[A-List] The anatomy of fascism, by Robert Paxton

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Fascism: From Adolf to Benito

The Anatomy Of Fascism by Robert O Paxton (Allen Lane, £20)
Reviewed by Iain Macwhirter
The Sunday Herald, 9 May 2004

Sicily has a lot to answer for. It gave us the Mafia, the modern drugs trade
and vendetta. It also had a hand in the origin of fascism. The peasants who
rose against the landlords of Sicily in 1893 called themselves the Fasci
Siciliano, roughly meaning "solidarity".

Benito Mussolini, teacher, bohemian novelist and socialist orator, rather
liked the sound of that. So did his syndicalist collaborators and the
Futurist intellectuals who travelled with Il Duce on his crazy adventure.

It was all so, well, modern. Miss Jean Brodie wasn't alone in idolising
Mussolini. Fascists seemed radical, progressive, heroic even. Left-wing
intellectuals, like Oswald Mosley, were seduced by the sheer style of
fascism, which he emulated with his black-shirt cadres.

Fascism was above all an aesthetic experience according to US sociologist
Robert O Paxton. It was about raw emotionalism and not unlike the passion of
the football terracing - all form and no content. Intoxicated by violent
emotion, its followers believed they could conquer the world, rather as
football fans do today.

Fascism replaced reasoned debate with sensual experience. Instead of
political programmes and dull meetings it offered rallies, leadership and
the romance of national destiny. It was ideally suited to the emerging mass
communications industry. It still is. Silvio Berlusconi, who's given
ex-fascists government posts, is a media tycoon. He has also modelled his
party, Forza Italia, on a supporters' club.

Mind you, fascism didn't dispense with radical politics altogether. At its
founding conference, in Milan in 1919, the Italian fascist party programme
called for women's suffrage, abolition of the monarchy, an eight-hour day,
worker control, punitive taxation and seizure of Church properties. This put
it to the left of the British Labour Party.

But within a year, Mussolini had lost his affection for social democracy.
His thugs broke into the Milan offices of the socialist daily Avanti, which
Mussolini edited, and smashed its presses, killing four people. Fascism,
said Il Duce, declared war on socialism because it had "abandoned
nationalism".

So, is fascism simply a bastard union of socialism and nationalism? Many
believe that to be an adequate definition of a movement which was, after
all, called the National Socialist or Nazi party in Germany. Sociologists
like Hannah Arendt, finding similarities between Soviet communism and the
fascism of Nazi Germany, concluded they were essentially the same beast.

Paxton disagrees. He has little patience with any of the conventional
definitions of the movement which he calls "the major political innovation
of the 20th century". He doesn't like the casual way in which authoritarian
and military dictatorships are routinely labelled "fascist". Indeed, he
controversially denies that the Spanish dictator, Franco, or Vichy France,
were fascist. Victims of those regimes, and their families, might take some
persuading. He dismisses the old Marxist claim that fascism is a militant
wing of international finance capital, and he rejects the common
misconception that fascism was anti-Semitism writ large. Mussolini had
Jewish backers and many leading figures in his movement, including his
mistress, were Jewish.

Nor does Paxton have much time for the theory, originally put forward by the
psycho analyst, Wilhelm Reich, that fascism is a psychological disorder -
though he accepts that many of its leaders were fruitcakes. He also
dismisses Bertolt Brecht's Arturo Ui image of fascists as capitalism's
bouncers.

Indeed, Paxton is so preoccupied with what fascism is not that he fails to
make clear what it actually is. His own definition is so broad and all
encompassing that it is largely useless. But along the way, in this anatomy
of the far right, he offers fascinating insights into the phenomenon.
"Fascism, like religion, mobilised believers around sacred rites and words,
excited them to self-denying fervour, and preached a revealed truth that
admitted no dissidence".

But is the bitch that bore it in heat again? Surveying the recent
manifestations of far right European politics - Pim Fortuyn, Jorge Haidar,
Jean Marie Le Pen - Paxton is satisfied that they offer no immediate threat
to democracy in western Europe. However, he isn't so sure about the east.
Paxton argues that the Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, can reasonably be
called fascist. The national decomposition of the former Yugoslavia created
fertile ground for extreme, emotional, anti-democratic nationalism. The
economic and social disintegration of the ex-Warsaw Pact is similarly
fertile.

I don't entirely buy Paxton's optimism about western Europe's immunity to
fascist extremism. It may be difficult to give a precise definition of
fascism. But you know when you've been beaten up by it. Paxton's book is
elegantly written, learned and exhaustive. But he has let his scholarship
obscure his vision.

The key, it seems to me, is the attitude of the people at large. Fascism is
about exploiting the irrational prejudices of ordinary people. Wherever it
has been successful, fascism has mobilised the masses against another race,
creed, nation or institution like the League of Nations. Nowadays we have
asylum seekers, migrants and the EU.

The cult of leadership requires that the movement is fronted by a
charismatic individual who embodies the national will. Fascism thrives in
cultures where civil society has been eroded, parliamentary democracy
discredited and where the mass media has colonised and debased political
debate.

Sound familiar? Almost all of our "advanced" industrial democracies have
some of the symptoms. All it might take is an economic crisis, or a lost
foreign war, and you could have a brand new 21st century version of a
political vice which is as old as democracy itself.