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The Specter of Fascism: Defining the “F-Word”

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The Specter of Fascism: Defining the “F-Word” Trevor Erlacher Te Specter of Fascism: Defning the “F-Word” In one sense—a moral sense—there could hardly be more agreement today on the subject of fascism as a general, interwar European political phenomenon.1 Liberals, conservatives, and socialists all concur on the immorality of fascism. Of all its conventional varieties, German National Socialism in particular has come to epitomize our notion of malevolence, serving as a guidepost to righteous certitude in an otherwise postmodern world of doubt, ambiguity, and fruitless debate. American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, for example, used Nazism as the cornerstone of his infuential postwar doctrine of Christian Realism. Nazism has also provided a common point of reference for the most hackneyed arguments against ethical relativism. traces Indeed, Nazism’s present-day status as evil par excellence has led to an unfortunate proliferation of the so-called reductio ad Hitlerum in daily conversation, political rhetoric, and Internet forums.2 All of the other putative varieties of 1 Fascism, that is, with a little ‘f,’ to distinguish it from its Italian namesake. 2 This phenomenon is summed up in Godwin’s Law, formulated by American attorney Mike Godwin, partly in jest, to state that as a given “online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler or the Nazis approaches 1.” The result, Godwin argues, is a trivialization of the Holocaust. See Andrew McFarlane, (2010-07-14). “Is it ever OK to call someone a Nazi?”. BBC News Magazine. http://www.bbc.co.uk/ news/10618638. Retrieved 2011-05-01. 244 Trevor Erlacher fascism—including the original, Italian Fascism (which we typically regard, despite its chronological priority and extreme brutality, as an entirely more benign, even humorous, junior partner)3—derive the better part of their historical guilt from association with the apogee (or nadir) of fascism in the Tird Reich. Yet, this moral certitude does not extend to the academic debate about what fascism, as a political genus, is. It also remains unclear whether we can legitimately categorize National Socialism under “fascism.” Only Italian Fascism, due to its name, is invariably designated as fascist, and even in this case scholars have argued that Nazism actually represented the more “fascistic” of the two.4 Te following discussion is typical insofar as it considers only the cases of Italian Fascism and Nazism. Other potential fascisms—the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Romanian Iron Guard, the Croatian Ustasha, Peronist Argentina, Showa Japan, and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, to name just a few—inspire far less agreement about classifcation and rarely enter treatises on fascism’s defnition until afer it has been established on the basis of the Italian and, usually, the German exemplars. A clear and concise defnition of fascism is needed, but a real consensus on what that might entail has yet to emerge. Is fascism an ideology, a collection of movements and regimes, or both? Is it lefwing, rightwing, or “radical centrist”? Is fascism confned to the interwar period? Is a resurgence of it still possible, and if so, how do we know it when we see it? Tis paper presents a brief critical survey of some of the most prominent attempts to solve these defnitional conundrums.5 Approaches to defning generic fascism can be divided into four categories, all of which are problematic for diferent reasons and motivated by diferent concerns. Te frst is the Marxist approach, which takes fascism to be a symptom of late capitalism’s desperate struggle against the working class. Te second will be referred to as the ideological approach, which intellectual historians starting with Ernst 3 R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (Londen: Hodder Education, 2005), 35. 4 This position is implied by Paxton’s five-stage program of fascist development, since Nazi Germany alone reached the fifth stage and “experienced full radicalization,” whereas Italian Fascism habitually lapsed into mere “military dictatorship.” Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2005), 23, 150. 5 More specifically, it will evaluate the arguments of Stanley G. Payne, Robert O. Paxton, George L. Mosse, Roger Griffin, Ernst Nolte, Zeev Sternhell, Gilbert Allardyce, Roger Eatwell, Geoff Eley, and Martin Kitchen. 