From: nlns@igc.apc.org (New Liberation News Service)
Subject: NLNS: WHAT IS FASCISM?
Organization: The Ohio State University Department of Computer and Information Science
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 12:49:21 GMT

/* Written  6:21 pm  Oct 13, 1992 by nlns in cdp:nlns.news */
/* ---------- "NLNS Packet 3.3 *** 10/12/92" ---------- */

What is Fascism?
Chip Berlet

This article is adapted from the author's preface to Russ 
Bellant's book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican 
Party, co-published by South End Press and Political Research 
Associates.

"Fascism, which was not afraid to call itself reactionaryI does 
not hesitate to call itself illiberal and anti-liberal."
		 --Benito Mussolini

(NLNS)--We have all heard of the Nazis--but our image is 
usually a caricature of a brutal goose-stepping soldier wearing 
a uniform emblazoned with a swastika. Most people in the U.S. 
are aware that the U.S. and its allies fought a war against the 
Nazis, but there is much more to know if one is to learn the 
important lessons of our recent history.
	Technically, the word NAZI was the acronym for the 
National Socialist German Worker's Party. It was a fascist 
movement that had its roots in the European nationalist and 
socialist movements, and that developed a grotesque 
biologically-determinant view of so-called "Aryan" supremacy. 
(Here we use "national socialism" to refer to the early Nazi 
movement before Hitler came to power, sometimes termed the 
"Brownshirt" phase, and the term "Nazi"  to refer to the 
movement after it had consolidated around ideological fascism.)
	The seeds of fascism, however, were planted in Italy. 
"Fascism is reaction," said Mussolini, but reaction to what? The 
reactionary movement following World War I was based on a 
rejection of the social theories that formed the basis of the 
1789 French Revolution, and whose early formulations in this 
country had a major influence on our Declaration of 
Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights.
	It was Rousseau who is best known for crystallizing 
these modern social theories in The Social Contract. The 
progeny of these theories are sometimes called Modernism or 
Modernity because they challenged social theories generally 
accepted since the days of Machiavelli. The response to the 
French Revolution and Rousseau, by Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche and 
others, poured into an intellectual stew which served up 
Marxism, socialism, national socialism, fascism, modern 
liberalism, modern conservatism, communism, and a variety of 
forms of capitalist participatory democracy.
	Fascists particularly loathed the social theories of the 
French Revolution and its slogan: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity."
	* Liberty from oppressive government intervention in 
the daily lives of its citizens, from illicit searches and seizures, 
from enforced religious values, from intimidation and arrest for 
dissenters; and liberty to cast a vote in a system in which the 
majority ruled but the minority retained certain inalienable 
rights.
	* Equality in the sense of civic equality, egalitarianism, 
the notion that while people differ, they all should stand equal 
in the eyes of the law.
	* Fraternity in the sense of the brotherhood of mankind. 
That all women and men, the old and the young, the infirm and 
the healthy, the rich and the poor, share a spark of humanity 
that must be cherished on a level above that of the law, and 
that binds us all together in a manner that continuously re-
affirms and celebrates life.
	This is what fascism as an ideology was reacting against-
-and its support came primarily from desperate people anxious 
and angry over their perception that their social and economic 
position was sinking and frustrated with the constant risk of 
chaos, uncertainty and inefficiency implicit in a modern 
democracy based on these principles. Fascism is the antithesis 
of democracy. We fought a war against it not half a century 
ago; millions perished as victims of fascism and champions of 
liberty.

"One of the great lies of this century is that in the 1930's 
Generalissimo Franco in Spain was primarily a nationalist 
engaged in stopping the Reds. Franco was, of course, a fascist 
who was aided by Mussolini and Hitler." "The history of this 
period is a press forgery. Falsified news manipulates public 
opinion. Democracy needs facts.
      --George Seldes
      Hartland Four Corners, Vermont,
      March 5, 1988

