The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  40. Marc Swyngedouw, “The Extreme Right in Belgium: Of a Non-Existent Front National and an Omnipresent Vlaams Blok," in Betz and Immerfall, eds., New Politics, p. 60.

  41. Marc Swyngedouw, “Belgium: Explaining the Relationship between Vlaams Blok and the City of Antwerp," in Betz and Immerfall, eds., New Politics, p. 59.

  42. Betz, Radical Right-Wing Populism, p. 139.

  43. Prowe, “ ‘Classic’ Fascism and the New Radical Right," pp. 289–313, finds some resemblance in programs but profound difference in circumstances.

  44. Hans Rogger, “Russia," in Rogger and Eugen Weber, eds., The European Right (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), p. 491, and Jewish Politics and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 212–32.

  45. Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), pp 16–28.

  46. Michael Cox and Peter Shearman, “After the Fall: Nationalist Extremism in Post-Communist Russia," in Hainsworth, Politics of the Extreme Right, pp. 224–46. Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2001); Erwin Oberländer, “The All-Russian Fascist Party," in Walter Laqueur and George L. Mosse, eds., International Fascism: 1920–1945 (New York: Harper, 1966), pp. 158–73, treats fascism among Russian émigrés in the 1930s.

  47. See articles in Cheles et al., The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe, for details.

  48. Renzo De Felice writes of fascism’s “inseparable link with the crises (moral, economic, social and political) of European society following the First War" in Il Fascismo:Le interpretazioni dei contemporanei e degli storici, rev. ed. (Bari: Laterza, 1998), p. 544. See also Payne, History, pp. 353–54.

  49. See chapter 8, pp. 215–16.

  50. Patrick J. Furlong, Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1991).

  51. Robert M. Levine, The Vargas Regime: The Critical Years, 1934–1938 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), p. 88.

  52. Ibid., pp. 83–85.

  53. Vargas returned to power by election in October 1950 and governed as head of a clientelistic labor party, claiming to be “Father of the Poor," until August 24, 1954, when he committed suicide in the presidential palace while awaiting a military coup. See Robert M. Levine, Father of the Poor? Vargas and His Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

  54. Levine, Vargas Regime, p. 36.

  55. For this and other countries discussed below, see the bibliographical essay.

  56. Argentina was the fifth or sixth wealthiest nation in the world in 1914, based on the export to Europe of beef and wheat from great pampas estates.

  57. Robert D. Crassweller, Perón and the Enigmas of Argentina (New York: Norton, 1987), is particularly informative about U.S. pressures on Argentina during World War II. See also Arthur P. Whitaker, The United States and Argentina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).

  58. His other post, more conventionally powerful, was secretary general of the War Ministry, from which he controlled military appointments. Over the next two years, he also became war minister and vice president.

  59. Joseph A. Page, Perón: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1983), p. 136n. At first a scornful epithet, the term was taken up proudly by the Peronistas. Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 31.

  60. James, Resistance and Integration, p. 11; Frederick C. Turner and José Enrique Miguens, Juan Perón and the Reshaping of Argentina (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1983), p. 4.

  61. Crassweller, Perón and the Enigmas, pp. 106–09, 124.

  62. On April 15, 1953, Peronist action squads burned the Socialist Party’s headquarters as well as the oligarchy’s exclusive Jockey Club. Page, Perón, pp. 271–73. Perón’s regime killed far fewer people, however, than the seven thousand or so murdered by the Argentine military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983.

  63. A classic in this genre is Joseph R. Barager, ed., Why Perón Came to Power: The Background to Peronism in Argentina (New York: Knopf, 1968).

  64. The sociologist Gino Germani, in Authoritarianism, Fascism, and National Populism (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1978), plausibly distinguishes Perón’s “National Populism" from fascism on the basis of the timing of social mobilization. While Perón carried out a “primary mobilization," a first step into mass politics, fascisms, according to Germani, were “secondary mobilizations," an attempt to redirect and discipline an already existing mass politics.

