A2 Government & Politics Unit:3b, Topic:4 (Fascism)

• Fascism is a child of the 20C 
• Emerged in the period between the two world wars 
• Revolt against modernity
• Phrases include Italy: "Believe, Obey, Fight" and "Order, Authority, Justice" 
• Fascism came not only as a "bolt from the blue" - O'Sullivan 20C, but also as an attempt to destroy genuine political thought 
• Fascism emerged most dramatically in Italy and Germany with parties being formed in 1919. 
• Hitler took the National Socialist German Workers' Party, the Nazis, and turned Germany into a Nazi dictatorship in 1934
• Other fascist developments were seen in Imperial Japan (1930s) and Argentina (1945-55) 
• Lipset - "extremism of the centre" 
• Fascist regimes were not overthrown by popular revolt or protest but by defeat in WWII 

• Fascism can be considered in some sense be doubted as a political ideology as it is an "ill-assorted hodge-podge of ideas" - Trevor-Roper 
• Hitler described his ideas as a Weltanschauug (world view on how people understand and engage with the world) 
• Therefore, may be better described as a political movement than an ideology? 

• Core themes : 
  • ANTI-RATIONALISM 
  • STRUGGLE 
  • LEADERSHIP AND ELITISM 
  • SOCIALISM 
  • ULTRANATIONALISM 

• Counter-Enlightenment thinking 
• Highlights the limits of human reason 
• Nietzsche - human beings are motivated by powerful emotions not reason 
• Henri Bergson - "vitalism" - instinct and impulse > intellect and reason 
• Anti-intellectualism 
• "Action not talk" and "inactivity is Death" - Mussolini
• Fascism practices the "politics of the will" 
• It is an anti-philosophy 
• "Creative destruction" - eugenics 
• Natonal community - the Volksgemeinshaft (German term) - viewed as an indivisible whole - UNITY 
• Nazi slogan "strength through unity" 
• Individuals - "revolution of the spirit" - men should be the 'new man' or the 'fascist man' - motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice - prepared to dissolve their personality 

• Darwin - "natural selection" 1859 
• Human existence is based on competition or struggle 
• Fascists regarded struggle as the natural and inevitable condition of both social and international life 
• "Victory is to the strong and the weak must go to the wall" -Hitler 
• Mussolini - "War isto men what maternity is to women" 
• Association of goodness with strength and evil with weakness 
• Replacement of caring values, sympathy and compassion with loyalty,duty and obedience 
• Eugenics - huge significance 
• Germany - mentally and physically disabled peopel forcibly sterilised and then between 1939 and 1941 systematically murdered
• Extermination of Jewish people from 1941 +
• Hitler wanted lebensraum in the East (living space) 

• Radical rejection of equality 
• Belief that leadership and elitism are natural and desirable 
• Need a supreme, all-seeing leader - the Ubermensch - Nietzsche 
• Rises above the 'herd of instinct' 
• Hitler adopted the title 'Der fuhrer' 
• Other examples - "Adolf Hitler is Germany, Germany is Adolf Hitler" and "Mussolini is always right" 

• Portrayed their ideas as forms of 'socialism' 
• Nazi Party espoused a philosophy called 'national socialism' 
• Lower-middle class fascists had a profound distaste for large-scale capitalism 
• Before Hitler 'leftist' ideas were seen in the SA / Brownshirts,- "Common Good before Private Good"
• Oswald Mosley - leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 30s said that capitalidm allows capital to use the nation, fascism allows the nation to use capital 
• Yet, severe limitations, Night of the Long Knives lead to the murder of the SA's leader Ernst Rohm in 1934

• Aryanism was seen as ideal to many fascists 
• More than mere patriotism 
• Militant sense of national identity 
• Charles Muarras - 'integral nationalism' 
• Nations should only rely on their own resources - therefore nationalisation is preferred, and privatisation is detested 

• Different versions of fascism 
• Two major traditions adopted by Italy and Germany 
• Italy - all-powerful or totalitarian state, extreme statism (state is more appropriate means of resolving problems) 
• Giovanni Gentile - "everything for the state" 
• Whereas Germany stressed the importance of race and racialism 
• Hitler described the state as a mere "vessel" 

