The precipitating events in his rise are controversial for reasons not worth dwelling on. Suffice it to say that the March on Rome was not a spontaneous, revolutionary event but a staged bit of political theater designed to advance a Sorelian myth. The violence between Fascist and other left-wing parties reached a crescendo in the summer of 1922, when the communists and socialists called for a general strike to protest the government’s refusal to clamp down on the Fascists. Mussolini declared that if the government didn’t break the strike, his Fascists would do it themselves. He didn’t wait for—or expect—a response. When the Reds launched their strike on July 31, Mussolini’s squadristi—made up largely of skilled ex-military troops—broke it within a day. They drove the streetcars, kept the traffic moving, and, most famously, got the “trains running on time.”
Mussolini’s strikebreaking tactics had a profound effect on the Italian public. At a time when intellectuals all over the world were growing cynical about parliamentary democracy and liberal politics, Mussolini’s military efficiency seemed to transcend partisan politics. Just as many today say we need to “get beyond labels” in order to get things done, Mussolini was seen as moving beyond the “tired categories of left and right.” Similarly—like certain modern liberals—he promised what he called a “Third Way” that was neither left nor right. He just wanted to get things done. With the public largely behind him, he planned to break a different sort of strike—the parliamentary deadlock that had paralyzed the government and, hence, “progress.” He threatened that he and his Blackshirts—so named because Italian special forces wore black turtlenecks, which quickly became a fashion among Fascists—would march on Rome and take the reins of state. Behind the scenes. King Vittorio Emanuele had already asked him to form a new government. But Il Duce marched anyway, reenacting Julius Caesar’s march on Rome and giving the new Fascist government a useful “revolutionary myth” that he would artfully exploit in years to come. Mussolini became prime minister and Fascist Italy was born.
How did Mussolini govern? Like the old joke about the gorilla, however he wanted. Mussolini became a dictator, less brutal than most, more brutal than some. But he was also very popular. In 1924 he held reasonably fair elections, and the Fascists won by a landslide. Among his achievements in the 1920s were the passage of women’s suffrage (which the New York Times hailed as a nod to the pressure of American feminists), a concordat with the Vatican, and the revitalization of the Italian economy. The settlement of the long-simmering schism between Italy and the pope was a monumental accomplishment in terms of Italy’s domestic politics. Mussolini succeeded where so many others had failed.
We will deal with many of the ideological issues and policies swirling around Italian Fascism in subsequent chapters. But there are some points that are worth stating here. First, Mussolini successfully cast himself as the leader of the future. Indeed, he was brought to power in part by an artistic movement called Futurism. Throughout the 1920s, even if he implemented some policies that Western intellectuals disliked—anti-press laws, for example—his method of governing was regarded as quintessentially modem. At a time when many young intellectuals were rejecting the “dogma” of classical liberalism, Mussolini seemed a leader at the forefront of the movement to reject old ways of thinking. This was the dawn of the “fascist century,” after all. It was no coincidence that Fascism was the first politically successful, self-styled modern youth movement, and was widely recognized as such. “Yesterday’s Italy is not recognizable in today’s Italy,” Mussolini declared in 1926. “The whole nation is 20 years old and as such it has the courage, the spirit, the intrepidity.” No leader in the world was more associated with the cult of technology, particularly aviation, than Mussolini in the 1920s. By the 1930s world leaders were trying to lit into Mussolini’s mold as a “modern” statesman.
Part of Mussolini’s reputation as a new kind of leader stemmed from his embrace of “modern” ideas, among them American Pragmatism. He claimed in many interviews that William James was one of the three or four most influential philosophers in his life. He surely said this to impress American audiences. But Mussolini really was an admirer of James (and the James-influenced Sorel), who believed that Pragmatism justified and explained his governing philosophy and governed in a pragmatic fashion. He was indeed the “Prophet of the Pragmatic Era in Politics,” as a 1926 article in the Political Science Quarterly (and subsequent book) dubbed him.
