Though many more interpretations and definitions were to be proposed over the years, even now, more than eighty years after the San Sepolcro meeting, none of them has obtained universal assent as a completely satisfactory account of a phenomenon that seemed to come from nowhere, took on multiple and varied forms, exalted hatred and violence in the name of national prowess, and yet managed to appeal to prestigious and well-educated statesmen, entrepreneurs, professionals, artists, and intellectuals. I will reconsider those many interpretations in chapter 8, after we have fuller knowledge of our subject.
Fascist movements varied so conspicuously from one national setting to another, moreover, that some even doubt that the term fascism has any meaning other than as a smear word. The epithet has been so loosely used that practically everyone who either holds or shakes authority has been someone’s fascist. Perhaps, the doubters suggest, it would be better just to scrap the term.29
It is the purpose of this book to propose a fresh way of looking at fascism that may rescue the concept for meaningful use and account more fully for its attractiveness, its complex historical path, and its ultimate horror.
Images of Fascism
Everyone is sure they know what fascism is. The most self-consciously visual of all political forms, fascism presents itself to us in vivid primary images: a chauvinist demagogue haranguing an ecstatic crowd; disciplined ranks of marching youths; colored-shirted militants beating up members of some demonized minority; surprise invasions at dawn; and fit soldiers parading through a captured city.
Examined more closely, however, some of these familiar images induce facile errors. The image of the all-powerful dictator personalizes fascism, and creates the false impression that we can understand it fully by scrutinizing the leader alone. This image, whose power lingers today, is the last triumph of fascist propagandists. It offers an alibi to nations that approved or tolerated fascist leaders, and diverts attention from the persons, groups, and institutions who helped him. We need a subtler model of fascism that explores the interaction between Leader and Nation, and between Party and civil society.
The image of chanting crowds feeds the assumption that some European peoples were by nature predisposed to fascism, and responded enthusiastically to it because of national character. The corollary of this image is a condescending belief that the defective history of certain nations spawned fascism. 30 This turns easily into an alibi for onlooker nations: It couldn’t happen here. Beyond these familiar images, on closer inspection, fascist reality becomes more complicated still. For example, the regime that invented the word fascism—Mussolini’s Italy—showed few signs of anti-Semitism until sixteen years after coming to power. Indeed, Mussolini had Jewish backers among the industrialists and big landowners who helped finance him at the beginning.31 He had close Jewish cronies such as the Fascist Party militant Aldo Finzi, and a Jewish mistress, the writer Margherita Sarfatti, author of his first authorized biography.32 About two hundred Jews took part in the March on Rome.33 By contrast, Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist French government at Vichy (1940–44) was aggressively anti-Semitic, while on other scores it is better considered authoritarian34 than fascist, as we will see in chapter 8. So it becomes problematical to consider an exacerbated anti-Semitism the essence of fascism.35
Another supposed essential character of fascism is its anticapitalist, antibourgeois animus. Early fascist movements flaunted their contempt for bourgeois values and for those who wanted only “to earn money, money, filthy money."36 They attacked “international finance capitalism" almost as loudly as they attacked socialists. They even promised to expropriate department-store owners in favor of patriotic artisans, and large landowners in favor of peasants.37
Whenever fascist parties acquired power, however, they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats. By contrast, they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism. Street fights over turf with young communists were among their most powerful propaganda images.38 Once in power, fascist regimes banned strikes, dissolved independent labor unions, lowered wage earners’ purchasing power, and showered money on armaments industries, to the immense satisfaction of employers. Faced with these conflicts between words and actions concerning capitalism, scholars have drawn opposite conclusions. Some, taking the words literally, consider fascism a form of radical anticapitalism.39 Others, and not only Marxists, take the diametrically opposite position that fascists came to the aid of capitalism in trouble, and propped up by emergency means the existing system of property distribution and social hierarchy.
This book takes the position that what fascists did tells us at least as much as what they said. What they said cannot be ignored, of course, for it helps explain their appeal. Even at its most radical, however, fascists’ anticapitalist rhetoric was selective. While they denounced speculative international finance (along with all other forms of internationalism, cosmopolitanism, or globalization—capitalist as well as socialist), they respected the property of national producers, who were to form the social base of the reinvigorated nation.40 When they denounced the bourgeoisie, it was for being too flabby and individualistic to make a nation strong, not for robbing workers of the value they added. What they criticized in capitalism was not its exploitation but its materialism, its indifference to the nation, its inability to stir souls.41 More deeply, fascists rejected the notion that economic forces are the prime movers of history. For fascists, the dysfunctional capitalism of the interwar period did not need fundamental reordering; its ills could be cured simply by applying sufficient political will to the creation of full employment and productivity.42 Once in power, fascist regimes confiscated property only from political opponents, foreigners, or Jews. None altered the social hierarchy, except to catapult a few adventurers into high places. At most, they replaced market forces with state economic management, but, in the trough of the Great Depression, most businessmen initially approved of that. If fascism was “revolutionary," it was so in a special sense, far removed from the word’s meaning as usually understood from 1789 to 1917, as a profound overturning of the social order and the redistribution of social, political, and economic power.
