IX. Fascist or Neofascist Movements since 1945
A particularly enlightening article with which one may suitably begin is Diethelm Prowe, “ ‘Classic’ Fascism and the New Radical Right in Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts," Contemporary European History 3:3 (1994), pp. 289–313. See also a review article surveying recent scholarly work by Roger Karapin, “Radical Right and Neo-Fascist Parties in Western Europe," Comparative Politics 30:2 (January 1998), pp. 213–34.
Useful recent descriptions of a broad range of these movements include Paul Hainsworth, ed., The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), and The Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margin to the Mainstream(London: Pinter, 2000); Peter H. Merkl and Leonard Weinberg, eds., Encounterswith the Contemporary Radical Right (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993); Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson, and Michalina Vaughan, eds., The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe (London: Longman, 1995); Hans-Georg Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism in Western Europe (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); Hans-Georg Betz and Stefan Immerfall, eds., The New Politics of the Right: Neo-Populist Parties and Movements in Established Democracies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998); and Herbert Kitschelt, in collaboration with Andrew J. McGann, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Sabrina P. Ramet, ed., The Radical Right in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). Among works in other languages, Piero Ignazi, L’estrema destra in Europa: Da Le Pen a Haider, 2nd ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000), is particularly thoughtful and well informed, though, despite its title, it deals only with western Europe.
For particular countries, one can start with the national articles in the works cited immediately above. For Italy, the most authoritative works now are Franco Ferraresi, “The Radical Right in Postwar Italy," Politics and Society 16 (March 1988), pp. 71–119; and Threat to Democracy: The Radical Right in Italy after the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), a revision of the 1984 edition; and Piero Ignazi, Il polo escluso: Profilo del Movimento sociale italiano, 2nd ed. (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1998).
For Germany, Rand C. Lewis, A Nazi Legacy: Right-Wing Extremism in Postwar Germany (New York: Praeger, 1991), provides a quick survey. In addition to good articles on Germany in the collective works already listed, see Richard Stöss, Politics Against Democracy: Right-Wing Extremism in West Germany (Oxford, NY: Berg, 1991); Uwe Backes and Patrick Moreau, Die Extreme Rechte in Deutschland (Munich: Akademische Verlag, 1993); and Patrick Moreau, Les héritiers du IIIè Reich: L’extrème droite allemande de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1994).
Stephen Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Tradition, Tendencies, and Movements (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001), assesses the post-1989 extreme right in Russia.
The best-informed historical survey of the many fascist and near-fascist groups in France since 1945 is Pierre Milza, Fascisme français: Passé et présent (Paris: Flammarion, 1987). Joseph Algazy, La tentation neo-fasciste en France (Paris: Fayard, 1984), is thorough for the earlier period. Authoritative recent studies of Front National voters are Pascal Perrineau, Le symptome Le Pen: Radiographie des électeurs du Front National (Paris: Fayard, 1997), and Nonna Mayer, Ces français qui votent Le Pen (Paris: Flammarion, 1999). English-language studies include Jonathan Marcus, The National Front and French Politics (London: Macmillan, 1995), and Harvey G. Simmons, The French National Front (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996).
Neofascism in Austria is examined most recently in Ruth Wodak and Anton Pelinka, The Haider Phenomenon in Austria (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2002).
NOTES
Chapter 1: Introduction
1. Friedrich Engels, 1895 preface to Karl Marx, The Class Struggles in France (1848–1850), in The Marx–Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 571.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 662 (vol. II, part 4, chap. 6).
3. Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 79–80.
4. I capitalize Fascism when I refer to the Italian movement, party, and regime; I leave fascism in the lower case when I refer to the general phenomenon.
5. See Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat: L’imagerie et la symbolique républicaine de 1789 à 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), pp. 28–29, 108–09, and Marianneau pouvoir (Paris: Seuil, 1989), pp. 77, 83.
6. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’sItaly (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 95–99.
7. Mussolini had been a leading figure in the revolutionary wing of the Italian Socialist Party, hostile to reformism and suspicious of the compromises of the party’s parliamentary wing. In 1912, aged only twenty-nine, he was made editor of the party’s newspaper, Avanti. He was expelled from the party in fall 1914 by its pacifist majority for advocating Italian entry into World War I.
8. Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Paris: Fayard, 1999), pp. 174, 176, 189. As early as 1911, Mussolini was calling the local socialist group he led in Forlì a fascio. R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini (London: Arnold, 2002), p. 52.
9. This term is explained on pp. 5–6.
10. After the defeat of Italian armies at Caporetto in November 1917, a large group of liberal and conservative deputies and senators formed a fascio parlamentare di difesa nazionale to rally opinion in support of the war effort.
11. The list swelled later with opportunistic additions when belonging among the founders—the sansepolcristi—became advantageous. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920 (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), p. 504.
