Phoenix

Fascism in Our Time

A. James Gregor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351499712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

A great deal of effort has been expended by Anglo-American scholars in an attempt to isolate past and contemporary "fascisms", "neofascisms", "cryptofascisms" and "latent" fascisms in the modern world. A. James Gregor's "Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time" is an insightful history of the intellectual rationale for Benito Mussolini's fascism offered by major Italian intellectuals. The book provides a list of recurrent features that helps to identify the generic phenomenon. This lucid account reviews seriously neglected aspects of intellectual history, describing the socioeconomic and political conditions that precipitate and sustain fascism. Gregor shows that Italian fascism was supported by a responsible and credible rationale. His account of that rationale permits us to understand the appeal fascism as an ideal has exercised over elites and masses in the 20th century. Gregor offers a credible list of traits in showing how instances of fascism can be identified when they first appear. The last chapters of the work are devoted to a case study of the newly emergent post-Soviet Russian nationalism and its affinities with historic fascism. Gregor discusses the implications of the rise of generic fascism in the former Soviet Union and post-Maoist China. This timely volume offers an alternative to conventional interpretations of the major historical events of the 20th century. "Phoenix" is must reading for scholars and policymakers dealing with European history between the two world wars, and should will be instructive for anyone interested in the fascist ideology in a new millennium.

1
The Problem

For about three quarters of a century, Western intellectuals have consumed an inordinate amount of time and energy in trying to “understand fascism.”¹ It has never been quite clear what that understanding might entail. More often than not, what we have been given has left us with an abiding sense of dissatisfaction.

The interpretations have come in waves. At times, fascism has been characterized as the last defense of capitalism.² At another time, we were told that fascism was the product of pandemic sexual disorder.³

More recently, the preoccupation seems to be with explaining the seeming popularity of fascism—its recent “rebirth” and “rise” in a variety of places both near and far.

In fact, a case can be made that there has been an unexpected reappearance of some kind of fascism in the last decade of the twentieth century. There are political movements of varying size and importance that seem to have found fascism cognitively and emotionally appealing. Our problem arises from the incongruity that results from the insistence, urged on us by a Western academic, that to “understand” fascism, one must appreciate the “pathology” that lay “behind the hatred and destructiveness [it] unleashes.”⁴ We are informed by yet another that “the word fascism conjures up visions of nihilistic violence, war, and Goetterdaemmerung,” together with a “world of…uniforms and discipline, of bondage and sadomasochism….”

It seems counterintuitive to suggest that the explanation of the contemporary reappearance of fascism lies in the fact that people have suddenly come to find “nihilistic violence” and “pathological destructiveness” attractive. As a consequence, we do not immediately know how to deal with the information that “fascism” has a demonstrated “ability to appeal to important intellectuals,”⁵ and those who follow them, when all the term conjures up for us is a vision of sadomasochism and unprecedented horrors. We are evidently left with a puzzle, “the conundrum of fascism’s appeal…,”⁶

In post-Soviet Russia, there are major intellectuals, who are politically influential, who show interest in Mussolini and Mussolini’s Fascism.⁷ In Moscow, Alexander Dugin, another of Russia’s intelligentsia, reads, and translates for his audience, the literature of “neofascism.” In Moldova, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, and Lithuania, “fascist” elements have resurfaced in a “baroque, often unpredictable alchemy” of “left” and “right.”⁸

What has become clear is that “fascism,” however the term is understood, has an appeal for many in the contemporary, post-Soviet world. That it should have any appeal at all is a riddle. If “fascism” is typically “narcissistic and megalomanie,…sadistic, necrophiliac…[and] psycho-pathological,” remarkable for its “sheer scale of inhumanity,”⁹ it is difficult to understand its continued attractiveness to anyone, much less intellectuals, anywhere in civilized society.

All of which suggests that something is very wrong. Either Western academics have offered assessments of fascism that lack accuracy, dimension, and depth, or some portion of thinking humanity finds sadomasochism, narcissism, and necrophilism seductive. If that is the case, then the appeal of fascism is not to be explained by a scrutiny of fascism’s intellectual pretentions; it is the proper subject for a textbook in abnormal psychology. Those who find fascism appealing must be left to provide case studies for psychiatrists.

Before any plausible answers can be forthcoming, it seems necessary to attempt to identify the referents of the term “fascism”—-in the effort to ensure that everyone is talking about the same thing. That has been proven to be a difficult task indeed.

Fascism as a Fugitive Notion

Throughout the major part of the twentieth century, academics have sought some theoretical understanding of “fascism.” At first, the concern was with the political phenomenon as it manifested itself on the Italian peninsula at the conclusion of the First World War—an effort that was not notable in its achievements.¹⁰ With the alliance of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany in the 1930s, the coupling resulted in the coalescence of both into what was conceived to be a generic phenomenon. By the advent of the Second World War, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Austria’s Heimwehr, the Swiss National Front, the Falanga in Poland, the revolutionaries led by Corneliu Zelea Codreanu in Romania, the Lapua movement in Finland, and that of the Arrow Cross in Hungary—among an indeterminate host of others— were all considered “fascist.”¹¹

In the Far East, the Kuomintang and the Chinese Blue Shirt Society were understood to be equally “fascist.”¹² In Japan, Ryu Shintaro and his New Order Movement—and sometimes the entire imperial government—were considered “fascist.”¹³

In Latin America, “fascism” was to be found almost everywhere. The Brazil of Getulio Vargas and the Argentina of Juan Peron were both conceived “fascist.” “Fascism” was a phenomenon that was just short of universal.

