Early influences (495 BC–1880 AD) Depiction of a Greek Hoplite warrior; ancient Sparta has been considered an inspiration for fascist and quasi-fascist movements, such as Nazism and quasi-fascist Metaxism Early influences that shaped the ideology of fascism have been dated back to Ancient Greece. The political culture of ancient Greece and specifically the ancient Greek city state of Sparta under Lycurgus, with its emphasis on militarism and racial purity, were admired by the Nazis.Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, Salvatore Settis. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard University Press, 2010. p . 353. Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler emphasized that Germany should adhere to Hellenic values and culture – particularly that of ancient Sparta. He rebuked potential criticism of Hellenic values being non-German by emphasizing the common Aryan race connection with ancient Greeks, saying in Mein Kampf: "One must not allow the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community". Hitler went on to say in Mein Kampf: "The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and Germanity together". The Spartans were emulated by the quasi-fascist regime of Ioannis Metaxas who called for Greeks to wholly commit themselves to the nation with self-control as the Spartans had done.Jürgen Fischer. Balkan strongmen: dictators and authoritarian rulers of South Eastern Europe. London, England, UK: Purdue University Press, 2007. p . 184. Supporters of the 4th of August Regime in the 1930s to 1940s justified the dictatorship of Metaxas on the basis that the "First Greek Civilization" involved an Athenian dictatorship led by Pericles who had brought ancient Greece to greatness. The Greek philosopher Plato supported many similar political positions to fascism. In The Republic (c. 380 BC),Contemporary Political Theory: New Dimensions, Basic Concepts and Major Trends. 12th Edition. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd, 2007. p . 705. Plato emphasizes the need for a philosopher king in an ideal state. Plato believed the ideal state would be ruled by an elite class of rulers known as "Guardians" and rejected the idea of social equality. Plato believed in an authoritarian state. Plato held Athenian democracy in contempt by saying: "The laws of democracy remain a dead letter, its freedom is anarchy, its equality the equality of unequals". Like fascism, Plato emphasized that individuals must adhere to laws and perform duties while declining to grant individuals rights to limit or reject state interference in their lives. Like fascism, Plato also claimed that an ideal state would have state-run education that was designed to promote able rulers and warriors. Like many fascist ideologues, Plato advocated for a state-sponsored eugenics program to be carried out in order to improve the Guardian class in his Republic through selective breeding. Italian Fascist Il Duce Benito Mussolini had a strong attachment to the works of Plato.Ludwig, Emile; Mussolini, Benito. Talks with Mussolini. Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1933. p. 130. However, there are significant differences between Plato's ideals and fascism. Unlike fascism, Plato never promoted expansionism and he was opposed to offensive war. Leviathan (1651), the book written by Thomas Hobbes that advocates absolute monarchy There were a number of influences on fascism from the Renaissance era in Europe. Niccolò Machiavelli is known to have influenced Italian Fascism, particularly through his promotion of the absolute authority of the state. Machiavelli rejected all existing traditional and metaphysical assumptions of the time—especially those associated with the Middle Ages—and asserted as an Italian patriot that Italy needed a strong and all-powerful state led by a vigorous and ruthless leader who would conquer and unify Italy.Contemporary Political Theory: New Dimensions, Basic Concepts and Major Trends. 12th Edition. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd, 2007. p . 706. Mussolini saw himself as a modern-day Machiavellian and wrote an introduction to his honorary doctoral thesis for the University of Bologna—"Prelude to Machiavelli".Benito Mussolini, "Prelude to Machiavelli," The Living Age, Vol. 323, No. 4194, November 22, 1924. Originally published in the Italian journal Gerarchia in 1924, edited by Mussolini and Margherita Sarfatti). Mussolini's thesis was titled "Comments of the year 1924 on the Prince of Machiavelli," (University of Bologna, 1924) Mussolini professed that Machiavelli's "pessimism about human nature was eternal in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign".(R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini, Chapter Eight: Government 1922-24, Hodder Education, 2002, p. 192. Most dictators of the 20th century mimicked Mussolini's admiration for Machiavelli and "Stalin... saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian virtù".Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, UK, Macmillan Publishers, Ltd, 2004, p. 343 English political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his work Leviathan (1651) created the ideology of absolutism that advocated an all-powerful absolute monarchy to maintain order within a state. Absolutism was an influence on fascism. Absolutism based its legitimacy on the precedents of Roman law including the centralized Roman state and the manifestation of Roman law in the Catholic Church.Perry Anderson. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso Edition. New York, New York, USA: Verso, 1979. p . 28. Though fascism supported the absolute power of the state, it opposed the idea of absolute power being in the hands of a monarch and opposed the feudalism that was associated with absolute monarchies. Portrait of Johann Gottfried Herder, the creator of the concept of nationalism During the Enlightenment, a number of ideological influences arose that would shape the development of fascism. The development of the study of universal histories by Johann Gottfried Herder resulted in Herder's analysis of the development of nations. Herder developed the term Nationalismus ("nationalism") to describe this cultural phenomenon. At this time nationalism did not refer to the political ideology of nationalism that was later developed during the French Revolution.Alexander J. Motyl. Encyclopedia of Nationalism, Volume 1: Fundamental Themes. San Diego, California, USA; London, England, UK: Academic Press, 2001. pp. 341–343. Herder also developed the theory that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Aryan people based on language studies. Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint and science. Contemporaries of Herder utilized the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture and this anti-Semitic variant view of Europeans' Aryan roots formed the basis of Nazi racial views. Another major influence on fascism came from the political theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel promoted the absolute authority of the state and said "nothing short of the state is the actualization of freedom" and that the "state is the march of God on earth". The ideological roots of fascism have been traced to the 1880s and in particular the fin de siècle theme of that time.Sternhell, Zeev, "Crisis of Fin-de-siècle Thought" in Griffin, Roger, ed., International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London and New York, 1998) pp. 169–171. The theme was based on revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society and liberal democracy. The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism and vitalism. The fin-de-siècle mindset saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution. The fin-de-siècle intellectual school of the 1890s – including Gabriele d'Annunzio and Enrico Corradini in Italy; Maurice Barrès, Edouard Drumont and Georges Sorel in France; and Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany – saw social and political collectivity as more important than individualism and rationalism. They considered the individual as only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as an atomized numerical sum of individuals. They condemned the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society. They saw modern society as one of mediocrity, materialism, instability, and corruption. They denounced big-city urban society as being merely based on instinct and animality and without heroism. Gaetano Mosca in his work The Ruling Class (1896) developed the theory that claims that in all societies, an "organized minority" will dominate and rule over the "disorganized majority".William Outhwaite. The Blackwell dictionary of modern social thought. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. p . 442.Tracy H. Koon. Believe, obey, fight: political socialization of youth in fascist Italy, 1922-1943. University of North Carolina Press, 1985. p . 6. Mosca claims that there are only two classes in society, "the governing" (the organized minority) and "the governed" (the disorganized majority).Giuseppe Caforio. "Handbook of the sociology of the military", Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. New York, New York, USA: Springer, 2006. p . 12. He claims that the organized nature of the organized minority makes it irresistible to any individual of the disorganized majority. Mosca developed this theory in 1896 in which he argued that the problem of the supremacy of civilian power in society is solved in part by the presence and social structural design of militaries. He claims that the social structure of the military is ideal because it includes diverse social elements that balance each other out and more importantly is its inclusion of an officer class as a "power elite". Mosca presented the social structure and methods of governance by the military as a valid model of development for civil society. Mosca's theories are known to have significantly influenced Mussolini's notion of the political process and fascism. Related to Mosca's theory of domination of society by an organized minority over a disorganized majority was Robert Michels' theory of the iron law of oligarchy, created in 1911, which was a major attack on the basis of contemporary democracy.James L. Hyland. Democratic theory: the philosophical foundations. Manchester, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Manchester University Press ND, 1995. p . 247. Michels argues that oligarchy is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization and on the topic of democracy, Michels stated: "It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy". He claims: "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy". He states that the official goal of contemporary democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that democracy is a façade which legitimizes the rule of a particular elite and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable. Michels had previously been a social democrat, but became drawn to the ideas of Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth, Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone and came to strongly oppose the parliamentarian, legalistic and bureaucratic socialism of social democracy. As early as 1904, he began to advocate in favor of patriotism and national interests. Later he began to support activist, voluntarist, and anti-parliamentarian concepts, and in 1911 he took a position in favor of the Italian war effort in Libya and started moving towards Italian nationalism. Michels eventually became a supporter of fascism upon Mussolini's rise to power in 1922, viewing fascism's goal to destroy liberal democracy in a sympathetic manner. Maurice Barrès Maurice Barrès, a French politician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who influenced the later fascist movement, claimed that true democracy was authoritarian democracy while rejecting liberal democracy as a fraud."Barres and Fascism" by Robert Soucy, French Historical Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1967), pp. 67–97. Duke University Press. Article Stable URL: URL pp. 87–90 Barrès claimed that authoritarian democracy involved a spiritual connection between a leader of a nation and the nation's people, and that true freedom did not arise from individual rights nor parliamentary restraints, but through "heroic leadership" and "national power". He emphasized the need for hero worship and charismatic leadership in national society. Barrès was a founding member of the League for the French Fatherland in 1889, and later coined the term "socialist nationalism" to describe his views during an electoral campaign in 1898. He emphasized class collaboration, the role of intuition and emotion in politics alongside racial Antisemitism, and "he tried to combine the search for energy and a vital style of life with national rootedness and a sort of Darwinian racism." Later in life he returned to cultural traditionalism and parliamentary conservatism, but his ideas contributed to the development of an extremist form of nationalism in pre-1914 France. Other French nationalist intellectuals of the early 20th century also wished to "obliterate the class struggle in ideological terms," ending the threat of communism by persuading working people to identify with their nation rather than their class.Mark Neocleous, Fascism, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 40 The rise of support for anarchism in this period of time was important in influencing the politics of fascism.Stuart Joseph Woolf. European fascism. