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If it is admitted that the nineteenth century has been the century of
Socialism, Liberalism and Democracy, it does not follow that the twentieth
must also be the century of Liberalism, Socialism and Democracy. Political
doctrines pass; peoples remain. It is to be expected that this century may be
that of authority, a century of the "Right," a Fascist century. If
the nineteenth was the century of the individual it may be expected that this
one may be the century of "collectivism" and therefore the century
of the State.
---Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine
of Fascism, 1932
While most of the lost and troubled generation found
newness in their unconsciousness or in the efforts to twist the rules of
"rational" art, there was also something real and vital which would
become their experience. Not just the backdrop to their experience, but their
experience itself. In the 1920s and 30s, liberal democracy was faced with a
grave crisis and its greatest challenge. A new political theory emerged --
one which drew its inspiration from Caligula, Nero and  Commodus. It was Benito Mussolini who proclaimed that
universal suffrage was the greatest of lies. And it was Lenin who proved
Russian bourgeois democracy to have been both decadent and impotent. In THE REVOLT OF THE MASSES (1930), the
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset
(1883-1955) remarked that:
There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost
importance in the public life of Europe
at the present moment. This fact is the accession of the masses to complete
social power.
The German OSWALD SPENGLER (1880-1936), believed that
liberalism led to democracy which in the end would lead to caesarism. This development he outlined in his massive
philosophy of history, The Decline of
the West, which he published in 1919. George Bernard Shaw
(1856-1950) believed that democracy substituted the rule of the incompetent
many for that of the corrupt few. Shaw admired Lenin -- Shaw admired
Mussolini. Why? Well, it was quite simply, really: any enemy of democracy was
a friend to Shaw.
It seemed as if perhaps Plato
was right after all. His Republic,
written as the classical age of Greece
came to a close, was a dialogue about the education required for a perfect
society. Democracy had no place in such a society: Plato merely called it
"a charming form of government." In its place, Plato believed that
a special breed of man, a Philosopher-King, ought to govern. One man --
endowed with the mind of a philosopher and body of a general. The Romans understood
Plato -- so too did the moderns. Lenin believed he
was that man -- so too did Joseph Stalin, Adolf
Hitler and Mussolini. Perhaps the rule of superior beings was required for
the 20th century. Perhaps democracy and parliamentary government, and
socialism and communism, had run their course. After all, none of them had
brought about peace. Instead, they had brought about the Great War.
Although many intellectuals toyed with fascism, their general sympathies
were stated in a more negative fashion. That is, they may have become
fascists, but only because fascism contained no democratic principles. H. G. Wells (1866-1946),
the author of The Time
Machine and War of
the Worlds, called for a class of governing experts or technocrats.
So too did the American critic, Walter Lippmann
(1894-1974). D. H.
Lawrence believed that democracy was spent force -- a new Caesar was
needed. Evelyn Waugh
(1903-1966), author of Brideshead
Revisited, accepted both Mussolini's Fascists and Franco's right wing
dictatorship. A new ideology, Italian fascism appeared after World War One in
a country which had clearly been demoralized by war. The nation found itself
frustrated and basically left out of the peace negotiations in 1919.
Italian Fascism was not a consistent doctrine but rather a fusion of
different ideas. It was successful, temporarily at least, because Italy
was near total collapse. The collapse was precipitated by war but there were
other elements as well. There was, for instance, conflict between socialist
trade unions and industrial capitalists. On top of that, there was the
general failure of parliamentary democracy. The key to these crises was
fascism with its aim, the end of class conflict. The Fascists, like the
Marxists, recognized the existence of class conflict, a class war which had
existed, according to Karl Marx,
throughout history. The Marxist solution was a world-wide proletarian
revolution in which workers would rise up, break free their fetters and seize
and then control the means of production. This great event would usher in the
historical stage of production known as socialism. With time, Marx argued,
the state controlled economy would whither away and the perfect form of
social organization, communism, would take its place.
