excerpts from the book
Anatomy of Fascism
by Robert O. Paxton
Vintage Books, 2005, paper
p4
The word fascism has its root in the Italian fascio, literally
a bundle or sheaf. More remotely, the word recalled the Latin
fasces, an axe encased in a bundle of rods that was carried before
the magistrates in Roman public processions to signify the authority
and unity of the state. Before 1914, the symbolism of the Roman
fasces was usually appropriated by the Left. Marianne, symbol
of the French Republic, was often portrayed in the nineteenth
century carrying the fasces to represent the force of Republican
solidarity against her aristocratic and clerical enemies. Fasces
are prominently displayed on Christopher Wren's Sheldonian Theater
(1664-69) at Oxford University. They appeared on the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington (1922) and on the United States quarter minted in
1932.
Italian revolutionaries used the term
fascio in the late nineteenth century to evoke the solidarity
of committed militants. The peasants who rose against their landlords
in Sicily in 1893-94 called themselves the Fasci Siciliani. When
in late 1914 a group of left-wing nationalists, soon joined by
the socialist outcast Benito Mussolini, sought to bring Italy
into World War I on the Allied side, they chose a name designed
to communicate both the fervor and the solidarity of their campaign:
the Fascio Rivoluzionario d'Azione Interventista (Revolutionary
League for Interventionist Action).8 At the end of World War I,
Mussolini coined the term fascismo to describe the mood of the
little band of nationalist ex-soldiers and pro-war syndicalist
revolutionaries that he was gathering around himself. Even then,
he had no monopoly on the word fascio, which remained in general
use for activist groups of various political hues.
Officially, Fascism was born in Milan
on Sunday, March 23, 1919.
That morning, somewhat more than a hundred
persons,' including war veterans, syndicalists who had supported
the war, and Futurist intellectuals, plus some reporters and the
merely curious, gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial
and Commercial Alliance, overlooking the Piazza San Sepolcro,
to "declare war against socialism ... because it has opposed
nationalism." Now Mussolini called his movement the Fasci
di Combattimento, which means, very approximately, "fraternities
of combat."
The Fascist program, issued two months
later, was a curious mixture of veterans' patriotism and radical
social experiment, a kind of "national socialism." On
the national side, it called for fulfilling Italian expansionist
aims in the Balkans and around the Mediterranean that had just
been frustrated a few months before at the Paris Peace Conference.
On the radical side, it proposed women's suffrage and the vote
at eighteen, abolition of the upper house, convocation of a constituent
assembly to draft a new constitution for Italy (presumably without
the monarchy), the eight hour workday, worker participation in
"the technical management of industry," the "partial
expropriation of all kinds of wealth" by a heavy and progressive
tax on capital, the seizure of certain Church properties, and
the confiscation of 85 percent of war profits.
Mussolini's movement was not limited to
nationalism and assaults on property. It boiled with the readiness
for violent action, anti-intellectualism, rejection of compromise,
and contempt for established society that marked the three groups
who made up the bulk of his first followers demobilized war veterans,
pro-war syndicalists, and Futurist intellectuals.
p7
... novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary on March 27, 1933,
two months after Hitler had become German chancellor, that he
witnessed a revolution of a kind never seen before, "without
underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better,
decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common
scum" had taken power, "accompanied by vast rejoicing
on the part of the masses."
p8
communist orthodoxy in Stalin's USSR
"Fascism is the open, terroristic
dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most
imperialist elements of finance capital."
p22
... fascism's two principal coalition partners, liberals and conservatives.
In this book I use liberalism in its original meaning, the meaning
in use at the time when fascism rose up against it, rather than
the current American usage noted above. European liberals of the
early twentieth century were clinging to what had been progressive
a century earlier, when the dust was still settling from the French
Revolution. Unlike conservatives, they accepted the revolution's
goals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but they applied them
in ways suitable for an educated middle class. Classical liberals
interpreted liberty as individual personal freedom, preferring
limited constitutional government and a laissez-faire economy
to any kind of state intervention, whether mercantilist, as in
the early nineteenth century, or socialist, as later on. Equality
they understood as opportunity made accessible to talent by education;
they accepted inequality of achievement and hence of power and
wealth. Fraternity they considered the normal, condition of free
men (and they tended to regard public affairs as men's business),
and therefore in no need of artificial reinforcement, since economic
interests were naturally harmonious and the truth would out in
a free marketplace of ideas. This is the sense in which I use
the term liberal in this book, and never in its current American
meaning of "far Left." Conservatives wanted order, calm,
and the inherited hierarchies of wealth and birth. They shrank
both from fascist mass enthusiasm and from the sort of total power
fascists grasped for. They wanted obedience and deference, not
dangerous popular mobilization, and they wanted to limit the state
to the functions of a "night watchman" who would keep
order while traditional elites ruled through property, churches,
armies, and inherited social influence.
