This leads us to another point: No society of any complexity speaks with one voice. There are a variety of perspectives in the intellectual community and elsewhere. The opinions most likely to prevail are not necessarily most representative of the great mass of people. Rather it is the select few who are usually best endowed with the material means to produce the literature of history. In short, history is written by those who can afford to write it.
If it is true that people tend to perceive reality, past and present, in accordance with the position they occupy in the social structure, then it is likely that most of the history that has been handed down to us is from elitist sources. The writing of history has been principally a privilege of the victor, written from within the court, church, government, and academy, at the very least written by persons of property and leisure. Who else had the time or means?
So in every age we have what might be called “dominant history,” the product of the prevailing institutions of whatever epoch we are looking at, which still exercises an influence over our perceptions. Consider what our history books still tell us about peasants in the Middle Ages, specifically their deep involvement with religion. To this notion the historian E. H. Carr poses an interesting question:
I wonder how we know this, and whether it is true. What we know as the facts of medieval history have almost all been selected for us by generations of chroniclers who were professionally occupied in the theory and practice of religion, and who therefore thought it supremely important, and recorded everything relating to it, and not much else. The picture of the Russian peasant as devoutly religious was destroyed by the revolution of 1917. The picture of medieval man as devoutly religious, whether true or not, is indestructible, because nearly all the known facts about him were preselected for us by people who believed it, and wanted others to believe it, and a mass of other facts, in which we might possibly have found evidence to the contrary, has been lost beyond recall.5
Indeed, during those feudal times, the keepers of the faith were also the keepers of the records, a historic fact still embodied in the French word clerc, which can mean clergyman, scholar, or clerk; and in the English “clerical,” an adjective pertaining both to clerks and clergy. As Henry Charles Lea writes, the ecclesiastics “monopolized . . . the educated intelligence of the age.”6 For more than a millennium, Europe was ruled by a totalitarian system known as Christendom.
With the recording of history so thoroughly controlled by one favored estate, the peasants had virtually no opportunity to speak for themselves. While there do exist numerous studies of feudal communities, they rarely offer any direct testimony from the common folk. But, in 1965, not long after Carr voiced his regret that all contrary evidence “has been lost beyond recall,” the three surviving volumes of the Inquisition Register of Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, transcribed in 1318–1325, happened to have been retrieved from the Vatican Library and published. These tomes contain exhaustive verbatim depositions elicited by the inquisitional courts from the peasantry of Montaillou, a village in southern France suspected of being a hotbed of Albigensian heresy. Sociologist Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie extracted from the volumes a detailed description of village life in Montaillou originally recorded directly from the mouths of the peasants themselves.
The picture that emerges is of a people who were concerned with much else besides religion, including property, farming, cooperative communal services, crafts, festivals, family relations, and love affairs.7 The peasants of 1318 were inclined to be affectionate toward their children, and wept more easily than we, both in happiness and sorrow. Of special interest for our inquiry: less than half of the Montaillou parishioners attended church, according to one of the religious dissidents, and many did so without any special enthusiasm.8 One villager remarks to a group of men in the community, “Instead of burning heretics they ought to burn Bishop Fournier himself, because he demands that we pay tithes in lambs.”
This statement was treated as a blasphemy against God. In fact, it was a secular criticism of class exploitation, a denunciation of a parasitic, high-living cleric. Bishop Fournier also imposed onerous tithes on previously exempt agricultural products. Not without cause did some of the village heretics claim that the “Pope devours the blood and sweat of the poor. And the bishops and priests, who are rich and honored and self-indulgent, behave in the same manner.”9 Heresy in Montaillou seems to have stemmed less from theological disputes and more from a resistance to the economic thievery of the church hierarchy.10 The impression one gets is that these peasants were not involved in church affairs so much as the church was involved in their affairs. They were preoccupied not with eternal salvation but earthly survival. Carr’s suspicions seem to be confirmed.
The point to remember here is that the evidence put together by Le Roy Ladurie regarding Montaillou is not likely to overturn the dominant history, the one that treats the feudal peasantry as composed of devout, simple bumpkins and stolid serfs who accepted their station in life in symbiotic vassalage with their superiors. The prevailing image of the common people was created by the churchmen themselves. And it remains the image embraced to this day by elitist scribes.
Who then speaks for the people of history? Through the centuries there have been scarcely anyone to record their glory and misery, no one to take note of the Roman commoners who wept for loved ones lost in Caesar’s war, the peaceful villages obliterated by the conqueror’s holocaust, the women torn from their hearths by the military rapists and plunderers, the men enslaved in Charlemaigne’s mines.
Few chroniclers over the centuries have recorded how the course of history was changed in a positive way by the peaceful women and men who created the crafts and generated the skills of society, those who developed horticulture and designed the first wagons, seafaring vessels, and fishing nets, the first looms, lathes, and kilns, who cultivated the first orchards, vineyards, and terraces and invented the written word, more than once in more than one place—those who did what Thorstein Veblen called “the work of civilization.” Not then, not now are they celebrated for their contributions to history, for the inventiveness and positive contributions that have made life bearable and even possible.