  65. Anti-Semitism existed in Peronist Argentina. The right-wing nationalist groups that sacked Socialist headquarters in April 1953 shouted “Jews! Go back to Moscow!" Page, Perón, p. 272. One can also find anti-Semitic utterances in Vargas’s Brazil, but racism was not central to either regime’s propaganda or popular appeal.

  66. J. M. Taylor, Eva Perón: The Myths of a Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 81. This is the most sophisticated account of Evita’s multiple images from Buenos Aires to Broadway.

  67. Ibid., p. 34.

  68. Sandra McGee Deutsch, Las Derechas: The Extreme Right in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).

  69. Herbert S. Klein, Parties and Political Change in Bolivia (London: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 235, 243–44, 372–74, and Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 199–216.

  70. Gregory J. Kasza, “Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective," in Stein Ugelvik Larsen, ed., Fascism Outside Europe: The

  European Impulse against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism

  (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001), pp. 183–232, reviews Japanese scholarship and analyzes lucidly the appropriateness of the fascist label for imperial Japan. I thank Carol Gluck for this reference.

  71. Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, rev. ed., ed. Ivan Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), esp. chap. 2, “The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism."

  72. George M. Wilson, Revolutionary Nationalist in Japan: Kita Ikki, 1883–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969).

  73. Ben Ami Shillony, Revolt in Japan: The Young Officers and the February 26, 1936, Incident (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).

  74. Miles Fletcher, The Search for a New Order: Intellectuals and Fascism in Prewar Japan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).

  75. Kasza, “Fascism from Above?" pp. 198–99, 228.

  76. Herbert P. Bix, “Rethinking ‘Emperor-System Fascism’: Ruptures and Continuities in Modern Japanese History," Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 14:2 (April-June 1982), pp. 2–19, restates this thesis, influenced by Marxism, and rejects the contrary opinion of most Western scholars, whom he dismisses as “pluralists." The role of class interests is contested. Kasza, “Fascism from Above?," observes that the great Japanese industrial combines, the zaibatsu, “dragged their feet on expansion abroad and militarism at home (though they profited from both" (p. 185).

  77. Gavan McCormack, “Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?" in Bulletin of ConcernedAsian Scholars 14:2 (April-June 1982), p. 29.

  78. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. 228–313.

  79. Paul Brooker, The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

  80. R. P. Dore and Tsutomo Ouchi, “Rural Origins of Japanese Fascism," in James William Morley, ed., Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 181–209, perform a stringent test of the applicability of the Barrington Moore paradigm to Japan.

  81. For bibliography see the bib
liographical essay.

  82. For Pelley, see Leo P. Ribuffo, The Old Christian Right: The Protestant Far Right from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983).

  83. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 7–15, 37–38.

  84. Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York: Knopf, 1982) (radio figures, pp. 83, 92). Lemke got eight hundred thousand votes.

  85. Brinkley, Voices of Protest, pp. 273–83, concludes that while the charismatic bond between Long and Coughlin and their publics recalled fascism, their aims— individual liberty from plutocrats more than the triumph of a national volk—were quite different. The classic T. Harry Williams, Huey Long (New York: Knopf, 1969), pp. 760–62, dismisses the fascist charges.

  86. Alan Crawford, Thunder on the Right: The “New Right” and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Pantheon, 1980).

  87. For the importance of guns in the macho symbolism of both Mussolini and Hitler, see chapter 8, note 61.

  88. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Blacklash," The New Yorker, May 17, 1993, p. 44.

  89. Payne, History, pp. 16, 490, 516.

  90. The Iraqi dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, considered by some to “come closer than any other dictator since 1945" to reproducing the Third Reich (Payne, History,pp. 516–17), was based on the secular Ba’ath Party and tried to crush Shi’ite fundamentalism. Samir al-Khalil, The Monument: Art, Vulgarity, and Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991), portrays the pair of huge arms, created from casts of Saddam’s own arms, holding swords to form triumphal arches over a Baghdad avenue. He does not use the word fascism.

