Mussolini Nationalism Quotes

A nation of spaghetti eaters cannot restore Roman civilization!

Satan has control now. No matter where you look, he is in control, even in our own land. He is guiding the governments as far as the Lord will permit him. That is why there is so much strife, turmoil, and confusion all over the earth. One master mind is governing the nations. It is not the president of the United States; it is not Hitler; it is not Mussolini; it is not the king or government of England or any other land; it is Satan himself.

All twenty-first-century authoritarians suppress climate change science, lest that discourage the plunder of national resources that generates profits for them and their allies.

We look back on history, and what do we see? Empires rising and falling; revolutions and counter-revolutions succeeding one another; wealth accumulating and wealth dispersed; one nation dominant and then another. As Shakespeare’s King Lear puts it, “the rise and fall of great ones that ebb and flow with the moon.” In one lifetime I’ve seen my fellow countrymen ruling over a quarter of the world, and the great majority of them convinced – in the words of what is still a favorite song – that God has made them mighty and will make them mightier yet. I’ve heard a crazed Austrian announce the establishment of a German Reich that was to last for a thousand years; an Italian clown report that the calendar will begin again with his assumption of power; a murderous Georgian brigand in the Kremlin acclaimed by the intellectual elite as wiser than Solomon, more enlightened than Ashoka, more humane than Marcus Aurelius. I’ve seen America wealthier than all the rest of the world put together; and with the superiority of weaponry that would have enabled Americans, had they so wished, to outdo an Alexander or a Julius Caesar in the range and scale of conquest. All in one little lifetime – gone with the wind: England now part of an island off the coast of Europe, threatened with further dismemberment; Hitler and Mussolini seen as buffoons; Stalin a sinister name in the regime he helped to found and dominated totally for three decades; Americans haunted by fears of running out of the precious fluid that keeps their motorways roaring and the smog settling, by memories of a disastrous military campaign in Vietnam, and the windmills of Watergate. Can this really be what life is about – this worldwide soap opera going on from century to century, from era to era, as old discarded sets and props litter the earth? Surely not. Was it to provide a location for so repetitive and ribald a production as this that the universe was created and man, or homo sapiens as he likes to call himself – heaven knows why – came into existence? I can’t believe it. If this were all, then the cynics, the hedonists, and the suicides are right: the most we can hope for from life is amusement, gratification of our senses, and death. But it is not all.

There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred: it is hate that is not in us, it is outside of man.. We cannot understand it, but we must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Consciences can be seduced and obscured again - even our consciences. For this reason, it is everyone duty to reflect on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were "charismatic leaders" ; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the soundness of things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practised. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.

Many strongmen, past and present, have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than by legal rights. For authoritarians, only some people are "the people," regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status, and only the leader, above and beyond any institution, embodies that group. This is why, in strongman states, attacking the leader is seen as attacking the state itself, and why critics are labeled enemies of the people or terrorists.

We tend to forget that unity is, at best, morally neutral and often a source of irrationality and groupthink. Rampaging mobs are unified. The Mafia is unified. Marauding barbarians bent on rape and pillage are unified. Meanwhile, civilized people have disagreements, and small-d democrats have arguments. Classical liberalism is based on this fundamental insight, which is why fascism was always antiliberal. Liberalism rejected the idea that unity is more valuable than individuality. For fascists and other leftists, meaning and authenticity are found in collective enterprises—of class, nation, or race—and the state is there to enforce that meaning on everyone without the hindrance of debate.

The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state, in Italian Fascism under Mussolini, or race in Hitler’s National Socialism. In liberalism, the subject was represented by the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any ‘membership’ (l’appartenance). While the ideological struggle had formal opponents, entire nations and societies, at least theoretically, were able to select their subject of choice — that of class, racism or statism, or individualism. The victory of liberalism resolved this question: the individual became the normative subject within the framework of all mankind. This is when the phenomenon of globalisation entered the stage, the model of a post-industrial society makes itself known, and the postmodern era begins. From now on, the individual subject is no longer the result of choice, but is a kind of mandatory given. Man is freed from his ‘membership’ in a community and from any collective identity,

From the start, authoritarians stand out from other kinds of politicians by appealing to negative experiences and emotions. They don the cloak of national victimhood, reliving the humiliations of their people by foreign powers as they proclaim themselves their nation’s saviors. Picking up on powerful resentments, hopes, and fears, they present themselves as the vehicle for obtaining what is most wanted, whether it is territory, safety from racial others, securing male authority, or payback for exploitation by internal or external enemies.

All Fascism did not die with Mussolini. Hitler is finished--but the seeds spread by his disordered mind have firm root in too many fanatical brains. It is easier to remove tyrants and destroy concentration camps than it is to kill the ideas which gave them birth and strength.

…The story of the Pledge of Allegiance and its National Socialist roots is a fascinating one. Dr. Rex Curry, a passionate libertarian, has made the issue his white whale.

Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.

It was also clear to me that without a truly internationalist component nationalism was reactionary. There was nothing revolutionary about nationalism by itself—Hitler and Mussolini were nationalists. Any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples’ freedom as well. The victory of oppressed people anywhere in the world is a victory for Black people.

So, we are supposed to see a party in favor of universal education, guaranteed employment, increased entitlements for the aged, the expropriation of land without compensation, the nationalization of industry, the abolition of market-based lending—a.k.a. “interest slavery”—the expansion of health services, and the abolition of child labor as objectively and obviously right-wing. What the Nazis pursued was a form of anticapitalist, antiliberal, and anti-conservative communitarianism

The totalitarian movements aim at and succeed in organizing masses—not classes, like the old interest parties of the Continental nation-states; citizens with opinions about, and interests in, the handling of public affairs, like the parties of Anglo-Saxon countries. While all political groups depend upon proportionate strength, the totalitarian movements depend on the sheer force of numbers to such an extent that totalitarian regimes seem impossible, even under otherwise favorable circumstances, in countries with relatively small populations. After the first World War, a deeply antidemocratic, prodictatorial wave of semitotalitarian and totalitarian movements swept Europe; Fascist movements spread from Italy to nearly all Central and Eastern European countries (the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was one of the notable exceptions); yet even Mussolini, who was so fond of the term "totalitarian state," did not attempt to establish a full-fledged totalitarian regime and contented himself with dictatorship and one-party rule. Similar nontotalitarian dictatorships sprang up in prewar Rumania, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, Portugal and Franco Spain. The Nazis, who had an unfailing instinct for such differences, used to comment contemptuously on the shortcomings of their Fascist allies while their genuine admiration for the Bolshevik regime in Russia (and the Communist Party in Germany) was matched and checked only by their contempt for Eastern European races.

Mussolini envisioned a powerful centralized state directing the institutions of the private sector, forcing their private welfare into line with the national welfare. Isn’t this precisely how progressives view the federal government’s control of banks, finance companies, insurance companies, health care, energy, and education?

Mussolini denounces the world’s great cities, such as New York, for their teeming populations of nonwhites. In fascist ideology, the city is a place where members of the nation go to age and die, childless, surrounded by the vast hordes of despised others, breeding out of control, their children permanent burdens on the state.

No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war -- the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand's breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress, we had won the war. England would live; Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live. How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end, no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care. Once again in our long Island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutiliated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end. We might not even have to die as individuals. Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.

In the modern world, tariffs and similar restrictions on trade have been one source of friction among nations. But a far more troublesome source has been the far-reaching intervention of the state into the economy in such collectivist states as Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Franco's Spain, and especially the communist countries, from Russia and its satellites to China.

Although Herbert Hoover in many ways prefigured him, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who first tried to create an explicit corporate state in America with his National Recovery Administration (NRA). With its fascist-style Blue Eagle emblem, the NRA coordinated big business and labor in a central plan, and outlawed competition. The NRA even employed vigilante groups to spy on smaller businesses and report if they violated the plan. Just as in Mussolini’s Italy, the beneficiaries of the U.S. corporate state were—in addition to the government itself—established economic interest groups. NRA cheerleaders included the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association, the United Mine Workers, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and—above all—Gerard Swope of General Electric, who helped draft the NRA act.