To the princes and presidents, plutocrats and prime ministers, we owe the horrors of war and conquest, the technologies of destruction and control, and the rapacious expropriation that has enriched the few and impoverished the many through so many epochs. Real history should give us not only accounts of popular struggles against oppression but also exposés of the crimes and abuses of ruling interests, so many of which have been glossed over by mainstream historians.
The dramatic struggles of working people in North America, extending over the better part of three centuries, are absent from most of our history texts, as are the armed revolts of farmers, slaves, and Native Americans (“Indians”). Dominant history has little to say about the pitched battles between workers and militia, the factory takeovers, and the gunning down of strikers by company gun thugs, police, and army. In his 1,122-page tome on U.S. history, Samuel Eliot Morison—one of America’s “official” historians, so to speak—has little or nothing to say about these struggles, not a word about the champions of labor such as John Swinton, Charles Steinmetz, Albert Parsons, Henry George, W. E. B. Du Bois, Bill Haywood, Clarence Darrow, Mother Jones, Carlo Tresca, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Emma Goldman. Morison’s history is a celebration of establishment leadership, generously larded with Eurocentric, ruling-elite apologetics.11
A study of seventeen widely used high-school U.S. history textbooks, covering the period from the Civil War to World War I, finds that, despite the claim to objectivity, the books offer an ideologically slanted pro-business, anti-labor view of events. The author of the study, Jean Anyon, notes that all the textbooks are marketed by “a publishing industry that is big business—with annual sales of several billion dollars—and that is increasingly owned by corporate conglomerates.”12 Historians will go on at length about the historica
l method, about how history relates to other social sciences; how historians must grapple with research problems, sift carefully through the evidence, accepting little on faith while letting the chips fall where they may; how they must immerse themselves in the historical context of their subject yet keep their perspective and detachment, showing imagination and caution, skill and sagacity, and other such sterling qualities of creative scholarship.
Hardly a word can be found in all this literature about the marketing of history, specifically the ideological forces within the corporate economy that help determine the distribution of historical studies—-and which thereby influence what is produced. Little is said about why certain books win foundation funding, are elaborately promoted and widely reviewed, earn awards and book-club adoptions, and are kept in print for long periods, while other volumes never emerge from an obscurity that seems no more deserved than the former’s celebrity. Big publishers, big distributors, and chain retailers largely determine which books are carried in bookstores and how they are displayed, which ones are highlighted at a front table or hidden away on a dusty shelf. Surely, one of the major factors determining this parsing is ideology.
Consider some classic cases. Osborne Ward wrote an amazing book, The Ancient Lowly (1888), about trade unions, guilds and strikes in the ancient world, which attempted to demonstrate that class struggle was the name of the game even then. For almost twenty years Ward was unable to find a publisher because, as Charles H. Kerr explained, “no capitalist publishing house would take the responsibility for so revolutionary a book, and no socialist publishing house existed.”13 In 1907, Ward’s work was published by Kerr’s socialist collective and received an enthusiastic reception among those limited numbers who heard of its existence.
In 1920, American socialist Upton Sinclair wrote a scathing critique of the business-owned press, The Brass Check. An acquaintance told him it was inconceivable that publication of this book would be permitted in America. After exasperating experiences with Doubleday and Macmillan, Sinclair decided to publish it himself. The book enjoyed six printings and sold 100,000 copies within a half-year.14
Recall also the critical works produced by the aforementioned Carroll Quigley who blew the whistle on the transatlantic policy plutocrats. Quigley’s first book, The Anglo-American Establishment, was rejected by fifteen publishers, and finally appeared posthumously more than thirty-two years after its completion. His major work, Tragedy and Hope, supposedly went out of print immediately after publication in 1966. Quigley was entitled to recover the plates from Macmillan, but after much stalling, the publisher claimed that the plates had been “inadvertently” destroyed.15
Ideological bias comes through clearly in which books get reviewed in the major media. Critical progressive titles are far less likely to receive attention, except perhaps to be savaged. A regular reviewer for the Boston Globe, a reputedly liberal newspaper, told a South End Press editor that she “would be fired” if she reviewed writers with a radical perspective.16 Publications like Choice, Kirkus, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly, used by libraries and bookstores to determine purchases, are also biased in what they review, tending to ignore—or denounce—titles that stray beyond the ideological norm.
Librarian Charles Willett points out that titles acquired by both university libraries and public libraries are slanted toward a conventional view of past and present, selected by librarians and faculty “who tend to accept large corporate and university press publishers as objective and trustworthy, while rejecting small nonprofit publishers as ‘political’ and unreliable.” If any change has occurred, it is in a more regressive direction, as libraries, faced with declining budgets, acquire even fewer alternative titles.17
To conclude, history is not just what the historians say it is, but what government agencies, corporate conglomerates, chain-store distributors, mass-media pundits, editors, reviewers, and other ideological gatekeepers want to put into circulation. In this sense we can speak of a dominant history. The deck is stacked to favor those who deal the cards.