  91. Quotations from interview with General Effi Eitam, representative of the National Religious Party and minister without portfolio in the government of Ariel Sharon, Le Monde, Paris, 7–8 April 2002.

  Chapter 8: What Is Fascism?

  1. For example, Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), p. 270.

  2. Wolfgang Schieder characterizes the early Fascist Party as “a loose bundle of person-oriented power groups who scuffle for power," in “Der Strukturwandel der faschistischen Partei italiens in der phase der Herrschaftsstabilisierung," in Schieder, ed., Der Faschismus als soziale Bewegung (Hamburg: Hoffman und Campe, 1976), p. 71.

  3. See chapter 1, pp. 7–8.

  4. Bertolt Brecht, The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui (London: Methuen, 2002, orig. 1941).

  5. See chapter 1, p. 8.

  6. A few thoughtful Marxists avoided such dogmatisms, among them the Italians Antonio Gramsci, with his reflections on the conditions and limits of Fascist cultural hegemony, and Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1976) (orig. pub. 1935), who recognized authentic popular appeal on pp. 5–7, 120, though both made fascism more class-specific than most contemporary commentators would. Among Germans there was the philosopher Ernst Bloch (p. 209). After 1968, younger Western Marxists were critical of the Stalinist line. E.g., Nikos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship (London: Verso, 1979) (orig. pub. in France in 1970).

  7. See chapter 3, pp. 66–67; chapter 4, p. 100; and chapter 5, pp. 145–46.

  8. See chapter 5, p. 146.

  9. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger, 1965), p. 238, say that Nazi Germany “ceases to be capitalist" when fear replaces confidence. The “fundamental incompatibility" between capitalism and fascism (Alan Milward, quoted approvingly by Payne, A Historyof Fascism, p. 190) might perhaps apply to the final apocalyptic paroxysm of Nazism, but fits poorly the way fascist regimes functioned in more normal times.

  10. Ernst von Weizsäcker, the senior official of the German Foreign Office, recalled Hitler treating British ambassador Neville Henderson to a furious tirade on August 23, 1939, only to slap his thigh and laugh as soon as the door closed behind the ambassador: “Chamberlain won’t survive that conversation. His cabinet will fall this evening." Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London: Odhams, 1952), p. 484. Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 281, agrees that such scenes were “often contrived." Richard Nixon is said to have wanted the North Vietnamese to think he was crazy.

  11. See examples in the bibliographical essay, p. 223.

  12. Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p. xxvi and passim.

  13. Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, ed. Mary Higgins and Chester M. Raphael (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1978) (orig. pub. in 1933).

  14. See the bibliographical essay, p. 226, for examples.

  15. For example, Luchino Visconti, “The Damned." For Pasolini, see David Forgacs, “Days of Sodom: The Fascist-Perversion Equation in Films of the 1960s and 1970s," in R. J. B. Bosworth and Patrizia Dogliani, eds., Italian Fascism: History, Memory, and Representation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 195–215. In a somewhat different register, Saul Friedländer assailed the treatment of Nazi brutality as spectacle in Reflections of Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death (New York: Harper, 1984).

  16. Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986), probes the astonishing capacity of doctors involved in the selection process at Auschwitz to isolate their normal family lives from their gruesome daytime duties.

  17. Talcott Parsons, “Democracy and Social Structure in Pre-Nazi Germany," in Parsons, Essays in Sociological Theory, rev. ed. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954), pp. 104–23 (orig. pub. 1942). In general, see Stephen P. Turner, Sociology Responds to Fascism (London: Routledge, 1992).

  18. Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephan Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), part II, “Non-Contemporaneity and Intoxication," pp. 37–185 (quotations from pp. 53, 57, 97).