To proclaim 'America First' was to deny any need to fight fascism either at home or abroad. When American Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville in August 2017, Trump said that some of them were 'very fine people.' He defended the Confederate and Nazi cause of preserving monuments to the Confederacy. Such monuments in the American South were raised in the 1920s and 1930s, at a time when fascism in the United States was a real possibility; they memorialized the racial purification of Southern cities that was contemporary with the rise of fascism in Europe. Contemporary observers had no difficulty seeing the connection. Will Rogers, the great American entertainer and social commentator of his time, saw Adolf Hitler in 1933 as a familiar figure: 'Papers all state that Hitler is trying to copy Mussolini. Looks to me it's the KKK he's copying.' The great American social thinker and historian W.E.B. Du Bois could see how the temptations of fascism worked together with American myths of the past. He rightly feared that American whites would prefer a story about enmity with blacks to a reforming state that would improve prospects for all Americans. Whites distracted by racism could become, as he wrote in 1935, 'the instrument by which democracy in the nation was done to death, race provincialism deified, and the world delivered to plutocracy,' what we call oligarchy.

There is frequently another way to look at things and we are encouraged to do exactly that if we want to grow as a nation, however when we mess with the principles of what made our country great we are in danger of upsetting the apple cart. Many civilized countries that did, lost their freedom in a rapid downhill spiral. Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Cubans lost out by electing Fidel Castro and the Germans and Italians, wanting a better life, voted for Mussolini and Hitler.

In a famous interview with Emil Ludwig, Mussolini reiterated his view that “America has a dictator” in FDR. In an essay written for American audiences, he marveled at how the forces of “spiritual renewal” were destroying the outdated notion that democracy and liberalism were “immortal principles.” “America itself is abandoning them. Roosevelt is moving, acting, giving orders independently of the decisions or wishes of the Senate or Congress. There are no longer intermediaries between him and the nation.

If you would know, therefore, who are the fascists in America, you must ask yourselves not who are the men and women most vocal in their denunciations of Hitler and Mussolini. The most ardent enemies of those two leaders were some of their rival fascist dictators in Europe. The test of fascism is not one's rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is—how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life? When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, thee autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government—then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.

In a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared: We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality….Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.1 Here, Mussolini makes clear that the fascist mythic past is intentionally mythical. The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology—authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity, and struggle.

Populism is a common term for the parties and movements that carry forth this illiberal evolution of democratic politics. While populism is not inherently authoritarian, many strongmen past and present have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than legal rights. For authoritarians, only some people are “the people,” regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status, and only the leader, above and beyond any institution, embodies that group. This is why, in strongman states, attacking the leader is seen as attacking the nation itself, and why critics are labeled “enemies of the people” or terrorists.10

Who were these leaders? What was the strength of the storm troops they were throwing into the streets? And what exactly were they up to? I worked long hours those first weeks in Paris to try to find out. It was not easy. Even the government and the police, as the rioting grew day after day, seemed to be ignorant and confused about the forces opposing them. The origins of these forces went back much farther than I had suspected. As early as 1926, when the franc had fallen to new lows and the government was facing bankruptcy, Ernest Mercier, the electricity magnate, had founded an antiparliamentarian movement called Redressement Français (French Resurgence). Its message was that a parliament of politicians was incompetent to handle the affairs of state in the complicated postwar world, where the intricacies of national and international business and finance called for specialized knowledge. It wanted a parliament and government of “technicians” who knew how modern capitalist society functioned, and it assured the country that the great business and financial enterprises could furnish these trained men. In other words, it wanted its own men to control directly what up to now they controlled only indirectly. Mercier saw in Mussolini’s corporate state a form in which his aims could be realized. Gradually he built up a following among his fellow magnates. Together they dispensed millions propagating their ideas.

First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy’ was potentially more dangerous than ‘the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’.2 In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted the anthropological models of neoliberal capitalism as a ‘new fascism’ compared to which the regime of Mussolini appeared irremediably archaic, as a kind of ‘paleofascism’.3 And in even more recent decades, many historians seeking to provide interpretations of Berlusconi’s Italy recognized its intimacy—if not its filiation—with classical fascism

Apart from a few explanations that are not the subject of this essay, the strange and terrifying growth of the modern State can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel or of Nietzsche ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been razed to the ground, a rational or irrational State, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror. In actual fact, the Fascist revolutions of the twentieth century do not merit the title of revolution. They lacked the ambition of universality. Mussolini and Hitler, of course, tried to build an empire, and the National Socialist ideologists were bent, explicitly, on world domination. But the difference between them and the classic revolutionary movement is that, of the nihilist inheritance, they chose to deify the irrational, and the irrational alone, instead of deifying reason. In this way they renounced their claim to universality. And yet Mussolini makes use of Hegel, and Hitler of Nietzsche; and both illustrate, historically, some of the prophecies of German ideology. In this respect they belong to the history of rebellion and of nihilism. They were the first to construct a State on the concept that everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force. The consequences were not long in appearing.

Over those years, students of “fascism,”1 as a subject of inquiry, have seen its “essence” change, in the judgments of scholars, from a movement of the “extreme right” into one that was neither of the “right” nor the “left.”2We are now told that “Fascist ideology represented a synthesis of organic nationalism with the antimaterialist revision of Marxism.”3 From a political revolution entirely without any pretense of a rational belief system, we are now told, by those best informed, that “fascism’s ability to appeal to important intellectuals . . . underlines that it cannot be dismissed as . . . irrational. . . . [In] truth, fascism was an ideology just like the others.”4 Moreover, it has been acknowledged that “Fascism was possible only if based on genuine belief.

MUSSOLINI OBSERVED THAT IN SEEKING TO ACCUMULATE POWER, it is wise to do so in the manner of one plucking a chicken—feather by feather. His tactics live on in our no-longer-new century. When we awaken each morning, we see around the globe what appear to be Fascism’s early stirrings: the discrediting of mainstream politicians, the emergence of leaders who seek to divide rather than to unite, the pursuit of political victory at all costs, and the invocation of national greatness by people who seem to possess only a warped concept of what greatness means. Most often, the signposts that should alert us are disguised: the altered constitution that passes for reform, the attacks on a free press justified by security, the dehumanization of others masked as a defense of virtue, or the hollowing out of a democratic system so that all is erased but the label.

Hitler and Mussolini were indeed authoritarians, but it doesn’t follow that authoritarianism equals fascism or Nazism. Lenin and Stalin were authoritarian, but neither was a fascist. Many dictators—Franco in Spain, Pinochet in Chile, Perón in Argentina, Amin in Uganda—were authoritarian without being fascists or Nazis. Trump admittedly has a bossy style that he gets from, well, being a boss. He has been a corporate boss all his life, and he also played a boss on TV. Republicans elected Trump because they needed a tough guy to take on Hillary; previously they tried bland, harmless candidates like Romney, and look where that got them. That being said, Trump has done nothing to subvert the democratic process. While progressives continue to allege a plot between Trump and the Russians to rig the election, the only evidence for actual rigging comes from the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to rig the 2016 primary in favor of Hillary over Bernie. This rigging evoked virtually no dissent from Democratic officials or from the media, suggesting the support, or at least acquiescence, of the whole progressive movement and most of the party itself. Trump fired his FBI director, provoking dark ruminations in the Washington Post about Trump’s “respect for the rule of law,” yet Trump’s action was entirely lawful.18 He has criticized judges, sometimes in derisive terms, but contrary to Timothy Snyder there is nothing undemocratic about this. Lincoln blasted Justice Taney over the Dred Scott decision, and FDR was virtually apoplectic when the Supreme Court blocked his New Deal initiatives. Criticizing the media isn’t undemocratic either. The First Amendment isn’t just a press prerogative; the president too has the right to free speech.

Historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition. But even if Nazi nationalism was in some ill-defined but fundamental way right-wing, this only meant that Nazism was right-wing socialism. And right-wing socialists are still socialists. Most of the Bolshevik revolutionaries Stalin executed were accused of being not conservatives or monarchists but rightists--that is, right-wing socialists. Any deviation from the Soviet line was automatic proof of rightism. Ever since, we in the West have apishly mimicked the Soviet usage of such terms without questioning the propagandistic baggage attached.

Given the benefit of hindsight, it’s difficult to understand why anyone doubts the fascist nature of the French Revolution. Few dispute that it was totalitarian, terrorist, nationalist, conspiratorial, and populist. It produced the first modern dictators, Robespierre and Napoleon, and worked on the premise that the nation had to be ruled by an enlightened avant-garde who would serve as the authentic, organic voice of the “general will.” The paranoid Jacobin mentality made the revolutionaries more savage and cruel than the king they replaced. Some fifty thousand people ultimately died in the Terror, many in political show trials that Simon Schama describes as the “founding charter of totalitarian justice.” Robespierre summed up the totalitarian logic of the Revolution: “There are only two parties in France: the people and its enemies. We must exterminate those miserable villains who are eternally conspiring against the rights of man…[W]e must exterminate all our enemies.

a 1960 self-published broadside, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [sic] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case Brown v. Board of Education, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.