36 FASCISM, THE REAL STORY
We should study history with the intention of trying to get at the real story, not the sanitized myths that too often are passed along. Most people are never exposed to real history. In school we rarely read history. We read history textbooks, mostly ones that avoid the underlying realities and propagate all sorts of improbable scenarios. Fascism is a good example of how a fearsome political movement of momentous scope can be diluted and misrepresented. Here is a turn at the real story.
Fascism is the name given to the political movement that arose in Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who ruled that country from 1922 to 1943. Nazism was a movement led by Adolph Hitler, who was Germany’s dictator from 1933 to 1945. Nazism is considered by most observers to be a variant of fascism, as to a lesser degree was the militaristic government that controlled Japan from 1940 to 1945; so too the Falangist movement led by Francisco Franco, who in 1939 took over Spain after a protracted civil war, with the military aid of the Italian and Nazi fascists.
Self-avowed fascist movements also arose in Great Britain, the United States, France, and much of Eastern Europe. During the early 1990s, the press carried numerous reports about how countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, and Croatia were overthrowing “the yoke of communism” and “returning to their democratic roots.” In fact these countries had been under rightist autocratic rule in their pre-communism days. With the exception of Poland, all had been openly allied with Nazi Germany.
Fascism offers a deceptive mix of revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics. Hitler’s party, for instance, was called the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) or Nazis, a leftist-sounding name designed to win broad support among working people even while the Nazis were destroying working- class organizations. The original Italian and German variations of fascism made a revolutionary appeal without making a revolution, promising to solve the ills of the many while in fact protecting the special interests of the few with violence and terror. Fascism propagated a false revolution with a new political consciousness, a new order to serve the same old moneyed interests. Let us briefly consider the major characteristics of the fascist ideology.
First, the leadership cult, the glorification of an all-knowing, supreme and absolutist leader.
Second, the idolatrous worship of the nation-state as an entity unto itself, an absolute component to which the individual is subsumed. Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state. That was Mussolini’s and Hitler’s dictum. Hitler’s henchman Rudolf Hess once said, “Adolf Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Adolf Hitler,” thereby wrapping both the leadership cult and the state cult in one. The leader is the embodiment of the state, and the state is supreme.
Third, glorification of military conquest and jingoism: the state is vitalized and empowered by subduing, conquering, and enslaving other peoples and territories.
Fourth, propagation of a folk mysticism, with its concomitant xenophobia and racism. The Nazi slogan was ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer (one people, one empire, one leader), an atavistic celebration of the special blood lineage and wondrous legacy of the people. Along with this comes a disdain for other peoples and nationalities. For the Nazis and most other Eastern European fascists, the core enemy was the Jew, who was seen as the perpetrator of all societal ills. Behind the trade unionists, communists, homosexuals and others were the Jews, wickedly alien creatures who would pollute the pure-blooded and undermine the state.
Fifth, on behalf of the interests of the giant business cartels, there was a concerted suppression, both by the Italian fascists and German Nazis, of all egalitarian working-class loyalties and organizations, including labor unions.
Of these various characteristics of fascism, the last one is rarely talked about by mainstream historians, political scientists and journalists who usually ignore the link between fascism and cap
italism, just as they tend to ignore the entire subject of capitalism itself when something unfavorable needs to be said about it. Instead, they dwell on the more bizarre components of fascist ideology: the “nihilist revolt against Western individuality,” the mystic volk attachment, and so forth. Fascism was those things, but along with its irrational appeals it had rational functions. It was a key instrument for the preservation of plutocratic domination.
After World War I, Italy had a parliamentary government that seemed incapable of solving the country’s economic crises. Profits were declining, banks were failing, unemployment was rising. To ensure profits, the big industrial giants and landowners needed higher prices for their commodities, massive government subsidies, tax exemptions, and tariff protections. To finance this, the population had to be taxed more heavily; their wages had to be rolled back and their social welfare expenditures drastically cut.
But the government was not totally free to apply these measures. Italian workers and peasants were fairly well organized with their own political organizations, cooperatives, unions, and publications. Through the use of demonstrations and strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and forcible occupation of farmlands they often won some real concessions. Even in the face of the worsening economic crisis they were able to mount a troublesome defense of their modest living standard. The only solution was to smash the worker and peasant organizations, in effect destroying all political and civil liberties, including the right to organize, agitate and propagandize. The state would have to be more authoritarian in order to keep the populace more firmly subservient to the interests of big capital.
Enter Benito Mussolini. Born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith, Mussolini had an early manhood marked by street brawls, arrests, jailings, and violent, radical political activities. Before World War I, he was a socialist. A brilliant organizer, agitator, and gifted journalist, he became editor of the Socialist Party’s official newspaper. Yet many of his comrades suspected him of being less interested in advancing socialism than in advancing Mussolini. Indeed, when the Italian industrialists and financiers tempted him with recognition, financial support, and the promise of power, he was not long in doing a volte-face.
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