  19. The theory of uneven development and survival of pre-industrial elites was powerfully restated by Jürgen Kocha, “Ursachen des Nationalsozialismus," Aus Politikund Zeitgeschichte (Beilage zur Wochenzeitung Das Parlament ) 21 (June 1980), pp. 3–15. See the reply by Geoff Eley, “What Produces Fascism: Preindustrial Traditions or a Crisis of the Capitalist State?" Politics and History 12 (1983), pp. 53–82.

  20. See the discussion in chapter 3, pp. 68–73.

  21. The classic statement is William Kornhauser, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959). A precursor was Peter Drucker, in The End of EconomicMan: A Study of the New Totalitarianism (London: John Day, 1939), p. 53: “Society ceases to be a community of individuals bound together by a common purpose and becomes a chaotic hubbub of purposeless isolated monads." This approach has been convincingly refuted by Bernt Hagtvet, “The Theory of Mass Society and the Collapse of the Weimar Republic: A Re-Examination," in Stein U. Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet, and Jan Petter Myklebust, eds., Who Were the Fascists: Social Roots of EuropeanFascism (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1980), pp. 66–117.

  22. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, rev. ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), esp. pp. 305–40 on “the masses" and “the mob."

  23. Horst Gies shows how the Nazis successfully penetrated and used existing agrarian organizations in “The NSDAP and Agrarian Organizations in the Final Phase of the Weimar Republic," in Henry Ashby Turner, Jr., Nazism and the Third Reich (New York: Quadrangle, 1972), pp. 45–88. Particularly relevant here are the studies by Rudy Koshar, cited in the bibliographical essay, p. 225, of how the Nazis took over a rich fabric of “apolitical" associations in German towns.

  24. William Sheridan Allen, The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a SingleTown, 1922–1945, rev. ed. (New York: Franklin Watts, 1984), p. 17. Allen is particularly revealing about the parallel worlds of socialist and nonsocialist organizations and how the Nazis exploited that polarity. See pp. 15ff, 55, 298.

  25. See
chapter 1, note 49.

  26. Jon S. Cohen, “Was Italian Fascism a Developmental Dictatorship?" EconomicHistory Review, 2nd series, 41:1 (February 1988), pp. 95–113. Rolf Petri, Von der Autarkie zum Wirtschaftswunder: Wirtschaftspolitik und industrielle Wandel in Italien, 1935–1963 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), agrees that the Fascist war economy was a “disaster" but finds it impossible to tell whether Italian emergence as an industrial society in the 1960s was impeded or hastened by the Fascist autarky stage.

  27. For example, Anthony J. Joes, Fascism in the Contemporary World: Ideology, Evolution, and Resurgence (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1978); A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion in Radical Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974).

  28. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1963), chap. 5, “Fascism—Left, Right, and Center." Arno Mayer, “The Lower Middle Class as Historical Problem," Journal of Modern History 75:3 (October 1975), pp. 409–36, takes class seriously but examines this category critically.

  29. For statistical work on the German case, now quite sophisticated, see the bibliographic essay, pp. 227–28. The much shakier Italian data are studied by Jens Petersen, “Ellettorato e base sociale del fascismo negli anni venti," Studi storici 3 (1975), pp. 627–69. William Brustein, “The ‘Red Menace’ and the Rise of Italian Fascism," American Sociological Review 56 (October 1991), pp. 652–64, applies rational choice theory to the election of 1921 and finds that Fascist voters chose that party not solely out of fear of socialism but because they preferred the Fascists’ defense of private property.

  30. Hans Mommsen, in “Zur Verschränkung traditioneller und faschistischer Führungsgruppen in Deutschland beim Ubergang von der Bewegung zur System-phase," in Mommsen, Der Nationalsozialismus und die Deutsche Gesellschaft: Ausgewählte Aufsätze, ed. Lutz Niethammer and Bernd Weisbrod (Reinbeck bei

  Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991), p. 47, claims that before September 1930 only about 40 percent of party members were relatively permanent.