More generally, conservatives in Europe
still rejected in 1930 the main tenets of the French Revolution,
preferring authority to liberty, hierarchy to equality, and deference
to fraternity. Although many of them might find fascists useful,
or even essential, in their struggle for survival against dominant
liberals and a rising Left, some were keenly aware of the
want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."
p23
The fascisms we have known have come into power with the help
of frightened ex-liberals and opportunist technocrats and ex-conservatives
...
p41
... fascism is more plausibly linked to a set of "mobilizing
passions" that shape fascist action than to a consistent
and fully articulated philosophy. At bottom is a passionate nationalism.
Allied to it is a conspiratorial and Manichean view of history
as a battle between the good and evil camps, between the pure
and the corrupt, in which one's own community or nation has been
the victim. In this Darwinian narrative, the chosen people have
been weakened by political parties, social classes, inassimilable
minorities, spoiled rentiers, and rationalist thinkers who lack
the necessary sense of community. These "mobilizing passions,"
mostly taken for granted and not always overtly argued as intellectual
propositions, form the emotional lava that set fascism's foundations:
* a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond
the reach of any traditional solutions;
* the primacy of the group, toward which
one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or
universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
* the belief that one's group is a victim,
a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral
limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; 60
* dread of the group's decline under the
corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict,
and alien influences;
* the need for closer integration of a
purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence
if necessary;
* the need for authority by natural leaders
(always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable
of incarnating the group's destiny;
* the superiority of the leader's instincts
over abstract and universal reason;
* the beauty of violence and the efficacy
of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;
* the right of the chosen people to dominate
others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law,
right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess
within a Darwinian struggle.
p102
What Fascists Offered the Establishment
In a situation of constitutional deadlock
and rising revolutionary menace, a successful fascist movement
offers precious resources to a faltering elite.
Fascists could offer a mass following
sufficiently numerous to permit conservatives to form parliamentary
majorities capable of vigorous decisions, without having to call
upon unacceptable Leftist partners. Mussolini's thirty-five deputies
were not a major weight in the balance, but Hitler's potential
contribution was decisive. He could offer the largest party in
Germany to conservatives who had never acquired a knack for the
mass politics suddenly introduced into their country by the constitution
of 1919. During the 1920s, the only non-Marxist party that had
successfully built a mass base in Germany was the Zentrum (Center
Party), a Catholic party that enjoyed, through its roots in parish
life, an actively engaged membership and multiclass recruitment.
The Zentrum reached broadly into the working class through the
Catholic trade unions, but, as a confessional party, it could
not recruit as broadly as Hitler. Holding in his hands the largest
party, Hitler permitted conservative coalition makers to escape
from reliance on the president's emergency powers that had already
endured nearly three years, and form a parliamentary majority
that excluded the Left.
The fascists offered more than mere numbers.
They offered fresh young faces to a public weary of an aging establishment
that had made a mess of things. The two youngest parties in Italy
and Germany were the communists and the fascists. Both nations
longed for new leaders, and the fascists offered conservatives
a fountain of youth. The fascists also offered another way of
belonging-deeper commitment and discipline in an era when conservatives
feared dissolution of the social bond.
Fascists had also found a magic formula
for weaning workers away from Marxism. Long after Marx asserted
that the working class had no homeland, conservatives had been
unable to find any way to refute him. None of their nineteenth-century
nostrums - deference, religion, schooling-had worked. On the eve
of World War I, the Action Française had enjoyed some success
recruiting a few industrial workers to nationalism, and the unexpectedly
wide acceptance by workers of their patriotic duty to fight for
their homelands when World War I began foretold that in the twentieth
century Nation was going to be stronger than Class.