It all began in 1919 when ex-Marxist Benito Mussolini wrote the Fascist Party platform, calling for central planning through a “partnership” of government, business, and labor. By 1925 he was in total power. Not all of Mussolini’s admirers were in Italy. The cover story of the New York Times Magazine for October 24, 1926, gushed: The most approachable as well as the most interesting statesman in Europe. He is a voracious learner who never makes the same mistake twice. . . . The whole country is keyed up by his energy. . . . The whole economic structure of the nation has been charted out in a graph that shows it as a huge corporation with the Government as the directorate. He explains it clearly and patiently, reminding you that he started his career as a teacher. An earlier New York Times editorial (October 31, 1922) had explained: In Italy as everywhere the great complaint against democracy today is its inefficiency. . . . Neither the failures nor the successes of (Russia’s) Bolshevist Government offer much of an example to the Western world. Dr. Mussolini’s experiment will perhaps tell us something more about the possibilities of oligarchic administration.

But first Hitler, taken in by Mussolini’s mythmaking, attempted a “march” of his own. On November 8, 1923, during a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler attempted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to support a coup d’état against the federal government in Berlin. He believed that if he took control of Munich and declared a new national government, the Bavarian civil and military leaders would be forced by public opinion to support him. He was equally convinced that the local army authorities would not oppose the Nazi coup because the World War I hero General Ludendorff was marching beside him. Hitler underestimated military fidelity to the chain of command. The conservative Bavarian minister-president Gustav von Kahr gave orders to stop Hitler’s coup, by force if necessary. The police fired on the Nazi marchers on November 9 as they approached a major square (possibly returning a first shot from Hitler’s side). Fourteen putschists and four policemen were killed. Hitler was arrested and imprisoned,8 along with other Nazis and their sympathizers. The august General Ludendorff was released on his own recognizance. Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” was thus put down so ignominiously by the conservative rulers of Bavaria that he resolved never again to try to gain power through force. That meant remaining at least superficially within constitutional legality, though the Nazis never gave up the selective violence that was central to the party’s appeal, or hints about wider aims after power.

The notion that communism and Nazism are polar opposites stems from the deeper truth that they are in fact kindred spirits. Or, as Richard Pipes has written, "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism". Both ideologies are reactionary in the sense that they try to re-create tribal impulses. Communists champion class, Nazis race, fascists the nation. All such ideologies--we can call them totalitarian for now--attract the same types of people. Hitler's hatred for communism has been opportunistically exploited to signify ideological distance, when in fact it indicated the exact opposite. Today this maneuver has settled into conventional wisdom. But what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as the economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf. He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or Strasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever. Hitler never cared much about economics anyway. He always considered it "secondary". What mattered to him was German identity politics.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

the military-industrial-scientific complex, because today’s wars are scientific productions. The world’s military forces initiate, fund and steer a large part of humanity’s scientific research and technological development. When World War One bogged down into interminable trench warfare, both sides called in the scientists to break the deadlock and save the nation. The men in white answered the call, and out of the laboratories rolled a constant stream of new wonder-weapons: combat aircraft, poison gas, tanks, submarines and ever more efficient machine guns, artillery pieces, rifles and bombs. 33. German V-2 rocket ready to launch. It didn’t defeat the Allies, but it kept the Germans hoping for a technological miracle until the very last days of the war. {© Ria Novosti/Science Photo Library.} Science played an even larger role in World War Two. By late 1944 Germany was losing the war and defeat was imminent. A year earlier, the Germans’ allies, the Italians, had toppled Mussolini and surrendered to the Allies. But Germany kept fighting on, even though the British, American and Soviet armies were closing in. One reason German soldiers and civilians thought not all was lost was that they believed German scientists were about to turn the tide with so-called miracle weapons such as the V-2 rocket and jet-powered aircraft. While the Germans were working on rockets and jets, the American Manhattan Project successfully developed atomic bombs. By the time the bomb was ready, in early August 1945, Germany had already surrendered, but Japan was fighting on. American forces were poised to invade its home islands. The Japanese vowed to resist the invasion and fight to the death, and there was every reason to believe that it was no idle threat. American generals told President Harry S. Truman that an invasion of Japan would cost the lives of a million American soldiers and would extend the war well into 1946. Truman decided to use the new bomb. Two weeks and two atom bombs later, Japan surrendered unconditionally and the war was over. But science is not just about offensive weapons. It plays a major role in our defences as well. Today many Americans believe that the solution to terrorism is technological rather than political. Just give millions more to the nanotechnology industry, they believe, and the United States could send bionic spy-flies into every Afghan cave, Yemenite redoubt and North African encampment. Once that’s done, Osama Bin Laden’s heirs will not be able to make a cup of coffee without a CIA spy-fly passing this vital information back to headquarters in Langley.

The German and Russian state apparatuses grew out of despotism. For this reason the subservient nature of the human character of masses of people in Germany and in Russia was exceptionally pronounced. Thus, in both cases, the revolution led to a new despotism with the certainty of irrational logic. In contrast to the German and Russia state apparatuses, the American state apparatus was formed by groups of people who had evaded European and Asian despotism by fleeing to a virgin territory free of immediate and effective traditions. Only in this way can it be understood that, until the time of this writing, a totalitarian state apparatus was not able to develop in America, whereas in Europe every overthrow of the government carried out under the slogan of freedom inevitably led to despotism. This holds true for Robespierre, as well as for Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. If we want to appraise the facts impartially, then we have to point out, whether we want to or not, and whether we like it or not, that Europe's dictators, who based their power on vast millions of people, always stemmed from the suppressed classes. I do not hesitate to assert that this fact, as tragic as it is, harbors more material for social research than the facts related to the despotism of a czar or of a Kaiser Wilhelm. By comparison, the latter facts are easily understood. The founders of the American Revolution had to build their democracy from scratch on foreign soil. The men who accomplished this task had all been rebels against English despotism. The Russian Revolutionaries, on the other had, were forced to take over an already existing and very rigid government apparatus. Whereas the Americans were able to start from scratch, the Russians, as much as they fought against it, had to drag along the old. This may also account for the fact that the Americans, the memory of their own flight from despotism still fresh in their minds, assumed an entirely different—more open and more accessible—attitude toward the new refugees of 1940, than Soviet Russia, which closed its doors to them. This may explain why the attempt to preserve the old democratic ideal and the effort to develop genuine self-administration was much more forceful in the United States than anywhere else. We do not overlook the many failures and retardations caused by tradition, but in any event a revival of genuine democratic efforts took place in America and not in Russia. It can only be hoped that American democracy will thoroughly realize, and this before it is too late, that fascism is not confined to any one nation or any one party; and it is to be hoped that it will succeed in overcoming the tendency toward dictatorial forms in the people themselves. Only time will tell whether the Americans will be able to resist the compulsion of irrationality or whether they will succumb to it.

In the contemporary world there are two classes of bad plans-the plans invented and put into practice by men who do not accept our ideal postulates, and the plans invented and put into practice by the men who accept them, but imagine that the ends proposed by the prophets can be achieved by wicked or unsuitable means. Hell is paved with good intentions, and it is probable that plans made by well-meaning people of the second class may have results no less disastrous than plans made by evil-intentioned people of the first class. Which only shows, yet once more, how right the Buddha was in classing unawareness and stupidity among the deadly sins. Let us consider a few examples of bad plans belonging to these two classes. In the first class we must place all Fascist and all specifically militaristic plans. Fascism, in the words of Mussolini, believes that "war alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it." Again, "a doctrine which is founded upon the harmful postulate of peace is hostile to Fascism." The Fascist, then, is one who believes that the bombardment of open towns with fire, poison and explosives (in other words, modern war) is intrinsically good. He is one who rejects the teaching of the prophets and believes that the best society is a national society living in a state of chronic hostility towards other national societies and preoccupied with ideas of rapine and slaughter. He is one who despises the non-attached individual and holds up for admiration the person who, in obedience to the boss who happens at the moment to have grabbed political power, systematically cultivates all the passions (pride, anger, envy, hatred) which the philosophers and the founders of religions have unanimously condemned as the most maleficent, the least worthy of human beings. All fascist planning has one ultimate aim: to make the national society more efficient as a war machine. Industry, commerce and finance are controlled for this purpose. The manufacture of substitutes is encouraged in order that the country may be self-sufficient in time of war. Tariffs and quotas are imposed, export bounties distributed, exchanges depreciated for the sake of gaining a momentary advantage or inflicting loss upon some rival. Foreign policy is conducted on avowedly Machiavellian principles; solemn engagements are entered into with the knowledge that they will be broken the moment it seems advantageous to do so; international law is invoked when it happens to be convenient, repudiated when it imposes the least restraint on the nation's imperialistic designs. Meanwhile the dictator's subjects are systematically educated to be good citizens of the Fascist state. Children are subjected to authoritarian discipline that they may grow up to be simultaneously obedient to superiors and brutal to those below them. On leaving the kindergarten, they begin that military training which culminates in the years of conscription and continues until the individual is too decrepit to be an efficient soldier. In school they are taught extravagant lies about the achievements of their ancestors, while the truth about other peoples is either distorted or completely suppressed. the press is controlled, so that adults may learn only what it suits the dictator that they should learn. Any one expressing un-orthodox opinions is ruthlessly persecuted. Elaborate systems of police espionage are organized to investigate the private life and opinions of even the humblest individual. Delation is encouraged, tale-telling rewarded. Terrorism is legalized. Justice is administered in secret; the procedure is unfair, the penalties barbarously cruel. Brutality and torture are regularly employed.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

