The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  The most striking step in the Fascist radicalization of the 1930s was discriminatory legislation against Jews. In July 1938, a “Manifesto of Fascist Racism" announced the new policy, and it was soon followed up by laws in September and November that forbade racial intermarriage, along the lines of the Nazi Nuremberg laws, and excluded Jews from government service and the professions. One out of twelve university professors had to abandon their chairs. The Nobel Prize–winnning physicist Enrico Fermi, not Jewish himself, left voluntarily for the United States because he was deprived of many of his research associates.

  The Fascists are usually assumed to have copied Nazi racial laws to please Hitler during the period of Italian foreign policy alignment with the Axis.66 Italy had been largely devoid of anti-Semitism, and its small and ancient Jewish community had been exceptionally well integrated. As we saw in chapter 1, Mussolini had had Jewish backers and even close associates in the early days. In 1933 he was listed by American Jewish publishers among the world’s “twelve greatest Christian champions" of the Jews. 67

  On closer inspection, one can find Italian stems upon which a native anti-Semitism could be grafted. Policies of racial discrimination had already become acceptable to Italians in the colonies. First in Libya and then in Ethiopia, the Italian military adopted tactics of separating nomads from their animals and from food and water. Their mass internment seemed to prefigure their elimination. In Ethiopia, laws forbade racial mixing (though they were widely flaunted). Angelo Del Boca can even use the word apartheid for what Fascism tried to institute in Ethiopia.68

  Another stem was the ambiguity of Catholic attitudes about Jews. To its credit, Catholic tradition was hostile to biological racism—the Church insisted, for example, that the sacrament of baptism prevented a convert from being henceforth considered Jewish, regardless of who his or her parents had been. Pope Pius XI had been trying to decide whether to issue an encyclical denouncing Nazi biological racism when he died in 1939. On the other hand, the language of the mass for Good Friday identified the Jews as the “deicide people" who had killed Christ. Church publications continued for a shockingly long time to express the coarsest forms of anti-Semitism, including accrediting the ancient legend of Jewish ritual murder.69 The Church raised no objection to nonbiological forms of discrimination against Jews in Catholic countries, such as quotas in universities and limitations on economic activity. 70 As for secular Fascists, there had always been anti-Semites among them. Some of them, like Telesio Interlandi, were given prominent space in the party press from the middle 1930s on, even before the formation of the Axis.

  It is true that the new legislation was generally unpopular, and that in Italian-occupied Croatia and southeastern France Italian authorities actually protected Jews.71 When the Germans began deporting Jews from Italy in 1943, few Italians joined in that undertaking. There had been enough support for the 1938 legislation, however, for it to be applied quite firmly. After 1938, Mussolini’s regime subsided once more into business as usual. When war began in September 1939, he told Hitler he was not ready. When he finally entered World War II, at the last possible moment, it brought Mussolini neither the spoils of victory nor the heightened popular enthusiasm he had hoped for.72 Mussolini’s “parallel war" after June 1940, intended to assert equality with Hitler, led only to defeats and humiliations that ended Fascism’s “privileged relation with history" and snapped the last links of affection between the Italian people and the Duce.

  The Germans, too, received with gloom the news that World War II had begun. Hitler’s successes, however, charged them with zeal. They made war longer and with more determination in 1939–45, despite greater civilian suffering, than in 1914–18. In Italy, by contrast, the balloon of fascist excitement burst quickly. In retrospect, Fascist mobilization turned out to be more fragile than democratic mobilization. Churchill could move the British people by an honest promise of nothing but blood, sweat, toil, and tears.

  Mussolini’s final days offer another case of radicalization, though it was geographically limited to northern Italy. When it became clear that Italy’s participation in World War II on Hitler’s side was turning into a disaster, parts of the Establishment—senior military officers, advisors to the king, even some dissident fascists—wanted to get rid of Mussolini and make a separate peace with the Allies. Soon after the Allies landed in Sicily on July 10, 1943, in the predawn hours of July 25, the Fascist Grand Council voted a resolution to restore full authority to the king. The same afternoon, Victor Emmanuel dismissed the deflated Duce from office and had him arrested.

  That ignominious arrest should have put an end to Mussolini’s charisma. On September 12, however, a daring German commando raid led by SS captain Otto Skorzeny liberated him from his captivity atop the Gran Sasso ski resort, east of Rome. Hitler reinstated the Duce as the dictator of a Fascist republic whose capital was at Salò, on Lake Garda, handy to the main road to Germany via the Brenner Pass. The Italian Social Republic was never more than a German puppet, and deserves little more than a footnote in history. 73 It interests us here, however, for, freed from the need to mollify the Church, the king, and the financial and industrial leadership of Italy, the Salò republic reverted to the radical impulses of fascism’s first days.

