The Anatomy of Fascism
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31. Philippe C. Schmitter contrasts movements that “vacuum up" discontent from a wide variety of sources with regimes that attract “bandwagoners" in his penetrating article “The Social Origins, Economic Bases, and Political Imperatives of Authoritarian Rule in Portugal," in Stein U. Larsen et al., Who Were the Fascists, p. 437.
32. Mathilde Jamin, Zwischen den Klassen: Zur Sozialstruktur der SA-Führerschaft (Wuppertal: P. Hammer, 1984); Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity, pp. 238, 255; Christoph Schmidt, “Zu den motiven ‘alter Kämpfer’ in der NSDAP," in Detlev Peukert and Jürgen Reulecke, eds., Die Reihe fast geschlossen: Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alltags unterm Nationalsozialismus (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer, 1981).
33. Jens Petersen has explored the term’s origins thoroughly in several works, most recently “Die Geschichte des Totalitarismusbegriffs in Italien," in Hans Meier, ed., ‘Totalitarismus’ und ‘Politische Religionen’: Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1996), pp. 15–36. In English see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 14–16.
34. E.g., Arendt, Origins, p. 257–59, 308.
35. Dante L. Germino, The Italian Fascist Party in Power: A Study in Totalitarian Rule (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959), and Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo stato nel regime fascista (Rome: La Nuova Italia Scientifica, 1995), make the strongest claims for the authentically totalitarian nature of Fascist rule in Italy.
36. Edward N. Peterson, The Limits of Hitler’s Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969). For an approach to the Soviet Union that refuses to reduce everything to impulses from above, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Stalin’s Peasants (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
37. Friedrich and Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship, p. 22.
38. Benjamin R. Barber, “The Conceptual Foundations of Totalitarianism," in Carl J. Friedrich, Michael Curtis, and Benjamin R. Barber, Totalitarianism in Perspective:Three Views (New York: Praeger, 1969).
39. Karl Dietrich Bracher, for example, preferred the totalitarian to the fascist concept because the latter, he thought, obscured the difference between dictatorial and democratic political systems, which, for Marxists, were just alternate forms of “bourgeois hegemony." See Bracher, Zeitgeschlichtliche Kontroversen: Um Faschismus, Totalitarismus, Demokratie (Munich: R. Piper, 1976), chaps. 1 and 2, Schlüsselwörter in der Geschichte: Mit einer Betrachtung zum Totalitarismusproblem (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1978), pp. 33ff, Zeit der Ideologien: Eine Geschichte politischen Denkens im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1982), pp. 122ff, 155ff. A West German example of the other side is Reinhard Kühnl, Formen bürgerlicher Herrschaft (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1971).
40. It informs Michael Burleigh’s brilliant indictment of Nazi viciousness, The Third Reich (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). Martin Malia, Russia under Western Eyes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 331, dismisses fascism as a category.
41. Gleason, Totalitarianism, traces the entire debate lucidly.
42. Margaretta Buber-Neumann experienced both, and wrote a classic memoir about it: Under Two Dictators (New York: Doubleday, 1949). We refer here, of course, to concentration camps like Dachau rather than to extermination camps like Auschwitz.
43. Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism, trans. from the French by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 15, argues that Stalin was responsible for four times as many deaths as Hitler, though it denies that it seeks to establish a “hierarchy of cruelty" based on a “macabre comparative system."
44. In addition to Jews, candidates for elimination included Slavs, Gypsies, the insane or chronically ill, and Jehovah’s Witnesses. Homosexuals are often included in this list, but although the Nazi regime enforced Article 175 of the German penal code vigorously and jailed thousands of homosexuals, it did not execute them systematically. Hitler himself, though he justified his murder of Ernst Röhm in June 1934 as an action against homosexuality, had, at earlier times, declined to censure Röhm’s notorious lifestyle. Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, 348.
45. Even The Black Book, p. 168, reviews with skepticism the genocide charge brought by some Ukrainian historians.
46. Alan Bullock refuses to equate the two kinds of killing in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London: HarperCollins, 1991): “Nowhere was there a [Soviet] counterpart to the Holocaust in which mass murder became not an instrument but an end in itself" (p. 974).
47. Hans Mommsen criticizes totalitarianism theory in these terms, with acerbity in “The Concept of Totalitarianism versus the Comparative Theory of Fascism," in E. A. Menze, ed., Totalitarianism Reconsidered (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1981), pp. 146–66, and more serenely in “Leistungen und Grenzen des Totalitarismus-Theorems: Die Anwendung auf die nationalsozialistische Diktatur," in Meier, ed., “Totalitarismus” und “Politische Religionen,” pp. 291–300. The change reflects the relative calming of German academic conflicts after the extreme tensions of the 1970s.
48. Hitler himself referred as early as 1926 to “our religion." Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept," History and Memory 9:1 and 2 (Fall 1997), p. 333.
49. Burrin, “Political Religion," provides by far the most complete and thoughtful analysis. Emilio Gentile, “Fascism as a Political Religion," Journal of ContemporaryHistory 190 (25), pp. 321–52, and Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich, pp. 5, 9–14, and 252–55, defend the concept (Burleigh cites many works on this subject on p. 816, n. 22). See also Meier, “Totalitarismus.”
50. Nazism, writes Burleigh, The Third Reich (p. 255), “sank a drillhead into a deep-seated reservoir of existential anxiety, offering salvation from an ontological crisis."
51. Burrin, “Political Religion," p. 338.
52. See chapter 1, pp. 15–19.
53. Roger Griffin, “The Reclamation of Fascist Culture," European History Quarterly 31:4 (October 2001), pp. 609–20, sees it as the “key" to understanding fascism. For some of the many studies of fascist culture see the bibliographical essay, p. 236.
