Fascism - David Renton

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beneath fascism and its incoherent nature. Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill is celebrated in popular memory for the determination with which he warned against the rise of Adolf Hitler, and for his principled ant-fascism which was unusual among Conservatives before 1940. Yet even in his anti-Nazi period, Churchill was effusive in his praise for Mussolini, urging one British audience in February 1933 to distinguish between Hitler’s pernicious intentions and the statesmanlike and anti-Bolshevik instincts of Mussolini, ‘the Roman genius … the greatest lawgiver among living men’.7 In the United States, the likes of Wilbur Carr, undersecretary of state to Roosevelt, and Breckinridge Long, ambassador to Italy, praised Mussolini in glowing terms and recommended the acceptance of his occupation of Ethiopia. Italy was a valuable ally and Mussolini her country’s ‘only one first-class mind’. It was better, it followed, to focus on the country’s geopolitical significance than the destructive ideology of its rulers.8

      More generous explanations can also be given other than mere anti-Communist realpolitik. There is a long-standing controversy, discussed below, as to the extent to which racism played an equal role within Italian and German fascism. There were indeed other differences between the fascist parties. The Iron Guard in Romania (founded by Corneliu Codreanu after he claimed to have been visited by the Archangel Michael while in prison) portrayed the clergy as an essential force in the transformation of society, so much so that in that country’s 1937 elections, some 33 of its 103 candidates were Orthodox priests.9 Mussolini depended on the Vatican for support, which was reciprocated. Hitler, meanwhile, despised both the Protestant and Catholic churches.10

      Fascism was a project for nationalist rule. Accordingly, many of its leaders called for independence or the expansion of the borders of their own nation, potentially at the expense of other fascist states. At one point in 1942 a concentration camp in Germany held the leading personalities of each of Austrian, Romanian and Ukrainian fascism (Kurt Schuschnigg, Horia Sima and Stepan Bandera).11 In Romania, Hitler preferred to negotiate with authoritarian conservatives rather than his own ideological admirers. Meanwhile Bandera’s mistake was to demand an independent Ukrainian state when Hitler preferred to keep the country under direct German rule. The more successful fascism was in Italy and Germany, the more that fascists outside were faced with a choice: were they accountable to their own aggrieved middle classes, or to the leaders of the two main fascist states? To characterise fascism as a single international tradition is not to deny the possibility of conflict between fascists.

      This book has already referred, in passing, to the New Consensus school. This is now the most influential approach in political science for understanding fascism. It is a series of arguments associated with the British writers Roger Griffin and Roger Eatwell, the American historian of Spanish fascism Stanley Payne and the Israeli historian of French fascism Ze’ev Sternhell. Eatwell argues that fascism must be seen primarily as a set of ideas: ‘fascism is best defined as an ideology’. Fascism, he adds, cannot be viewed as a form of regime, because ‘there were only two’; moreover, fascism cannot be defined as a species of political movement, because such movements ‘exhibit time and context-specific features’ which draw attention away from the decisive heart of fascist ideas. Fascism was: ‘An ideology that strives to forge rebirth on a holistic-national radical Third Way, though in practice fascism has tended to stress style, especially action and the charismatic leader, more than detailed programme and to engage in a manichean demonisation of its enemies.’12

      In numerous books and articles, Sternhell has argued that fascism emerged first in France in the 1880s and 1890s. It was born in the minds of writers and artists. Fascism began as a rejection of the idea that reason could be used to understand society. It resulted, Sternhell argues, in the formation of a ‘new generation of intellectuals [which] rose violently against the rationalist individualism of liberal society’. Various French intellectuals absorbed and then synthesised socialism and nationalism and thus created a new ideology, ‘a socialism without the proletariat’, which became fascism.13

      One of the small ironies of this approach is that, while it is a main way in which politics students are taught to understand fascism, several of its advocates express a deep uncertainty as to whether the various fascist parties can usefully be treated as belonging to the same tradition at all. For Sternhell, ‘Fascism can in no way be identified with Nazism’, ‘Nazism cannot ... be treated as a mere variant of fascism, its emphasis on biological determinism rules out all efforts to deal with it as such.’ According to Payne, Hitler’s Germany was ‘a non-Communist National Socialist equivalent’ to Stalin’s Russia: ‘Mussolini’s Italy bore little resemblance to either one’.14 Griffin accepts that Hitler’s Germany was a fascist state,15 although he shares with Sternhell and Payne the idea that Mussolini’s Italy was closer to the core of the fascist experience:

      It is a particularly grotesque and tragic example of the operation of ‘Murphy’s law’ in the historical process that of the only two forms of fascism that managed, against the odds, to seize state power, one of them was informed by an ideology of unparalleled destructive potential. The Mazzinian squadrista or Roman Empire myths invoked by fascist Italy, [or] Mosley’s vision of a Greater Britain ... cannot compare with the sheer scale of military aggression and racial persecution implied by the Nazi dream of a Jew-free racial empire.16

      The interwar Marxist theorists of fascism saw the matter differently. As long ago as the early 1920s they insisted on seeing fascism in Italy, Germany and Hungary as local variations on the same theme. One advantage of seeing fascism as a single form of politics is that it enables you to explain the common politics which persisted despite these groups’ undoubted differences. When fascists took power, their systems of government were highly similar: in the way they curtailed the liberty of their subjects and attacked their racial and political enemies. They promoted the same groups of people while subordinating the same enemies. Ian Kershaw lists the similarities between German and Italian fascist rule:

      • Extreme chauvinistic nationalism with pronounced imperialistic expansionist tendencies;

      • an anti-socialist, anti-Marxist thrust aimed at the destruction of working-class organisations and their Marxist political philosophy;

      • the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society, though with pronounced support in the middle class and proving attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly unstable sectors of the population;

      • fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitary, legitimised leader;

      • extreme intolerance towards all oppositional and presumed oppositional groups, expressed through vicious terror, open violence and ruthless repression;

      • glorification of militarism and war, heightened by the backlash to the comprehensive socio-political crisis in Europe arising from the First World War;

      • dependence upon an ‘alliance’ with existing elites, industrial, agrarian, military and bureaucratic, for their political breakthrough;

      • and, at least an initial function, despite a populist-revolutionary anti-establishment rhetoric, in the stabilisation or restoration of social order and capitalist structures.17

      It would have been possible, in effect, for a traveller in Europe in 1936 or 1939 to trek the 700 miles from Rome to Berlin and feel that for all the differences of language and geography between the two cities they were in the same country, governed by the same people, working to the same ends.

      Another advantage of seeing fascism as a single entity is that it allows you to grasp how developments in one country fed into politics elsewhere. In the words of the socialist and anti-fascist Clara Zetkin, ‘neither the Peace Treaties nor the occupation of the Ruhr have given such a fillip to Fascism in Germany as the seizure of power by Mussolini’. In autumn 1922, days after Mussolini’s appointment, Hitler told one supporter, ‘We have in common with the fascists the uncompromising love for the fatherland, the will to rip class from the claws of the International and the fresh, comradely frontline spirit.’18 The following year, Hitler’s attempted Beer Hall Putsch was modelled on Mussolini’s March on Rome.

      Later,

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