Mussolini created the first National Socialism, stripped of its German racial connotations. His was a vision of a nation organized along socialist lines in which everyone would share in the benefits and all would contribute their due portion. This language of course has Obama overtones, and we see an obvious congruence between the fascist unification and the modern progressive insistence that America is a single community and that everyone should come together and each one contribute his “fair share.

The fascist synthesis did not view Italy as a society divided by class but rather as a unified country in which all sectors of society could come together. The fascists replaced the old Marxist divide between unproductive capitalists and productive labor with the single category of the productive nation. Mussolini called this a Fascio nazionale, a national union.

In a speech at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, he attacked by name some of the nation’s most prominent advocates of right-wing politics. He was most vocal about Father Charles Coughlin, the “radio priest” whose pulpit of the air was seen by some as a major dispenser of racial disharmony and anti-Semitism. Cantor also denounced George Sylvester Viereck, a German-American poet, frequent contributor to Coughlin’s Social Justice magazine, and admitted admirer of Hitler and Mussolini.

It is my argument that American liberalism is a totalitarian political religion, but not necessarily an Orwellian one. It is nice, not brutal. Nannying, not bullying. But it is definitely totalitarian--or "holistic", if you prefer--in that liberalism today sees no realm of human life that is beyond political significance, from what you eat to what you smoke to what you say. Sex is political. Food is political. Sports, entertainment, your inner motives and outer appearance, all have political salience for liberal fascists. Liberals place their faith in priestly experts who know better, who plan, exhort, badger, and scold. They try to use science to discredit traditional notions of religion and faith, but they speak the language of pluralism and spirituality to defend "nontraditional" beliefs. Just as with classical fascism, liberal fascists speak of a "Third Way" between right and left where all good things go together and all hard choices are "false choices". The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choices between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservatives or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life. Liberal fascism differs from classical fascism in many ways. I don't deny this. Indeed, it is central to my point. Fascisms differ from each other because they grow out of different soil. What unites them are their emotional or instinctual impulses, such as the quest for community, the urge to "get beyond" politics, a faith in the perfectibility of man and the authority of experts, and an obsession with the aesthetics of youth, the cult of action, and the need for an all powerful state to coordinate society at the national or global level. Most of all, they share the belief--what I call the totalitarian temptation--that with the right amount of tinkering we can realize the utopian dream of "creating a better world".

No nation influenced American thinking more profoundly than Germany, W.E.B. DuBois, Charles Beard, Walter Weyl, Richard Ely, Richard Ely, Nicholas Murray Butler, and countless other founders of modern American liberalism were among the nine thousand Americans who studied in German universities during the nineteenth century. When the American Economic Association was formed, five of the six first officers had studied in Germany. At least twenty of its first twenty-six presidents had as well. In 1906 a professor at Yale polled the top 116 economists and social scientists in America; more than half had studied in Germany for at least a year. By their own testimony, these intellectuals felt "liberated" by the experience of studying in an intellectual environment predicated on the assumption that experts could mold society like clay. No European statesman loomed larger in the minds and hearts of American progressives than Otto von Bismarck. As inconvenient as it may be for those who have been taught "the continuity between Bismarck and Hitler", writes Eric Goldman, Bismarck's Germany was "a catalytic of American progressive thought". Bismarck's "top-down socialism", which delivered the eight-hour workday, healthcare, social insurance, and the like, was the gold standard for enlightened social policy. "Give the working-man the right to work as long as he is healthy; assure him care when he is sick; assure him maintenance when he is old", he famously told the Reichstag in 1862. Bismarck was the original "Third Way" figure who triangulated between both ends of the ideological spectrum. "A government must not waver once it has chosen its course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward", he proclaimed. Teddy Roosevelt's 1912 national Progressive Party platform conspicuously borrowed from the Prussian model. Twenty-five years earlier, the political scientist Woodrow Wilson wrote that Bismarck's welfare state was an "admirable system . . . the most studied and most nearly perfected" in the world.

The 1920s, ’30s, and early ’40s were a time of rising nationalism coupled with technology-driven angst and revulsion at governments that appeared to be both corrupt and relics of an earlier age. The widespread questioning and tottering of faith caused prospective Fascist leaders to test their training wheels and spurred movements and fads of every description, from mysticism and belief in fairies to flagpole-sitting and a flirtation across the political spectrum with eugenics and its accompanying racial theories. Mussolini’s early success energized those whose primary fear was Bolshevism or what they imagined to be Bolshevism: loud demands for higher wages, for example, or campaigns for land reform. In virtually every country, there were veterans who—regardless of which side they had fought on during the war—were contemptuous of civilian politicians. Anti-Semitism, whether casual or visceral, flourished in politics, the professions, academia, and the arts. The bewildering rush of globalization prompted many to find solace in the familiar rhythms of nation, culture, and faith; and people everywhere seemed to be on the lookout for leaders who claimed to have simple and satisfying answers to modernity’s tangled questions.

So much depended upon the daft schedule of Trenitalia and the unions so imbued with whimsy and given to strikes. In theory, Trenitalia, the national corporation responsible for rail travel in Italy, is organized, codified, simple, and comprehensible. In actual lived experience, however, Trenitalia is chaotic, disordered, complex, and arcane. I’m sure there are some who understand the great mysterious force that is Trenitalia; the fascist conduttori, for one, and the persons who wrote Trenitalia’s adulatory Wikipedia entry, for another. To my thinking, the logic of Trenitalia was the worst kind of Italian disregard for rules. Even the Trenitalia website appears to have been created by workers who have a slender understanding of how humans think. It reads like it was written in Cyborg, fed through Google Translate into Italian, and slapped on to a webpage. More than one time, I’ve sat in the wrong Trenitalia car, taken the wrong train, or bought an online ticket for a trip other than the one I’d intended to take. And all this even before the trains mysteriously stop running because of a sciopero bianco, a work-to-rule strike, otherwise known as an “Italian strike,” when workers register protest by doing no more work than is mandated by their employment contracts. A butterfly flaps its wings in Chioggia, and a train running to Siena freezes on its tracks, such is the indescribable strangeness of Trenitalia. It’s a fascist adage: “Say what you like about Mussolini, but at least the trains run on time.” This was true neither in Mussolini’s day nor today. Trains exist and there are many, which makes Italy already superior to the car-logged, rail-beleaguered United States, but don’t set your watch by them. However predictable, Trenitalia’s inconstancy is an issue when you’re planning a perfectly orchestrated murder from 4,000 miles away. I raise the bureaucratic specter of Trenitalia because much of the success of Marco’s murder rested upon it. The remainder hinged on my skill with knives.

And a few months later, in January of this year, Benito Mussolini stood before his nation to declare himself absolute ruler of his country, and to take proud responsibility for the violence that had put him there. As he put it, “Italy wants peace and quiet, work and calm. I will give it these things—with love if possible, with force if necessary.

The anxiety prevalent in our day and the succession of economic and political catastrophes our world has been going through are both symptoms of the same underlying cause, namely the traumatic changes occurring in Western society. Fascist and Nazi totalitarianism, for example, do not occur because a Hitler or Mussolini decides to seize power. When a nation, rather, is prey to insupportable economic want and is psychologically and spiritually empty, totalitarianism comes in to fill the vacuum; and the people sell their freedom as a necessity for getting rid of the anxiety which is too great for them to bear any longer.

