Over the past few years, the word "fascist" has been deployed increasingly to describe modern-day political movements in the United States, Hungary, Greece, and Italy, to name a few places. The word brings with it some of the most odious associations from the 20th century, namely Nazi Germany and the most devastating war in human history. Yet to what degree is the label appropriate and to what extent is it more melodramatic epithet than an appropriate description?

 

It was in part to answer that question that I picked up a copy of Robert O. Paxton's book. As a longtime historian of 20th century France and author of a seminal work on the Vichy regime, he brings a perspective to the question that is not predominantly Italian or German. This shows in the narrative, as his work uses fascist movements in nearly every European country to draw out commonalities that explain the fascist phenomenon. As he demonstrates, fascism can be traced as far back as the 1880s, with elements of it proposed by authors and politicians across Europe in order to mobilize the growing population of voters (thanks to new measures of enfranchisement) to causes other than communism. Until then, it was assumed by nearly everyone that such voters would be automatic supporters for socialist movements. Fascism proposed a different appeal, one based around nationalist elements which socialism ostensibly rejected.

 

Despite this, fascism remained undeveloped until it emerged in Italy in the aftermath of the First World War. This gave Benito Mussolini and his comrades a flexibility in crafting an appeal that won over the established elites in Italian politics and society. From this emerged a pattern that Paxton identifies in the emergence of fascism in both Italy and later in Germany, which was their acceptance by existing leaders as a precondition for power. Contrary to the myth of Mussolini's "March on Rome," nowhere did fascism take over by seizing power; instead they were offered it by conservative politicians as a solution to political turmoil and the threatened emergence of a radical left-wing alternative. It was the absence of an alternative on the right which led to the acceptance of fascism; where such alternatives (of a more traditional right-authoritarian variety) existed, fascism remained on the fringes. The nature of their ascent into power also defined the regimes that emerged, which were characterized by tension between fascists and more traditional conservatives, and often proved to be far less revolutionary in practice than their rhetoric promised.

 

Paxton's analysis is buttressed by a sure command of his subject. He ranges widely over the era, comparing and contrasting national groups in a way that allows him to come up an overarching analysis of it as a movement. All of this leads him to this final definition:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. (p. 218)

While elements of this are certainly present today, they are hardly unique to fascism and exist in various forms across the political spectrum. Just as important, as Paxton demonstrates, is the context: one in which existing institutions are so distrusted or discredited that the broader population is willing to sit by and watch as they are compromised, bypassed, or dismantled in the name of achieving fascism's goals. Paxton's arguments here, made a decade before Donald Trump first embarked on his candidacy, are as true now as they were then. Reading them helped me to appreciate better the challenge of fascism, both in interwar Europe and in our world today. Everyone seeking to understand it would do well to start with this perceptive and well-argued book.

As our web site makes very clear, we are totally opposed to ideas such as racism, religious intolerance and communism. However, in order to combat such evils, it is necessary to understand them by means of the study of key documentary material.

Thus reads World Future Fund's disclaimer at the beginning of Mussolini's The Doctrine of Fascism. And for good reason! This is some seriously totalitarian stuff. As with other world-jarring and vile works like The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, Mein Kampf, and The Turner Diaries, we should read them to better understand tyrants and the murderous ideologies they espouse.

Here's a sampling of the dangerous crap spewed by uber-turd Benito Mussolini:

Against the concept of individual human dignity.

In the Fascist conception of history, man is man only by virtue of the spiritual process to which he contributes as a member of the family, the social group, the nation, and in function of history to which all nations bring their contribution.... Outside history man is a nonentity. Fascism is therefore opposed to all individualistic abstractions based on eighteenth century materialism.... Anti-individualistic, the Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as a historic entity.

With individuals subordinated to the will of the State, Mussolini really pours on the totalitarian Statist propaganda.

The Fascist conception of the State is all embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State - a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values - interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a people.

Now with individuals belittled and the State exalted, Mussolini seeks to justify his becoming the State's sole ruler.

[I]t is the purest form of democracy if the nation be considered as it should be from the point of view of quality rather than quantity, as an idea, the mightiest because the most ethical, the most coherent, the truest, expressing itself in a people as the conscience and will of the few, if not, indeed, of one, and ending to express itself in the conscience and will of the mass, of the whole group ethnically molded by natural and historical conditions into a nation, advancing, as one conscience and one will, along the self same line of development and spiritual formation.

Here's Mussolini's poop in a nutshell. He made himself alone the State. The State's will was his will. And since simplicity and clarity of mind demand there be only one will or conscience, Mussolini gave himself a mandate to eradicate individuals and ideas that did not coincide with his preferences. That's a high price to pay for making trains run on time!

Mussolini believed the 20th century to be the totalitarian's time to rule. For him, the individual's time had run it's course in the 18th and 19th centuries. And really, events seem to have agreed with Mussolini. Millions upon millions of people died at the hands of him, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and a host of other uglies. Tyranny was an equal opportunity endeavor in the last century, with mass killers coming from both the left and right sides of the ideological spectrum. Lovely! The good news is there are things we can do to end these cycles of mass violence. For starters, when a theocratic, racialist or war party approaches you, move quickly in the opposite direction.