	Fascism was forged in the crucible of post-World War I 
nationalism in Europe. The national aspirations of many 
European peoples--nations without states, peoples arbitrarily 
assigned to political entities with little regard for custom or 
culture--had been crushed after World War I. The humiliation 
imposed by the victors in the Great War, coupled with the 
hardship of the economic Depression, created bitterness and 
anger. That anger frequently found its outlet in an ideology 
that asserted not just the importance of the nation, but its 
unquestionable primacy and central predestined role in 
history.
	In identifying "goodness" and "superiority" with "us," 
there was a tendency to identify "evil" with "them." This 
process involves scapegoating and dehumanization. It was then 
an easy step to blame all societal problems on "them," and 
presuppose a conspiracy of these evildoers which had 
emasculated and humiliated the idealized core group of the 
nation. To solve society's problems one need only unmask the 
conspirators and eliminate them.
	In Europe, Jews were the handy group to scapegoat as 
"them." Anti- Jewish conspiracy theories and discrimination 
against Jews were not a new phenomenon, but most academic 
studies of the period note an increased anti-Jewish fervor in 
Europe, especially in the late 1800's. In France this anti-Jewish 
bias was most publicly expressed in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, 
a French military officer of Jewish background, who in 1894 
was falsely accused of treason, convicted (through the use of 
forged papers as evidence) and imprisoned on Devil's Island. 
Emile Zola led a noble struggle which freed Dreyfus and 
exposed the role of anti-Jewish bigotry in shaping French 
society and betraying the principles on which France was 
building its democracy.
	Not all European nationalist movements were necessarily 
fascist, although many were. In some countries much of the 
Catholic hierarchy embraced fascist nationalism as a way to 
counter the encroachment of secular influences on societies 
where previously the church had sole control over societal 
values and mores. This was especially true in Slovakia and 
Croatia, where the Clerical Fascist movements were strong, and 
to a lesser extent in Poland and Hungary. Yet even in these 
countries individual Catholic leaders and laity spoke out against 
bigotry as the shadow of fascism crept across Europe. And in 
every country of Europe there were ordinary citizens who took 
extraordinary risks to shelter the victims of the Holocaust. So 
religion and nationality cannot be valid indicators of fascist 
sentiment. And the Nazis not only came for the Jews, as the 
famous quote reminds us, but for the communists and the 
trade union leaders, and indeed the Gypsies, the dissidents and 
the homosexuals. Nazism and fascism are more complex than 
popular belief. What, then, is the nature of fascism?

"If fascism came to America, it would be on a program of 
Americanism."
                      --Huey P. Long

	Italy was the birthplace of fascist ideology. Mussolini, a 
former socialist journalist, organized the first fascist movement 
in 1919 at Milan. In 1922 Mussolini led a march on Rome, was 
given a government post by the king, and began transforming 
the Italian political system into a fascist state. In 1938 he 
forced the last vestige of democracy, the Council of Deputies, to 
vote themselves out of existence, leaving Mussolini dictator of 
fascist Italy.
	Yet there were Italian fascists who resisted scapegoating 
and dehumanization even during World War II. Not far from 
the area where Austrian Prime Minister Kurt Waldheim is 
accused of assisting in the transport of Jews to the death 
camps, one Italian General, Mario Roatta, who had pledged 
equality of treatment to civilians, refused to obey the German 
military order to round up Jews. Roatta said such an activity 
was "incompatible with the honor of the Italian Army."
	Franco's fascist movement in Spain claimed state power 
in 1936, although it took three years, the assistance of the 
Italian fascists and help from the secretly reconstituted 
German Air Force finally to crush those who fought for 
democracy. Picasso's famous painting Guernica depicts the 
carnage wrought in a Spanish village by the bombs dropped by 
the forerunner of the Luftwaffe which all too soon would be 
working on an even larger canvas. Yet Franco's fascist Spain 
never adopted the obsession with race and anti-Jewish 
conspiracy theories that were hallmarks of Hitler's Nazi 
movement in Germany.
	Other fascist movements in Europe were more explicitly 
racialist, promoting the slogan still used today by some neo-
Nazi movements: "Nation is Race." The Nazi racialist version of 
fascism was developed by Adolph Hitler who with six others 
formed the Nazi party during 1919 and 1920. Imprisoned after 
the unsuccessful 1923 Beer Hall putsch in Munich, Hitler 
dictated his opus, Mein Kampf to his secretary, Rudolph Hess.
	Mein Kampf (My Battle) sets out a plan for creating in 
Germany through national socialism a racially pure Volkis 
state. To succeed, said Hitler, "Aryan" Germany had to resist 
two forces: the external threat posed by the French with their 
bloodlines "negrified" through "contamination by Negro blood," 
and the internal threat posed by "the Marxist shock troops of 
international Jewish stock exchange capital." Hitler was named 
Chancellor of Germany by Hindenburg in January 1933 and by 
year's end had consolidated his power as a fascist dictator and 
begun a campaign for racialist nationalism that eventually led 
to the Holocaust.
	This obsession with a racialism not only afflicted the 
German Nazis, but also several eastern European nationalist 
and fascist movements including those in Croatia, Slovakia, 
Serbia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Ukraine. Anti-
Jewish bigotry was rampant in all of these racialist movements, 
as was the idea of a link between Jewish financiers and 
Marxists. Even today the tiny Anti-Communist Confederation of 
Polish Freedom Fighters in the U.S.A. uses the slogan 
"Communism is Jewish."