245 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History Nolte have typically favored. Te third is the functionalist (or structuralist) approach, which attempts to understand fascism “in time” as the sum total of its deeds in specifc contexts rather than its ideas and rhetoric. Te fourth, or nominalist, approach argues for a rejection of the other three as logically fawed, philosophically unjustifable, and detrimental to the study of history. Te latter position represents the most rational, modest, and easily defensible of the four, although its acceptance entails a renunciation of the purported heuristic, didactic, and political advantages of an umbrella concept to incorporate all ostensible instances of “fascism.” Te Bestiary: A Typology of Typologies I. Te Marxist Approach Self-identifed Marxists of diferent stripes made the frst attempts to understand fascism analytically as a generic breed of politics shortly afer its appearance in the early 1920s. Nevertheless, prior to Hitler’s rise to power, many of them remained skeptical about the potential for fascism to take root anywhere other than Italy. Writing in 1928, Italian Communist Palmiro Togliatti expressed his belief that Fascism could not be exported to other countries, because of the degree to which the economic and class relations peculiar to Italy determined its existence: “A movement of the ‘fascist’ type, like the one in Italy, would have the greatest difculty in conquering power elsewhere.”6 Antonio Gramsci proposed a similar, Sonderweg-like explanation of Italy’s descent into fascism, arguing that the Risorgimento was a “missed revolution” that had burdened the country with a tortured social and political development thereafer.7 In his 1944 pamphlet, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, Leon Trotsky argued that fascism was a reactionary mass movement of the petty bourgeoisie under the aegis of the capitalist class—their true enemies—against a bewildered and disorganized proletariat. Trotsky did not, however, regard fascism as an inevitable outcome of the crisis of capitalism. Instead, he argued for its latency in any capitalist society, holding the Communist Party’s incompetence, complacency, and cowardice responsible for fascism’s rise to power in Italy 6 Palmiro Togliatti, “On the Question of Fascism,” in Aristotle A. Kallis, ed., The Fascism Reader (New York: Routledge, 2003), 109. 7 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison (New York: Weidenfled and Nicolson, 1971). 246 Trevor Erlacher and Germany.8 More sophisticated Marxist interpretations of fascism have appeared since, though the list-making method of defnition has retained its appeal. Martin Kitchen, for example, has posited ten distinguishing marks of fascism, each with a decidedly economistic favor.9 On the basis of these criteria, Kitchen efectively limits fascism to Germany and Italy, while insisting that many other places came close to ftting his defnition, and that refusing to recognize fascism as a possibility in the postwar context “would make it impossible to analyze fascist dangers in the present day.”10 Writing in the 1970s, Kitchen warned of the likelihood, given the economic problems at the time, of a resurgent “neo-fascism” in capitalist countries. Te tactical value of the term “fascism” as a general concept for use in Cold War-era socialist politics thus constituted Kitchen’s principal justifcation for the adoption of his ten-point defnition. More recently, one of the most nuanced, nonpartisan, and self-critical statements of the problem from a Marxist perspective has been that of Geof Eley, who nevertheless retreats to the trite position that fascism was nothing other than the “counterrevolutionary” outgrowth of the interwar “crisis of capitalism” 8 Leon Trotsky, Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It (New York: Pathfinder, 1996). 9 They are as follows: 1) Fascism “is a phenomenon of developed industrial states”; 2) “fascist movements are triggered off by a severe socioeconomic crisis”; 3) “fascism is a response to a large and organized working class”; 4) it “recruits its mass following from a politicized, threatened, and frightened petite bourgeoisie”; 5) “fascist regimes are characterized by an alliance between the fascist party leadership and the traditional elites of industry, banking, the bureaucracy, and the military”; 6) fascism was intended to “stabilize, strengthen and, to a certain degree, transform capitalist property relationships and to ensure the social and economic domination of the capitalist class”; 7) “fascism is a terror regime which dispenses with all of the trappings of parliamentary democracy”; 8) “fascist movements use ideology deliberately to manipulate and divert the frustrations and anxieties of the mass following away from their objective source”; 9) “fascist regimes pursue aggressive expansionist foreign political aims”; and 10) fascism displays a “greater degree of intensity” in more developed societies. Martin Kitchen, Fascism (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1976), 83-91. 10 Ibid. 247 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History in countries with potent workers’ movements.11 Insofar as capitalism is still with us, therefore, fascistic movements and regimes could still appear wherever the prevailing economic order is challenged.12
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