Fascists everywhere have built on that
revelation. I mentioned the French Cercle Proudhon earlier among
the precursors. As for the Nazi Party, its very name proclaimed
that it was a workers' party, an Arbeiterpartei. Mussolini expected
to recruit his old socialist colleagues. Their results were not
overwhelmingly successful. Every analysis of the social composition
of the early fascist parties agrees: although some workers were
attracted, their share of party membership was always well below
their share in the general population. Perhaps those few fascist
workers were enough. If the fascist parties could recruit some
workers, then fascist violence would take care of the holdouts.
This formula of divide and conquer was far more effective than
anything the conservatives could provide on their own.
Another seductive fascist offer was a
way to overcome the climate of disorder that the fascists themselves
had helped cause. Having unleashed their militants in order to
make democracy unworkable and discredit the constitutional state,
the Nazi and Fascist leaders then posed as the only nonsocialist
force that could restore order. It was not the last time that
the leaders capitalized on that ambiguity: "Being in the
center of the movement," Hannah Arendt wrote in one of her
penetrating observations, "the leader can act as though he
were above it." Fascist terms for a deal were not insuperably
high. Some German conservatives were uneasy about the ant' capitalist
rhetoric still flaunted by some Nazi intellectuals, as were Italian
conservatives by Fascist labor activists like Edmondo Rossoni.
But Mussolini had long come around to "productivism"
and admiration for the industrial hero, while Hitler made it clear
in his famous speech to the Düsseldorf Industrialists' Club
on January 26, 1932, as well as in private conversations, that
he was a social Darwinist in the economic sphere, too.
Even if one had to admit these uncouth
outsiders to high office in order to make a bargain, conservatives
were convinced that they would still control the state. It was
unheard-of for such upstarts to run European governments. It was
still normal in Europe, even after World War I, even in democracies,
for ministers and heads of state to be educated members of the
upper classes with long experience in diplomacy or administration.
The first lower-class prime minister in Britain was Ramsay MacDonald,
in 1924, and he soon came to look, speak, and act like a patrician,
to the disgust of Labour militants, who ridiculed him as "Gentleman
Mac." President Friedrich Ebert of Germany (1919-25), a saddlemaker
by trade, had acquired standing in a long career as Socialist
Party functionary and deputy. Hitler and Mussolini were the first
lower-class adventurers to reach power in major European countries.
Even to this day the French Republic has had no head of state
and only a handful of prime ministers who were social outsiders
of the ilk of, say, Harry Truman. But circumstances were far from
normal in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933. A central ingredient
in the conservatives' calculation was that the Austrian corporal
and the greenhorn Italian ex-socialist rabble-rouser would not
have the faintest idea what to do with high office. They would
be incapable of governing without the cultivated and experienced
conservative leaders' savoir faire.
In sum, fascists offered a new recipe
for governing with popular support but without any sharing of
power with the Left, and without any threat to conservative social
and economic privileges and political dominance. The conservatives,
for their part, held the keys to the doors of
p135
Did a majority of the population support fascist regimes consensually,
even with enthusiasm, or were they bent to submission by force
and terror? The terror model has prevailed, partly because it
serves as an alibi for the peoples concerned. But recent scholarship
has tended to show that terror was selective and that consensus
was high in both Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.
Neither regime was conceivable without
terror. Nazi violence was omnipresent and highly visible after
1933. The concentration camps were not hidden, and executions
of dissidents were meant to be known. The publicity of Nazi violence
does not mean that support for the regime was coerced, however.
Since the violence was directed at Jews, Marxists, and "asocial"
outsiders (homosexuals, Gypsies, pacifists, the congenitally insane
or crippled, and habitual criminals-groups that many Germans were
often happy to see the last of), Germans often felt more gratified
than threatened by it. The rest soon learned to keep silent. Only
at the end, as the Allies and the Russians closed in, when the
authorities attacked anyone accused of giving in, did the Nazi
regime turn its violence upon ordinary Germans.
p137
Fascists were past masters at manipulating group dynamics: the
youth group, the leisure-time association, party rallies. Peer
pressure was particularly powerful in small groups. There the
patriotic majority shamed or intimidated nonconformists into at
least keeping their mouths shut. Sebastian Haffner recalled how
his group of apprentice magistrates was sent in summer 1933 on
a retreat, where these highly educated young men, mostly non-Nazis,
were bonded into a group by marching, singing, uniforms, and drill.