"Reactionary concepts plus revolutionary emotion result in 
Fascist mentality."
                       --Wilhelm Reich

	One element shared by all fascist movements, racialist or 
not, is the apparent lack of consistent political principle behind 
the ideology--political opportunism in the most basic sense. 
One virtually unique aspect of fascism is its ruthless drive to 
attain and hold state power. On that road to power, fascists are 
willing to abandon any principle to adopt an issue more in 
vogue and more likely to gain converts.
	Hitler, for his part, committed his act of abandonment 
bloodily and dramatically. When the industrialist power 
brokers offered control of Germany to Hitler, they knew he was 
supported by national socialist ideologues who held views 
incompatible with their idea of profitable enterprise. Hitler 
solved the problem in the "Night of the Long Knives," during 
which he had the leadership of the national socialist wing of his 
constituency murdered in their sleep.
	What distinguishes Nazism from generic fascism is its 
obsession with racial theories of superiority, and some would 
say, its roots in the socialist theory of proletarian revolution.
	Fascism and Nazism as ideologies involve, to varying 
degrees, some of the following hallmarks:
	* Nationalism and super-patriotism with a sense of 
historic mission.
	* Aggressive militarism even to the extent of glorifying 
war as good for the national or individual spirit.
	 * Use of violence or threats of violence to impose views 
on others (fascism and Nazism both employed street violence 
and state violence at different moments in their development).   
	* Authoritarian reliance on a leader or elite not 
constitutionally responsible to an electorate.
	* Cult of personality around a charismatic leader.
	* Reaction against the values of Modernism, usually with 
emotional attacks against both liberalism and communism.
	* Exhortations for the homogeneous masses of common 
folk (Volkish in German, Populist in the U.S.) to join voluntarily 
in a heroic mission--often metaphysical and romanticized in 
character.
	* Dehumanization and scapegoating of the enemy--seeing 
the enemy as an inferior or subhuman force, perhaps involved 
in a conspiracy that justifies eradicating them.
	* The self image of being a superior form of social 
organization beyond socialism, capitalism and democracy.
	 * Elements of national socialist ideological roots, for 
example, ostensible support for the industrial working class or 
farmers; but ultimately, the forging of an alliance with an elite 
sector of society.
	* Abandonment of any consistent ideology in a drive for 
state power.
	It is vitally important to understand that fascism and 
Nazism are not biologically or culturally determinant. Fascism 
does not attach to the gene structure of any specific group or 
nationality. Nazism was not the ultimate expression of the 
German people. Fascism did not end with World War II.
	After Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies, the 
geopolitical landscape of Europe was once again drastically 
altered. In a few short months, some of our former fascist 
enemies became our allies in the fight to stop the spread of 
communism. The record of this transformation has been laid 
out in a series of books. U.S. recruitment of the Nazi spy 
apparatus has been chronicled in books ranging from The 
General was a Spy by Hohne & Zolling, to the recent Blowback 
by Simpson. The laundering of Nazi scientists into our space 
program is chronicled in The Paperclip Conspiracy by Bowers. 
The global activities of, and ongoing fascist role within, the 
World Anti-Communist League were described in Inside the 
League by Anderson and Anderson. Bellant's bibliography cites 
many other examples of detailed and accurate reporting of 
these disturbing realities.
	But if so much is already known of this period, why does 
journalist and historian George Seldes call the history of Europe 
between roughly 1920 and 1950 a "press forgery"? Because 
most people are completely unfamiliar with this material, and 
because so much of the popular historical record either ignores 
or contradicts the facts of European nationalism, Nazi 
collaborationism, and our government's reliance on these 
enemies of democracy to further our Cold War foreign policy 
objectives.
	This widely-accepted, albeit misleading, historical record 
has been shaped by filtered media reports and self-serving 
academic revisionism rooted in an ideological preference for 
those European nationalist forces which opposed socialism and 
communism. Since sectors of those nationalist anti-communist 
forces allied themselves with political fascism, but later became 
our allies against communism, apologia for collaborationists 
became the rule, not the exception.
	Soon, as war memories dimmed and newspaper accounts 
of collaboration faded, the fascists and their allies re-emerged 
cloaked in a new mantle of respectability. Portrayed as anti-
communist freedom fighters, their backgrounds blurred by 
time and artful circumlocution, they stepped forward to 
continue their political organizing with goals unchanged and 
slogans slightly repackaged to suit domestic sensibilities.
	To fight communism after World War II, our government 
forged a tactical alliance with what was perceived to be the 
lesser of two evils--and as with many such bargains, there has 
been a high price to pay.
"The great masses of people. . .will more easily fall victims to a 
big lie than to a small one."

                    --Adolph Hitler

Chip Berlet can be reached at Political Research Associates, 678 
Mass. Ave., #702, Cambridge, MA 02139.

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