12. This term is explained on p. 6.
13. An English version of Mussolini’s speeches of that day is published in Charles F. Delzell, Mediterranean Fascism, 1919–1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 7–11. The fullest accounts are De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, pp. 504–09, and Milza, Mussolini, pp. 236–40.
14. Text of June 6, 1919, in De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, pp. 744–45. English versions in Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. 3–6, and Delzell, pp. 12–13.
15. Mussolini arrived at this self-dramatizing number by counting all the fragments, large and small, that injured him in February 1917 during a training exercise with a grenade launcher.
16. A helpful introduction to syndicalism is Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas (London: Macmillan, 1990). Revolutionary syndicalism appealed more to the fragmented and poorly organized workers of Spain and Italy than to the numerous and well-organized workers of northern Europe, who had something to gain by reformist legislation and tactical strikes in support of specific workplace demands. Indeed it may have attracted more intellectuals than workers. See Peter N. Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor: Cause without Rebels (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971).
17. Zeev Sternhell et al., The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 160ff; David Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (Bari: Laterza, 1975), pp. 134–52.
18. Published in the Paris daily Le Figaro on March 15, 1909. Quoted here from Adrian Lyttelton, ed., Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1973), p. 211.
19. The first Risorgimento, or revival, inspired by the humanist nationalism of Giuseppe Mazzini, had united Italy during 1859–70.
20. Emilio Gentile, Il mito dello stato nuovo dall’antigiolittismo al fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1982); Walter Adamson, Avant-garde Florence: From Moder
nism to Fascism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
21. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, p. 521.
22. Whether the Nazi party was “fascist" or something sui generis is intensely debated. We will explain in due course why we consider Nazism a form of fascism. For the moment we note simply that Hitler kept a monumental bust of the Duce in his office at Nazi Party headquarters in the Brown House in Munich (Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris [New York: Norton, 1999], p. 343). Even at the peak of Nazi power, when most Nazis preferred not to lend Italy priority by labeling Germany “fascist," Hitler still called himself Mussolini’s “sincere admirer and disciple." A letter in these terms to the Duce on October 21, 1942, the twentieth anniversary of the March on Rome, is published in Meir Michaelis, “I rapporti fra fascismo e nazismo prima dell’avvento di Hitler al potere (1922–1933)," Rivista storica italiana, 85:3 (1973), p. 545. The most recent examination of Hitler’s ties to Mussolini is Wolfgang Schieder, “The German Right and Italian Fascism," in Hans Mommsen, ed., The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality: New Perspectives on German History (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 39–57.
23. Mussolini’s own words, mocking his enemies’ failure to understand “the noble passion of Italian youth." Speech of January 3, 1925, in Eduardo and Duilio Susmel, eds., Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, vol. XXI (Florence: La Fenice, 1956), pp. 238ff.
24. Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918–1939, selection and foreword by Herman Kesten, trans. from the German by Richard and Clara Winston (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1982), p. 136 and passim. Mann’s repugnance for Nazi “barbarism" did not prevent him from confessing on April 20, 1933, to “a certain amount of understanding for the rebellion against the Jewish element" (p. 153).
25. Quoted in Alberto Aquarone and Maurizio Vernassa, eds., Il regime fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1974), p. 48.
26. Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus, 1946), trans. as The German Catastrophe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).
27. Resolution of the Communist International, July 1924, quoted in David Beetham, ed., Marxists in Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism from the Interwar Period (Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 1983), pp. 152–53.
28. Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 262.
29. The most thorough skeptic is Gilbert Allardyce, “What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept," American Historical Review 84:2 (April 1979), pp. 367–88.
30. Some 1940s works, colored by wartime propaganda, saw Nazism as the logical fulfillment of German national culture. See, among others, W. M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941), and Rohan d’Olier Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1942). The principal French example is Edmond-Joachim Vermeil, L’Allemagne: Essai d’explication (Paris: Gallimard, 1940). The most depressing contemporary example is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Knopf, 1996), depressing because the author diverted a valuable study of sadism among the rank-and-file perpetrators of the Holocaust into a primitive demonization of all German people, thereby obscuring both numerous non-German accomplices and some humane Germans.
31. Alexander Stille, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (New York: Penguin, 1993), provides interesting examples of wealthy Jewish backers from Turin and Ferrara, though Jews also figured in the anti-Fascism resistance, notably in the movement Giustizia e Libertà. When the Italian racial laws were enacted in 1938, one Italian Jewish adult in three was a Fascist Party member (p. 22).
32. Philip V. Canistraro and Brian R. Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman (New York: Morrow, 1993).
33. Susan Zuccotti, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, Survival (New York: Basic Books, 1987), p. 24.
34. Authoritarian dictatorships govern through preexisting conservative forces (churches, armies, organized economic interests) and seek to demobilize public opinion, while fascists govern through a single party and try to generate public enthusiasm. We discuss this distinction more fully in chapter 8, pp. 216–18.
35. Some authors consider anti-Semitism the heart of the matter; I see it as instrumental. Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), roots totalitarianism in a fermenting brew of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and atomized mass society. She did not think Mussolini’s Italy was totalitarian (pp. 257–59, 308).