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970. p . 282. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin's concept of propaganda of the deed, which stressed the importance of direct action as the primary means of politics—including revolutionary violence, became popular amongst fascists who admired the concept and adopted it as a part of fascism. Sorel's political allegiances were constantly shifting, influencing a variety of people across the political spectrum from Benito Mussolini to Benedetto Croce to Georg Lukács, and both sympathizers and critics of Sorel considered his political thought to be a collection of separate ideas with no coherence and no common thread linking them.Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, Yale University Press, 2011, pp. 94–95 In this, Sorelianism is considered to be a precursor to fascism, as fascist thought also drew from disparate sources and did not form a single coherent ideological system. Sorel described himself as "a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction", and stated that his goal was to be original in all of his writings and that his apparent lack of coherence was due to an unwillingness to write down anything that had already been said elsewhere by someone else. The academic intellectual establishment did not take him seriously,Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, Yale University Press, 2011, p. 95 but Mussolini applauded Sorel by declaring: "What I am, I owe to Sorel".Jacob Leib Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, University of California Press, 1981, p. 451. 300px|Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto (1908) and later the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto (1919) Radical nationalism in Italy—support for expansionism and cultural revolution to create a "New Man" and a "New State"—began to grow in 1912 during the Italian conquest of Libya and was supported by Italian Futurists and members of the ANI. Futurism was both an artistic-cultural movement and initially a political movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the Futurist Manifesto (1908), that championed the causes of modernism, action and political violence as necessary elements of politics while denouncing liberalism and parliamentary politics. Marinetti rejected conventional democracy for being based on majority rule and egalitarianism, while promoting a new form of democracy, that he described in his work "The Futurist Conception of Democracy" as the following: "We are therefore able to give the directions to create and to dismantle to numbers, to quantity, to the mass, for with us number, quantity and mass will never be—as they are in Germany and Russia—the number, quantity and mass of mediocre men, incapable and indecisive".Andrew Hewitt. Fascist modernism: aesthetics, politics, and the avant-garde. Stanford, California, USA: Stanford University Press, 1993. p . 153. The ANI claimed that liberal democracy was no longer compatible with the modern world and advocated a strong state and imperialism, claiming that humans are naturally predatory and that nations were in a constant struggle, in which only the strongest nations could survive. With this manifesto, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento campaigned in the Italian elections of November 1919, mostly attempting to take votes away from the socialists. The results were disastrous. The fascists received less than 5000 votes in their political heartland of Milan, compared to 190,000 for the socialists, and not a single fascist candidate was elected to any office.Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, University of Michigan Press, 1997, pp. 284–285 Mussolini's political career seemed to be over. This crippling electoral defeat was largely due to fascism's lack of ideological credibility, as the fascist movement was a mixture of many different ideas and tendencies. It contained monarchists, republicans, syndicalists and conservatives, and some candidates supported the Vatican while others wanted to expel the Pope from Italy.Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 285 In response to the failure of his electoral strategy, Mussolini shifted his political movement to the right, seeking to form an alliance with the conservatives. Soon, agrarian conflicts in the region of Emilia and in the Po Valley provided an opportunity to launch a series of violent attacks against the socialists, and thus to win credibility with the conservatives and establish fascism as a paramilitary movement rather than an electoral one. In this period, to appease the King of Italy, Mussolini formed a close political alliance between the Italian Fascists and Italy's conservative faction in Parliament, which was led by Luigi Federzoni, a conservative monarchist and nationalist who was a member of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI).De Grand, Alexander. Italian fascism: its origins and development. 3rd ed. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. pp. 45, 54. The ANI joined the National Fascist Party in 1923.De Grand, Alexander. Italian fascism: its origins and development. 3rd ed. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. p. 45. Because of the merger of the Nationalists with the Fascists, tensions existed between the conservative nationalist and revolutionary syndicalist factions of the movement. The conservative and syndicalist factions of the Fascist movement sought to reconcile their differences, secure unity and promote fascism by taking on the views of each other. Conservative nationalist Fascists promoted fascism as a revolutionary movement to appease the revolutionary syndicalists, while to appease conservative nationalists, the revolutionary syndicalists declared they wanted to secure social stability and insure economic productivity. This sentiment included most syndicalist Fascists, particularly Edmondo Rossoni, who as secretary-general of the General Confederation of Fascist Syndical Corporations sought "labor's autonomy and class consciousness".David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism, University of North Carolina Press, 1979 pp. 289–290 In the 1920s, Fascist Italy pursued an aggressive foreign policy that included an attack on the Greek island of Corfu, aims to expand Italian territory in the Balkans, plans to wage war against Turkey and Yugoslavia, attempts to bring Yugoslavia into civil war by supporting Croat and Macedonian separatists to legitimize Italian intervention, and making Albania a de facto protectorate of Italy (which was achieved through diplomatic means by 1927).Aristotle A. Kallis. Fascist ideology: territory and expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2000. p. 132. In response to revolt in the Italian colony of Libya, Fascist Italy abandoned the previous liberal-era colonial policy of cooperation with local leaders. Instead, claiming that Italians were a superior race to African races and thereby had the right to colonize the "inferior" Africans, it sought to settle 10 to 15 million Italians in Libya.Ali Abdullatif Ahmida. The making of modern Libya: state formation, colonization, and resistance, 1830–1922. Albany, New York, US: State University of New York Press, 1994. pp. 134–135. This resulted in an aggressive military campaign against the Libyans, including mass killings, the use of concentration camps and the forced starvation of thousands of people. Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing by forcibly expelling 100,000 Bedouin Cyrenaicans, half the population of Cyrenaica in Libya, from land that was slated to be given to Italian settlers.Anthony L. Cardoza. Benito Mussolini: the first fascist. Pearson Longman, 2006 p . 109.Donald Bloxham, A. Dirk Moses. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford, England, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. p . 358. Another early admirer of Italian Fascism was Gyula Gömbös, leader of the Hungarian National Defence Association (known by its acronym MOVE), one of several groups that were known in Hungary as the "right radicals." Gömbös described himself as a "national socialist" and championed radical land reform and "Christian capital" in opposition to "Jewish capital." He also advocated a revanchist foreign policy and in 1923 stated the need for a "march on Budapest". Yugoslavia briefly had a significant fascist movement, the ORJUNA, which supported Yugoslavism, advocated the creation of a corporatist economy, opposed democracy and took part in violent attacks on communists, though it was opposed to the Italian government due to Yugoslav border disputes with Italy. ORJUNA was dissolved in 1929 when the King of Yugoslavia banned political parties and created a royal dictatorship, though ORJUNA supported the King's decision. Amid a political crisis in Spain involving increased strike activity and rising support for anarchism, Spanish army commander Miguel Primo de Rivera engaged in a successful coup against the Spanish government in 1923 and installed himself as a dictator as head of a conservative military junta that dismantled the established party system of government.Dylan J. Riley. The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945. Baltimore, Maryland, US: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. pp. 87–90 Upon achieving power, Primo de Rivera sought to resolve the economic crisis by presenting himself as a compromise arbitrator figure between workers and bosses and his regime created a corporatist economic system based on the Italian Fascist model. In Lithuania in 1926, Antanas Smetona rose to power and founded a fascist regime under his Lithuanian Nationalist Union. International surge of fascism and World War II (1929–1945) Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right) The events of the Great Depression resulted in an international surge of fascism and the creation of several fascist regimes and regimes that adopted fascist policies. The most important new fascist regime was Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. With the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933, liberal democracy was dissolved in Germany and the Nazis mobilized the country for war, with expansionist territorial aims against several countries. In the 1930s, the Nazis implemented racial laws that deliberately discriminated against, disenfranchised and persecuted Jews and other racial minority groups. Hungarian fascist Gyula Gömbös rose to power as Prime Minister of Hungary in 1932 and visited Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in order to consolidate good relations with the two regimes. He attempted to entrench his Party of National Unity throughout the country, created a youth organization and a political militia with sixty thousand members, promoted social reforms such as a 48-hour work week in industry, and pursued irredentist claims on Hungary's neighbors. The fascist Iron Guard movement in Romania soared in political support after 1933, gaining representation in the Romanian government and an Iron Guard member assassinated prime minister Ion Duca. The Iron Guard had little in the way of a concrete program and placed more emphasis on ideas of religious and spiritual revival. During the 6 February 1934 crisis, France faced the greatest domestic political turmoil since the Dreyfus Affair when the fascist Francist Movement and multiple far right movements rioted en masse in Paris against the French government resulting in major political violence.Stuart Joseph Woolf. Fascism in Europe. 3rd Edition. Taylor & Francis, 1983. p . 