Mussolini had nothing to do with such a scenario. To believe that the
proletariat would rise up on their own was idealist
fantasy. Mussolini's fascism attempted to remove class antagonisms through
nationalism and corporatism. The economy was organized and all producers --
from peasants and factory workers to intellectuals and industrialists -- were
situated into twenty-two corporations to improve productivity and avoid
industrial disputes. It all sounded good on paper but as the Italians and the
world later discovered, it didn't work. So Mussolini found himself having to
make compromises with big business, the monarchy and the Roman Catholic
Church. The Italian economy experienced no appreciable growth. The corporate
state was never fully implemented and the expansionist and militaristic
nature of fascism contributed to imperialist adventures in Ethiopia
and the Balkans, and ultimately, World War Two. What fascism became was a nightmare world come true -- a nightmare feared by mean
like Ortega, Spengler, Lawrence and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). It was the revolt of the
dehumanized masses enslaved by a totalitarian state.
 Fascism's
leader was BENITO MUSSOLINI. Born in 1883, the son of an anti-clerical,
socialist blacksmith, Mussolini was an unruly child. He shared his father's
views and added to them ideas he picked up from his wide reading of
revolutionary writers. He read Louis Blanqui
(1805-1881), a French revolutionary leader during the Paris Commune of 1871 and
master of insurrection. Mussolini absorbed the writings of Georges
Sorel
(1847-1922), a French syndicalist philosopher who
argued that true socialism could only appear after a period of violent
revolution at the hands of a disciplined proletariat. In his LETTER TO DANIEL
HALEVY (1907), Sorel
introduced his doctrine of the "social myth." A true myth, said Sorel, does not aim to provide a
rational conception of a future society but is a vision, a dream, a great emotional force that can inspire violent revolutionary
activity. Such myths cannot be subjected to rational discussion. The function
of a myth, above all, is mass inspiration: "the myths are not
descriptions of things," Sorel
wrote, "but determinations to act." Mussolini was also familiar
with our old friend Friedrich Nietzsche.
Mussolini was influenced by all these theorists but spent his early years
as a traveling schoolteacher and journalist. In 1912, Mussolini became editor
of the Milan Socialist Party newspaper, Avanti.
When the Great War broke out in 1914, he at first opposed Italy's
entry but soon reversed his position and called for Italy's
entry on the side of the Allies. Expelled from the Socialist Party for this
stance, he founded his own newspaper in Milan,
Il popolo
d'Italia, which later became the organ of his
Fascist movement. He served in the army until he was wounded in 1917.
On March 23, 1919,
Mussolini and other war veterans founded in Milan
a revolutionary, nationalistic group called the Fasci
di Combattimento,
named for the ancient Roman symbol of power, the fasces. His fascist
movement developed into a powerful "radicalism of the right,"
gaining the support of many landowners in the lower Po Valley, industrialists
and army officers. Fascist blackshirt squads
carried on local civil war against Socialists, Communists, Catholics and
Liberals.
On October 28, 1922,
after the Fascists had marched on Rome,
Mussolini secured a mandate from King Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947) to form
a coalition government. In 1925-26, after a lengthy crisis with parliament
following the assassination of the Socialist leader Giacomo
Matteotti (1885-1924), he imposed a single-party,
totalitarian dictatorship. His corporative state came to terms with Italian
capitalism but abolished free trade unions.
Mussolini understood that there was a need for a complete revolution of
values to replace those of decadent and bankrupt bourgeois civilization.
These values were not socialist, they were not communist and they certainly
were not liberal. Mussolini sought to move beyond contemporary political
ideologies and his solution was fascism. Fascism stressed charismatic
leadership, a dynamic leadership which would bring Italy
away from the humiliation it had suffered since the late 19th century. In
this manner, Fascism was both a species of revival and restoration. But, it
was based on irrationality. There was no system or program, just action for
the sake of action, violence for the sake of violence. Mussolini wanted to
destroy the "lie of universal suffrage," he wanted to destroy
parliamentary democracy by substituting for it a strong
heroic elite. True, he broke the power of the trade unions but the result was
near total economic collapse. As a new religion, fascism was stamped on the
mind of youth through control of education but it soon ceased to interest
anyone of even meager intelligence. It was almost laughable -- this
theatrical performance for the sake of performance. Despite the performance,
the myths, the ritual and the pretended charisma of Il Duce, it has
been said that the only thing Mussolini managed to do was to make the trains
run on time.