The government cannot love you, and any politics that works on a different assumption is destined for no good. And yet ever since the New Deal, liberals have been unable to shake this fundamental dogma that the state can be the instrument for a politics of meaning that transforms the entire nation into a village.

But until the twentieth century there were few references of any kind to bushido. Some doubted its very existence. Professor Hall Chamberlain, in an essay The Invention of a New Religion, published in 1912, wrote: ‘Bushido, as an institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign consumption… Bushido was unknown until a decade or so ago.’12 It may have been a series of religious exercises, accessible to very few. At all events in the 1920s it was popularized as a code of military honour, identified with extreme nationalism and militarism, and became the justification for the most grotesque practices, first the murder of individuals, later mass-cruelty and slaughter. The ‘knights of bushido’ were the militant leadership of totalitarian Shintoism, the equivalent, in this oriental setting, of the ‘vanguard élites’ of Lenin and Mussolini, the blackshirts and brownshirts and Chekists of Europe.

In the grim aftermath of World War II and the Stalinist purges, the term “totalitarianism” has become a bad word. But for progressives before the war, Jonah Goldberg points out, it was a good word. “Totalitarianism” was a term used by Mussolini in a positive, descriptive sense. It meant giving total allegiance to the state; it meant a state that took care of people’s physical, emotional, and aspirational needs. Totalitarianism implied an exhilarating unity of thought and action. 19 Totalitarianism, in this sense, was the shared aspiration of fascists, Nazis, and progressives. Schivelbusch writes, “The New Deal Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany all profited from the illusion of the nation as an egalitarian community whose members looked out for one another’s welfare under the watchful eyes of a strong leader.”20 Progressives across Europe and America in the 1930s relished the idea of the totalitarian society in which they could impose this unity, in other words, to supervise and control people’s lives. Does totalitarianism in this sense seem unfamiliar? It shouldn’t be. Recall President Obama’s propagandistic “Julia” videos. Essentially the Obama administration promised this hypothetical young woman cradle-to-grave protection. Absurdly, the package of benefits offered by the government under Obama would be worth more than the wages of a typical forty-hour work week. “Under President Obama” Julia would get education subsidies, minimum wage, food stamps, and free health care. “Under President Obama” Julia even decides to bear a child. To me, it’s a bit unnerving. But this is progressive utopia: citizens are all brought into complete subordination and submission to an all-powerful state.

1919, race riots broke out in Chicago and a dock workers’ strike hit New York; the eight-hour workday was instituted nationally; President Woodrow Wilson won the Nobel Peace Prize and presided over the first meeting of the League of Nations in Paris; the Red Army took Omsk, Kharkov, and the Crimea; Mussolini founded the Italian fascist movement; Paderewski became Premier of Poland. Henri Bergson, Karl Barth, Ernst Cassirer, Havelock Ellis, Karl Jaspers, John Maynard Keynes, Rudolf Steiner—indelible figures—were all active in their various spheres. Short-wave radio made its earliest appearance, there was progress in sound for movies, and Einstein’s theory of relativity was borne out by astrophysical experiments. Walter

The Lixingshe movement set up by dedicated supporters from Whampoa in 1932 to ensure authoritarian allegiance to the leader grew to number half a million members, with offshoots such as the political shock troops known as the Blue Shirts. But the notion of a continuous mass movement remained deeply suspect to the militarised bureaucracy in Nanking - a major difference between Chiang's regime and Mussolini's Italy or Hitler's Germany. It presented an authoritarian view of Chinese tradition as a historic justification for dictatorship with a conservative cultural policy to buttress the supremacy' of the state and its chief. Intellectuals were told to sacrifice their individual liberty for the sake of the nation. If the regime had fascist tendencies, it was `Confucian Fascism', as the historian Frederic Wakeman has dubbed it.

In America, where hostility to big government is central to the national character, the case for statism must be made in terms of "pragmatism" and decency. In other words, our fascism must be nice and for your own good.

The nasty racism that infused the progressive eugenics of Margaret Sanger and others has largely melted away. But liberal fascists are still racist in their own nice way, believing in the inherent numinousness of blacks and the permanence of white sin, and therefore the eternal justification of white guilt. While I would argue that this is bad and undesirable, I would not dream of saying that today's liberals are genocidal or vicious in their racial attitudes the way Nazis were. Still, it should be noted that on the postmodern left, they do speak in terms Nazis could understand. Indeed, notions of "white logic" and the "permanence of race" were not only understood by Nazis but in some cases pioneered by them. The historian Anne Harrington observes that the "key words of the vocabulary of postmodernism (deconstructionism, logocentrism) actually had their origins in antiscience tracts written by Nazi and protofascist writers like Ernst Krieck and Ludwig Klages. The first appearance of the word Dekonstrucktion was in a Nazi psychiatry journal edited by Hermann Goring's cousin. Many on the left talk of destroying "whiteness" in a way that is more than superficially reminiscent of the National Socialist effort to "de-Judaize" German society. Indeed, it is telling that the man who oversaw the legal front of this project, Carl Schmitt, is hugely popular among leftist academics. Mainstream liberals don't necessarily agree with these intellectuals, but they do accord them a reverence and respect that often amount to a tacit endorsement.

Mussolini never conceded the absolute authority of the state to dictate the course of the economy. By the early 1930s he had found it necessary to start putting Fascist ideology down on paper. Before then, it was much more ad hoc. But when he did get around to writing it out, doctrinal Fascist economics looked fairly recognizable as just another left-wing campaign to nationalize industry, or regulate it to the point where the distinction was hardly a difference. These policies fell under the rubric of what was called corporatism, and not only were they admired in America at the time, but they are unknowingly emulated to a staggering degree today.

From Mussolini through Putin, all of the strongmen featured in this book establish forms of personalist rule, which concentrates enormous power in one individual whose own political and financial interests prevail over national ones in shaping domestic and foreign policy. Loyalty to him and his allies, rather than expertise, is the primary qualification for serving in the state bureaucracy, as is participation in his corruption schemes. Personalist rulers can be long-lasting rulers, because they control patronage networks that bind people to them in relationships of complicity and fear. Making all political activity bolster his own authority allowed Franco to stay in power in Spain for thirty-six years.

The subject of Communism was class. Fascism’s subject was the state, in Italian Fascism under Mussolini, or race in Hitler’s National Socialism. In liberalism, the subject was represented by the individual, freed from all forms of collective identity and any ‘membership’ (l’appartenance).

a 1922 speech at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Benito Mussolini declared: We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality….Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything.1

the National Socialists were divided into pro-church and anti-church factions that were “bitterly opposed to each other.

... he could forsake his principles without even noticing he was doing so. Thus, his almost mystical belief in the virtues of democracy did not prevent him from admiring Mussolini. Mussolini had destroyed the representative government and the freedom of the press for which Chesterton had struggled so hard at home, but Mussolini was an Italian and had made Italy strong, and that settled the matter. Nor did Chesterton ever find a word to say about imperialism and the conquest of coloured races when they were practised by Italians or Frenchmen. His hold on reality, his literary taste, and even to some extent his moral sense, were dislocated as soon as his nationalistic loyalties were involved.

In 1935, in the pit of the Depression, when milk was being sold below cost, Merritt’s father had helped write the “milk control” laws, which partly govern California’s milk business (they have since been updated several times), especially the relations between the milk companies and grocery stores. After World War II, these laws increasingly were honored in the breach, as the big creameries and the big supermarket chains cut deals for illegal rebates or illegal financing or both. This is the normal result of quasi-fascist laws that try to regulate the marketplace. But in 1935, Benito Mussolini’s concept of binding state and industry together (the fasces is a Roman symbol, an ax with a bundle of sticks tied around its handle; the sticks represent the industries and the church, the ax represents the state, a one-for-all-and-all-for-one construct) was so popular around the world that Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to copy it with the Blue Eagle National Recovery Administration, until the Supreme Court threw it out in 1937. Relics of Mussolini, however, linger in all the states of the union, sometimes in milk control laws (and always in alcoholic beverage laws).

Blum called for an agreement among all the interested nations that none of them would supply armaments to either side. So began weeks of dickering, and then months of lying and cheating which took the heart out of every lover of justice. Blum would keep his pledges, while Hitler and Mussolini laughed at theirs. Who stands to gain when an honest man makes a bargain with thieves?