311. A variety of para-fascist governments that borrowed elements from fascism were also formed during the Great Depression, including in Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia. Integralists marching in Brazil Fascism also expanded its influence outside Europe, especially in East Asia, the Middle East and South America. In China, Wang Jingwei's Kai-tsu p'ai (Reorganization) faction of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of China) supported Nazism in the late 1930s.Dongyoun Hwang. Wang Jingwei, The National Government, and the Problem of Collaboration. Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University. UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 2000, 118.Larsen, Stein Ugelvik (ed.). Fascism Outside of Europe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. . p . 255. In Japan, a Nazi movement called the Tōhōkai was formed by Seigō Nakano. The Al-Muthanna Club of Iraq was a pan-Arab movement that supported Nazism and exercised its influence in the Iraqi government through cabinet minister Saib Shawkat who formed a paramilitary youth movement.I. Gershoni, James P. Jankowski. Confronting fascism in Egypt: dictatorship versus democracy in the 1930s. Stanford, California, US: Stanford University Press, 2010. p. 273. In South America, several mostly short-lived fascist governments and prominent fascist movements were formed during this period. Argentine President General José Félix Uriburu proposed that Argentina be reorganized along corporatist and fascist lines.Michael A. Burdick. For God and the fatherland: religion and politics in Argentina. Albany, New York, US: State University of New York Press, 1995. p . 45. Peruvian president Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro founded the Revolutionary Union in 1931 as the state party for his dictatorship. Later, the Revolutionary Union was taken over by Raúl Ferrero Rebagliati, who sought to mobilise mass support for the group's nationalism in a manner akin to fascism and even started a paramilitary Blackshirts arm as a copy of the Italian group, but the Union lost heavily in the 1936 elections and faded into obscurity. In Paraguay in 1940, Paraguayan President General Higinio Morínigo began his rule as a dictator with the support of pro-fascist military officers, appealed to the masses, exiled opposition leaders and only abandoned his pro-fascist policies after the end of World War II. The Brazilian Integralists led by Plínio Salgado, claimed as many as 200,000 members although following coup attempts it faced a crackdown from the Estado Novo of Getúlio Vargas in 1937. In the 1930s, the National Socialist Movement of Chile gained seats in Chile's parliament and attempted a coup d'état that resulted in the Seguro Obrero massacre of 1938. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany pursued territorial expansionist and interventionist foreign policy agendas from the 1930s through the 1940s, culminating in World War II. Mussolini supported irredentist Italian claims over neighboring territories, establishing Italian domination of the Mediterranean Sea, securing Italian access to the Atlantic Ocean, and the creation of Italian spazio vitale ("vital space") in the Mediterranean and Red Sea regions.Aristotle A. Kallis. Fascist ideology: territory and expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945. New York, New York, US: Routledge, 2001. p . 51. Hitler supported irredentist German claims over all territories inhabited by ethnic Germans, along with the creation of German Lebensraum ("living space") in Eastern Europe, including territories held by the Soviet Union, that would be colonized by Germans.Aristotle A. Kallis. Fascist ideology: territory and expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945. New York, New York, US: Routledge, 2001. p . 53. Corpses of victims of the German Buchenwald concentration camp From 1935 to 1939, Germany and Italy escalated their demands for territorial gains and greater influence in world affairs. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, resulting in condemnation by the League of Nations and widespread diplomatic isolation. In 1936, Germany remilitarized the industrial Rhineland, a region that had been ordered demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The next year, Czechoslovakia was partitioned between Germany and a client state of Slovakia. At the same time, from 1938 to 1939, Italy was demanding territorial and colonial concessions from France and Britain in the Mediterranean.Davide Rodogno. Fascism's European empire. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006 p . 47. In 1939, Germany prepared for war with Poland, but also attempted to gain territorial concessions from Poland through diplomatic means. Germany demanded that Poland accept the annexation of the Free City of Danzig to Germany and authorize the construction of automobile highways from Germany through the Polish Corridor into Danzig and East Prussia, promising a twenty-five year non-aggression pact in exchange.Eugene Davidson. The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler. Columbia, Missouri, USA: University of Missouri Press, 2004 pp. 371–372. The Polish government did not trust Hitler's promises and refused to accept German demands. Following a strategic alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, the two powers invaded Poland in September of that year. In response, the United Kingdom, France and their allies declared war against Germany, resulting in the outbreak of World War II. Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland between them in late 1939 followed by the successful German offensive in Scandinavia and continental Western Europe in 1940. On 10 June 1940, Mussolini led Italy into World War II on the side of the Axis. Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with France or Britain and waited until France was on the verge of imminent collapse before declaring war, on the assumption that the war would be short-lived.MacGregor Knox. Mussolini unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War. Edition of 1999. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. pp . 122–127. Mussolini believed that Italy could gain some territorial concessions from France and then concentrate its forces on a major offensive in Egypt. Plans by Germany to invade the United Kingdom in 1940 failed after Germany lost the aerial warfare campaign in the Battle of Britain. The war became prolonged contrary to Mussolini's plans, resulting in Italy losing battles on multiple fronts and requiring German assistance. In 1941, the Axis campaign spread to the Soviet Union after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. Axis forces at the height of their power controlled almost all of continental Europe, including the occupation of large portions of the Soviet Union. By 1942, Fascist Italy occupied and annexed Dalmatia from Yugoslavia, Corsica and Nice from France and controlled other territories. During World War II, the Axis Powers in Europe led by Nazi Germany participated in the extermination of millions of Jews and others in the genocide known as the Holocaust. Ba'ath Party founder Michel Aflaq (left) with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (right) in 1988, as both of Ba'athism's key ideologists Michel Aflaq and Zaki al-Arsuzi were directly inspired by Fascism and Nazism Another ideology strongly influenced by fascism is Ba'athism. Ba'athism is a revolutionary Arab nationalist ideology that seeks the unification of all claimed Arab lands into a single Arab state. Zaki al-Arsuzi, one of the principal founders of Ba'athism, was strongly influenced by and supportive of Fascism and Nazism.Curtis, Michel (1971). People and Politics in the Middle East. Transaction Publishers. . pp. 132–138. Several close associates of Ba'athism's key ideologist Michel Aflaq have admitted that Aflaq had been directly inspired by certain fascist and Nazi theorists. Ba'athist regimes in power in Iraq and Syria have held strong similarities to fascism, they are radical authoritarian nationalist one-party states. Due to Ba'athism's anti-Western stances it preferred the Soviet Union in the Cold War and admired and adopted certain Soviet organizational structures for their governments, but the Ba'athist regimes have persecuted communists. Like fascist regimes, Ba'athism became heavily militarized in power. Ba'athist movements governed Iraq in 1963 and again from 1968 to 2003 and in Syria from 1963 to the present. Ba'athist heads of state such as Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein created personality cults around themselves portraying themselves as the nationalist saviours of the Arab world. In the 1990s, Payne claimed that the Hindu nationalist movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) holds strong resemblances to fascism, including its use of paramilitaries and its irredentist claims calling for the creation of a Greater India. Cyprian Blamires in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia describes the ideology of the RSS as "fascism with Sanskrit characters" – a unique Indian variant of fascism. Blamires notes that there is evidence that the RSS held direct contact with Italy's Fascist regime and admired European fascism, a view with some support from A. James Gregor.Gregor, Anthony James The Search for Neofascism: The Use And Abuse of Social Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p. 201 However, these views have met wide criticism,Brass, Paul Competing Nationalisms in South Asia:Essays for Asghar Ali Engineer (Hyderabad, India: Orient Blackswan, 2002) pp. 15–16Connerney , Richard D., The Upside-Down Tree:India's Changing Culture (New York, NY: Algora Publishing, 2009) pp. 154–158 especially from academics specializing Indian politics. Paul Brass, expert on Hindu-Muslim violence, notes that there are many problems with accepting this point of view and identified four reasons that it is difficult to define the Sangh as fascist. Firstly, most scholars of the field do not subscribe to the view the RSS is fascist, notably among them Christophe Jaffrelot, A. James Gregor and Chetan Bhatt.Bhatt, Chetan Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 2001) p. 124 The other reasons include an absence of charismatic leadership, a desire on the part of the RSS to differentiate itself from European fascism, major cultural differences between the RSS and European fascists and factionalism within the Sangh Parivar. Stanley Payne claims that it also has substantial differences with fascism such as its emphasis on traditional religion as the basis of identity. There were both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist elements in fascist thought. Fascist opposition to capitalism was based on the perceived decadence, hedonism and cosmopolitanism of the wealthy, in contrast to the idealized discipline, patriotism and moral virtue of the members of the middle classes. Fascist support for capitalism was based on the idea that economic competition was good for the nation, as well as social Darwinist beliefs that the economic success of the wealthy proved their superiority and the idea that interfering with natural selection in the economy would burden the nation by preserving weak individuals.William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. p . 35 These two ways of thinking about capitalism – viewing it as a positive force which promotes economic efficiency and is necessary for the prosperity of the nation but also viewing it as a negative force which promotes decadence and disloyalty to the nation – remained in uneasy coexistence within most fascist movements. The economic policies of fascist governments, meanwhile, were generally not based on ideological commitments one way or the other, instead being dictated by pragmatic concerns with building a strong national economy, promoting autarky, and the need to prepare for and to wage war. In 1922, following the March on Rome, the National Fascist Party came to power and Mussolini became prime minister of Italy. From that time until the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, the Italian Fascists pursued a generally free-market and pro-capitalist economic policy, in collaboration with traditional Italian business elites.Carl T. Schmidt, "The corporate state in action; Italy under fascism", Oxford University Press, 1939. pp. 116–119William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. p . 163 Near the beginning of his tenure as prime minister, in 1923, Mussolini declared that "the [Fascist] government will accord full freedom to private enterprise and will abandon all intervention in private economy."Carl T. Schmidt, "The corporate state in action; Italy under fascism", Oxford University Press, 1939. p . 