There were misgivings. At times, the “fascism” of one or another group was characterized as “conservative,” or “clerical,” or “authoritarian” rather than fascist. And there were times when the “fascism” of one or another movement or regime was dismissed as “false”—not a fascism at all.¹⁴

It was never quite clear what “fascism” was, how it was to be characterized, and how it was to be identified. By the end of the Second World War, the issue seemingly had become moot. The “War Against Fascism” had been successful.

For academics, however, victory in the War Against Fascism notwithstanding, the issues became increasingly complicated and confused. By the mid-1960s, the term “fascism” had passed into the lexicon of ordinary laymen. In general, the term had become nothing more than an expression of derogation. Not only had the terms “fascism” and “fascist” been reduced to invectives, but in 1975, Stanley Payne spoke of both as among the “vaguest of contemporary political terms.”¹⁵

The terms had inextricably mercurial and ambiguous reference. With the passage of time, there was scant improvement. In 1995, Payne could still report that “at the end of the twentieth century fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms.”¹⁶

In the interim, unhappily, the issue of fascism in the modern world had taken on considerable urgency. Without any clear warning from our “Sovietologists,” the Soviet Union had disappeared, and in its place more than one analyst reported the stirrings of what they could only identify as “fascism.”¹⁷ Vladimir Zhirinovsky had made his appearance and was identified as the leader of a “Russian fascism.”¹⁸ The issues had become so tendentious that when an English translation of Zhirinovsky’s book, The Final Dash South, appeared, it was given the title, My Struggle¹⁹—a gratuitous reminder of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

For many academics, everything seemed to have telescoped into Hitler’s National Socialism. The world appeared to lay prostrate before the threat of its revival.²⁰

That was not to be the worst. Soon authors were speaking of Zhirinovsky, Serbia’s Radovan Karadzic, Romania’s Gheorghe Funar, and Hungary’s Jozsef Torgyan as “Stalino-fascists.”²¹ There was talk of “Red-Brown coalitions,” with former Marxist-Leninists joining forces with fascists to challenge the liberal, free market successors of a failed communism.²²

It seemed as though everyone was testing the conceptual fungibility of language. What became eminently clear was the realization that any account of fascism, and its influence in the modem world, had become increasingly tortured and obscure. By the end of the twentieth century, scholarship gave every evidence of not understanding very much about one of the most important political phenomena of the contemporary world.

By the end of the century, it had become obvious to almost everyone charged with the responsibility of offering a comprehensive and intelligible interpretation of the political history of our time, that great confusion confounded the study of “fascism,” however “fascism” was understood.

One only needed to consider the implications of the judgment of Walter Laqueur, who could argue that if fascism rather than Bolshevism had prevailed in Russia after the revolution of 1917, “it would have done what Stalin did in any case.”²³ Stalinism and fascism were conceived, in some real operational sense, to be historically identical in outcome.

Had fascism prevailed in post-tzarist Russia, it would have marshalled everyone, labor and enterprise alike, to the task of making Russia a “great power.” Like Stalinism, fascism would have “militarized the economy and society in general”; it would have “nationalized” heavy industry “to a significant degree.” It would have persecuted “minorities” and “intellectuals” in very much the same manner as Stalin. In effect, and in substance, fascism was, for all intents and purposes, all but indistinguishable from Stalinism.

For at least half a century, we had been told that fascism was reactionary and congenitally anticommunist. Marxist-Leninists were revolutionary and intrinsically antifascist. We had been told that fascism was of the “extreme right” and Marxism-Leninism was of the left. Now we are told that “resurfacing communist leaders…” have been gravitaiing toward fascism, and “quite often exhibit a degree of ultranationalist prejudice we would never have expected from such past paragons of communist internationalism.”²⁴

Communists, in effect, have become increasingly like the fascists on the “radical right”—or perhaps they had always been of the “radical right.” In any event, it would seem that we are no longer certain of anything.

If all that is not confusing enough, other academics insist that “fascism,” as all “right-wing extremist groups,”²⁵ include “antitax,” “fundamentalist religious,” and “anticommunist” organizations.²⁶ Thus, “fascism” can be either anticommunist, or a form of Stalinism, a host for religious fanaticism, or a vehicle for tax protestors. It can be an expression of “clerical conservativism” or Islamic fundamentalism.²⁷ It can asso...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Problem
• 2. Paradigmatic Fascism
• 3. Roberto Michels and the “Logic” of Fascism
• 4. Roberto Michels, Nationalism and Corporativism
• 5. Giovanni Gentile and the Philosophy of Fascism
• 6. Totalitarianism and the Interpretation of Fascism
• 7. Fascism and the New Russian Nationalism
• 8. Conclusions
• Index