It would seem to follow that we should “start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes."68 Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an “ism" like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing.
The other “isms" were created in an era when politics was a gentleman’s business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other’s reasons as well as their sentiments. The classical “isms" rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them.
Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric. The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism. Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples. It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville.69
In a way utterly unlike the classical “isms," the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name. Fascism is “true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason. The first fascists were entirely frank about this.
We [Fascists] don’t think ideology is a problem that is resolved in such a way that truth is seated on a throne. But, in that case, does fighting for an ideology mean fighting for mere appearances? No doubt, unless one considers it according to its unique and efficacious psychological-historical value. The truth of an ideology lies in its capacity to set in motion our capacity for ideals and action. Its truth is absolute insofar as, living within us, it suffices to exhaust those capacities.70
The truth was whatever permitted the new fascist man (and woman) to dominate others, and whatever made the chosen people triumph.
Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity.71 The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.72
Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento," Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program" of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form."73 A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better."74 “The fist," asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory."75 Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize" his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. 76 Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone."77
Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises."78
Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent.79 Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along.
Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right. That does not mean, however, that the ideological roots of the early fascist movements are not important. We need to establish just what the intellectual and cultural history of the founders can contribute to understanding fascism, and what it cannot.
The intellectuals of the early days had several kinds of major impact. First, they helped create a space for fascist movements by weakening the elite’s attachment to Enlightenment values, until then very widely accepted and applied in concrete form in constitutional government and liberal society. Intellectuals then made it possible to imagine fascism. What Roger Chartier had to say about cultural preparation as the “cause" of the French Revolution is exactly right for the history of fascism as well: “attributing ‘cultural origins’ to the French Revolution does not by any means establish the Revolution’s causes; rather, it pinpoints certain of the conditions that made it possible because it was conceivable."80 Finally, intellectuals helped operate a seismic emotional shift in which the Left was no longer the only recourse for the angry, and for those inebriated by dreams of change.
Fascism’s ideological underpinnings became central again in the final stages, as the accompaniment and guide of wartime radicalization. As the fascist hard core acquired independence from their conservative allies at the battlefront or in occupied enemy territory, their racial hatreds and their contempt for liberal or humanist values reasserted themselves in the killing fields of Libya, Ethiopia, Poland, and the Soviet Union.81
Although the study of fascist ideology helps elucidate beginnings and endings, it is much less helpful in understanding the middle ranges of the fascist cycle. In order to become a major political player, to gain power, and to exercise it, the fascist leaders engaged in alliance building and political compromises, thereby putting aside parts of their program, and accepting the defection or marginalization of some of their early militants. I will examine that experience more closely in chapters 3 and 4.<
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No sound strategy for studying fascism can fail to examine the entire context in which it was formed and grew. Some approaches to fascism start with the crisis to which fascism was a response, at the risk of making the crisis into a cause. A crisis of capitalism, according to Marxists, gave birth to fascism. Unable to assure ever-expanding markets, ever-widening access to raw materials, and ever-willing cheap labor through the normal operation of constitutional regimes and free markets, capitalists were obliged, Marxists say, to find some new way to attain these ends by force.
Others perceive the founding crisis as the inadequacy of liberal state and society (in the laissez-faire meaning of liberalism current at that time) to deal with the challenges of the post-1914 world. Wars and revolutions produced problems that parliament and the market—the main liberal solutions—appeared incapable of handling: the distortions of wartime command economies and the mass unemployment attendant upon demobilization; runaway inflation; increased social tensions and a rush toward social revolution; extension of the vote to masses of poorly educated citizens with no experience of civic responsibility; passions heightened by wartime propaganda; distortions of international trade and exchange by war debts and currency fluctuations. Fascism came forward with new solutions for these challenges. I will examine this crucial matter further in chapter 3.
Fascists hated liberals as much as they hated socialists, but for different reasons. For fascists, the internationalist, socialist Left was the enemy and the liberals were the enemies’ accomplices. With their hands-off government, their trust in open discussion, their weak hold over mass opinion, and their reluctance to use force, liberals were, in fascist eyes, culpably incompetent guardians of the nation against the class warfare waged by the socialists. As for beleaguered middle-class liberals themselves, fearful of a rising Left, lacking the secret of mass appeal, facing the unpalatable choices offered them by the twentieth century, they have sometimes been as ready as conservatives to cooperate with fascists.
Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other “isms."
This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy. The community comes before humankind in fascist values, and respecting individual rights or due process gave way to serving the destiny of the Volk or razza.82 Therefore each individual national fascist movement gives full expression to its own cultural particularism. Fascism, unlike the other “isms," is not for export: each movement jealously guards its own recipe for national revival, and fascist leaders seem to feel little or no kinship with their foreign cousins. It has proved impossible to make any fascist “international" work.83
Instead of throwing up our hands in despair at fascism’s radical disparities, let us make a virtue of this necessity. For variety invites comparison. It is precisely the differences that separated Hitler’s Nazism from Mussolini’s Fascism, and both of them from, say, the religious messianism of Corneliu Codreanu’s Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, that give bite to comparison. Comparison, as Marc Bloch reminded us, is most useful for eliciting differences.84 I use comparison that way. I shall not be very interested in finding similarities—deciding whether some regime falls within the definition of some fascist essence. That kind of taxonomy, so widespread in the literature about fascism, does not lead very far. Instead, I will search as precisely as possible for the reasons behind differing outcomes. Movements that called themselves fascist or that deliberately modeled themselves on Mussolini existed in every Western country after World War I, and in some cases outside the Western world. Why did movements of similar inspiration have such different outcomes in different societies? Comparison used in this way will be a central strategy in this work.