115 Mussolini's government privatized former government monopolies (such as the telephone system), repealed previous legislation that had been introduced by the Socialists (such as the inheritance tax), and balanced the budget.William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. pp. 160–161 Alfredo Rocco, the Fascist Minister of Justice at the time, wrote in 1926 that: The Italian Fascist outlook towards capitalism changed after 1929, with the onset of the Great Depression which dealt a heavy blow to the Italian economy. Prices fell, production slowed, and unemployment more than tripled in the first four years of the Depression.William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. p . 166 In response, the Fascist government abandoned economic liberalism and turned to state intervention in the economy. Mussolini developed a theory which held that capitalism had degenerated over time, and that the capitalism of his era was facing a crisis because it had departed too far from its original roots. According to Mussolini, the original form was heroic capitalism or dynamic capitalism (1830–1870), which gave way to static capitalism (1870–1914), which then transformed into decadent capitalism or "supercapitalism", starting in 1914.Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy. University of California Press, 2000. pp. 136–137. Mussolini denounced this supercapitalism as a failure due to its alleged decadence, support for unlimited consumerism and intention to create the "standardization of humankind".Günter Berghaus. Fascism and theatre: comparative studies on the aesthetics and politics of performance. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, US: University of California Press, 2000. pp. 136–137Mussolini, Benito. Four Speeches on the Corporate State: With an Appendix Including the Labour Charter, the Text of Laws on Syndical and Corporate Organisations and Explanatory notes (Laboremus, 1935) p. 16. He claimed that supercapitalism had resulted in the collapse of the capitalist system in the Great Depression, but that the industrial developments of earlier types of capitalism were valuable and that private property should be supported as long as it was productive. Fascists also argued that, without intervention, supercapitalism "would ultimately decay and open the way for a Marxist revolution as labour-capital relations broke down". They presented their new economic program as a way to avoid this result. The purpose of the economy, according to the Nazi worldview, was to "provide the material springboard for military conquest." As such, the Nazis aimed to place the focus of the German economy on a drive for empire and conquest, and they found and promoted businessmen who were willing to cooperate with their goals. They opposed free-market economics and instead promoted a state-driven economy that would guarantee high profits to friendly private companies in exchange for their support, which was a model adopted by many other political movements and governments in the 1930s, including the governments of Britain and France. Private capitalism was not directly challenged, but it was subordinated to the military and foreign policy goals of the state, in a way that reduced the decision-making power of industrial managers but did not interfere with the pursuit of private profit.De Grand, Alexander J., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The "fascist" style of rule (London, England; New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 57. Leading German business interests supported the goals of the Nazi government and its war effort in exchange for advantageous contracts, subsidies, and the suppression of the trade union movement.Tooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and the Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2006), pp. 101–114 Avraham Barkai concludes that, because "the individual firm still operated according to the principle of maximum profit," the Nazi German economy was therefore "a capitalist economy in which capitalists, like all other citizens, were not free even though they enjoyed a privileged status, had a limited measure of freedom in their activities, and were able to accumulate huge profits as long as they accepted the primacy of politics."Barkai, Avraham, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 248. Conservatism Conservatives and fascists in Europe have held similar positions on many issues, including anti-communism and support of national pride. Conservatives and fascists both reject the liberal and Marxist emphasis on linear progressive evolution in history.Erin G. Carlston. Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. p . 68. Fascism's emphasis on order, discipline, hierarchy, military virtues and preservation of private property appealed to conservatives. The fascist promotion of "healthy", "uncontaminated" elements of national tradition such as chivalric culture and glorifying a nation's historical golden age has similarities with conservative aims. Fascists also made pragmatic tactical alliances with traditional conservative forces in order to achieve and maintain power. Even at the height of their influence and popularity, fascist movements were never able to seize power entirely by themselves, and relied on alliances with conservative parties in order to come to power. Many of fascism's recruits were disaffected right-wing conservatives who were dissatisfied with the traditional right's inability to achieve national unity and its inability to respond to socialism, feminism, economic crisis and international difficulties.Kevin Passmore. Fascism: a very short introduction. New York, New York, USA: Oxford University Press, 2002. With traditional conservative parties in Europe severely weakened in the aftermath of World War I, there was a political vacuum on the right which fascism filled.Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002. Chapter 6. Fascists gathered support from landlords, business owners, army officers, and other conservative individuals and groups, by successfully presenting themselves as the last line of defense against land reform, social welfare measures, demilitarization, higher wages, and the socialization of the means of production.John Weiss, "The Fascist Tradition: Radical right-wing extremism in modern Europe." Harper & Row, 1967. pp. 4–5 Another difference with traditional conservatism lies in the fact that fascism had radical aspirations for reshaping society. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote that "Fascists were not conservative in any very meaningful sense… The Fascists, in a meaningful sense, were revolutionaries".Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. "Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center", New York Times Magazine, (April 4, 1948) Fascists sought to destroy existing elites through revolutionary action in order to replace them with a new elite selected on the principle of the survival of the fittest, and thus they "rejected existing aristocracies in favor of their own new aristocracy." Yet at the same time, some fascist leaders claimed to be counter-revolutionary, and fascism saw itself as being opposed to all previous revolutions from the French Revolution onward, blaming them for liberalism, socialism, and decadence. In his book Fascism (1997), Mark Neocleous sums up these paradoxical tendencies by referring to fascism as "a prime example of reactionary modernism" as well as "the culmination of the conservative revolutionary tradition."Neocleous, Mark (1997) Fascism. University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 4, pp . 57–60 Liberalism Fascism is strongly opposed to the individualism found in classical liberalism. Fascists accuse liberalism of de-spiritualizing human beings and transforming them into materialistic beings whose highest ideal is moneymaking.Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, Margaret Jacob, James R. Jacob. WESTERN CIVILIZATION: IDEAS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY- FROM 1600, Volume 2. 9th ed. Boston, Massaschussetts, USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009 p . 760. In particular, fascism opposes liberalism for its materialism, rationalism, individualism and utilitarianism. Fascists believe that the liberal emphasis on individual freedom produces national divisiveness. Mussolini criticized classical liberalism for its individualistic nature, writing: "Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; ... It is opposed to classical Liberalism ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.""The Doctrine of Fascism", Firenze: Vallecchi Editore (1935 version), p. 13 However, Fascists and Nazis support a type of hierarchical individualism in the form of Social Darwinism because they believe it promotes "superior individuals" and weeds out "the weak".Alexander J. De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Routledge, 1995. p . 47 They also accuse both Marxism and democracy, with their emphasis on equality, of destroying individuality in favor of the "dead weight" of the masses.Lorna Waddington, (2007) Hitler's Crusade: Bolshevism and the Myth of the International Jewish Conspiracy. I.B.Tauris. p . 17. An organization called National Socialist People's Welfare (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, NSV) was given the task of taking over the functions of social welfare institutions and "coordinating" the private charities, which had previously been run mainly by the churches and by the labour movement.Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, Oxford: UK, Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 92–93 Hitler instructed NSV chairman Erich Hilgenfeldt to "see to the disbanding of all private welfare institutions," in an effort to direct who was to receive social benefits. Welfare benefits were abruptly withdrawn from Jews, Communists, many Social Democrats, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others that were considered enemies of the Nazi regime, at first without any legal justification. Marxism and fascism oppose each other primary because Marxism "called on the workers of the world to unite across national borders in a global battle against their oppressors, treating nation-states and national pride as tools in the arsenal of bourgeois propaganda", while fascism, on the contrary, exalted the interests of the nation or race as the highest good, and rejected all ideas of universal human interests standing above the nation or race. Within the nation, Marxism calls for class struggle by the working class against the ruling class, while fascism calls for collaboration between the classes to achieve national rejuvenation.Mark Neocleous, "Fascism", University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 40–41 Fascism proposes a type of society in which different classes continue to exist, but the rich and poor both serve the national interest and do not oppose each other.Mark Neocleous, "Fascism", University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 42 Fascism opposed the internationalist character of mainstream socialism, but in doing so, it sometimes defined itself as a new, nationalist form of socialism, an alternative to the mainstream form of socialism which it regarded as its bitter enemy. Hitler at times attempted to redefine the word socialism, such as saying: "Socialism! That is an unfortunate word altogether... What does socialism really mean? If people have something to eat and their pleasures, then they have their socialism".Henry A. Turner, "German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler", Oxford University Press, 1985. p. 77 In 1930, Hitler said: "Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not".Carsten, Francis Ludwig The Rise of Fascism, 2nd ed. University of California Press, 1982. p. 137. Quoting: Hitler, A., Sunday Express, September 28, 1930. The name that Hitler later wished he had used to describe his political party was "social revolutionary".Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism, vol. 2, New York: NY, Rutledge, 2010, p. 85. First published in 1934.
