The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  Assessing Latin American dictatorships in the optic of fascism is a perilous intellectual enterprise. At worst, it can become an empty labeling exercise. At best, however, it can sharpen our image of the classical fascisms. To compare properly, one must distinguish among various levels of similarity and difference. The similarities are found in the mechanisms of rule, in the techniques of propaganda and image manipulation, and occasionally in specific borrowed policies such as corporatist economic organization. The differences become more apparent when one examines the social and political settings and the relation of these regimes to society. The surgeons’ scalpels could look similar, but in Latin America they were operating on different bodies than in Europe.

  Both Vargas and Perón took power from oligarchies rather than from failed democracies, and both subsequently broadened political participation. They ruled over only partly formed nations, whose disparate populations and factious local bosses they sought to integrate into unified national states, whereas classical fascist dictators ruled over already established nation-states obsessed by threats to their unity, energy, and rank. Hitler’s vision of a perfect Germany sullied by communists and Jews (identical, in his mind) had their parallel in the Brazilian Integralistas and the Argentine Nacionalistas, but Vargas and Perón marginalized them and alarmed them with their populism.68 Neither Vargas nor Perón felt called to exterminate any group. Their police, though harsh and unchecked, punished individual enemies rather than eliminated whole categories, as Hitler’s SS did. Mussolini’s less murderous effort to complete the creation of modern Italians worthy of Romanità forms a closer parallel, but he was as dedicated as Hitler to expansive war, a project altogether absent in Vargas and Perón.

  In sum, the similarities seem matters of tools or instruments, borrowed during fascism’s apogee, while the differences concern more basic matters of structure, function, and relation to society. The Latin American dictatorships are best considered national-populist developmental dictatorships with fascist trappings, perhaps distantly comparable to Mussolini but hardly at all to Hitler (despite wartime sympathy for the Axis).

  Once we have established that fully authentic fascism did not exist in even the most advanced Latin American countries during 1930–50, we can pass more rapidly over some of the other Latin American movements and regimes that have been linked to fascism. Aside from small pro-Axis factions in Chile and Peru, the other main example was the “military socialism" of Colonel David Toro in Bolivia in 1936–37 and his successor, Germán Busch, in 1937–39, with its “Legion" of war veterans, its state syndicalism, and its effort to construct a nation-state out of disparate Indian and European components via charismatic dictatorship.69

  Imperial Japan, the most industrialized country outside the West and the one most powerfully influenced by a selective adoption of things Western, was the other non-European regime most often called fascist. During World War II, Allied propagandists easily lumped imperial Japan with its Axis partners. Nowadays, while most Western scholars consider imperial Japan something other than fascist, Japanese scholars, and not only Marxists, commonly interpret it as “fascism from above."70

  Fascism in interwar Japan can be approached in two ways. One can focus on the influence “from below" of intellectuals and national regeneration movements that advocated a program closely resembling fascism, only to be crushed by the regime. The other approach focuses upon the actions “from above" of imperial institutions. It asks whether the expansionist militarized dictatorship set up in the 1930s did not constitute a distinctive form of “emperor-system fascism."71

  Japan had moved several steps toward democracy in the 1920s. In 1926 all adult males received the vote, and even though the appointed upper house and privy council remained powerful and the army escaped parliamentary control, the cabinet was normally headed by the leader of the largest party in the lower house. Among the many opinions heard then were those of Kita Ikki, who has been called an authentic Japanese fascist. Kita’s “General Outline of Measures for the Reconstruction of Japan" (1919) advocated state restrictions upon the industrialists and landowners whom he saw as the main barrier to national unification and regeneration. Once free of the division and drag of competitive capitalism, according to Kita, Japan would become the center of a new Asia independent of European domination.72

  Japan’s fledgling democracy did not survive the crises of 1931. The Great Depression had already brought poverty to the countryside, and, starting in September 1931, Japanese military leaders used a pretext to invade Manchuria. Restless junior officers, angered by fruitless attempts by the lower house to limit military expansion and influenced in some cases by the works of Kita Ikki, founded secret societies with names like the Cherry Blossom Association and the Blood Pledge Corps. They tried by assassinations and coup attempts to install a dictatorship under the emperor that would pursue national regeneration by a program of state economic control, social leveling, and expansion. In the most ambitious of these, rebellious young officers occupied downtown Tokyo on February 26, 1936, and killed the finance minister and other officials.73

  After this insurrection was put down, Kita Ikki was among those executed. The emperor himself thus ended what has been called Japanese “fascism from below." Since 1932 parliamentary party cabinets had given way to “national unity" governments dominated by senior military officers and bureaucrats, and that process accelerated after the repression of the 1936 rebellion. In June 1937, Prince Konoe Fumimaro, an aristocrat who had been president of the Chamber of Peers and who opposed government by parties, became prime minister (1937–39). In July 1937 the Japanese military instigated an incident in China, beginning eight years of total war on the mainland. The Konoe cabinet supported this escalation and mobilized the nation for war. Prime minister again in July 1940, Prince Konoe established an overtly totalitarian domestic “New Order" intended to place a regenerated Japan at the head of what came to be called a “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere."