If at times he would adopt, say, free-market policies, as he did to some extent in the early 1920s, that didn’t make him a capitalist. Mussolini never conceded the absolute authority of the state to dictate the course of the economy. By the early 1930s he had found it necessary to start putting Fascist ideology down on paper. Before then, it was much more ad hoc. But when he did get around to writing it out, doctrinal Fascist economics looked fairly recognizable as just another left-wing campaign to nationalize industry, or regulate it to the point where the distinction was hardly a difference. These policies fell under the rubric of what was called corporatism, and not only were they admired in America at the time, but they are unknowingly emulated to a staggering degree today. Pragmatism is the only philosophy that has an everyday word as its corollary with a generally positive connotation. When we call a leader pragmatic, we tend to mean he’s realistic, practical, and above all non-ideological. But this conventional use of the word obscures some important distinctions. Crudely, Pragmatism is a form of relativism which holds that any belief that is useful is therefore necessarily true. Conversely, any truth that is inconvenient or non-useful is necessarily untrue. Mussolini’s useful truth was the concept of a “totalitarian” society—he made up the word—defined by his famous motto: “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State .” The practical consequence of this idea was that everything was “fair game” if it furthered the ends of the state. To be sure, the militarization of society was an important part of fascism’s assault on the liberal state, as many anti-fascists assert. But that was the means, not the end. Mussolini’s radical lust to make the state an object of religious fervor was born in the French Revolution, and Mussolini, an heir to the Jacobins, sought to rekindle that fire. No project could be less conservative or less right-wing.
In this and many other ways, Mussolini remained a socialist until his last breath, just as he predicted. His reign ended in 1943, when he became little more than a figurehead for the Nazi regime head-quartered at Salo, where he pathetically plotted his comeback. He spent his days issuing proclamations, denouncing the bourgeoisie, promising to nationalize all businesses with more than a hundred employees, and implementing a constitution written by Nicola Bombacci, a communist and longtime friend of Lenin’s. He selected a socialist journalist to record his final chapter as Il Duce, according to whom Mussolini declared, “I bequeath the republic to the republicans not to the monarchists, and the work of social reform to the socialists and not to the middle classes.” In April 1945 Mussolini fled for his life—back to Switzerland, ironically—with a column of German soldiers (he was disguised as one of them) as well as his aides, his mistress, and his acolyte Bombacci in tow. They were captured by a band of communist partisans, who the next morning were ordered to execute him. Mussolini’s mistress allegedly dove in front of her lover. Bombacci merely shouted, “Long live Mussolini! Long live Socialism!”
2
Adolf Hitler: Man of the Left
WAS HITLER’S GERMANY fascist? Many of the leading scholars of fascism and Nazism—Eugen Weben A. James Gregor, Renzo De Felice, George Mosse, and others—have answered more or less no. For various reasons having to do with different interpretations of fascism, these academics have concluded that Italian Fascism and Nazism, while superficially similar and historically bound up with each other, were in fact very different phenomena. Ultimately, it is probably too confusing to try to separate Nazism and Italian Fascism completely. In other words, Nazism wasn’t Fascist with a capital F but it was fascist with a
lowercase f But the fact that such an argument exists among high-level scholars should suggest how abysmally misunderstood both phenomena are in the popular mind, and why reflexive rejection of the concept of liberal fascism may be misguided.
The words “fascist” and “fascism” barely appear in Mein Kanipf. In seven-hundred-plus pages, only two paragraphs make mention of either word. But the reader does get a good sense of what Hitler thought of the Italian experiment and what it had to teach Germany. “The appearance of a new and great idea was the secret of success in the French Revolution. The Russian Revolution owes its triumph to an idea. And it was only the idea that enabled Fascism triumphantly to subject a whole nation to a process of complete renovation.”