Early influences (495 BC–1880 AD) Depiction of a Greek Hoplite warrior; ancient Sparta has been considered an inspiration for fascist and quasi-fascist movements, such as Nazism and quasi-fascist Metaxism Early influences that shaped the ideology of fascism have been dated back to Ancient Greece. The political culture of ancient Greece and specifically the ancient Greek city state of Sparta under Lycurgus, with its emphasis on militarism and racial purity, were admired by the Nazis.Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, Salvatore Settis. The Classical Tradition. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: Harvard University Press, 2010. Pp . 353. Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler emphasized that Germany should adhere to Hellenic values and culture – particularly that of ancient Sparta. He rebuked potential criticism of Hellenic values being non-German by emphasizing the common Aryan race connection with ancient Greeks, saying in Mein Kampf: "One must not allow the differences of the individual races to tear up the greater racial community". Hitler went on to say in Mein Kampf: "The struggle that rages today involves very great aims: a culture fights for its existence, which combines millenniums and embraces Hellenism and Germanity together". The Spartans were emulated by the quasi-fascist regime of Ioannis Metaxas who called for Greeks to wholly commit themselves to the nation with self-control as the Spartans had done.Jürgen Fischer. Balkan strongmen: dictators and authoritarian rulers of South Eastern Europe. London, England, UK: Purdue University Press, 2007. Pp . 184. Supporters of the 4th of August Regime in the 1930s to 1940s justified the dictatorship of Metaxas on the basis that the "First Greek Civilization" involved an Athenian dictatorship led by Pericles who had brought ancient Greece to greatness. The Greek philosopher Plato supported many similar political positions to fascism. In The Republic (c. 380 BC),Contemporary Political Theory: New Dimensions, Basic Concepts and Major Trends. 12th Edition. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd, 2007. Pp . 705. Plato emphasizes the need for a philosopher king in an ideal state. Plato believed the ideal state would be ruled by an elite class of rulers known as "Guardians" and rejected the idea of social equality. Plato believed in an authoritarian state. Plato held Athenian democracy in contempt by saying: "The laws of democracy remain a dead letter, its freedom is anarchy, its equality the equality of unequals". Like fascism, Plato emphasized that individuals must adhere to laws and perform duties while declining to grant individuals rights to limit or reject state interference in their lives. Like fascism, Plato also claimed that an ideal state would have state-run education that was designed to promote able rulers and warriors. Like many fascist ideologues, Plato advocated for a state-sponsored eugenics program to be carried out in order to improve the Guardian class in his Republic through selective breeding. Italian Fascist Il Duce Benito Mussolini had a strong attachment to the works of Plato.Ludwig, Emile; Mussolini, Benito. Talks with Mussolini. Boston: Little Brown & Company, 1933. p. 130. However, there are significant differences between Plato's ideals and fascism. Unlike fascism, Plato never promoted expansionism and he was opposed to offensive war. Leviathan (1651), the book written by Thomas Hobbes that advocates absolute monarchy There were a number of influences on fascism from the Renaissance era in Europe. Niccolò Machiavelli is known to have influenced Italian Fascism, particularly through his promotion of the absolute authority of the state. Machiavelli rejected all existing traditional and metaphysical assumptions of the time—especially those associated with the Middle Ages—and asserted as an Italian patriot that Italy needed a strong and all-powerful state led by a vigorous and ruthless leader who would conquer and unify Italy.Contemporary Political Theory: New Dimensions, Basic Concepts and Major Trends. 12th Edition. New Delhi, India: Sterling Publishers Private Ltd, 2007. Pp . 706. Mussolini saw himself as a modern-day Machiavellian and wrote an introduction to his honorary doctoral thesis for the University of Bologna—"Prelude to Machiavelli".Benito Mussolini, "Prelude to Machiavelli," The Living Age, Vol. 323, No. 4194, November 22, 1924. Originally published in the Italian journal Gerarchia in 1924, edited by Mussolini and Margherita Sarfatti). Mussolini's thesis was titled "Comments of the year 1924 on the Prince of Machiavelli," (University of Bologna, 1924) Mussolini professed that Machiavelli's "pessimism about human nature was eternal in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign".(R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini, Chapter Eight: Government 1922-24, Hodder Education, 2002, p. 192. Most dictators of the 20th century mimicked Mussolini's admiration for Machiavelli and "Stalin... saw himself as the embodiment of Machiavellian virtù".Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, UK, Macmillan Publishers, Ltd, 2004, p. 343 English political theorist Thomas Hobbes in his work Leviathan (1651) created the ideology of absolutism that advocated an all-powerful absolute monarchy to maintain order within a state. Absolutism was an influence on fascism. Absolutism based its legitimacy on the precedents of Roman law including the centralized Roman state and the manifestation of Roman law in the Catholic Church.Perry Anderson. Lineages of the Absolutist State. Verso Edition. New York, New York, USA: Verso, 1979. Pp . 28. Though fascism supported the absolute power of the state, it opposed the idea of absolute power being in the hands of a monarch and opposed the feudalism that was associated with absolute monarchies. Portrait of Johann Gottfried Herder, the creator of the concept of nationalism During the Enlightenment, a number of ideological influences arose that would shape the development of fascism. The development of the study of universal histories by Johann Gottfried Herder resulted in Herder's analysis of the development of nations. Herder developed the term Nationalismus ("nationalism") to describe this cultural phenomenon. At this time nationalism did not refer to the political ideology of nationalism that was later developed during the French Revolution.Alexander J. Motyl. Encyclopedia of Nationalism, Volume 1: Fundamental Themes. San Diego, California, USA; London, England, UK: Academic Press, 2001. Pp. 341-343. Herder also developed the theory that Europeans are the descendants of Indo-Aryan people based on language studies. Herder argued that the Germanic peoples held close racial connections with the ancient Indians and ancient Persians, who he claimed were advanced peoples possessing a great capacity for wisdom, nobility, restraint and science. Contemporaries of Herder utilized the concept of the Aryan race to draw a distinction between what they deemed "high and noble" Aryan culture versus that of "parasitic" Semitic culture and this anti-Semitic variant view of Europeans' Aryan roots formed the basis of Nazi racial views. Another major influence on fascism came from the political theories of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel promoted the absolute authority of the state and said "nothing short of the state is the actualization of freedom" and that the "state is the march of God on earth". The ideological roots of fascism have been traced to the 1880s and in particular the fin de siècle theme of that time.Sternhell, Zeev, "Crisis of Fin-de-siècle Thought" in Griffin, Roger, ed., International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (London and New York, 1998) p. 169-171. The theme was based on revolt against materialism, rationalism, positivism, bourgeois society and liberal democracy. The fin-de-siècle generation supported emotionalism, irrationalism, subjectivism and vitalism. The fin-de-siècle mindset saw civilization as being in a crisis that required a massive and total solution. The fin-de-siècle intellectual school of the 1890s – including Gabriele d'Annunzio and Enrico Corradini in Italy; Maurice Barrès, Edouard Drumont and Georges Sorel in France; and Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany – saw social and political collectivity as more important than individualism and rationalism. They considered the individual as only one part of the larger collectivity, which should not be viewed as an atomized numerical sum of individuals. They condemned the rationalistic individualism of liberal society and the dissolution of social links in bourgeois society. They saw modern society as one of mediocrity, materialism, instability, and corruption. They denounced big-city urban society as being merely based on instinct and animality and without heroism. Gaetano Mosca in his work The Ruling Class (1896) developed the theory that claims that in all societies, an "organized minority" will dominate and rule over the "disorganized majority".William Outhwaite. The Blackwell dictionary of modern social thought. Wiley-Blackwell, 2006. Pp . 442.Tracy H. Koon. Believe, obey, fight: political socialization of youth in fascist Italy, 1922-1943. University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Pp . 6. Mosca claims that there are only two classes in society, "the governing" (the organized minority) and "the governed" (the disorganized majority).Giuseppe Caforio. "Handbook of the sociology of the military", Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. New York, New York, USA: Springer, 2006. Pp . 12. He claims that the organized nature of the organized minority makes it irresistible to any individual of the disorganized majority. Mosca developed this theory in 1896 in which he argued that the problem of the supremacy of civilian power in society is solved in part by the presence and social structural design of militaries. He claims that the social structure of the military is ideal because it includes diverse social elements that balance each other out and more importantly is its inclusion of an officer class as a "power elite". Mosca presented the social structure and methods of governance by the military as a valid model of development for civil society. Mosca's theories are known to have significantly influenced Mussolini's notion of the political process and fascism. Related to Mosca's theory of domination of society by an organized minority over a disorganized majority was Robert Michels' theory of the iron law of oligarchy, created in 1911, which was a major attack on the basis of contemporary democracy.James L. Hyland. Democratic theory: the philosophical foundations. Manchester, England, UK; New York, New York, USA: Manchester University Press ND, 1995. Pp . 247. Michels argues that oligarchy is inevitable as an "iron law" within any organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization and on the topic of democracy, Michels stated: "It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy". He claims: "Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy". He states that the official goal of contemporary democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that democracy is a façade which legitimizes the rule of a particular elite and that elite rule, which he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable. Michels had previously been a social democrat, but became drawn to the ideas of Georges Sorel, Édouard Berth, Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone and came to strongly oppose the parliamentarian, legalistic and bureaucratic socialism of social democracy. As early as 1904, he began to advocate in favor of patriotism and national interests. Later he began to support activist, voluntarist, and anti-parliamentarian concepts, and in 1911 he took a position in favor of the Italian war effort in Libya and started moving towards Italian nationalism. Michels eventually became a supporter of fascism upon Mussolini's rise to power in 1922, viewing fascism's goal to destroy liberal democracy in a sympathetic manner. Maurice Barrès Maurice Barrès, a French politician of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who influenced the later fascist movement, claimed that true democracy was authoritarian democracy while rejecting liberal democracy as a fraud."Barres and Fascism" by Robert Soucy, French Historical Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1967), pp. 67-97. Duke University Press. Article Stable URL: URL Pp. 87-90 Barrès claimed that authoritarian democracy involved a spiritual connection between a leader of a nation and the nation's people, and that true freedom did not arise from individual rights nor parliamentary restraints, but through "heroic leadership" and "national power". He emphasized the need for hero worship and charismatic leadership in national society. Barrès was a founding member of the League for the French Fatherland in 1889, and later coined the term "socialist nationalism" to describe his views during an electoral campaign in 1898. He emphasized class collaboration, the role of intuition and emotion in politics alongside racial Antisemitism, and "he tried to combine the search for energy and a vital style of life with national rootedness and a sort of Darwinian racism." Later in life he returned to cultural traditionalism and parliamentary conservatism, but his ideas contributed to the development of an extremist form of nationalism in pre-1914 France. Other French nationalist intellectuals of the early 20th century also wished to "obliterate the class struggle in ideological terms," ending the threat of communism by persuading working people to identify with their nation rather than their class.Mark Neocleous, Fascism, University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 40 The rise of support for anarchism in this period of time was important in influencing the politics of fascism.Stuart Joseph Woolf. European fascism. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970. Pp . 282. The anarchist Mikhail Bakunin's concept of propaganda of the deed, which stressed the importance of direct action as the primary means of politics—including revolutionary violence, became popular amongst fascists who admired the concept and adopted it as a part of fascism. Sorel's political allegiances were constantly shifting, influencing a variety of people across the political spectrum from Benito Mussolini to Benedetto Croce to Georg Lukács, and both sympathizers and critics of Sorel considered his political thought to be a collection of separate ideas with no coherence and no common thread linking them.Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, Yale University Press, 2011, p. 94-95 In this, Sorelianism is considered to be a precursor to fascism, as fascist thought also drew from disparate sources and did not form a single coherent ideological system. Sorel described himself as "a self-taught man exhibiting to other people the notebooks which have served for my own instruction", and stated that his goal was to be original in all of his writings and that his apparent lack of coherence was due to an unwillingness to write down anything that had already been said elsewhere by someone else. The academic intellectual establishment did not take him seriously,Jan-Werner Müller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth-Century Europe, Yale University Press, 2011, p. 95 but Mussolini applauded Sorel by declaring: "What I am, I owe to Sorel".Jacob Leib Talmon, The Myth of the Nation and the Vision of Revolution, University of California Press, 1981, p. 451. 300px|Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, author of the Futurist Manifesto (1908) and later the co-author of the Fascist Manifesto (1919) Radical nationalism in Italy—support for expansionism and cultural revolution to create a "New Man" and a "New State"—began to grow in 1912 during the Italian conquest of Libya and was supported by Italian Futurists and members of the ANI. Futurism was both an artistic-cultural movement and initially a political movement in Italy led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the author of the Futurist Manifesto (1908), that championed the causes of modernism, action and political violence as necessary elements of politics while denouncing liberalism and parliamentary politics. Marinetti rejected conventional democracy for being based on majority rule and egalitarianism, while promoting a new form of democracy, that he described in his work "The Futurist Conception of Democracy" as the following: "We are therefore able to give the directions to create and to dismantle to numbers, to quantity, to the mass, for with us number, quantity and mass will never be—as they are in Germany and Russia—the number, quantity and mass of mediocre men, incapable and indecisive".Andrew Hewitt. Fascist modernism: aesthetics, politics, and the avant-garde. Stanford, California, USA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Pp . 153. The ANI claimed that liberal democracy was no longer compatible with the modern world and advocated a strong state and imperialism, claiming that humans are naturally predatory and that nations were in a constant struggle, in which only the strongest nations could survive. With this manifesto, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento campaigned in the Italian elections of November 1919, mostly attempting to take votes away from the socialists. The results were disastrous. The fascists received less than 5000 votes in their political heartland of Milan, compared to 190,000 for the socialists, and not a single fascist candidate was elected to any office.Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 284-285 Mussolini's political career seemed to be over. This crippling electoral defeat was largely due to fascism's lack of ideological credibility, as the fascist movement was a mixture of many different ideas and tendencies. It contained monarchists, republicans, syndicalists and conservatives, and some candidates supported the Vatican while others wanted to expel the Pope from Italy.Denis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, University of Michigan Press, 1997, p. 285 In response to the failure of his electoral strategy, Mussolini shifted his political movement to the right, seeking to form an alliance with the conservatives. Soon, agrarian conflicts in the region of Emilia and in the Po Valley provided an opportunity to launch a series of violent attacks against the socialists, and thus to win credibility with the conservatives and establish fascism as a paramilitary movement rather than an electoral one. In this period, to appease the King of Italy, Mussolini formed a close political alliance between the Italian Fascists and Italy's conservative faction in Parliament, which was led by Luigi Federzoni, a conservative monarchist and nationalist who was a member of the Italian Nationalist Association (ANI).De Grand, Alexander. Italian fascism: its origins and development. 3rd ed. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. pp. 45, 54. The ANI joined the National Fascist Party in 1923.De Grand, Alexander. Italian fascism: its origins and development. 3rd ed. University of Nebraska Press, 2000. p. 45. Because of the merger of the Nationalists with the Fascists, tensions existed between the conservative nationalist and revolutionary syndicalist factions of the movement. The conservative and syndicalist factions of the Fascist movement sought to reconcile their differences, secure unity and promote fascism by taking on the views of each other. Conservative nationalist Fascists promoted fascism as a revolutionary movement to appease the revolutionary syndicalists, while to appease conservative nationalists, the revolutionary syndicalists declared they wanted to secure social stability and insure economic productivity. This sentiment included most syndicalist Fascists, particularly Edmondo Rossoni, who as secretary-general of the General Confederation of Fascist Syndical Corporations sought "labor's autonomy and class consciousness".David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism, University of North Carolina Press, 1979 pp. 289-290 In the 1920s, Fascist Italy pursued an aggressive foreign policy that included an attack on the Greek island of Corfu, aims to expand Italian territory in the Balkans, plans to wage war against Turkey and Yugoslavia, attempts to bring Yugoslavia into civil war by supporting Croat and Macedonian separatists to legitimize Italian intervention, and making Albania a de facto protectorate of Italy (which was achieved through diplomatic means by 1927).Aristotle A. Kallis. Fascist ideology: territory and expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945. London, England, UK: Routledge, 2000. p. 132. In response to revolt in the Italian colony of Libya, Fascist Italy abandoned the previous liberal-era colonial policy of cooperation with local leaders. Instead, claiming that Italians were a superior race to African races and thereby had the right to colonize the "inferior" Africans, it sought to settle 10 to 15 million Italians in Libya.Ali Abdullatif Ahmida. The making of modern Libya: state formation, colonization, and resistance, 1830–1922. Albany, New York, US: State University of New York Press, 1994. pp. 134–135. This resulted in an aggressive military campaign against the Libyans, including mass killings, the use of concentration camps and the forced starvation of thousands of people. Italian authorities committed ethnic cleansing by forcibly expelling 100,000 Bedouin Cyrenaicans, half the population of Cyrenaica in Libya, from land that was slated to be given to Italian settlers.Anthony L. Cardoza. Benito Mussolini: the first fascist. Pearson Longman, 2006 Pp . 109.Donald Bloxham, A. Dirk Moses. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. Oxford, England, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010. Pp . 358. Another early admirer of Italian Fascism was Gyula Gömbös, leader of the Hungarian National Defence Association (known by its acronym MOVE), one of several groups that were known in Hungary as the "right radicals." Gömbös described himself as a "national socialist" and championed radical land reform and "Christian capital" in opposition to "Jewish capital." He also advocated a revanchist foreign policy and in 1923 stated the need for a "march on Budapest". Yugoslavia briefly had a significant fascist movement, the ORJUNA, which supported Yugoslavism, advocated the creation of a corporatist economy, opposed democracy and took part in violent attacks on communists, though it was opposed to the Italian government due to Yugoslav border disputes with Italy. ORJUNA was dissolved in 1929 when the King of Yugoslavia banned political parties and created a royal dictatorship, though ORJUNA supported the King's decision. Amid a political crisis in Spain involving increased strike activity and rising support for anarchism, Spanish army commander Miguel Primo de Rivera engaged in a successful coup against the Spanish government in 1923 and installed himself as a dictator as head of a conservative military junta that dismantled the established party system of government.Dylan J. Riley. The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945. Baltimore, Maryland, US: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. p. 87-90 Upon achieving power, Primo de Rivera sought to resolve the economic crisis by presenting himself as a compromise arbitrator figure between workers and bosses and his regime created a corporatist economic system based on the Italian Fascist model. In Lithuania in 1926, Antanas Smetona rose to power and founded a fascist regime under his Lithuanian Nationalist Union. International surge of fascism and World War II (1929–1945) Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler (right) The events of the Great Depression resulted in an international surge of fascism and the creation of several fascist regimes and regimes that adopted fascist policies. The most important new fascist regime was Nazi Germany, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler. With the rise of Hitler and the Nazis to power in 1933, liberal democracy was dissolved in Germany and the Nazis mobilized the country for war, with expansionist territorial aims against several countries. In the 1930s, the Nazis implemented racial laws that deliberately discriminated against, disenfranchised and persecuted Jews and other racial minority groups. Hungarian fascist Gyula Gömbös rose to power as Prime Minister of Hungary in 1932 and visited Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany in order to consolidate good relations with the two regimes. He attempted to entrench his Party of National Unity throughout the country, created a youth organization and a political militia with sixty thousand members, promoted social reforms such as a 48-hour work week in industry, and pursued irredentist claims on Hungary's neighbors. The fascist Iron Guard movement in Romania soared in political support after 1933, gaining representation in the Romanian government and an Iron Guard member assassinated prime minister Ion Duca. The Iron Guard had little in the way of a concrete program and placed more emphasis on ideas of religious and spiritual revival. During the 6 February 1934 crisis, France faced the greatest domestic political turmoil since the Dreyfus Affair when the fascist Francist Movement and multiple far right movements rioted en masse in Paris against the French government resulting in major political violence.Stuart Joseph Woolf. Fascism in Europe. 