Fascists took their cues from liberal projects. The non-mythological components of the times they were pining for were just liberalism 30-80 years prior, before advances in imperialism and the rise of socialists. The things they actually planned and attempted were to cut a larger piece of imperislist pie for themselves using the same basic mechanisms of the dominant imperial powers.

Both Italian fascists and Mazis took inspiration from the British Empire and its colonies, particularly settler colonies. Concentration camps developed by the Brits were the inspiration for those used by the Nazis, as were apartheid systems. The Nazis took further inspiration from the United States in its settler colonial genocide of indigenous Americans, using this to form Generalplan Ost, to largely depopulate Slavic states and turn them into apartheid settler colonies for German “Aryans”. They also used America’s anti-black racism as inspiration for their own apartheid plans, though they rapidly gave up on having a “one-drop rule” for Jewish people because so many Germans would have been in violation of it.

By this I mean that liberalism is, itself, a horrific thing and should have enough negative weight on its own. Fascists tried to copy liberals and do a superfast version of it centered on their nationalism. It’s not that liberals are fascists. They are who fascists wish they were, just swapping ethnicities and nationalities and some aesthetics. The higher crimes have been done by liberalism.

This is an important concept because fascism, generally speaking, no longer exists. Neonazis exist. Reactionary governments exist. But fascism essentially died in WWII. What we see today is just the return to liberalism and the reaction it creates and supports. Liberals gladly incorporated fascists back into their formations, especially the anticommunist ones. Stable liberalism is an ideology of genocide, ethnic supremacy, deprivation, conquering. All of these horrors we want to call modern fascism are liberal ideologically.