To resist seemed pointless, tam to lead nowhere but to prison
and an end to the dreamed-of career. Finally, with astonishment,
he observed himself raising his arm, fitted with a swastika armband,
in the Nazi salute.
These various techniques of social control
were successful. Mussolini was broadly supported from 1929 at
least up through his victory in Ethiopia in 1936. Accommodation
with the Catholic Church was central to this support. The Lateran
Treaties concluded by Mussolini and Pope Pius XI in February 1929
ended nearly sixty years of conflict between the Italian state
and the Vatican with mutual recognition and the payment by Italy
of a substantial indemnity for its seizure of papal lands in 1870.
Italy recognized Roman Catholicism as "the religion of most
Italians." The once anticlerical Mussolini, who had written
a youthful novel called The Cardinal's Mistress and, at twenty-one,
in a debate with a Swiss pastor, had given God-if He existed-five
minutes to strike him dead, had submitted in 1925 to a belated
church marriage to his longtime common-law companion Rachele Guidi
and to the baptism of their children. In elections on March ,
the Church's explicit support helped produce a vote of 98 percent
in favor of the Fascist list of candidates (there were no others)
for parliament. Fascism paid a high price in the long term for
the Church's aid to consensus: as the hare of Fascist dynamism
wore itself out, the tortoise of Catholic parish life and culture
plodded along to become the basis of Christian democratic rule
in Italy after 1945.
The other ingredient of Mussolini's popularity
in the middle years was his victory over Ethiopia in summer 1936,
the last-it turned out-of his military successes. Popular approval
of the Italian Fascist regime declined only when Mussolini's expansionist
foreign policy began to produce defeats. The Duce's need to demonstrate
a "special relation with history" required him to mount
a dynamic foreign policy. Beginning with the defeat of his "volunteer"
armored force by Spanish Republicans and international volunteers
at Guadalajara, in the hills northeast of Madrid, in March 1937,
however, foreign policy provided more humiliation than reinforcement
for Mussolini's regime.
The Nazi regime, too, aroused considerable
popular enthusiasm within Germany by the mid-1930s. Full employment
plus a long string of bloodless foreign policy victories raised
approval far above the Nazis' initial 44 percent in the March
1933 elections. Although Germans grumbled a lot about restrictions
and shortages, and although the outbreak of war in September 1939
was received glumly, the Hitler cult was exempt from the criticism
reserved for party officials and bureaucrats.
Fascist regimes were particularly successful
with young people. Fascist arrival in power sent a shock wave
down through society to each neighborhood and village. Young Italians
and Germans had to face the destruction of their social organizations
(if they came from socialist or communist families) as well as
the attraction of new forms of sociability. The temptation to
conform, to belong, and to achieve rank in the new fascist youth
and leisure organizations (which I will discuss more fully below)
was very powerful. Especially when fascism was still new, joining
in its marching and uniformed squads was a way to declare one's
independence from smothering bourgeois homes and boring parents.
Some young Germans and Italians of otherwise modest attainments
found satisfaction in pushing other people around.
p140
Even if public enthusiasm was never as total as fascists promised
their conservative allies, most citizens of fascist regimes accepted
things as they were. The most interesting cases are people who
never joined the party, and who even objected to certain aspects
of the regime, but who accommodated because its accomplishments
overlapped with some of the things they wanted, while the alternatives
all seemed worse.
p145
Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most
of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in
the special conditions of 1922 and 1933-socialism or a dysfunctional
market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a
fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing
Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls.
In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working
with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of
rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given
to them in economic management. Mussolini's famous corporatist
economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading
businessmen.
Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi
regime and business had "converging but not identical interests."
Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments
contracts, and job-creation stimuli.
p147
Fascists had to do something about the welfare state. In Germany,
the welfare experiments of the Weimar Republic had proved too
expensive after the Depression struck in 1929. The Nazis trimmed
them and perverted them by racial forms of exclusion. But neither
fascist regime tried to dismantle the welfare state (as mere reactionaries
might have done).
Fascism was revolutionary in its radically
new conceptions of citizenship, of the way individuals participated
in the life of the community. It was counterrevolutionary, however,
with respect to such traditional projects of the Left as individual
liberties, human rights, due process, and international peace.
In sum, the fascist exercise of power
involved a coalition composed of the same elements in Mussolini's
Italy as in Nazi Germany. It was the relative weight among leader,
party, and traditional institutions that distinguished one case
from the other. In Italy, the traditional state wound up with
supremacy over the party, largely because Mussolini feared his
own most militant followers, the local ras and their squadristi.