 Fascism was a mass anti-liberal, anti-communist movement. It
was radical in its acceptance of conflict. It was radical in its willingness
to employ force whenever necessary. It held all upper class values in
contempt. And, it attacked its enemies on both the left and the right. With a
leader such as ADOLF HITLER (1889-1945), support tended to come from the
lower middle class. The little men -- the clerks, the shopkeepers, the minor
civil servants. These were the people whose ambitions had been frustrated by
the wartime economy. These were the people who were self-taught but could not
get ahead. Finally, these were the people who came out of the Great War
demoralized by German defeat in 1918.
There's no doubt about it. Hitler borrowed from Mussolini. But Hitler also
went beyond Il Duce. Mussolini had not been ruthless enough. Lenin,
the leader of the Bolsheviks in Russia,
had been ruthless, so Mussolini borrowed tactics from the Party for his own
purposes. Hitler hated democracy and Marxism he regarded as Jewish poison. Of
Marxism, Hitler wrote: "Either this racial poison, the mass
tuberculosis, grows in our people, and Germany
dies of an infected lung, or it is eliminated, and Germany
can then thrive." He was fanatically nationalistic. Nazism thrived on
the defeat of WWI as well as the national sense of humiliation shared by all
Germans due to the Versailles Treaty's war guilt clause.
There is little doubt that Nazism made its appeal to the emotions of a
society devastated by war. Capitalism, communism, the Jews, the pacifists and
liberals, the weak and the insane were all denounced. Hitler demanded a
strong government capable of voicing the national will and leading Germany
back to it place in the sun.
Hitler's storm troopers specialized in brutal violence. His party borrowed
heavily from the Russian Bolsheviks for its organization. And this was
important for in such a party as the Nazis, organization was everything. And
then there was Hitler's social Darwinism -- that life is struggle and that
the weak will perish. Is this an idea that became new with Hitler? Certainly
not. Richard Wagner
(1813-1883), after all, was racist. So too were many of Hitler's teachers.
Racism was not a creation of the early twentieth century. Not only that, the
entire period from 1880-1920 was one in which the science of eugenics had
become popular. This is true whether we consider developments in England,
France, Russia,
Germany or
the United States.
From Nietzsche, the Nazis borrowed slogans about the Superman, the blond
beast, heroic leadership, the herd and the need to purge the old order.
Unfortunately for poor Nietzsche -- a man who hated anti-Semites and
nationalists -- Hitler made him the Reich's official philosopher. For Hitler,
the Jew was the scapegoat, blamed for everything. Everything that had
anything to do with capitalism, democracy, socialism, communism, modern art
and modern literature and a hundred other things was all part of a Jewish
conspiracy. Stalin shared a similar disposition. The Jew was identified with
intellectualism, while the German or Aryan was identified with the cultural
and national soil -- the "Volk," a nineteenth century
concept pre-dating Hitler by almost 100 years. "Volk is a much
more comprehensive term than people," the historian George Mosse wrote in The Crisis of German Ideology,
for to German thinkers ever since
the birth of German romanticism in the late eighteenth century Volk
signified the union of a group of people with a transcendental
"essence." This "essence" might be called
"nature" or "cosmos" or "mythos," but in each
instance it was fused to man's innermost nature, and represented the source
of his creativity, his depth of feeling, his individuality, and his unity
with other members of the Volk. (1964)
The Nazis talked of a pure Aryan Christianity, unblemished by Judaic
influence. This idea went so far that Hitler asserted there was an Aryan
science and that Albert Einstein was incorrect simply because he was a Jew.
