Fascism-The Perennial Temptation

Paulos Mar Gregorios

Contents

In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Thomas Mann, the great German humanist wrote a political treatise, Reflections of an unpolitical Man, in defence of German nationalism. This 43 year old, cultured, literary writer who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, could be so emotionally moved by the defeat of Germany in the first World War that he could support German Nationalism, which later became the forerunner of National Socialism. Of course, he later wholeheartedly repudiated what he wrote. In 1930, three years before Hitler came to power, Thomas Mann made a spirited appeal to the cultured bourgeoisie and to the working classes to oppose German nationalism with all their might. It is a warning to all of us here in India too.When things go bad for a nation, there is an increased temptation to an anti-humanist totalitarianism.

The Origin of Fascism in Italy

But Fascism did not begin in Germany. It was an Italian movement, and Fascism was a peculiar Italian creation. The word, first used by Benito Mussolini in 1919, had two connotations-- one associated with the ancient Roman imperial glory and the second with the united strength of the people bound together by absolute authority.

The Fasces was the insignia of authority in the ancient Roman Empire. It was a bundle of birch rods tied together with an axe. Every Roman official carried it as a badge of authority. In the city of Rome itself the axe had to be omitted, because authority was supposedly in the hands of the free citizens without the arbitrary ruler symbolized by the axe.

The Italian word Facio meant a bundle, a close-knit group under clear authority, with a high sense of identity with the national soil and the uniting trees of blood, excluding and hating foreigners.

Mussolini started out as a leftist, by 1912 editor of Milan's Avanti (Advance ), advocate of the poor, militant anti-militarist.

Mussolini's ideology was an odd mixture-- a little Marx, a little Sorel, a little Nietzsche, and a lot of himself. The Ideology is related to Hegel's (1770-1831) conception of the national state as a materialisation of the Absolute Idea, and to Johann Gottlieb Fichte's (1762-1814) quasi-deification of the national collectivity. These German thinkers regarded the state not as instrumental, but as an end in itself. The person or individual received his dignity, objectively and ethically, only in the state.

It is also related to the French anti-Parliamentarians, Maurice Barres (1862-1923) and Charles Maurras (1868-1952). These men despised the democratic French state and admired the more autocratic Roman Catholic Church. They agreed with Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and also with Friedrich Nietzsche (l844-1900), who was strongly anti-nationalist, that the decadence of the west was to be attributed to democracy and Christianity. They were all anti-liberals.

Mussolini learned from all these, but also from the anti-liberal French Socialist Georges Sorel (1847- 1922) in his contention that the bourgeoisie was effete and decadent while the proletariat alone had vitality. Mussolini was a socialist, who founded the socialist party Il Popolo d' Italia (The People of Italy).

He came to power in 1922 by popular support, and showed his true colors in 1932 with his article on Dottrina del Fascismo in the Encyclopedia Italiana.

"our programme is simple. We wish to govern Italy. They ask us for programmes, but there are already too many. It is not programmes that are lacking for the salvation of Italy, but men and willpower.

"War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to face it. Fascism carries this anti-pacifist struggle into the lives of individuals.. It is education for combat.. War is to the man what maternity is to the woman. I do not believe in perpetual peace; not only do I find it depressing, but it is also a negation of all the fundamental virtues of man".

The consequences for Mussolini were the thirst for empire, the rape of Ethiopia in 1935, the formation of the Rome-Berlin axis with Hitler in 1936, entering the Fascist side in the Spanish Civil War in 1938, and joining World War 11 on the side of Germany in 1940-- leading to defeat and dismissal in 1945.

