Fascism 1133

Chap 13 6/5/03 3:15 pm Page 256 Fascism 1133 Events have made ‘fascism’ a term of political abuse rather than one of serious ideological analysis. Moreover, self-proclaimed fascists have claimed that fascism is beyond intellectual analysis and have despised those who favour rational examination of their beliefs. However, we take fascism seriously as an ideology by examining fascist values and the concrete actions of some of the regimes that have declared themselves fascist, notably Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. We also consider movements often described as fascist in modern Britain and elsewhere and consider whether facism is still a viable political creed. POINTS TO CONSIDER ➤ How far do explanations of the rise of fascism cast light on its nature? ➤ What does it mean to say that fascism was essentially non-materialistic? ➤ How useful is it to distinguish Italian Fascism from German Nazism? ➤ Was fascism as hostile to international capitalism as it was to Bolshevism? ➤ Why did fascism have such little impact on Britain compared with its effect on continen- tal European countries? ➤ Is fascism a realistic threat to modern democracies? Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd - 9781526137951 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 11:39:07AM via free access Chap 13 6/5/03 3:15 pm Page 257 Fascism 257 We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything else. (Benito Mussolini, The Naples Speech, 24th October 1922) Blood mixture and the resultant drop in the racial level is the sole cause of the dying out of old cultures; for men do not perish as a result of lost wars, but by the loss of that force of resistance which is continued only in pure blood. All who are not of good race in this world are chaff. (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925) Fascists were originally revolutionary socialists of the 1890s. By the era following the First World War fascism had acquired its modern links with radical right-wing politics. The term ‘fascist’ originated in the early 1920s as a self-description of the political movement in Italy led by Benito Mussolini. The word itself is generally thought to derive from the bundle of wooden rods (fasces) carried before Roman consuls as a sign of authority, symbolising strength in unity. The movement was initially based on the nationalist groups (facsi) which emerged during and after the First World War and which were largely composed of ex-servicemen and claimed to be a new political force to rejuvenate tired nations made decadent by liberalism and democracy. Indeed, it might be claimed that fascism is the only genuine twentieth-century ideology. As an analytical term, ‘fascism’ has its limitations. It has become used, especially by the left, as a blanket expression of political abuse of their opponents. Moreover, the label ‘fascist’ has been applied to a wide variety of regimes from Pinochet’s Chile to Saddam Hussain’s Iraq, to the point where it becomes almost meaningless. Even before 1945 there were wide divergences in theory and practice among states generally described as fascist, such as Franco’s Spain, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. It is possible to argue that Nazism’s extreme racism, for example, makes it an ideology in its own right and not merely an extreme form of fascism. Fascists themselves have compounded the problem by emphasising, and even glorying in, its non-rational essence. A clear, authoritative, internally consistent exposition of fascist ideology simply does not exist. Besides, historical manifes- tations of fascism have been so tied up with the extraordinary personalities of its leaders that some critics have simply dismissed it as a vehicle for political power. Such articulation as exists was later fudged to provide a spurious intellectual justification for illegitimate power, such as Franco’s fascist regime in Spain. There is a problem caused by fascism’s ambiguous relationship with both past and future. German Nazism and Italian Fascism both sought justification and inspiration in a glorious, if largely mythical, past. They challenged many of the modern world’s values and assumptions, especially those proceeding from the Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd - 9781526137951 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 11:39:07AM via free access Chap 13 6/5/03 3:15 pm Page 258 258 Understanding political ideas and movements eighteenth-century Enlightenment. At the same time they emphasised youth, energy and dynamism and made full use of available twentieth-century technology for propaganda purposes. Hitler, for example, proclaimed the excellence of traditional, rural, peasant Germany but his election campaigns made imaginative use of the then novel instruments of cinema, microphone and aircraft. Fascism cannot be regarded as belonging to a particular historical period, even though it reached its greatest force as a movement during the 1920s and 1930s and its greatest political power in the early 1940s. Many aspects of fascist thought are alive and well in the modern world and not just in formally ‘fascist’ political parties. Explanations of fascism Faced with the difficulty of clearly articulating a comprehensive account of fascist ideology, some critics have tried to provide explanations for the emergence of fascist regimes in the inter-War period derived from cultural, historical and even psychological interpretations. Anti-Semitism had been a feature of European culture and thought for many centuries before the Nazis adopted it as a major element of their philosophy. Fascism’s roots may be found in pre-Christian German mythology, early nineteenth-century futurism Romantic literature, and even traditional fairy A movement in art in the early tales. Italian Fascism, in particular, has been twentieth century, especially identified with artistic movements like futurism. in Italy, which delighted in machines, speed, aircraft, The nineteenth-century roots of much of what cars and all aspects of the new century. became fascist thought can be more clearly identified. G. W. F. Hegel, the great German phil- osopher and nationalist, was one important thinker who stressed the organic nature of the state and society. Some have drawn attention to the importance of racist theorists in the nineteenth century, such as Arthur Gobineau with his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1855) and Houston Stewart Chamberlain with his The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). Friedrich Nietzsche was also especially influential. He identified the importance of inequality between individuals, sexes, nations and races, the will to power of Übermen- schen (‘Supermen’) who create their own morality. Fascists, especially Nazis, seized on Nietzsche’s ideas of society as made up of the leader, the elite and the masses – the ‘true’ democracy’. The Nazis added a fourth group, the Unter- mensch (‘sub-human’), parasitic on society and doomed to eradication. Psychological explanations have also been presented, such as the interpre- tation of fascism as a ‘mass psychosis’ or the political manifestation of the Kevin Harrison and Tony Boyd - 9781526137951 Downloaded from manchesterhive.com at 09/25/2021 11:39:07AM via free access Chap 13 6/5/03 3:15 pm Page 259 Fascism 259 ‘authoritarian personality’. A particularly influential explanation has been that of Erich Fromm, in The Fear of Freedom (1942), that fascism proceeds from the isolation, loneliness and insecurity created in a liberal society and people’s desire to end this situation by relinquishing their freedom to others. After 1945 a fashionable explanation provided by Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt was that fascism was very similar to communism in that it also was a form of totalitarianism. This was essentially a system in which all distinctions between the state and society were obliterated and in which the state was the supreme authority, having absolute control of all forms of intellectual, cultural, economic and social activity and to which the citizen owed absolute obedience. Although much historical analysis has concentrated on detailed biographical study of key figures such as Hitler and Mussolini, one of the most widely accepted approaches has been the Marxist view that fascism was a last-ditch stand by monopoly capitalism against its inevitable collapse. Other analysts have pointed to the extraordinary impact of the First World War on European society – the militarisation of society, the overheated patriotism and the stress on such values as self-sacrifice, obedience and dramatic action. While these approaches all have some value they are open to challenge. Excessive reliance on psychological explanation removes the essential historical dimension. Moreover, if fascism were to be related to certain individual personality characteristics, it would imply particularly high concentrations of such personality types at particular times and places, which would seem absurd. Marxist explanations omit matters of race, which are surely fundamental, at least to Nazism, and provide no real explanation for the mass support enjoyed by Hitler and Mussolini. Nor is it obvious that fascist regimes in fact serve the interests of capitalism. On the contrary, both Hitler and Mussolini at various times expressed strong anti-capitalist sentiments and, of course, the ‘Nazi’ Party was an abbreviation for the National Socialist German Workers Party. The most serious objection to these explanations is that they do not take fascist ideas seriously enough. They may tell us something of the nature of the regimes but not of the beliefs which shaped them. Fascist ideas We must state at the outset that, although it is difficult to present a structured account of fascist ideology there are a number of fascist values that inter-relate more or less logically.

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