All this talk about Nordic supremacy or the Aryan race was quite common at
the turn of the century -- although it certainly appeared in different forms.
In the United States,
for instance, there was consistent talk of "race suicide" and the
"mongrelization" of native Americans
(meaning white, Europeans) due to their intermarriage with inferior races of
Slavs, Jews and Italians. Anti-Semitism, social Darwinism and eugenics were
also a commonplace in England
at the turn of the century, as were fears of racial suicide. But it was the Dreyfus
Affair in France
in the 1890s which exposed the modern appearance of anti-Semitism.
Hitler learned his anti-Semitism in Austria
where he developed his ideas of pan-Germanism, Lebensraum
and the master race. Anti-Semitism was common in Russia
and Eastern Europe where pogroms against the Jews
already had a lengthy history by the 1920s and 30s. In fact, anti-Semitism in
various forms has an extremely long history. In Germany,
as compared with other areas of eastern and central Europe,
there was no Jewish problem. The Jewish problem only became real after Hitler
and the Nazis invented it.
The Nazi and Fascist movements of the 1920s and 30s were profoundly
anti-intellectual. "When I hear the world culture," said Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945), "I reach for my gun."
Fascism came to be led by the brutal, the ignorant and the criminal -- men
who were clever at exploiting the irrationality of the masses. As keen
students of modern propaganda, the Fascists and Nazis borrowed heavily from
the great mass movements of the age (radio, film, print). The Fascists
employed the language of religious conversion, freely using words like faith,
salvation, miracle, rebirth and sacrifice. This was a tendency already
apparent in 19th century nationalism, an ideology whose past extends backward
to early 19th century German Romanticism.
The Fascists also borrowed heavily from the Bolsheviks and communists,
from the Jesuits and Freemasons and from the army. It has been said that
Fascism and Nazism also learned a great deal from American advertising.
Hitler and the Nazis looked to the recent German past and borrowed whatever
was useful to them. There was, in the case of Hitler, a deliberate use of
myth and a general acceptance of the need to lead the masses by attention to
their irrational impulses. The respect for truth -- truth as discerned by thinkers
like Hegel, Goethe, Marx or Nietzsche -- was replaced by the systematic lying
of the Nazis.
In general, the Fascists and Nazis elevated all that was horrific in
pre-war and inter-war European culture. They were the evil spirits of western
civilization. They did not create the evil -- they merely exploited it. They
heightened it. They were intellectual parasites who borrowed the ideas of
others to use as the new tools of power.
Fascism or Fascist ideology was not restricted to Italy
or to Germany
alone. Fascism was a European phenomenon which developed as a reaction to the
perceived failure of western-style liberal democracies and industrial
capitalism. From France,
Belgium and Romania
to Austria, England
and the United States,
Fascism did manage to receive some support. Fascism was a radicalism of the
political right and as such, profoundly conservative. Its ideology glorified
the country over the city, stressed blind patriotism, the family, traditional
values and old customs. We see the same emphasis in the German "Volk."
"The world between the wars was attracted to madness," wrote the
British philosopher Bertrand
Russell (1872-1970). "Of this attraction Nazism was the most
emphatic expression." Watching Hitler's chanting crowds, and mass
meetings, one could only get the idea that some kind of madness had come over
Germany. In
actual fact, most Germans cared less for Fascist or Nazi propaganda. They
like Hitler because he got things done, solved unemployment and restored the
pride of all Germans.
It's been said that people, not being truly rational, have need of ritual,
romance and religion. Perhaps these needs had been neglected in a
rationalized, bureaucratic and mechanical society. Fascism reminded these
people that twentieth century man is in search of religion and religious
faith -- faith needed to replace a Christianity now hidden. In Fascism and
Nazism, they found a new faith replete with rituals, symbols, sacraments, the
good book as well as a Messiah. In the end, of course, this new faith turned
out to be a disastrous one.
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