Non-participation in fascism can still promote a depoliticising justificationism toward it

Evidence

Whereas in the period leading up to the first world war much of what Croce said and did could be held to have a positive value-his leftish sympathies, his revaluation of a “romantic” tradition in Italian culture from Vico through De Sanctis up to the present, his opposition to contemporary positivism-the rise of fascism and Croce’s ambiguous attitude to it had turned his role into a pernicious and reactionary one. Unlike Gentile, Croce did not play a direct and active part in the elaboration of fascist cultural policy and .even managed to draw intellectual credit from the fact of his abstention from public life after 1926. But the fact remains that he did support the regime at the outset and that the theoretical character of his later opposition was of a singularly insipid and depoliticising kind, whose effect on the intellectual strata subject to Crocean influence was at best to inspire a certain withdrawal from fascist vulgarity, but which more often promoted a habit of “justificationism” with regard to the regime far more extensive than any provoked by Hegel’s supposed glorification of the Prussian monarchy. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 54

Categorization

• XREF: The mechanism of quietist abstention enabling complicity resonates with later Islamophobia-field arguments about liberal depoliticization and tolerance discourse as cover.
• DEFINE: ‘Justificationism’ here names a habit of continually justifying an existing regime by omission of forceful critique.