Fascism Becomes Nazism in Germany

Adolf Hitler was much more racist than Mussolini, and much more anti-communist. Nazism, the German version of fascism, was a reaction to the Proletarian victory of Bolshevism in 1917 and to the defeat of Germany in 1918. The German people, Hitler felt, could not advance, because their advanced technology and industry were inhibited by a semi-feudal national political structure. Unlike in Italy, it was clearly a bourgeois, anti-proletarian movement. Nazism built upon Hegel's conception of the Prussian state as the highest manifestation of the Absolute Idea, by adding the racist doctrines that the Nordic Aryans, the Herrenvolk, were the only creative race on earth destined to rule over the others, (Deutschland ueber Alles) and that the salvation of Germany from defeat was necessary for the salvation of all humanity. Two enemies were identified as western capitalism and slavic Marxism, which were both Jewish. So Jews and Slavs were to be exterminated.

The ideology and techniques used by Adolf Hitler are frighteningly reminiscent of the current U S administration and particularly president Reagan. Hitler had great faith in the power of the spoken word. Even a total lie if repeated with conviction and often enough will be accepted as truth, Hitler believed. He also held that propaganda should be formulated at the lowest possible intellectual level. It was important to appeal to the vanity of the German people and constantly to tell them that they were the number one people, and that their interests were sovereign over the interests of all others. Narrow patriotic sentiments should always be stirred up.

Fascism Spreads Worldwide

Fascist movements sprang up in other countries also. In spain the Falange Espanola, under the leadership of young and fiery Jose Antonio Primo de Riviera (1903-36) was an anti-bourgeois movement. But when the young leader died at 33, Franco used his Falange as an instrument of the conservative aristocracy. In Belgium the flemish reactionaries organized the Verbond van Dietsche Nationalsolidaristen. In Norway, the Quisling group organized the Nasjonal Samling, with the St Olaf Cross as its emblem. ln Romania the Legion of the archangel Michael under bodreanu used an orthodox icon as its emblem.

In Japan, the army took charge on Feb. 26, 1936, and systematically assassinated west-inclined liberals. The emperor Hirohito and his will were the highest principle of morality.

In Argentina, Juan and Eva Peron with the support of the poor, used the anti-yankee imperialism plank to create a fascist organization and seized power m 1943.

In South Africa, the white Afrikaners developed a racist fascism which is the only one still in power. It is also the oldest fascist party in terms of birth, the Christian National Party having been formed in January 1940. By 1940, it was clear to the white regime that Nazi Germany was its friend, and Communist Russia its foe. A series of fascist minded leaders of varying degrees, general Herzog, general Smuts, Verwoerd, Vorster, and now finally Pieter Botha, have tried to uphold the structures of an unjust racist totalitarianism.

Soviet Union's Role in Breaking the Nazi Terror

German National socialism was the pivot of world fascism. Hitler, much more than Mussolini, was its true prophet -- racist, militarist, imperialist, anti-pacifist, anti-socialist, totalitarian, anti-intellectual, and ultimately inhuman.

In the thirties when Nazism was establishing itself, it was not perceived as a threat by the world capita1ist system. In fact, the western nations first perceived Hitler as an ally in their anti-communism. Only when their own interests were threatened did they turn against Hitler. Till the last part of the war, the Allies secretly hoped that Hitler would destroy the Soviet Union. They thought they could turn against Hitler after he had done the Job for them of destroying the first country to establish a workers' regime.

It was the Soviet Union's historic role to destroy this reactionary movement. In was in that process of combating the mighty war machine of Hitler that the Soviet Union finally found its inner strength and deeper coherence. It would be interesting to speculate what the world would have been like if the Soviet Union had not been there to combat the Nazi terror and the reactionary forces of conservative but technically proficient capitalism behind it. Would the allies have been able to break Fascism without the Soviet Union taking the brunt of the Nazi attack and sacrificing 20 million of her citizens in that combat?

Perhaps the question is idle. Those who know the nature of the Nazi terror and its diabolical inhumanity to which five million Jewish people were offered as a holocaust, would know also that humanity is ever in the debt of the Soviet Union for beating back the forces of darkness and diabolism-forces which are rearing their heads again in Western Europe, Japan and the Americas. Even in Germany, it is socialism alone that will ultimately be able to cope with the latent Nazism.