3rd Edition. Taylor & Francis, 1983. Pp . 311. A variety of para-fascist governments that borrowed elements from fascism were also formed during the Great Depression, including in Greece, Lithuania, Poland and Yugoslavia. Integralists marching in Brazil Fascism also expanded its influence outside Europe, especially in East Asia, the Middle East and South America. In China, Wang Jingwei's Kai-tsu p'ai (Reorganization) faction of the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party of China) supported Nazism in the late 1930s.Dongyoun Hwang. Wang Jingwei, The National Government, and the Problem of Collaboration. Ph.D. Dissertation, Duke University. UMI Dissertation Services, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 2000, 118.Larsen, Stein Ugelvik (ed.). Fascism Outside of Europe. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. . P . 255. In Japan, a Nazi movement called the Tōhōkai was formed by Seigō Nakano. The Al-Muthanna Club of Iraq was a pan-Arab movement that supported Nazism and exercised its influence in the Iraqi government through cabinet minister Saib Shawkat who formed a paramilitary youth movement.I. Gershoni, James P. Jankowski. Confronting fascism in Egypt: dictatorship versus democracy in the 1930s. Stanford, California, US: Stanford University Press, 2010. p. 273. In South America, several mostly short-lived fascist governments and prominent fascist movements were formed during this period. Argentine President General José Félix Uriburu proposed that Argentina be reorganized along corporatist and fascist lines.Michael A. Burdick. For God and the fatherland: religion and politics in Argentina. Albany, New York, US: State University of New York Press, 1995. Pp . 45. Peruvian president Luis Miguel Sánchez Cerro founded the Revolutionary Union in 1931 as the state party for his dictatorship. Later, the Revolutionary Union was taken over by Raúl Ferrero Rebagliati, who sought to mobilise mass support for the group's nationalism in a manner akin to fascism and even started a paramilitary Blackshirts arm as a copy of the Italian group, but the Union lost heavily in the 1936 elections and faded into obscurity. In Paraguay in 1940, Paraguayan President General Higinio Morínigo began his rule as a dictator with the support of pro-fascist military officers, appealed to the masses, exiled opposition leaders and only abandoned his pro-fascist policies after the end of World War II. The Brazilian Integralists led by Plínio Salgado, claimed as many as 200,000 members although following coup attempts it faced a crackdown from the Estado Novo of Getúlio Vargas in 1937. In the 1930s, the National Socialist Movement of Chile gained seats in Chile's parliament and attempted a coup d'état that resulted in the Seguro Obrero massacre of 1938. Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany pursued territorial expansionist and interventionist foreign policy agendas from the 1930s through the 1940s, culminating in World War II. Mussolini supported irredentist Italian claims over neighboring territories, establishing Italian domination of the Mediterranean Sea, securing Italian access to the Atlantic Ocean, and the creation of Italian spazio vitale ("vital space") in the Mediterranean and Red Sea regions.Aristotle A. Kallis. Fascist ideology: territory and expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945. New York, New York, US: Routledge, 2001. Pp . 51. Hitler supported irredentist German claims over all territories inhabited by ethnic Germans, along with the creation of German Lebensraum ("living space") in Eastern Europe, including territories held by the Soviet Union, that would be colonized by Germans.Aristotle A. Kallis. Fascist ideology: territory and expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922-1945. New York, New York, US: Routledge, 2001. Pp . 53. Corpses of victims of the German Buchenwald concentration camp From 1935 to 1939, Germany and Italy escalated their demands for territorial gains and greater influence in world affairs. Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, resulting in condemnation by the League of Nations and widespread diplomatic isolation. In 1936, Germany remilitarized the industrial Rhineland, a region that had been ordered demilitarized by the Treaty of Versailles. In 1938, Germany annexed Austria and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. The next year, Czechoslovakia was partitioned between Germany and a client state of Slovakia. At the same time, from 1938 to 1939, Italy was demanding territorial and colonial concessions from France and Britain in the Mediterranean.Davide Rodogno. Fascism's European empire. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006 Pp . 47. In 1939, Germany prepared for war with Poland, but also attempted to gain territorial concessions from Poland through diplomatic means. Germany demanded that Poland accept the annexation of the Free City of Danzig to Germany and authorize the construction of automobile highways from Germany through the Polish Corridor into Danzig and East Prussia, promising a twenty-five year non-aggression pact in exchange.Eugene Davidson. The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler. Columbia, Missouri, USA: University of Missouri Press, 2004 Pp. 371-372. The Polish government did not trust Hitler's promises and refused to accept German demands. Following a strategic alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union in August 1939, the two powers invaded Poland in September of that year. In response, the United Kingdom, France and their allies declared war against Germany, resulting in the outbreak of World War II. Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned Poland between them in late 1939 followed by the successful German offensive in Scandinavia and continental Western Europe in 1940. On 10 June 1940, Mussolini led Italy into World War II on the side of the Axis. Mussolini was aware that Italy did not have the military capacity to carry out a long war with France or Britain and waited until France was on the verge of imminent collapse before declaring war, on the assumption that the war would be short-lived.MacGregor Knox. Mussolini unleashed, 1939-1941: Politics and Strategy in Fascist Italy's Last War. Edition of 1999. Cambridge, England, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp . 122–127. Mussolini believed that Italy could gain some territorial concessions from France and then concentrate its forces on a major offensive in Egypt. Plans by Germany to invade the United Kingdom in 1940 failed after Germany lost the aerial warfare campaign in the Battle of Britain. The war became prolonged contrary to Mussolini's plans, resulting in Italy losing battles on multiple fronts and requiring German assistance. In 1941, the Axis campaign spread to the Soviet Union after Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. Axis forces at the height of their power controlled almost all of continental Europe, including the occupation of large portions of the Soviet Union. By 1942, Fascist Italy occupied and annexed Dalmatia from Yugoslavia, Corsica and Nice from France and controlled other territories. During World War II, the Axis Powers in Europe led by Nazi Germany participated in the extermination of millions of Jews and others in the genocide known as the Holocaust. Ba'ath Party founder Michel Aflaq (left) with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (right) in 1988, as both of Ba'athism's key ideologists Michel Aflaq and Zaki al-Arsuzi were directly inspired by Fascism and Nazism Another ideology strongly influenced by fascism is Ba'athism. Ba'athism is a revolutionary Arab nationalist ideology that seeks the unification of all claimed Arab lands into a single Arab state. Zaki al-Arsuzi, one of the principal founders of Ba'athism, was strongly influenced by and supportive of Fascism and Nazism.Curtis, Michel (1971). People and Politics in the Middle East. Transaction Publishers. . Pp. 132-138. Several close associates of Ba'athism's key ideologist Michel Aflaq have admitted that Aflaq had been directly inspired by certain fascist and Nazi theorists. Ba'athist regimes in power in Iraq and Syria have held strong similarities to fascism, they are radical authoritarian nationalist one-party states. Due to Ba'athism's anti-Western stances it preferred the Soviet Union in the Cold War and admired and adopted certain Soviet organizational structures for their governments, but the Ba'athist regimes have persecuted communists. Like fascist regimes, Ba'athism became heavily militarized in power. Ba'athist movements governed Iraq in 1963 and again from 1968 to 2003 and in Syria from 1963 to the present. Ba'athist heads of state such as Syrian President Hafez al-Assad and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein created personality cults around themselves portraying themselves as the nationalist saviours of the Arab world. In the 1990s, Payne claimed that the Hindu nationalist movement Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) holds strong resemblances to fascism, including its use of paramilitaries and its irredentist claims calling for the creation of a Greater India. Cyprian Blamires in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia describes the ideology of the RSS as "fascism with Sanskrit characters" – a unique Indian variant of fascism. Blamires notes that there is evidence that the RSS held direct contact with Italy's Fascist regime and admired European fascism, a view with some support from A. James Gregor.Gregor, Anthony James The Search for Neofascism: The Use And Abuse of Social Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006) p. 201 However, these views have met wide criticism,Brass, Paul Competing Nationalisms in South Asia:Essays for Asghar Ali Engineer (Hyderabad, India: Orient Blackswan, 2002) p.15-16Connerney , Richard D., The Upside-Down Tree:India's Changing Culture (New York, NY: Algora Publishing, 2009) p 154-158 especially from academics specializing Indian politics. Paul Brass, expert on Hindu-Muslim violence, notes that there are many problems with accepting this point of view and identified four reasons that it is difficult to define the Sangh as fascist. Firstly, most scholars of the field do not subscribe to the view the RSS is fascist, notably among them Christophe Jaffrelot, A. James Gregor and Chetan Bhatt.Bhatt, Chetan Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 2001) p. 124 The other reasons include an absence of charismatic leadership, a desire on the part of the RSS to differentiate itself from European fascism, major cultural differences between the RSS and European fascists and factionalism within the Sangh Parivar. Stanley Payne claims that it also has substantial differences with fascism such as its emphasis on traditional religion as the basis of identity. There were both pro-capitalist and anti-capitalist elements in fascist thought. Fascist opposition to capitalism was based on the perceived decadence, hedonism and cosmopolitanism of the wealthy, in contrast to the idealized discipline, patriotism and moral virtue of the members of the middle classes. Fascist support for capitalism was based on the idea that economic competition was good for the nation, as well as social Darwinist beliefs that the economic success of the wealthy proved their superiority and the idea that interfering with natural selection in the economy would burden the nation by preserving weak individuals.William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. pp . 35 These two ways of thinking about capitalism – viewing it as a positive force which promotes economic efficiency and is necessary for the prosperity of the nation but also viewing it as a negative force which promotes decadence and disloyalty to the nation – remained in uneasy coexistence within most fascist movements. The economic policies of fascist governments, meanwhile, were generally not based on ideological commitments one way or the other, instead being dictated by pragmatic concerns with building a strong national economy, promoting autarky, and the need to prepare for and to wage war. In 1922, following the March on Rome, the National Fascist Party came to power and Mussolini became prime minister of Italy. From that time until the advent of the Great Depression in 1929, the Italian Fascists pursued a generally free-market and pro-capitalist economic policy, in collaboration with traditional Italian business elites.Carl T. Schmidt, "The corporate state in action; Italy under fascism", Oxford University Press, 1939. pp. 116-119William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. pp . 