  At Salò, Mussolini surrounded himself with some remaining party fanatics and a few pro-Nazi officers. They played the one card left to them: a populist national socialism. The new Fascist Republican Party program of November 1943 called for the “socialization" of those sectors of the economy necessary for self-sufficiency (energy, raw materials, indispensable services), and leaving in private hands only property that was the fruit of personal effort and savings. The public sector was to be run by management committees in which the workers would have a voice. Unproductive or uncultivated farms would be taken over by their hired hands. Roman Catholicism remained the religion of the Fascist republic, but many of the new leaders were irreligious. The new republic promised to govern through an assembly which would be chosen by unions, professional groups, and soldiers. The Italian Social Republic at Salò never had the power to put these measures into effect, however. Its radicalization’s main effect was to make its police and armed squads murderous in the Italian civil war of 1944–45.

  The Salò republic also tried to remedy the slackness that had overcome established Fascism in Italy. It raised new armed forces of committed Fascists to carry on the war against the Allies. These consisted mainly of volunteer groups like Prince Borghese’s Tenth Torpedo Boat Squadron, which fought on dry land, and mostly against the Resistance. 74 The agents of the Salò republic also tried to remedy most Italians’ refusal to take antiSemitism seriously. It was at this point that Fascist activists rounded up Jews and put them in camps where the Nazis had easy access to them. This is how the chemist (and later celebrated author) Primo Levi was taken prisoner in December 1943, to end up in Auschwitz. 75

  The Salò republic sought revenge against the traitors to Mussolini within Fascism. The republic had its hands on only a few members of the Fascist Grand Council who had voted against Mussolini on July 25, but it executed five of them—including Mussolini’s own son-in-law Count Ciano, the Fascist regime’s former foreign minister—at Verona in January 1944. Even so, all the blood shed by the republic of Salò was only a few drops compared to that spilled by Nazism’s final days.

  As the Allied armies approached in April 1945, Mussolini’s few remaining supporters melted away. Italian Partisans found him on April 28 hidden in the back of a German army truck withdrawing up the western shore of Lake Como, and killed him along with his steadfast young mistress, Clara Petacci, and several Fascist notables. They strung up the bodies in a Milan filling station, after a bitter crowd had mutilated the Duce’s corpse. Only a generation later would Mussolini’s remains, restored to the family in 1957 and buried in his home village of Predappio, become an object of pilgrimage. 76

  Final Thoughts

  The radicalization stage shows us fascism at
its most distinctive. While any regime can radicalize, the depth and force of the fascist impulse to unleash destructive violence, even to the point of self-destruction, sets it apart.

  At this ultimate stage, comparison is hardly possible: only one fascist regime really reached it. A tempting candidate for comparison has been Stalin’s radicalization of the Soviet dictatorship. The Nazi and Soviet cases shared a rejection of the state of law and due process; both subordinated them to the imperatives of History. In other respects, however, fascist radicalization was not identical to the Stalinist form. Fascism idealized violence in a distinctive way, as a virtue proper to a master race. And while the agents of Stalin’s purges knew that they would be covered by the dictator, the Soviet system lacked Nazism’s ingrained competition between party parallel organizations and established elites for the leader’s favor.

  Expansionist war lies at the heart of radicalization. Insofar as Fascist Italy radicalized, it did so most fully in conquered East Africa and in the final paroxysm of the Italian campaign. The Nazi regime reached the outer limits of radicalization with its war of extermination against the Soviet Union. In that specially charged situation Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism’s conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction.77

  Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917–18 and in Franco’s Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. 78 Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. 79 It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler—and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted.

  Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism, so problematical for the earlier stages of fascism, fits here. For here we enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience.

  Liberation from constraints permitted a hard core of the movement’s fanatics to regain the upper hand over their bourgeois allies and carry out some of the initial radical projects. At the outposts of empire, fascism recovered the face-to-face violence of the early days of squadrismo and SA street brawling. One must resist the temptation at this final stage to revert to a highly personalized way of looking at the exercise of power in fascist regimes, with its discredited notions of hoodlums kidnapping the state. The Nazi regime was able to pursue the war with ever mounting intensity only with the continued complicity of the state services and large sectors of the socially powerful.

  Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat.