Garvey told a reporter that he represented the future of black nationalism, while Du Bois represented the past.63 That future, he believed, hinged on what he was convinced would be the future of twentieth-century politics: mass politics, mass propaganda, and the power of the disciplined and mobilized nation. That conviction drew him to the figure of Benito Mussolini. Garvey expressed great admiration for the Italian dictator until he invaded Ethiopia in 1936. He even claimed that far from his movement’s being patterned after Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the influence flowed the other way around: “When we had 100,000 men and were training children, Mussolini was still unknown.” Garvey would insist that “the UNIA were the first Fascists.”64 He reserved the same admiration for Adolf Hitler. For Garvey, Jews were the symbol of the “lying, wheedling” West, and Jewish international finance was a power that “can destroy men, organizations, and nations.” No black was safe from that power, he warned his followers. The “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” taught “that a harm done by a Jew to a Gentile is no harm at all, and the Negro is a Gentile.” Anti-Semitism and the appeal of modern mass movements also led him to seek a partner in an unusual quarter: the Ku Klux Klan.

When she was in Vienna she saw fascist groups triumph during outbreaks of bloody political unrest. On trips over the border she witnessed Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party rising fast in popularity on the back of his pledge to put Germany first, with his Nuremberg rallies becoming massive displays of Nazi paramilitary power. In nearby Italy, the dictator Benito Mussolini had declared war on democracy itself back in 1925, and had been building up a police state ever since. She was thus witness to the dark clouds of nationalism gathering across the horizon. Peace in Europe and Virginia’s intoxicating “belle vie de Paris” were already under threat.

The first four months of Truman’s presidency saw the collapse of Nazi Germany, the founding of the United Nations, firebombings of Japanese cities that killed many thousands of civilians, the liberation of Nazi death camps, the suicide of Adolf Hitler, the execution of Benito Mussolini, and the capture of arch war criminals from Hitler’s number two, Hermann Göring, to the Nazi “chief werewolf” Ernst Kaltenbrunner. There was the fall of Berlin, victory at Okinawa (which the historian Bill Sloan has called “the deadliest campaign of conquest ever undertaken by American arms”), and the Potsdam Conference, during which the new president sat at the negotiating table with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Soviet-occupied Germany, in an attempt to map out a new world. Humanity saw the first atomic explosion, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the dawn of the Cold War, and the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Never had fate shoehorned so much history into such a short period. “The four months that have elapsed since the death of President Roosevelt on April 12 have been one of the most momentous periods in man’s history,” wrote a New York Times columnist at the time. “They have hardly any parallel throughout

Antidemocratic and xenophobic movements have flourished in America since the Native American party of 1845 and the Know-Nothing Party of the 1850s. 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); 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, 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. 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. Of course the United States would have to suffer catastrophic setbacks 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, desecrations of the flag, unassimilated minorities, artistic license, dissident and unusual behavior of all sorts that could be labeled antinational or decadent.

In the programs and statements of these parties one hears echoes of classical fascist themes: fears of decadence and decline; assertion of national and cultural identity; a threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order; and the need for greater authority to deal with these problems. Even though some of the European radical Right parties have full authoritarian-nationalist programs (such as the Belgian Vlaams Blok’s “seventy points” and Le Pen’s “Three Hundred Measures for French Revival” of 1993), most of them are perceived as single-issue movements devoted to sending unwanted immigrants home and cracking down on immigrant delinquency, and that is why most of their voters chose them. Other classical fascist themes, however, are missing from the programmatic statements of the most successful postwar European radical Right parties. The element most totally absent is classical fascism’s attack on the liberty of the market and economic individualism, to be remedied by corporatism and regulated markets. In a continental Europe where state economic intervention is the norm, the radical Right has been largely committed to reducing it and letting the market decide. Another element of classical fascist programs mostly missing from the postwar European radical Right is a fundamental attack on democratic constitutions and the rule of law. None of the more successful European far Right parties now proposes to replace democracy by a single-party dictatorship. At most they advocate a stronger executive, less inhibited forces of order, and the replacement of stale traditional parties with a fresh, pure national movement. They leave to the skinheads open expressions of the beauty of violence and murderous racial hatred. The successful radical Right parties wish to avoid public association with them, although they may quietly share overlapping membership with some ultraright action squads and tolerate a certain amount of overheated language praising violent action among their student branches. No western European radical Right movement or party now proposes national expansion by war—a defining aim for Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed the advocates of border changes in postwar Europe have mostly been secessionist rather than expansionist, such as the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and (for a time) Umberto Bossi’s secessionist Northern League (Lega Nord) in northern Italy. The principal exceptions have been the expansionist Balkan nationalisms that sought to create Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia, and Greater Albania.

Mussolini was a Marxist—together with Antonio Gramsci, the most famous Marxist in Italy. Mussolini was “the strongman of the revolutionary Left” who, in the words of historian Zeev Sternhell, “never said a single word against socialism as a system of thought.”27 Together with a group of revolutionary socialists known as the Syndicalists, he created the first fascist party in the early 1900s and the first fascist state in 1922. Around the same time, fascist movements were started in England, in France, in Germany and elsewhere in Europe.

You begin following the news in the papers, just like your dad does. Germany is not alone in preparing for war. In 1936 Italy and Japan join with Germany to form the Axis Powers. Italy, under its dictator, Benito Mussolini, wages war in Africa. In Asia, Japan is invading China. In 1938 you read about the German Army’s march into Austria. The next September you hear that 1.5 million German troops attacked Poland and claimed that nation for Germany.

Garvey told a reporter that he represented the future of black nationalism, while Du Bois represented the past.63 That future, he believed, hinged on what he was convinced would be the future of twentieth-century politics: mass politics, mass propaganda, and the power of the disciplined and mobilized nation. That conviction drew him to the figure of Benito Mussolini. Garvey expressed great admiration for the Italian dictator until he invaded Ethiopia in 1936. He even claimed that far from his movement’s being patterned after Mussolini’s Blackshirts, the influence flowed the other way around: “When we had 100,000 men and were training children, Mussolini was still unknown.” Garvey would insist that “the UNIA were the first Fascists.”64

FDR did learn from both of them, and moreover, like Mussolini and Hitler, he had the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression to justify moving his country in a direction that the people would never ordinarily want to go.

At the same time, progressives began to redefine fascism and Nazism in such a way that they could project these evils onto the right, so that future generations would be bamboozled into thinking that the Republicans, not the Democrats, the conservatives, not the progressives, were in bed with Mussolini and Hitler in the critical decades leading up to global war and Holocaust.

In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. [...] Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall, communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our own shores.

The simplest boundary separates fascism from classical tyranny. The exiled moderate socialist Gaetano Salvemini, having abandoned his chair as professor of history at Florence and moved to London and then to Harvard because he could not bear to teach without saying what he thought, pointed to the essential difference when he wondered why “Italians felt the need to get rid of their free institutions” at the very moment when they should be taking pride in them, and when they “should step forward toward a more advanced democracy.” Fascism, for Salvemini, meant setting aside democracy and due process in public life, to the acclamation of the street. It is a phenomenon of failed democracies, and its novelty was that, instead of simply clamping silence upon citizens as classical tyranny had done since earliest times, it found a technique to channel their passions into the construction of an obligatory domestic unity around projects of internal cleansing and external expansion. We should not use the term fascism for predemocratic dictatorships. However cruel, they lack the manipulated mass enthusiasm and demonic energy of fascism, along with the mission of “giving up free institutions” for the sake of national unity, purity, and force. Fascism is easily confused with military dictatorship, for both fascist leaders militarized their societies and placed wars of conquest at the very center of their aims. Guns and uniforms were a fetish with them. In the 1930s, fascist militias were all uniformed (as, indeed, were socialist militias in that colored-shirt era), and fascists have always wanted to turn society into an armed fraternity. Hitler, newly installed as chancellor of Germany, made the mistake of dressing in a civilian trenchcoat and hat when he went to Venice on June 14, 1934, for his first meeting with the more senior Mussolini, “resplendent with uniform and dagger.” Thereafter the Führer appeared in uniform on public occasions—sometimes a brown party jacket, later often an unadorned military tunic. But while all fascisms are always militaristic, military dictatorships are not always fascist. Most military dictators have acted simply as tyrants, without daring to unleash the popular excitement of fascism. Military dictatorships are far commoner than fascisms, for they have no necessary connection to a failed democracy and have existed since there have been warriors.

