B.R. Myers (author of this book and this book) would argue that North Korea is much closer to being a fascist state than a communist one. It successfully co-opted communist imagery and rhetoric, but Juche is a sham ideology devoid of content, and references to Marxism-Leninism are now more or less absent from North Korean rhetoric and founding documents. Juche exists to cover up the country's right-wing nature, including veneration of a "parent" leader who is believed to have supernatural powers (Myers would argue this is directly borrowed from fascist imperial Japan), ethnocentrism (the reverence of the Korean people as morally pure but needing a strong leader to protect them), erratic, belligerent military posturing aimed at projecting an image of strength to their citizens, and so on. The fascist state has survived, it seems, by convincing the world that it is not fascist at all.

I would be interested to know from other North Korea experts whether Myers' thesis is generally accepted.

There is argument whether Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar were fascist states, I tend to see Salazar's Portugal as more classically fascist whereas Franco's Spain was more of a conservative military junta analogous to what we have seen many times in Latin America. Portugal under Salazar, otherwise known as theEstado Novo survived from 1933 until 1974 when discontent over the wars to retain Portuguese hold over their African territories which are now known as Angola and Moçambique led to a coup d'état followed by pretty severe turmoil which led to the establishment of Portugal as a liberal democracy similar to the rest of Western Europe.

If you consider communism in Eastern Europe which lasted from the end of WWII in 1944/45 until 1990/91 to have been enduring, then I suppose you would consider the Portuguese Estado Novo to have been enduring as well since it lasted for just a few years less.

I understand you want to exempt Spain from this analysis, but in my opinion Spain stands as really the most compelling example of a fascist state that outlasts the "heyday" of European fascism between the early 1920s and 1945.

Paavali95 has put forth an argument that many Spanish historians have certainly made, which is that the Franco regime was a conservative-military state and not a fascist one. Historian Stanley Payne is perhaps the primary expositor of this argument; Payne contends that Francoism merely provided a platform for fascism but that the Francoist state was essentially a military-authoritarian state backed largely by monarchist and conservative interests. For Payne, the "true" Spanish fascists, the Falange, had largely been sidelined from political power throughout the trajectory of the regime.

However, there are many Spanish historians who dispute this characterization and who are more flexible in ascribing a fascist character to Franco's regime. This becomes more evident if we analyze Francoism in a longer context and connect it to the legacies of the military dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera in the 1920s. Historian Alejandro Quiroga maintains that there is a direct link between Primoriverismo and Francoism, and he has no problem characterizing Primo de Rivera's regime as much more explicitly fascist. Quiroga frequently draws comparisons between the Primoriverista and Italian fascist state. These commonalities included the implementation of corporate structures of representation and political participation, a commitment to vertical syndicalism, and a shared bio-political and scientistic discourse in conceptions of state and national community. I should point out too that Primo de Rivera came to power in 1923 but a few months after Mussolini did in 1922. Primo confessed to being a huge fan of Mussolini's doctrine, so much so that he hosted the Italian dictator in an elaborate state visit. These patterns of state organization and political mobilization persist in the Franco regime.

When we look to Francoism, we should not be too eager to dismiss its fascistic characteristics either. While normally not associated with scientific racism to the same extent that Nazism was, there is an emerging community of Spanish historians that argue that Francoism's methods of political repression both during the Civil War and immediately after, constituted acts of "political" genocide (Paul Preston, Helen Graham). This is inferred from both the manner in which extermination of Francoism's enemies was carried out and in the specific discourse deployed by the regime in describing its opponents. Francoism did not simply target those who openly identified or associated with opposing political parties, but it singled out all perceived social inferiors (women, the poor, gypsies) that it considered to have the POTENTIAL to be enemies of the state. The discourse used to describe Francoism's enemies was both racialized and classist. Leftist ideology was commonly described in biological and scientific language, often described as a contagion that contaminated the body politic and that had to be "exterminated"- furthermore, some Francoist doctors even argued there was a "red" gene that predisposed certain Spaniards toward socialist ideology. Franco routinely spoke at length of a "Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy" at the heart of the politics of the Second Republic (1931-1936). Looking at this language, we start to see familiar linguistic patterns to Nazi ideology. What's more, if you subscribe to the thesis as older social historians of Nazi Germany like Tim Mason do, that Nazism was, in its origins, an ideology rooted in hatred for the working class and in anti-communism, then Francoism doesn't seem so alien to European fascism anymore.

As we think about the Franco regime in power, we have to view its state structure as one that was constantly evolving and that had different "phases" of its political trajectory. From 1939-1953 (some date the end point at 1959), I would argue that the Spanish state was unquestioningly fascist, both in its discursive/symbolic presentation and in the economic policies it pursued (autarky/vertical syndicalism). In the late 1950s, the regime slowly began to liberalize its economy, transitioning to capitalism and supported by military dictatorship (like Pinochet). By the 1960s, Spain had more or less completed the transition from fascist autarky to free-market capitalism, and a new class of religiously Catholic technocrats began to wrest control from the old guard of conservative monarchists. Yet even throughout these changes, the political and economic structures of Spain's fascist past remained, even if their influence had been significantly reduced. If you compare these kinds of structures to any other existing corporatist regime in the world in the 1960s, there really isn't much of a compelling comparison (except perhaps a slightly convincing one in Argentine Peronism and maybe the Mexican PRI to some degree). Thus, in the postwar period, Spain arguably stood alone in the world as a country with a political and economic structure that resembled the fascism of the 1920s and 1930s.

So, while Payne is correct that Franco explicitly rejected political control of the regime from the hardline fascists (the Falangists) in his political coalition, Payne overlooked certain patterns in the regime's economy and politics that were certainly comparable to fascism. As you can see, I'm more open to seeing Francoism as fascism, while recognizing that it's extraordinarily complex. But then again, fascism is always contradictory and messy in all of its historical examples, even in the "classic" cases of Italy and Germany.