  Prolonged fascist radicalization over a very long period has never been witnessed. It is even hard to imagine. Can one suppose that even Hitler could keep up the tension into old age? Arranging the succession to a senescent fascist leader is another intriguing but, so far, hypothetical problem. 80 The more normal form of succession to a fascist regime is likely to be decay into a traditional authoritarianism. At that point, there can be progressive liberalization as in post-Franco Spain or perhaps revolution (as in post-Salazar Portugal). But orderly succession is clearly far more of a problem with fascism than with other forms of rule, even communism. Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing. In the long run, therefore, it was not really a solution to the problems of frightened conservatives or liberals.

  The final outcome was that the Italian and German fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. Mussolini had to take his fatal step into war in June 1940 because Fascist absence from Hitler’s victory over France might well fatally loosen his grip on his people. Hitler never stopped imagining further conquests— India, the Americas—until he committed suicide in his besieged bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relation with history" they promised their people.

  CHAPTER 7

  Other Times, Other Places

  Is Fascism Still Possible?

  In chapter 2, I traced the early boundary of fascism easily enough at the moment when mass democracy was entering into full operation and encountering its first heavy weather. Although precursors can be identified before 1914 (we discussed some in chapter 2), adequate space was not available for fascism until after World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Fascist movements could first reach full development only in the outwash from those two tidal waves.

  The outer time limit to fascism is harder to locate. Is fascism over? Is a Fourth Reich or some equivalent in the offing? More modestly, are there conditions under which some kind of neofascism might become a sufficiently powerful player in a political system to influence policy? There is no more insistent or haunting question posed to a world that still aches from wounds that fascisms inflicted on it during 1922–45.

  Important scholars have argued that the fascist period ended in 1945. In 1963 the German philosopher Ernst Nolte wrote in a celebrated book about “fascism in its era" that although fascism still existed after 1945 it had been stripped of real significance.1 Many have agreed with him that fascism was a product of a particular and unique crisis growing out of the cultural pessimism of the 1890s, the turmoil of the first “nationalization of the masses,"2 the strains of World War I, and the incapacity of liberal Democratic regimes to cope with that war’s aftermath, and in particular with the spread of the Bolshevik Revolution.

  The greatest obstacle to the revival of classical fascism after 1945 was the repugnance it had come to inspire. Hitler aroused nausea as gruesome pictures of the liberated camps were released. Mussolini inspired derision. Devastated landscapes testified to the failure of both of them. Hitler’s charred body in the ruins of his Berlin bunker and Mussolini’s corpse strung up by the heels in a seedy Milan filling station marked the extinction by squalor of their charisma.3

  A revival of fascism faced additional obstacles after 1945: the increasing prosperity and seemingly irreversible globalization of the world economy, the triumph of individualistic consumerism,4 the declining availability of war as an instrument of national policy for large nations in the nuclear age, the diminishing credibility of a revolutionary threat. All these postwar developments have suggested to many that fascism as it flourished in Europe between the two world wars could not exist after 1945, at least not in the same form.5

  The end of fascism was opened to doubt in the 1990s by a series of sobering developments: ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; the sharpening of exclusionary nationalisms in postcommunist eastern Europe; spreading “skinhead" violence against immigrants in Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, and Italy; the first participation of a neofascist party in a European government in 1994, when the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, direct descendant of the principal Italian ne
ofascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), joined the first government of Silvio Berlusconi;6 the entry of Jörg Haider’s Freiheitspartei (Freedom Party), with its winks of approval at Nazi veterans, into the Austrian government in February 2000; the astonishing arrival of the leader of the French far Right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, in second place in the first round of the French presidential elections in May 2002; and the meteoric rise of an anti-immigrant but nonconformist outsider, Pym Fortuyn, in the Netherlands in the same month. Finally, a whole universe of fragmented radical Right “grouplets" proliferated, keeping alive a great variety of far Right themes and practices. 7

  Whether or not one believes that fascism can recur depends, of course, on one’s understanding of fascism. Those who warn that fascism is returning tend to present it rather loosely as overtly violent racism and nationalism.8 The author who announced most categorically the death of fascism in 1945 argues that its defining elements—unlimited particular sovereignty, a relish for war, and a society based on violent exclusion— simply have no place in the complex, interdependent post–World War II world.9 The commonest position is that although fascists are still around, the conditions of interwar Europe that permitted them to found major movements and even take power no longer exist.10

  The issue of fascism since 1945 is further clouded by polemical name-calling. The far Right in Europe after 1945 is loudly and regularly accused of reviving fascism; its leaders deny the charges no less adamantly. The postwar movements and parties themselves have been no less broad than interwar fascisms, capable of bringing authentic admirers of Mussolini and Hitler into the same tent with one-issue voters and floating protesters. Their leaders have become adept at presenting a moderate face to the general public while privately welcoming outright fascist sympathizers with coded words about accepting one’s history, restoring national pride, or recognizing the valor of combatants on all sides.