Enemies were central to the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination. Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies, though their danger seemed to intensify with the advance of Bolshevism and with the exacerbated border conflicts and unfulfilled national claims that followed World War I. Internal enemies grew luxuriantly in number and variety in the mental landscape as the ideal of the homogeneous national state made difference more suspect. Ethnic minorities had been swollen in western Europe after the 1880s by an increased number of refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe. Political and cultural subversives—socialists of various hues, avant-garde artists and intellectuals—discovered new ways to challenge community conformism. The national culture would have to be defended against them. Joseph Goebbels declared at a book-burning ceremony in Berlin on May 10, 1933, that “the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit.” Though Mussolini and his avant-garde artist friends worried less than the Nazis about cultural modernism, Fascist squads made bonfires of socialist books in Italy. The discovery of the role of bacteria in contagion by the French biologist Louis Pasteur and the mechanisms of heredity by the Austrian monk-botanist Gregor Mendel in the 1880s made it possible to imagine whole new categories of internal enemy: carriers of disease, the unclean, and the hereditarily ill, insane, or criminal. The urge to purify the community medically became far stronger in Protestant northern Europe than in Catholic southern Europe. This agenda influenced liberal states, too. The United States and Sweden led the way in the forcible sterilization of habitual offenders (in the American case, especially African Americans), but Nazi Germany went beyond them in the most massive program of medical euthanasia yet known.

After the war, in 1924 Gerardo Machado was elected to the Presidency. As a General during the Cuban War of Independence, he had a great deal of popular support. He was best known for rustling cattle from the Spanish Imperial Army to feed the poor. As the President of Cuba, he undertook many public projects, including the 777-mile construction of a highway, going almost the entire 782-mile length of Cuba. He developed the Capital in Havana and intended to modernize and industrialize the nation. His ambitions and admiration of fascist Benito Mussolini in Italy, caused him to overreach when he convened the legislature to extend his term in office for 6 years, without the benefit of an election. Not only had he overspent, but now he also alienated the Cuban public who denounced him as an authoritarian nationalist. Students, labor unions and intellectualists denounced him as a dictator. Due to a new worldview of Marxist thinking brought on by the Russian revolution, communism was becoming popular and gained a reasonably strong foothold in Cuba. Machado, intent on holding on to power, became more despotic. He created a secret police and resorted to torture and even assassination to control the Cuban people. What started as a great idea ended in disaster for the Cuban people! World history shows this to be a common event. First someone like Machado or Hitler gets elected and in the end as the elected leader becomes a “despot” and takes over the country!

In 1925, Gerardo Machado defeated the conservative Mario García Menocal by an overwhelming majority, becoming Cuba's 5th president. A colleague of Alfredo Zayas, he was also a popular Liberal Party member, and a General during the Cuban War of Independence. General Machado was best known for rustling cattle from the Spanish Imperial Army’s livestock herd, with the good intention of feeding the poor during the revolution. This brazen act of kindness won him a great deal of support among the people. As President, he undertook many popular public projects, including the construction of a highway running the entire length of Cuba. During the beginning of his career as president, he had the National Capitol, as well as other government buildings, constructed in Havana. At first, he did much to modernize and industrialize the mostly agrarian nation. Benito Mussolini and his march on Rome impressed Machado. He admired Mussolini for demanding that liberal King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy elevate the Fascists to power, instead of the Socialists. Although Mussolini originally started his political career as a Socialist, with power and wealth he became a staunch anti-communist. When he was elected as the 27th Prime Minister, he turned Italy into a Totalitarian State. Machado’s ambitions and admiration of Mussolini caused him to emulate the dictator and to misread the importance of his own office. Becoming a “legend in his own mind,” he overreached and started down a slope that led to his administration’s failure and earned him the hatred of the Cuban people. From the very beginning, he fought with the labor leaders and anarchists for control of the labor unions, which represented the workers in the sugar industry. This brought him into a serious conflict with the plantation owners who were mostly wealthy Cuban families and Americans. Keeping the cost of labor down became a priority for the Sugar Barons, and Machado used patriotism as a tool to keep the workers in line. His dictatorial, arrogant ways created unrest within the labor force, as well as with the politically active university students.

Emboldened by the inaction of the League of Nations upon Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler marched troops into the Rhineland, the former German territory west of the Rhine River that the Treaty of Versailles had made off-limits to Germany

National loyalties overcame class loyalties, a fact not lost on ambitious demagogues like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who would rise to power after the war on platforms that fused socialism and nationalism.

THE AUTHORITARIAN PLAYBOOK has no chapter on failure. It does not foresee the leader’s own people turning against him, from military men he trained to young people he indoctrinated to women he rewarded for having babies. It has no pages on how to deal with becoming a national disgrace, someone who is pelted with tomatoes and eggs when he appears in public after leaving office, like Pinochet, or forced into exile, like Amin.

Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations. Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty”—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left." Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement” (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements or camps or bands or rassemblements or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation. Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary” aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success. Becoming a successful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics” had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics” was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement,” in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all” parties of “engagement,”17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants. Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted.

Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit. The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin. At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf.” The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both. Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation. It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists” who deserved it. Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice,” according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, frontsoldiers,” and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another.” Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’” The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism. For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful. Some war veterans and intellectuals (Marinetti and Ernst Jünger were both) indulged in the aesthetics of violence. Violence often appealed to men too young to have known it in 1914–18 and who felt cheated of their war. It appealed to some women, too. But it is a mistake to regard fascist success as solely the triumph of the D’Annunzian hero. It was the genius of fascism to wager that many an orderly bourgeois (or even bourgeoise) would take some vicarious satisfaction in a carefully selective violence, directed only against “terrorists” and “enemies of the people.” A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.

Hitler’s electoral success—far greater than Mussolini’s—allowed him more autonomy in bargaining with the political insiders whose help he needed to reach office. Even more than in Italy, as German governmental mechanisms jammed after 1930, responsibility for finding a way out narrowed to a half-dozen men: President Hindenburg, his son Oskar and other intimate advisors, and the last two Weimar chancellors, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher. At first they tried to keep the uncouth Austrian ex-corporal out. One must recall that in the 1930s cabinet ministers were still supposed to be gentlemen. Bringing raw fascists into government was a measure of their desperation. The Catholic aristocrat Franz von Papen tried as chancellor (July– November 1932) to govern without politicians, through a so-called Cabinet of Barons composed of technical experts and nonpolitical eminences. His gamble at holding national elections in July let the Nazis become the largest party. Von Papen then tried to bring Hitler in as vice chancellor, a position without authority, but the Nazi leader had enough strategic acumen and gambler’s courage to accept nothing but the top office. This path forced Hitler to spend the tense fall of 1932 in an agony of suspenseful waiting, trying to quiet his restless and office-hungry militants while he played for all or nothing. Hoping to deepen the crisis, the Nazis (like the Fascists before them) increased their violence, carefully choosing their targets. The apogee of Nazi street violence in Germany came after June 16, 1932, when Chancellor von Papen lifted the ban on SA uniforms that Brüning had imposed in April. During several sickening weeks, 103 people were killed and hundreds were wounded. Von Papen’s expedient of new elections on November 6 diminished the Nazi vote somewhat (the communists gained again), but did nothing to extract Germany from constitutional deadlock. President Hindenburg replaced him as chancellor on December 2 with a senior army officer regarded as more technocratic than reactionary, General Kurt von Schleicher. During his brief weeks in power (December 1932–January 1933), Schleicher prepared an active job-creation program and mended relations with organized labor. Hoping to obtain Nazi neutrality in parliament, he flirted with Gregor Strasser, head of the party administration and a leader of its anticapitalist current (Hitler never forgot and never forgave Strasser’s “betrayal”). At this point, Hitler was in serious difficulty. In the elections of November 6, his vote had dropped for the first time, costing him his most precious asset—momentum. The party treasury was nearly empty. Gregor Strasser was not the only senior Nazi who, exhausted by Hitler’s all ornothing strategy, was considering other options. The Nazi leader was rescued by Franz von Papen. Bitter at Schleicher for taking his place, von Papen secretly arranged a deal whereby Hitler would be chancellor and he, von Papen, deputy chancellor—a position from which von Papen expected to run things. The aged Hindenburg, convinced by his son and other intimate advisors that Schleicher was planning to depose him and install a military dictatorship, and convinced by von Papen that no other conservative option remained, appointed the Hitler–von Papen government on January 30, 1933. Hitler, concluded Alan Bullock, had been “hoist” into office by “a backstairs conspiracy.