  Authentic fascists did appear in Japan in the late 1930s, when Nazi success was dazzling. The Eastern Way Society of the black-shirted Seigo Nakano, “the Japanese Hitler," won 3 percent of the vote in the 1942 election. Nakano, however, was put under house arrest. The Showa Research Assocation was a more scholarly group of intellectuals who drew explicitly upon fascist formulas for popular mobilization and economic organization. Konoe had been advised by the Showa Research Association. In practice, however, Prince Konoe quietly set aside all the solidarist and anticapitalist features of these intellectuals’ proposals.74

  In summary, the Japanese government decided to pick and choose within the fascist menu and adopt a certain number of its measures of corporatist economic organization and popular control in a “selective revolution" by state action, while at the same time suppressing the messy popular activism of authentically (though derivatively) fascist movements.75

  The militarist expansionist dictatorship that gradually came into being in Japan between 1931 and 1940 is called fascist by some because it consisted of emergency rule by an alliance among the imperial authority, big business, senior functionaries, and the military in defense of threatened class interests.76 But even if imperial Japan indubitably drew upon fascist models and shared important features with fascism, the Japanese variant of fascism was imposed by rulers in the absence of a single mass party or popular movement, and indeed in disregard of, or even in opposition to, those Japanese intellectuals who were influenced by European fascism. “It was as if fascism had been established in Europe as a result of the crushing of Mussolini and Hitler."77

  The American sociologist Barrington Moore proposed a longer-term explanation for the emergence of military dictatorship in Japan. Seeking the ultimate roots of dictatorship and democracy in different routes toward the capitalist transformation of agriculture, Moore noted that Britain allowed an independent rural gentry to enclose its estates and expel from the countryside “surplus" labor who were then “free" to work in its precoc
ious industries. British democracy could rest upon a stable, conservative countryside and a large urban middle class fed by upwardly mobile labor. Germany and Japan, by contrast, industrialized rapidly and late while maintaining unchanged a traditional landlord-peasant agriculture. Thereafter they were obliged to hold in check all at once fractious workers, squeezed petty bourgeois, and peasants, either by force or by manipulation. This conflict-ridden social system, moreover, provided only limited markets for its own products. Both Germany and Japan dealt with these challenges by combining internal repression with external expansion, aided by the slogans and rituals of a right-wing ideology that sounded radical without really challenging the social order.78

  To Barrington Moore’s long-term analysis of lopsided modernization, one could add further short-term twentieth-century similarities between the German and Japanese situations: the vividness of the perception of a threat from the Soviet Union (Russia had made territorial claims against Japan since the Japanese victory of 1905), and the necessity to adapt traditional political and social hierarchies rapidly to mass politics. Imperial Japan was even more successful than Nazi Germany in using modern methods of mobilization and propaganda to integrate its population under traditional authority. 79

  Moore’s perceived similarities between German and Japanese development patterns and social structures have not been fully convincing to Japan specialists. Agrarian landlords cannot be shown to have played a major role in giving imperial Japan its peculiar mix of expansionism and social control. And if imperial Japanese techniques of integration were very successful, it was mostly because Japanese society was so coherent and its family structure so powerful.80

  Imperial Japan, finally, despite undoubted influence from European fascism and despite some structural analogies to Germany and Italy, faced less critical problems than those two countries. The Japanese faced no imminent revolutionary threat, and needed to overcome neither external defeat nor internal disintegration (though they feared it, and resented Western obstacles to their expansion in Asia). Though the imperial regime used techniques of mass mobilization, no official party or autonomous grassroots movement competed with the leaders. The Japanese empire of the period 1932–45 is better understood as an expansionist military dictatorship with a high degree of state-sponsored mobilization than as a fascist regime.

  Dictatorial regimes in Africa and Latin America that aided American or European interests (resource extraction, investment privileges, strategic support in the cold war) and were, in return, propped up by Western protectors have been called “client fascism," “proxy fascism," or “colonial fascism." One thinks here of Chile under General Pinochet (1974–90) or Western protectorates in Africa like Seko-Seso Mobutu’s Congo (1965–97). These client states, however odious, cannot legitimately be called fascist, because they neither rested on popular acclaim nor were free to pursue expansionism. If they permitted the mobilization of public opinion, they risked seeing it turn against their foreign masters and themselves. They are best considered traditional dictatorships or tyrannies supported from outside.