The passage is revealing. Hitler acknowledges that fascism was invented by Mussolini. It may have been reinvented, reinterpreted, revised, or extended, but its authorship—and, to a lesser extent, its novelty—were never in doubt. Nor did many people doubt for its first fifteen years or so that it was essentially an Italian movement or method.
National Socialism likewise predated Hitler. It existed in different forms in many countries. The ideological distinctions between Fascism and National Socialism aren’t important right now. What is important is that Hitler didn’t get the idea for Nazism from Italian Fascism, and at first Mussolini claimed no parentage of Nazism. He even refused to send Hitler an autographed picture of himself when the Nazis requested one from the Italian embassy. Nevertheless, no Nazi ideologue ever seriously claimed that Nazism was an offshoot of Italian Fascism. And during Nazism’s early days, Fascist theorists and Nazi theorists often quarreled openly. Indeed, it was Mussolini who threatened a military confrontation with Hitler to save Fascist Austria from a Nazi invasion in 1934.
It’s no secret that Mussolini didn’t care for Hitler personally. When they met for the first time, Mussolini recounted how “Hitler recited to me from memory his Mein Kampf, that brick I was never able to read.” Der Fiihrer, according to Mussolini, “was a gramophone with just seven tunes and once he had finished playing them he started all over again.” But their differences were hardly just personal. Italian Fascist ideologues went to great lengths to distance themselves from the Nazi strains of racism and anti-Semitism. Even “extremist ultra-Fascists” such as Roberto Farinacci and Giovanni Preziosi (who was a raving anti-Semite personally and later became a Nazi toady) wrote that Nazism, with its emphasis on parochial and exclusivist racism, “was offensive to the conscience of mankind.” In May 1934 Mussolini probably penned—and surely approved—an article in Gerarchia deriding Nazism as “one hundred per cent racism. Against everything and everyone: yesterday against Christian civilization, today against Latin civilization, tomorrow, who knows, against the civilization of the whole world.” Indeed, Mussolini doubted that Germans were a single race at all, arguing instead that they were a mongrel blend of six different peoples. (He also argued that up to 7 percent of Bavarians were dim-witted.) In September of that same yean Mussolini was still referring to his “sovereign contempt” for Germany’s racist policies. “Thirty centuries of history permit us to regard with supreme pity certain doctrines supported beyond the Alps by the descendents of people who did not know how to write, and could not hand down documents recording their own lives, at a time when Rome had Caesar, Virgil, and Augustus.” Meanwhile, the Nazi ideologues derided the Italians for practicing “Kosher Fascism.”
What Hitler got from Italian Fascism—and, as indicated above, from the French and Russian revolutions—was the importance of having an idea that would arouse the masses. The particular content of the idea was decidedly secondary. The ultimate utility of ideas is not their intrinsic truth but the extent to which they make a desired action possible—in Hitler’s case the destruction of your enemies, the attainment of glory, and the triumph of your race. This is important to keep in mind because Hitler’s ideological coherence left a great deal to be desired. His opportunism, pragmatism, and megalomania often overpowered any desire on his part to formulate a fixed ideological approach.
Hermann Rauschning, an early Nazi who broke with Hitler, encapsulated this point when he famously dubbed Hitler’s movement “The Revolution of Nihilism.” According to Rauschning, Hitler was a pure opportunist devoid of loyalty to men or ideas—unless you call hatred of Jews an idea—and willing to break oaths, liquidate people, and say or do anything to achieve and hold power. “This movement is totally without ideals and lacks even the semblance of a program. Its commitment is entirely to action...the leaders choose action on a cold, calculating and cunning basis. For National Socialists there was and is no aim they would not take up or drop at a moment’s notice, their only criterion being the strengthening of the movement.” Rauschning exaggerated the case, but it is perfectly true that Nazi ideology cannot be summarized in a program or platform. It can be better understood as a maelstrom of prejudices, passions, hatreds, emotions, resentments, biases, hopes, and attitudes that, when combined, most often resembled a religious crusade wearing the mask of apolitical ideology.