Yet fascism in power did carry out some changes profound enough to be called “revolutionary," if we are willing to give that word a different meaning. At its fullest development, fascism redrew the frontiers between private and public, sharply diminishing what had once been untouchably private. It changed the practice of citizenship from the enjoyment of constitutional rights and duties to participation in mass ceremonies of affirmation and conformity. It reconfigured relations between the individual and the collectivity, so that an individual had no rights outside community interest. It expanded the powers of the executive—party and state—in a bid for total control. Finally, it unleashed aggressive emotions hitherto known in Europe only during war or social revolution. These transformations often set fascists into conflict with conservatives rooted in families, churches, social rank, and property. We will see below43 when we examine more fully the complex relationship of complicity, accommodation, and occasional opposition that linked capitalists with fascists in power, that one cannot consider fascism simply a more muscular form of conservatism, even if it maintained the existing regime of property and social hierarchy.
It becomes hard to locate fascism on the familiar Right-Left political map. Did the fascist leaders themselves know, at the beginning? When Mussolini called his friends together at the Piazza San Sepolcro in March 1919, it was not entirely clear whether he was trying to compete with his former colleagues in the Italian Socialist Party on the Left or to attack them frontally from the Right. Where on the Italian political spectrum would what he still sometimes called “national syndicalism" find its place?44 Indeed, fascism always retained that ambiguity.
Fascists were clear about one thing, however: they were not in the middle. Fascist contempt for the soft, complacent, compromising center was absolute (though fascist parties
actively seeking power would need to make common cause with centrist elites, against their common enemies on the Left). Their scorn for liberal parliamentarianism and for slack bourgeois individualism, and the radical tone of their remedies for national weakness and disunity, always jarred with their readiness to conclude practical alliances with national conservatives against the internationalist Left. The ultimate fascist response to the Right-Left political map was to claim that they had made it obsolete by being “neither Right nor Left," transcending such outdated divisions and uniting the nation.
Another contradiction between fascist rhetoric and fascist practice concerns modernization: the shift from rural to urban, from handwork to industry, the division of labor, secular societies, and technological rationalization. Fascists often cursed faceless cities and materialist secularism, and exalted an agrarian utopia free from the rootlessness, conflict, and immorality of urban life.45 Yet fascist leaders adored their fast cars46 and planes,47 and spread their message by dazzlingly up-to-date techniques of propaganda and stagecraft. Once in power, they forced the industrial pace in order to rearm. Thus it becomes difficult to posit the essence of fascism solely in either antimodernist reaction48 or in modernizing dictatorship.49
The solution is best found not in setting up binary opposites but in following the relationship between modernity and fascism through its complex historical course. That relationship differed dramatically at different stages. Early fascist movements exploited the protests of the victims of rapid industrialization and globalization—modernization’s losers, using, to be sure, the most modern styles and techniques of propaganda.50 At the same time, an astonishing number of “modernist" intellectuals found fascism’s combination of a high-tech “look" with attacks upon modern society, along with its scorn for conventional bourgeois taste, pleasing aesthetically and emotionally.51 Later, in power, fascist regimes chose resolutely the path of industrial concentration and productivity, superhighways52 and weaponry. The urge to rearm and wage expansive war quickly swept aside the dream of a paradise for the struggling artisans and peasants who had formed the early movements’ first mass base, leaving only a few thatched youth hostels, Hitler’s weekend Lederhosen, and photographs of Mussolini bare-chested for the grain harvest as tokens of the initial rural nostalgia.53
It is only in following the entire fascist itinerary that we can resolve the ambiguous relationship between fascism and modernity that so troubles the seekers for a single fascist essence. Some individuals followed the itinerary in their own careers. Albert Speer joined the party in January 1931 as the disciple of Heinrich Tessenow at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Institute of Technology, who was “not modern but in a certain sense more modern than the others" in his belief in simple, organic architecture. 54 Speer went on after 1933 to become the designer of monumental cityscapes for Hitler, and wound up in 1942–45 marshalling German economic might as minister of armaments. But it was an alternative modernity that Fascist regimes sought: a technically advanced society in which modernity’s strains and divisions had been smothered by fascism’s powers of integration and control. 55
Many have seen in fascism’s ultimate wartime radicalization—the murder of the Jews—a denial of modern rationality and a return to barbarism. 56 But it is plausible to perceive it as fascism’s alternate modernity run amok. Nazi “racial cleansing" built upon the purifying impulses of twentieth-century medicine and public health, the eugenicists’ eagerness to weed out the unfit and the unclean,57 an aesthetic of the perfect body, and a scientific rationality that rejected moral criteria as irrelevant. 58 It has been suggested that old-fashioned pogroms would have taken two hundred years to complete what advanced technology wrought in three years of Holocaust.59
The complex relationship between fascism and modernity cannot be resolved all at once, and with a simple yes or no. It has to be developed in the unfolding story of fascism’s acquisition and exercise of power. 60 The most satisfactory work on this matter shows how antimodernizing resentments were channeled and neutralized, step by step, in specific legislation, by more powerful pragmatic and intellectual forces working in the service of an alternate modernity.61 We need to study the whole fascist itinerary—how fascism worked out its practice in action—before we can understand it clearly.