  The United States itself has never been exempt from fascism. Indeed, antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. 81 In the crisis-ridden 1930s, as in other democracies, derivative fascist movements were conspicuous in the United States: the Protestant evangelist Gerald B. Winrod’s openly pro-Hitler Defenders of the Christian Faith with their Black Legion; William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts (the initials “SS" were intentional);82 the veteran-based Khaki Shirts (whose leader, one Art J. Smith, vanished after a heckler was killed at one of his rallies); and a host of others. Movements with an exotic foreign look won few followers, however. George Lincoln Rockwell, flamboyant head of the American Nazi Party from 1959 until his assassination by a disgruntled follower in 1967, 83 seemed even more “un-American" after the great anti-Nazi war.

  Much more dangerous are movements that employ authentically American themes in ways that resemble fascism functionally. The Klan revived in the 1920s, took on virulent anti-Semitism, and spread to cities and the Middle West. In the 1930s, Father Charles E. Coughlin gathered a radio audience estimated at forty million around an anticommunist, anti–Wall Street, pro–soft money, and—after 1938—anti-Semitic message broadcast from his church in the outskirts of Detroit. For a moment in early 1936 it looked as if his Union Party and its presidential candidate, North Dakota congressman William Lemke, might overwhelm Roosevelt.84 The plutocrat-baiting governor Huey Long of Louisiana had authentic political momentum until his assassination in 1935, but, though frequently labeled fascist at the time, he was more accurately a share-the-wealth demagogue.85 The fundamentalist preacher Gerald L. K. Smith, who had worked with both Coughlin and Long, turned the message more directly after World War II to the “Judeo-Communist conspiracy" and had a real impact. Today a “politics of resentment" rooted in authentic American piety and nativism sometimes leads to violence against some of the very same “internal enemies" once targeted by the Nazis, such as homosexuals and defenders of abortion rights.86

  Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic set-backs and polarization for these fringe groups to find powerful allies and enter the mainstream. I half expected to see emerge after 1968 a movement of national reunification, regeneration, and purification directed against hirsute antiwar protesters, black radicals, and “degenerate" artists. I thought that some of the Vietnam veterans might form analogs to the Freikorps of 1919 Germany or the Italian Arditi, and attack the youths whose demonstrations on the steps of the Pentagon had “stabbed them in the back." Fortunately I was wrong (so far). Since September 11, 2001, however, civil liberties have been curtailed to popular acclaim in a patriotic war upon terrorists.

  The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.

  Around such reassuring language and symbols and in the event of some redoubtable setback to national prestige, Americans might support an enterprise of forcible national regeneration, unification, and purification. Its targets would be the First Amendment, separation of Church and State (creches on the lawns, prayers in schools), efforts to place controls on gun ownership,87 desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.

  Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has detected a “regrettably fascist ring" in the assertion by some African-American nationalists of “the redemptive power of Afrocentricity" against “European decadence" through “the submission of their own wills into the collective will of our people."88 The classification of peoples advanced by Professor Leonard Jeffries, formerly of the City University of New York, as “sun people" (Africans) and “ice people" (Europeans), and his conspiratorial view that the “ice people" have tried through history to exterminate the “sun people," sound that note even more loudly. If one were to add to this Manichean sense of victimization an exaltation of remedial violence against both external enemies and internal slackers, one would come close to fascism. But such a movement within a historically excluded minority would have so little opportunity to wield genuine power that, in the last analysis, any comparison to authentic fascisms seems far-fetched. A subjugated minority may employ rhetoric that resembles early fascism, but it can hardly embark on i
ts own program of internal dictatorship and purification and territorial expansionism.

  I come now to the difficult issue of whether religion may serve as the functional equivalent of fascism to regenerate and unite a humiliated and vengeful people. Was Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini a fascist regime? What about Hindu fundamentalism in India, al-Qaeda among Muslim fundamentalists, and the Taliban in Afghanistan? Would Protestant fundamentalism play this function for Americans? Payne has argued that fascism requires the space created by secularization, because a religious fascism would inevitably limit its leader not only by the cultural power of the clergy but by “the precepts and values of traditional religion."89

  This argument applies best to Europe. But conditions there may have been peculiar. The anticlericalism of the first European fascisms was a matter of historical circumstance; both Italian and German nationalism had traditionally been directed against the Catholic Church. Mussolini and Hitler were both nurtured in somewhat different anticlerical traditions: in Mussolini’s case revolutionary syndicalism, in Hitler’s case anti-Habsburg pan-Germanism. This historical peculiarity of the original fascisms does not mean that future integrist movements could not build upon a religion in place of a nation, or as the expression of national identity. Even in Europe, religion-based fascisms were not unknown: the Falange Española, Belgian Rexism, the Finnish Lapua Movement, and the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael are all good examples, even if we exclude the Catholic authoritarian regimes of 1930s Spain, Austria, and Portugal.