Contrary to his relentless assertions in Mein Kampf, Hitler had no great foundational ideas or ideological system. His genius lay in the realization that people wanted to rally to ideas and symbols. And so his success lay in the quintessential techniques, technologies, and icons of the twentieth century—marketing, advertising, radio, airplanes, TV (he broadcast the Berlin Olympics), film (think Leni Riefenstahl), and. most of all, oratory to massive, exquisitely staged rallies. Time and again in Mein Kampf, Hitler makes it clear that he believed his greatest gift to the party wasn’t his ideas but his ability to speak. Conversely, his sharpest criticism of others seems to be that so-and-so was not a good speaker. This was more than simple vanity on Hitler’s part. In the 1930s, in Germany and America alike, the ability to sway the masses through oratory was often the key to power. “Without the loudspeaker,” Hitler once observed, “we would never have conquered Germany.” Note the use of the word “conquered.”
However, saying that Hitler had a pragmatic view of ideology is not to say that he didn’t use ideology. Hitler had many ideologies. Indeed he was an ideology peddler. Few “great men” were more adept at adopting, triangulating, and blending different ideological poses for different audiences. This was the man, after all who had campaigned as an ardent anti-Bolshevik, then signed a treaty with Stalin, and convinced Neville Chamberlain as well as Western pacifists that he was a champion of peace while busily (and openly) arming for war.
Nevertheless, the four significant “ideas” we can be sure Hitler treasured in their own right were power concentrated in himself, hatred—and fear—of Jews, faith in the racial superiority of the German Volk, and, ultimately, war to demonstrate and secure the other three.
The popular conception that Hitler was a man of the right is grounded in a rich complex of assumptions and misconceptions about what constitutes left and right, terms that get increasingly slippier the more you try to nail them down. This is a problem we will be returning to throughout this book, but we should deal with it here at least as to how it related to Hitler and Nazism.
The conventional story of Hitler’s rise to power goes something like this: Hitler and the Nazis exploited popular resentment over Germany’s perceived illegitimate defeat in World War I (”the stab in the back” by communists, Jews, and weak politicians) and the unjust “peace” imposed at Versailles. Colluding with capitalists and industrialists eager to defeat the Red menace (including, in some of the more perfervid versions, the Bush family)—the Nazis staged a reactionary coup by exploiting patriotic sentiment and mobilizing the “conservative”—often translated as racist and religious—elements in German society. Once in power, the Nazis established “state capitalism” as a reward to the industrialists, who profited further from the Nazis’ push to exterminate the Jews.
Obviously, there’s a lot of truth here. But it is not the whole truth. And as we all know, the most effective lies are the ones sprinkled with the most actua
l truths. For decades the left has cherry-picked the facts to form a caricature of what the Third Reich was about. Caricatures do portray a real likeness, but they exaggerate certain features for a desired effect. In the case of the Third Reich, the desired effect was to cast Nazism as the polar opposite of Communism. So, for example, the roles of industrialists and conservatives were grossly exaggerated, while the very large and substantial leftist and socialist aspects of Nazism were shrunk to the status of trivia, the obsession of cranks and Hitler apologists.
Consider William Shirer’s classic, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which did so much to establish the “official” history of the Nazis. Shirer writes of the challenge facing Hitler when the radicals within his own party, led by the SA founder Ernst Rohm, wanted to carry out a “Second Revolution” that would purge the traditional elements in the German army, the aristocracy, the capitalists, and others. “The Nazis had destroyed the Left,” Shirer writes, “but the Right remained: big business and finance, the aristocracy, the Junker landlords and the Prussian generals, who kept tight rein over the Army.”
LIBERAL FASCISM: The Secret History of the AMERICAN LEFT from MUSSOLINI to the POLITICS OF MEANING Page 7