A further problem with conventional images of fascism is that they focus on moments of high drama in the fascist itinerary—the March on Rome, the Reichstag fire, Kristallnacht—and omit the solid texture of everyday experience and the complicity of ordinary people in the establishment and functioning of fascist regimes. Fascist movements could never grow without the help of ordinary people, even conventionally good people. Fascists could never attain power without the acquiescence or even active assent of the traditional elites—heads of state, party leaders, high government officials—many of whom felt a fastidious distaste for the crudities of fascist militants. The excesses of fascism in power also required wide complicity among members of the establishment: magistrates, police officials, army officers, businessmen. To understand fully how fascist regimes worked, we must dig down to the level of ordinary people and examine the banal choices they made in their daily routines. Making such choices meant accepting an apparent lesser evil or averting the eyes from some excesses that seemed not too damaging in the short term, even acceptable piecemeal, but which cumulatively added up to monstrous end results.
For example, consider the reactions of ordinary Germans to the events of Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass). During the night of November 9, 1938, incited by an incendiary speech to party leaders by the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and in reaction to the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Polish Jew enraged by the recent expulsion of his immigrant parents from Germany, Nazi Party militants rampaged through the Jewish communities of Germany. They burned hundreds of synagogues, smashed more than seven thousand Jewish shops, deported about twenty thousand Jews to concentration camps, and killed ninety-one Jews outright. A fine of a billion marks was imposed collectively on the Jews of Germany, and their insurance reimbursements were confiscated by the German state, in order to compensate for incidental damage done to non-Jewish property. It is clear now that many ordinary Germans were offended by the brutalities carried out under their windows.62 Yet their widespread distaste was transitory and without lasting effect. Why were there no lawsuits or judicial or administrative enquiries, for example? If we can understand the failure of the judicial system, or of religious or civilian authorities, or of citizen opposition to put any brakes on Hitler in November 1938, we have begun to understand the wider circles of individual and institutional acquiescence within which a militant minority was able to free itself sufficiently from constraints to be able to carry out genocide in a heretofore sophisticated and civilized country.
These are difficult questions to answer, and they take us a long way beyond simple images of a solitary leader and cheering crowds. They also reveal some of the difficulties raised by the search for a single essence, the famous “fascist minimum," which is supposed to allow us to formulate a neat general definition of fascism.
Definitions are inherently limiting. They frame a static picture of something that is better perceived in movement, and they portray as “frozen ‘statuary’ "63 something that is better understood as a process. They succumb all too often to the intellectual’s temptation to take programmatic statements as constitutive, and to identify fascism more with what it said than with what it did. The quest for the perfect definition, by reducing fascism to one ever more finely honed phrase, seems to shut off questions about the origins and course of fascist development rather than open them up. It is a bit like observing Madame Tussaud’s waxworks instead of living people, or birds mounted in a glass case instead of alive in their habitat.
Of course, fascism should not be discussed without reaching, at some point in the debate, an agreed concept of what it is. This book proposes to arrive at such a concept at the end of its quest, rather than t
o start with one. I propose to set aside for now the imperative of definition, and examine in action a core set of movements and regimes generally accepted as fascist (with Italy and Germany predominant in our sample). I will examine their historical trajectory as a series of processes working themselves out over time, instead of as the expression of some fixed essence.64 We start with a strategy instead of a definition.
Strategies
Disagreements about how to interpret fascism turn upon profoundly different intellectual strategies. Just what parts of the elephant should we examine? Where in modern European or American experience should we look in order to find the first seeds of fascism and see them germinate? In what kinds of circumstances did fascism grow most rankly? And just what parts of the fascist experience—its origins? its growth? its behavior once in power?—expose most clearly the nature of this complex phenomenon?
If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, “fascism is an ideology."65 The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or “worldview," an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world. Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed.66 A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology—an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project.67 It has become almost automatic to focus a book about fascism on the thinkers who first put together the attitudes and patterns of thought that we now call fascist.
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