Where Do We Go from Here?
Faced with the great variety of fascisms and the elusiveness of the “fascist minimum," there have been three sorts of response. As we saw at the outset, some scholars, exasperated with the sloppiness of the term fascism in common usage, deny that it has any useful meaning at all. They have seriously proposed limiting it to Mussolini’s particular case.85 If we followed their advice, we would call Hitler’s regime Nazism, Mussolini’s regime Fascism, and each of the other kindred movements by its own name. We would treat each one as a discrete phenomenon.
This book rejects such nominalism. The term fascism needs to be rescued from sloppy usage, not thrown out because of it. It remains indispensable. We need a generic term for what is a general phenomenon, indeed the most important political novelty of the twentieth century: a popular movement against the Left and against liberal individualism. Contemplating fascism, we see most clearly how the twentieth century contrasted with the nineteenth, and what the twenty-first century must avoid.
The wide diversity among fascisms that we have already noted is no reason to abandon the term. We do not doubt the utility of communism as a generic term because of its profoundly different expressions in, say, Russia, Italy, and Cambodia. Nor do we discard the term liberalism because liberal politics took dissimilar forms in free-trading, Bible-reading Victorian Britain, in the protectionist, anticlerical France of the Third Republic, or in Bismarck’s aggressively united German Reich. Indeed “liberalism" would be an even better candidate for abolition than “fascism," now that Americans consider “liberals" the far Left while Europeans call “liberals" advocates of a hands-off laissez-faire free market such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Even fascism isn’t as confusing as that.
A second response has been to accept fascism’s variety and compile an encyclopedic survey of its many forms.86 Encyclopedic description provides enlightening and fascinating detail but leaves us with something that recalls a medieval bestiary, with its woodcut of each creature, classified by external appearances, fixed against a stylized background of branch or rock.
A third approach finesses variety by constructing an “ideal type" that fits no case exactly, but lets us posit a kind of composite “essence." The most widely accepted recent concise definition of fascism as an “ideal type" is by the British scholar Roger Griffin: “Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism."87
This book proposes to set aside, for a moment, both the bestiary and the essence. These condemn us to a static view, and to a perspective that encourages looking at fascism in isolation. Let us instead watch fascism in action, from its beginnings to its final cataclysm, within the complex web of interaction it forms with society. Ordinary citizens and the holders of political, social, cultural, and economic power who assisted, or failed to resist, fascism belong to the story. When we are done, we may be better able to give fascism an appropriate definition.
We will need a clear understanding of fascism’s two principal coalition partners, liberals and conservatives. In this book I use liberalism in its original meaning, the meaning in use at the time when fascism rose up against it, rather than the current American usage noted above. European liberals of the early twentieth century were clinging to what had been progressive a century earlier, when the dust was still settling from the French Revolution. Unlike conservatives, they accepted the revolution’s goals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, but they applied them in ways suitable for an educated middle class. Classical liberals interpreted liberty as individual personal freedom, preferring limited constitutional government and a laissez-faire economy to any kind of state intervention, whether mercantilist, as in the early nineteenth century, or socialist, as later on. Equality they understood as opportunity made accessible to talent by education; they accepted inequality of achievement and hence of power and wealth. Fraternity they considered the normal condition of free men (and they tended to regard public affairs as men’s business), and therefore in no need of artificial rei
nforcement, since economic interests were naturally harmonious and the truth would out in a free marketplace of ideas. This is the sense in which I use the term liberal in this book, and never in its current American meaning of “far Left." Conservatives wanted order, calm, and the inherited hierarchies of wealth and birth. They shrank both from fascist mass enthusiasm and from the sort of total power fascists grasped for. They wanted obedience and deference, not dangerous popular mobilization, and they wanted to limit the state to the functions of a “night watchman" who would keep order while traditional elites ruled through property, churches, armies, and inherited social influence. 88
More generally, conservatives in Europe still rejected in 1930 the main tenets of the French Revolution, preferring authority to liberty, hierarchy to equality, and deference to fraternity. Although many of them might find fascists useful, or even essential, in their struggle for survival against dominant liberals and a rising Left, some were keenly aware of the different agenda of their fascist allies and felt a fastidious distaste for these uncouth outsiders.89 Where simple authoritarianism sufficed, conservatives much preferred that. Some of them maintained their antifascist posture to the end. Most conservatives, however, were sure that communism was worse. They would work with fascists if the Left looked otherwise likely to win. They made common cause with the fascists in the spirit of Tancredi, the recalcitrant aristocratic youth in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s great novel of the decay of a noble Sicilian family, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change."90
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