163 Near the beginning of his tenure as prime minister, in 1923, Mussolini declared that "the [Fascist] government will accord full freedom to private enterprise and will abandon all intervention in private economy."Carl T. Schmidt, "The corporate state in action; Italy under fascism", Oxford University Press, 1939. pp . 115 Mussolini's government privatized former government monopolies (such as the telephone system), repealed previous legislation that had been introduced by the Socialists (such as the inheritance tax), and balanced the budget.William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. pp. 160-161 Alfredo Rocco, the Fascist Minister of Justice at the time, wrote in 1926 that: The Italian Fascist outlook towards capitalism changed after 1929, with the onset of the Great Depression which dealt a heavy blow to the Italian economy. Prices fell, production slowed, and unemployment more than tripled in the first four years of the Depression.William G. Welk, "Fascist economy policy; an analysis of Italy's economic experiment", Harvard University Press, 1938. pp . 166 In response, the Fascist government abandoned economic liberalism and turned to state intervention in the economy. Mussolini developed a theory which held that capitalism had degenerated over time, and that the capitalism of his era was facing a crisis because it had departed too far from its original roots. According to Mussolini, the original form was heroic capitalism or dynamic capitalism (1830–1870), which gave way to static capitalism (1870–1914), which then transformed into decadent capitalism or "supercapitalism", starting in 1914.Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy. University of California Press, 2000. p. 136-137. Mussolini denounced this supercapitalism as a failure due to its alleged decadence, support for unlimited consumerism and intention to create the "standardization of humankind".Günter Berghaus. Fascism and theatre: comparative studies on the aesthetics and politics of performance. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, US: University of California Press, 2000. pp. 136–137Mussolini, Benito. Four Speeches on the Corporate State: With an Appendix Including the Labour Charter, the Text of Laws on Syndical and Corporate Organisations and Explanatory notes (Laboremus, 1935) p. 16. He claimed that supercapitalism had resulted in the collapse of the capitalist system in the Great Depression, but that the industrial developments of earlier types of capitalism were valuable and that private property should be supported as long as it was productive. Fascists also argued that, without intervention, supercapitalism "would ultimately decay and open the way for a Marxist revolution as labour-capital relations broke down". They presented their new economic program as a way to avoid this result. The purpose of the economy, according to the Nazi worldview, was to "provide the material springboard for military conquest." As such, the Nazis aimed to place the focus of the German economy on a drive for empire and conquest, and they found and promoted businessmen who were willing to cooperate with their goals. They opposed free-market economics and instead promoted a state-driven economy that would guarantee high profits to friendly private companies in exchange for their support, which was a model adopted by many other political movements and governments in the 1930s, including the governments of Britain and France. Private capitalism was not directly challenged, but it was subordinated to the military and foreign policy goals of the state, in a way that reduced the decision-making power of industrial managers but did not interfere with the pursuit of private profit.De Grand, Alexander J., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: The "fascist" style of rule (London, England; New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 57. Leading German business interests supported the goals of the Nazi government and its war effort in exchange for advantageous contracts, subsidies, and the suppression of the trade union movement.Tooze, Adam, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and the Breaking of the Nazi Economy (New York: Viking, 2006), p. 101-114 Avraham Barkai concludes that, because "the individual firm still operated according to the principle of maximum profit," the Nazi German economy was therefore "a capitalist economy in which capitalists, like all other citizens, were not free even though they enjoyed a privileged status, had a limited measure of freedom in their activities, and were able to accumulate huge profits as long as they accepted the primacy of politics."Barkai, Avraham, Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 248. Conservatism Conservatives and fascists in Europe have held similar positions on many issues, including anti-communism and support of national pride. Conservatives and fascists both reject the liberal and Marxist emphasis on linear progressive evolution in history.Erin G. Carlston. Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp . 68. Fascism's emphasis on order, discipline, hierarchy, military virtues and preservation of private property appealed to conservatives. The fascist promotion of "healthy", "uncontaminated" elements of national tradition such as chivalric culture and glorifying a nation's historical golden age has similarities with conservative aims. Fascists also made pragmatic tactical alliances with traditional conservative forces in order to achieve and maintain power. Even at the height of their influence and popularity, fascist movements were never able to seize power entirely by themselves, and relied on alliances with conservative parties in order to come to power. Many of fascism's recruits were disaffected right-wing conservatives who were dissatisfied with the traditional right's inability to achieve national unity and its inability to respond to socialism, feminism, economic crisis and international difficulties.Kevin Passmore. Fascism: a very short introduction. New York, New York, USA: Oxford University Press, 2002. With traditional conservative parties in Europe severely weakened in the aftermath of World War I, there was a political vacuum on the right which fascism filled.Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002. Chapter 6. Fascists gathered support from landlords, business owners, army officers, and other conservative individuals and groups, by successfully presenting themselves as the last line of defense against land reform, social welfare measures, demilitarization, higher wages, and the socialization of the means of production.John Weiss, "The Fascist Tradition: Radical right-wing extremism in modern Europe." Harper & Row, 1967. pp. 4-5 Another difference with traditional conservatism lies in the fact that fascism had radical aspirations for reshaping society. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote that "Fascists were not conservative in any very meaningful sense… The Fascists, in a meaningful sense, were revolutionaries".Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. "Not Right, Not Left, But a Vital Center", New York Times Magazine, (April 4, 1948) Fascists sought to destroy existing elites through revolutionary action in order to replace them with a new elite selected on the principle of the survival of the fittest, and thus they "rejected existing aristocracies in favor of their own new aristocracy." Yet at the same time, some fascist leaders claimed to be counter-revolutionary, and fascism saw itself as being opposed to all previous revolutions from the French Revolution onward, blaming them for liberalism, socialism, and decadence. In his book Fascism (1997), Mark Neocleous sums up these paradoxical tendencies by referring to fascism as "a prime example of reactionary modernism" as well as "the culmination of the conservative revolutionary tradition."Neocleous, Mark (1997) Fascism. University of Minnesota Press. Chapter 4, pp .57-60 Liberalism Fascism is strongly opposed to the individualism found in classical liberalism. Fascists accuse liberalism of de-spiritualizing human beings and transforming them into materialistic beings whose highest ideal is moneymaking.Marvin Perry, Myrna Chase, Margaret Jacob, James R. Jacob. WESTERN CIVILIZATION: IDEAS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY- FROM 1600, Volume 2. 9th ed. Boston, Massaschussetts, USA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2009 Pp . 760. In particular, fascism opposes liberalism for its materialism, rationalism, individualism and utilitarianism. Fascists believe that the liberal emphasis on individual freedom produces national divisiveness. Mussolini criticized classical liberalism for its individualistic nature, writing: "Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; ... It is opposed to classical Liberalism ... Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual.""The Doctrine of Fascism", Firenze: Vallecchi Editore (1935 version), p. 13 However, Fascists and Nazis support a type of hierarchical individualism in the form of Social Darwinism because they believe it promotes "superior individuals" and weeds out "the weak".Alexander J. De Grand, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Routledge, 1995. pp . 47 They also accuse both Marxism and democracy, with their emphasis on equality, of destroying individuality in favor of the "dead weight" of the masses.Lorna Waddington, (2007) Hitler's Crusade: Bolshevism and the Myth of the International Jewish Conspiracy. I.B.Tauris. pp . 17. An organization called National Socialist People's Welfare (Nationalsozialistische Volkswohlfahrt, NSV) was given the task of taking over the functions of social welfare institutions and "coordinating" the private charities, which had previously been run mainly by the churches and by the labour movement.Martina Steber and Bernhard Gotto, Visions of Community in Nazi Germany: Social Engineering and Private Lives, Oxford: UK, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 92-93 Hitler instructed NSV chairman Erich Hilgenfeldt to "see to the disbanding of all private welfare institutions," in an effort to direct who was to receive social benefits. Welfare benefits were abruptly withdrawn from Jews, Communists, many Social Democrats, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others that were considered enemies of the Nazi regime, at first without any legal justification. Marxism and fascism oppose each other primary because Marxism "called on the workers of the world to unite across national borders in a global battle against their oppressors, treating nation-states and national pride as tools in the arsenal of bourgeois propaganda", while fascism, on the contrary, exalted the interests of the nation or race as the highest good, and rejected all ideas of universal human interests standing above the nation or race. Within the nation, Marxism calls for class struggle by the working class against the ruling class, while fascism calls for collaboration between the classes to achieve national rejuvenation.Mark Neocleous, "Fascism", University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 40-41 Fascism proposes a type of society in which different classes continue to exist, but the rich and poor both serve the national interest and do not oppose each other.Mark Neocleous, "Fascism", University of Minnesota Press, 1997, p. 42 Fascism opposed the internationalist character of mainstream socialism, but in doing so, it sometimes defined itself as a new, nationalist form of socialism, an alternative to the mainstream form of socialism which it regarded as its bitter enemy. Hitler at times attempted to redefine the word socialism, such as saying: "Socialism! That is an unfortunate word altogether... What does socialism really mean? If people have something to eat and their pleasures, then they have their socialism".Henry A. Turner, "German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler", Oxford University Press, 1985. pg 77 In 1930, Hitler said: "Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not".Carsten, Francis Ludwig The Rise of Fascism, 2nd ed. University of California Press, 1982. p. 137. Quoting: Hitler, A., Sunday Express, September 28, 1930. The name that Hitler later wished he had used to describe his political party was "social revolutionary".Konrad Heiden, A History of National Socialism, vol. 2, New York: NY, Rutledge, 2010, p. 85. First published in 1934.
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