• Authoritarian corporatism 
• Closely associated with fascist Italy 
• Alternative to capitalism 
• Liberal coroporatism - Germany, organised interests to be granted privilege 
• Mussolini portrayed this as the 'third-way' 
• Embraced by Mosley in the UK and Peron in Argentina 
• Traditional Catholic social thought - social classes are bound together by duty and mutual obligations 
• Not Griffin's response currently in the BNP - "let the banks fail" 

• Fascists seen fascism as an agent of modernisation 
• Fascism tends to be backward-looking, highlighting the glories of a lost era of national greatness e.g. To Mussolini this was Imperial Rome 
• Yet it can be forward-looking, and has a bit of an interest in futurism (glorified movements in art, factories, machinery and industrial life) led by Marinetti - who became absorbed by fascism 

• Mainly Nazis
• Voluntaristic form of facism under Mussolini in theory, he only passed anti-Semitic laws after 1937 to follow Hitler not for any particular ideological purposes 
• Hitler supported militant nationalism 
• Generally, all forms of fascism are either hospitable to racialism, or harbour implicit or explicit racialist doctrines, e.g. Griffin 1993 
• Enoch Powell in the UK in 1960s and Jean-Marie le Pen in France in the 1980s both argued against 'non-white' immigration into their countries - on the grounds of there being a damage to their culture, and that the community would be threatened 
• Nazi ideology was fashioned out of a combination of racial anti-Semitism and social Darwinism 
• Anti-Semitism intensified in the late 19C 
• Growth of a 'science of race' - shown in eugenics in Germany 
• Hitler divided the world into three races in his Manichaean view of the world (terms of conflict between good and evil) - 1. Aryans, 2. 'bearers of culture' 3. the Jews - 'destroyers of culture' 
• Led to genocide and racial extermination in 1941 

FASCISM..........................................................................Nazism 

state worship.....................................................................state as a vessel

chauvinist nationalism........................................................extreme radicalism 

voluntarism.......................................................................essentialism 

national greatness.............................................................biological superiority

organic unity.....................................................................racial purity/eugenics 

pragmatic anti-Semitism....................................................genocidal anti-Semitism 

futurism/modernism...........................................................peasant ideology 

corporatism......................................................................war economy

colonial expansion............................................................world domination 

• Commentators have argued that fascism, properly understood, did not survive into the second half of the 20C 
• Rise of religious fundamentalism though - seen in a form of 'Islamo-fascism' 
• French Front National 
• Freedom Party in Austria 
• Their acceptrance of political pluralism and electoral democracy "democratic fascism" deems them not fully classic fascists 

• J. A. Gobineau - Architect of the modern racial theory, Aryans > others 19C
• F. Nietzsche - "Will to power 19C 
• H. S. Chamberlain - Populised racial theories 20C
• G. Gentile - Importance of the state stressed 20C 
• A. Rosenberg - "race-soul", 'sub-human' Slavs, Poles and Czechs 20C 

• BNP - office of PM should have full executive powers 
• Tyndall - 'stamp out' feminism 1992 - "our women folk to regard home and family-making as the highest vocation of their sex" 
• Tyndall - "lie of social equality" - promoted by "dark-skinned sub-racials" 
• 1970s - BNP - forced repatriation of all non-whites Tyndall 
• Enoch Powell - "Rivers of Blood" speech in 1968 
• British Union of Fascists 1930s under Oswald Mosley modelled on Mussolini 
• Tyndall - "Mein Kampf is my bible" 
• English Defence League 2005+ more a fascist movement than Party. Anti-Islamism. Fascist concerning race and nationalism, not democracy 
• Rebranding of the BNP under Griffin -Identity not race 
• Griffin - Holocaust denial 
• Combat 18 - 1992, violence against immigrants, nasty group, modelled on Hitler, published a "Redwatch" magazine listing names, photos and addresses of political opponents 
• Jean Marie le Pen - Front National 1972 Anti-immigration and downplayer of the Holocaust