Italian and German conservatives had not created Mussolini and Hitler, of course, though they had too often let their law breaking go unpunished. After the Fascists and the Nazis had made themselves too important to ignore, by the somewhat different mixtures of electoral appeal and violent intimidation that we saw in the last chapter, the conservatives had to decide what to do with them. In particular, conservative leaders had to decide whether to try to coopt fascism or force it back to the margins. One crucial decision was whether the police and the courts would compel the fascists to obey the law. German chancellor Brüning attempted to curb Nazi violence in 1931–32. He banned uniformed actions by the SA on April 14, 1932. When Franz von Papen succeeded Brüning as chancellor in July 1932, however, he lifted the ban, as we saw above, and the Nazis, excited by vindication, set off the most violent period in the whole 1930–32 constitutional crisis. In Italy, although a few prefects tried to restrain Fascist lawlessness, the national leaders preferred, at crucial moments, as we already know, to try to “transform” Mussolini rather than to discipline him. Conservative national leaders in both countries decided that what the fascists had to offer outweighed the disadvantages of allowing these ruffians to capture public space from the Left by violence. The nationalist press and conservative leaders in both countries consistently applied a double standard to judging fascist and left-wing violence.

Conservative complicities in the fascism’s arrival in power were of several types. First of all, there was complicity in fascist violence against the Left. One of the most fateful decisions in the German case was von Papen’s removal, on June 16, 1932, of the ban on SA activity. Mussolini’s squadristi would have been powerless without the closed eyes and even the outright aid of the Italian police and army. Another form of complicity was the gift of respectability. We have seen how Giolitti helped make Mussolini respectable by including him in his electoral coalition in May 1921. Alfred Hugenberg, Krupp executive and leader of the party that competed with Hitler most directly, the German National Party (DNVP), alternately attacked the Nazi upstart and appeared at political rallies with him. One at Bad Harzburg in fall 1931 made the public believe the two had formed a “Harzburg Front.” But while Hugenberg helped make Hitler look acceptable, his DNVP membership drained away to the more exciting Nazis.

Much ink has been spilled over whether fascism represented an emergency form of capitalism, a mechanism devised by capitalists by which the fascist state—their agent—disciplined the workforce in a way no traditional dictatorship could do. Today it is quite clear that businessmen often objected to specific aspects of fascist economic policies, sometimes with success. But fascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler’s will. Mussolini returned to the gold standard and revalued the lira at 90 to the British pound in December 1927 for reasons of national prestige, and over the objections of his own finance minister. Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in the special conditions of 1922 and 1933—socialism or a dysfunctional market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls. In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given to them in economic management. Mussolini’s famous corporatist economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading businessmen. Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi regime and business had “converging but not identical interests.” Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments contracts, and job-creation stimuli. Important areas of conflict involved government economic controls, limits on trade, and the high cost of autarky—the economic self-sufficiency by which the Nazis hoped to overcome the shortages that had lost Germany World War I. Autarky required costly substitutes—Ersatz— for such previously imported products as oil and rubber. Economic controls damaged smaller companies and those not involved in rearmament. Limits on trade created problems for companies that had formerly derived important profits from exports. The great chemical combine I. G. Farben is an excellent example: before 1933, Farben had prospered in international trade. After 1933, the company’s directors adapted to the regime’s autarky and learned to prosper mightily as the suppliers of German rearmament. The best example of the expense of import substitution was the Hermann Goering Werke, set up to make steel from the inferior ores and brown coal of Silesia. The steel manufacturers were forced to help finance this operation, to which they raised vigorous objections.

In the short term, as liberal economies floundered in the early 1930s, fascist economies could look more capable than democracies of performing the harsh task of reconciling populations to diminished personal consumption in order to permit a higher rate of savings and investment, particularly in the military. But we know now that they never achieved the growth rates of postwar Europe, or even of pre-1914 Europe, or even the total mobilization for war achieved voluntarily and belatedly by some of the democracies. This makes it difficult to accept the definition of fascism as a “developmental dictatorship” appropriate for latecomer industrial nations. Fascists did not wish to develop the economy but to prepare for war, even though they needed accelerated arms production for that. Fascists had to do something about the welfare state. In Germany, the welfare experiments of the Weimar Republic had proved too expensive after the Depression struck in 1929. The Nazis trimmed them and perverted them by racial forms of exclusion. But neither fascist regime tried to dismantle the welfare state (as mere reactionaries might have done). Fascism was revolutionary in its radically new conceptions of citizenship, of the way individuals participated in the life of the community. It was counterrevolutionary, however, with respect to such traditional projects of the Left as individual liberties, human rights, due process, and international peace. In sum, the fascist exercise of power involved a coalition composed of the same elements in Mussolini’s Italy as in Nazi Germany. It was the relative weight among leader, party, and traditional institutions that distinguished one case from the other. In Italy, the traditional state wound up with supremacy over the party, largely because Mussolini feared his own most militant followers, the local ras and their squadristi. In Nazi Germany, the party came to dominate the state and civil society, especially after war began. Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy: an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism and the Left, and a shared willingness to stop at nothing to destroy their common enemies.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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, 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.

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. The inoculation of most Europeans against the original fascism by its public shaming in 1945 is inherently temporary. The taboos of 1945 have inevitably faded with the disappearance of the eyewitness generation. In any event, a fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols. Some future movement that would “give up free institutions” in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous. For example, while a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in Russia and eastern Europe, religious, anti-Semitic, Slavophile, and anti-Western. New fascisms would probably prefer the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time to alien swastikas or fasces. The British moralist George Orwell noted in the 1930s that an authentic British fascism would come reassuringly clad in sober English dress. There is no sartorial litmus test for fascism.

Totalitarianism served as the political idea of fascist dictators. Notorious Hitler in Germany and Mussolini in Italy used totalitarianism as an ideological tool to justify their fascist dictatorship. The fascist dictators stamped out even the most elementary democratic freedom and rights of the masses of the working people and enforced unprecedentedly tyrannical policies, behind the misleading name of "national socialism", claiming that for the sake of the whole nation and the whole state no working-class movement and no class struggle could be permitted. The reactionary nature of totalitarianism is that the interests of the working people are sacrificed for the sake of the rapacious interests of the reactionary ruling class under the pretence that the individual should be subordinated to the whole. What is meant by the whole in totalitarianism is not the whole of the popular masses but a tiny handful of privileged circles such as monopoly capitalists, major landowners, reactionary bureaucrats and warlords.

Esta idea imperialista partía de una actitud filosófica que propugnaba el destino de las naciones más poderosas a regir todos aquellos territorios cuyas metrópolis hubiesen entrado en decadencia. Se exaltaba la fuerza y la desigualdad entre las naciones. Las ideas apuntadas fueron expresadas en el «Dying nations speech», pronunciado por lord Salisbury en 1898. Esa supuesta superioridad se concebía en manos de las naciones anglosajonas y en detrimento de las naciones latinas, aquellas naciones que no vivieron con plenitud la Reforma en el siglo XVI, el racionalismo en el XVII, el empirismo en el XVIII y la revolución industrial en el XIX22. Salisbury afirmaba: «Las naciones vivas se irán apropiando gradualmente de los territorios de las moribundas, y surgirán rápidamente las semillas y las causas de conflicto entre las naciones civilizadas...»

Esta idea imperialista partía de una actitud filosófica que propugnaba el destino de las naciones más poderosas a regir todos aquellos territorios cuyas metrópolis hubiesen entrado en decadencia. Se exaltaba la fuerza y la desigualdad entre las naciones. Las ideas apuntadas fueron expresadas en el «Dying nations speech», pronunciado por lord Salisbury en 1898. Esa supuesta superioridad se concebía en manos de las naciones anglosajonas y en detrimento de las naciones latinas, aquellas naciones que no vivieron con plenitud la Reforma en el siglo XVI, el racionalismo en el XVII, el empirismo en el XVIII y la revolución industrial en el XIX22.

Mussolini and Hitler also felt that they were doing things along similar lines to FDR. Indeed, they celebrated the New Deal as a kindred effort. The German press was particularly lavish in its praise for FDR. In 1934 the Völkischer Beobachter—the Nazi Party’s official newspaper—described Roosevelt as a man of “irreproachable, extremely responsible character and immovable will” and a “warmhearted leader of the people with a profound understanding of social needs.” The paper emphasized that Roosevelt, through his New Deal, had eliminated “the uninhibited frenzy of market speculation” of the previous decade by adopting “National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies.” After his first year in office, Hitler sent FDR a private letter congratulating “his heroic efforts in the interests of the American people. The President’s successful battle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration.” And he told the American ambassador, William Dodd, that he was “in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan ‘The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual.’ ”38