In Nazi Germany, the party came to dominate the state and civil
society, especially after war began.
Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy:
an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and
conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism
and the Left, and a shared willingness to stop at nothing to destroy
their common enemies.
p201
The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed,
antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America
since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party
of the 1850s. In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies,
derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States:
the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod's openly pro-Hitler
Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William
Dudley Pelley's Silver Shirts (the initials "SS" were
intentional);" the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader,
one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of
his rallies); and a host of others. Movements with an exotic foreign
look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant
head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination
by a disgruntled follower in 1967,83 seemed even more "un-American"
after the great anti-Nazi war.
Much more dangerous are movements that
employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism
functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent
anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the
1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated
at forty million around an anticommunist, anti-Wall Street, pro-soft
money, and-after 1938-anti-Semitic message broadcast from his
church in the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936
it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate,
North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt.
The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic
political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though
frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately
a share-the-wealth demagogue. The fundamentalist preacher Gerald
L. K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned
the message more directly after World War II to the "Judeo-Communist
conspiracy" and had a real impact. Today a "politics
of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism
sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same "internal
enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals
and defenders of abortion rights.
Of course the United States would have
to suffer catastrophic setbacks and polarization for these fringe
groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half
expected to see emerge after 1968 a movement of national reunification,
regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar
protesters, black radicals, and "degenerate" artists.
I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs
to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany or the Italian Arditi, and attack
the youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had
"stabbed them in the back." Fortunately I was wrong
(so far). Since September ii, 2001, however, civil liberties have
been curtailed to popular acclaim in a patriotic war upon terrorists.
The language and symbols of an authentic
American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the
original European models. They would have to be as familiar and
reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the
original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians
and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after
all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No
swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars
and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations
of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of
fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would
transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the
internal enemy.
Around such reassuring language and symbols
and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige,
Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration,
unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First
Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns,
prayers in schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership,
desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license,
dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled
antinational or decadent.
p203
Religion may be as powerful an engine of identity as the nation;
indeed, in some cultures, religious identity may be far more powerful
than national identity. In integrist religious fundamentalisms,
the violent promotion of the unity and dynamism of the faith may
function very much like the violent promotion of the unity and
dynamism of the nation. Some extreme forms of Orthodox Judaism
regard the state of Israel as a blasphemy because it was established
before Messiah came. Here religious integrism fully replaces national
integrism. Fundamentalist Muslims offer little loyalty to the
various secular Islamic states, whether presidential or monarchical.
Islam is their nation. For Hindu fundamentalists, their religion
is the focus of an intense attachment that the secular and pluralist
Indian state does not succeed in offering. In such communities,
a religious-based fascism is conceivable. After all, no two fascisms
need be alike in their symbols and rhetoric, employing, as they
do, the local patriotic repertory.
The principal objection to succumbing
to the temptation to call Islamic fundamentalist movements like
al-Qaeda and the Taliban fascist is that they are not reactions
against a malfunctioning democracy. Arising in traditional hierarchical
societies, their unity is, in terms of Emile Durkheim's famous
distinction, more organic than mechanical. Above all, they have
not "given up free institutions," since they never had
any.
p218
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked
by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation,
or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and
purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants,
working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional
elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive
violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal
cleansing and external expansion.
p219
fascism's "mobilizing passions":
* a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond
the reach of any traditional solutions;
* the primacy of the group, toward which
one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or
universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
* the belief that one's group is a victim,
a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral
limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
* dread of the group's decline under the
corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict,
and alien influences;
* the need for closer integration of a
purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence
if necessary;
* the need for authority by natural chiefs
(always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is
capable of incarnating the group's historical destiny;
* the superiority of the leader's instincts
over abstract and universal reason;
* the beauty of violence and the efficacy
of will, when they are devoted to the group's success;
* the right of the chosen people to dominate
others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law,
right being decided by the sole criterion of the group's prowess
within a Darwinian struggle.
p220
"Giving up free institutions," especially the freedoms
of unpopular groups, is recurrently attractive to citizens of
Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing
its path that fascism does not require a spectacular "march"
on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate
lawless treatment of national "enemies" is enough.
Fascism watch
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