54. Bateson quoted in Eric Rentschler, “Emotional Engineering: Hitler Youth Quex," in Modernism/Modernity 2:3 (September 1995), p. 31.
55. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
56. Susan Sontag made an interesting effort to extract the elements of a fascist aesthetic from the work of Leni Riefenstahl: “Fascinating Fascism," in Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), but that mixture of virile heroism, ruralism, and anti-intellectualism may apply best to Germany.
57. R. J. B. Bosworth is one of the rare authors to make this point. See The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998), pp. 159, 162, 179.
58. Murray Kempton, “Mussolini in Concert," New York Review of Books 30:6 (April 24, 1983), pp. 33–35. For Nazism’s failure to eradicate jazz from Germany, see Michael H. Kater, Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
59. For Bolivia, see chapter 7, note 69. For China, see Payne, History, pp. 337–38; Marcia H. Chang, The Chinese Blue Shirt Society: Fascism and Developmental Nationalism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), and Fred Wakeman, Jr., “A Revisionist View of the Nanjing Decade: Confucian Fascism," China Quarterly 150 (June 1997), pp. 395–430. Wakeman does not consider the Blueshirts authentically fascist. I thank him for advice on this point.
60. Gaetano Salvemini’s Harvard lectures, published in Opera de Gaetano Salvemini, vol. VI, Scritti sul fascismo, vol. I, p. 343.
61. For guns as a “love object" of Fascist militants, see Emilio Gentile
, Storia del partito, p. 498. “As long as I have a pen in my hand and a revolver in my pocket," said Mussolini after breaking with the Socialists in 1914, “I don’t fear anyone." In the early 1920s, he kept a revolver and a couple of grenades on his desk. By the 1930s the revolver had migrated into a desk drawer of his grand office in the Palazzo Venezia (Pierre Milza, Mussolini [Paris: Fayard, 1999], pp. 183, 232, 252, 442). Hitler preferred dog-whips (Kershaw, Hitler, vol. I, p. 188), but he told his lunch guests on April 23, 1942, that “The bearing of arms contributes to a man’s pride and bearing." (Hitler’s Table Talk, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens [London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1953], p. 435.)
62. Colored shirts come from the Left, probably from Garibaldi’s “Thousand," the red-shirted volunteers who conquered Sicily and Naples for a united, liberal Italy in 1860. The title Duce also came from Garibaldi.
63. Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (London, Harper & Row 1962), p. 297.
64. Juan J. Linz has made the classic analysis of authoritarianism as a distinct form of rule: “An Authoritarian Regime: Spain," in Erik Allardt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Mass Politics: Studies in Political Sociology (New York: Free Press, 1970), pp. 251–83, “From Falange to Movimiento-Organización: The Spanish Single Party and the Franco Regime, 1936–1968," in Samuel P. Huntington and Clement Moore, eds.,
Authoritarian Politics in Modern Societies: The Dynamics of Established One-Party
Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1970), and “Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby, Handbook of Political Science (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975), vol. III, esp. pp. 264–350.
65. The authoritarian-fascist border is blurred here, for, in practice, neither gets its wish. Faced with aroused publics, authoritarians as well as fascists may attempt to create a Durkheimian “mechanical solidarity." See Paul Brooker, The Faces of Fraternalism:Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991). Even fascists may achieve no more than a “superficial" and “fragile" consent. Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organization of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 20, and chap. 8, “The Limits of Consent." The most meticulous study of German public opinion under Nazism, Martin Broszat’s “Bavaria program," concluded that it was discontented but atomized, fragmented, and passive. See Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), pp. 110, 277, 286, 389.
66. See the interesting comparison by Javier Tusell Gomez, “Franchismo et fascismo," in Angelo Del Boca et al., Il regime fascista, pp. 57–92.
67. Michael Richards, A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco’s Spain, 1936–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), shows how economic and cultural autarky fit with internal repression. The estimated number of dead appears on p. 30. Paul Preston, Franco (New York: Basic Books, 1994), makes the fascism charge in another way, emphasizing Franco’s close relations with the Axis until at least 1942.
68. The indispensable study of the Falange is Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain, 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999) (quotation on p. 401).
69. See chapter 6, pp. 149–50.
70. See chapter 6, p. 150.
71. Quoted in Stanley Payne, History, p. 315. Gregory J. Kasza, “Fascism from Above? Japan’s Kakushin Right in Comparative Perspective," in Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Fascism Outside Europe (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 2001), pp. 223–32, working from the Japanese example, proposes a distinct category of one-party regimes that suppress fascist movements while adopting some fascist devices, such as youth movements and corporatist economies, thus falling between traditional conservatism and fascism. His examples are Japan, Portugal, Poland in 1939, Estonia, and Lithuania. One might add Vargas’s Brazil.
72. See above pp. 112–13.
73. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism,1933–1944, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944), p. 39. Skepticism about fascist ideology is not limited to the Left. Cf. the famous denunciation by the former Nazi president of the Danzig senate, Hermann Rauschning, Revolution of Nihilism (New York: Alliance/Longman’s Green, 1939). See also Hannah Arendt’s remarks quoted in chapter 2, p. 38.
74. See chapter 1, pp. 15–19.
Bibliographical Essay
1. Renzo De Felice, Bibliografia orientativa del fascismo (Rome: Bonacci, 1991). About two thousand of the entries refer to generic fascism and the history of World War II.
2. The final volume, still incomplete, was published posthumously by his students.
3. R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship (London: Arnold, 1998), p. 7.
4. Raoul Girardet, sympathetic himself to the far Right but scrupulously self-effacing in his elegant work, used “impregnation" in almost exactly the same way with impunity in his pioneering “Notes sur l’esprit d’un fascisme français," Revue française de science politique 5 (July-September 1955), pp. 529–46.
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