36. Otto Wagener, chief of staff of the SA and head of the economic policy office of the NSDAP before 1933, quoted in Henry A. Turner, ed., Hitler aus nächster Nähe (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1978), p. 374. Wagener nearly became economics minister in June 1933. See chapter 5, p. 146.
37. The Nazis promised land redistribution in Point 17 of their 25 Points of February 24, 1920 (Jeremy Noakes and Geoffrey Pridham, Nazism 1919–1945 , vol. I: The Rise to Power, 1919–1934 [Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998], p. 15). This was the only one of the “unalterable" 25 Points that Hitler explicitly revised later when, after 1928, he turned his attention to trying to recruit family farmers to his movement. The order of March 6, 1930, “completing" Point 17 and affirming the inviolability of private farm property (except that of Jews) is in Hitler Reden, Schriften, Anordnungen,Februar 1925 bis Januar 1933, edited by the Institut für Zeitgeschichte (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1995), vol. III, part 3, pp. 115–20. An English version appears in Norman Baynes, ed., The Speeches of Adolf Hitler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1942), vol. I, p. 105.
38. Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The Nazi anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied" (Horst Wessel Song), memorialized a young Nazi ruffian killed in such a brawl, omitting that the issue was a quarrel with his landlady. See Peter Longerich, Die braune Bataillonen: Geschichte der SA (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1989), p. 138.
39. “If there was one thing all Fascists and National Socialists agreed on, it was their hostility to capitalism." Eugen Weber, Varieties of Fascism (New York: Van Nostrand, 1964), p. 47. Weber noted, of course, that opportunism limited the practical effect of this hostility. See also Eugen Weber, “Revolution? Counter-Revolution? What Revolution?" Journal of Contemporary History 9:2 (April 1974), pp. 3–47, republished in Walter Laqueur, ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 435–67.
40. For Mussolini’s early switch from the proletariat to “productive forces" as the basis of a renewed nation, see Sternhell et al., Birth, pp. 12, 106, 160, 167, 175, 179, 182, 219.
41. Authors who lump together these two very different ways of being antibourgeois are simply not reading closely. A recent example is the assertion by the great French historian of the French Revolution François Furet, in repudiation of his own communist youth, that both fascism and communism spring from a common self-hatred by young bourgeois. See The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communismin the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 4, 14.
42. T. W. Mason, “The Primacy of Politics—Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany," in Jane Caplan, ed., Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class: Essays by Tim Mason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 53–76. (First published in German in Das Argument 41 [Dec. 1966].)
43. The issue of “fascist revolution" is dealt with more fully in chapter 5, pp. 141–47.
44. When Mussolini abandoned socialism is a matter of dispute. His principal Italian biographer, Renzo De Felice, thinks Mussolini still considered himself a socialist in 1919 (Mussolini il rivoluzionario, pp. 485, 498, 519). Milza, Mussolini, thinks he ceased to consider himself a socialist in early 1918 when he changed the subtitle of his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia from “socialist daily" to “daily for warriors and producers," but that even in 1919 he had not yet clearly opted for counterrevolution (pp.
210, 228). Sternhell et al., Birth, p. 212, thinks the failure of Red Week (June 1914) in northern Italian industrial cities “put an end to Mussolini’s socialism." Emilio Gentile says that Mussolini’s expulsion from the PSI in September 1914 started a long ideological evolution, but that Mussolini had always been a “heretical" socialist, more Nietzschean than Marxist (Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (1918–1925), 2nd ed., [Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996], pp. 61–93). Bosworth, Mussolini, p. 107, agrees on the timing but suspects that Mussolini was an opportunist for whom socialism was merely the conventional means of ascent for a provincial arriviste. The heart of the matter is how to interpret his lingering verbal commitment to “revolution," a subject to which we will return.
45. This current was stronger among the Nazis (e.g., Walther Darré) and central European fascists than in Italy, but Mussolini exalted peasant life and tried to keep Italians on the land. Paul Corner, in “Fascist Agrarian Policy and the Italian Economy in the Interwar Years," in J. A. Davis, ed., Gramsci and Italy’s Passive Revolution(London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 239–74, suspects this was mainly to keep the unemployed out of the cities, and in no way hindered an economic policy that favored large landowners. Alexander Nützenadel, Landwirtschaft, Staat, und Autarkie: Agrarpolitik im faschistischen Italien, Bibliothek des Deutschen Historischen Instituts in Rom, Band 86 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997), p. 45ff, thinks Mussolini wanted even before power to finish the Risorgimento by integrating the peasants.
46. The Duce drove his own red Alfa Romeo sports car (Milza, Mussolini, pp. 227, 318), sometimes accompanied by his lion cub. Hitler loved to be driven fast in a powerful Mercedes, which the company sold him at half price as advertisement. See Bernard Bellon, Mercedes in Peace and War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 232.
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