out in the definitions section, and every case page shows its work against them.