Add This To The Pile:
For David Neiwert, who does good work (and especially good work explaining the beliefs and desires and tendencies of the fascistic if not outright fascist American right-wing), I copy-out this short essay on the nature of fascism by A.J.P. Taylor. It’s not exactly profound and I don’t agree with all of it, but it is interesting and blessedly brief:
Fascism
A contribution to a series of articles on The Isms in 1957.
The oddest thing about Fascism nowadays is that even its advocates have to pretend to be ashamed of it. Fascism has become a dirty word, and a speech in its favour can be identified at once by the unfailing phrase: ‘Of course I have no sympathy with Fascism, but…’ We have to make do with less branded words like totalitarianism, authoritarianism, demagogy, and so on. It will save a lot of trouble when Fascism gets back into currency.
Fascism is a disease of democracy or at any rate of the mass-age. Dictatorship alone is not Fascism if it relies simply on force and has no popular backing. Fascism demands a mass-party where a few self-chosen leaders control a body of disciplined followers drawn from the disgruntled elements of society. Here is the starting point of Fascism: a sense of grievance, social, political, national, even personal, it really does not matter what. But the psychology of resentment must be there, and if the resentment is unfounded so much the better. A Fascist party exists to express emotions, not to achieve results. Its programme is a mere rigamarole of high-sounding phrases, and if any of its aims are in fact achieved then others equally irrelevant will have to be botched up. Hence the futility of concession or appeasement to a Fascist party or country. Indeed, concession aggravates the resentment by exposing its irrational bias. Fascism has to be kept on the boil by parades and uniforms. Its demonstrations release pent-up emotions and at the same time generate fresh ones rather as an atomic reactor turns out more power than it consumes. The demonstrations must threaten violence. Later they must apply violence against some element felt to be outside the Fascist community — Jews, Slavs, coloured peoples. The actual choice of the victim has no practical sense. Hatred and persecution are practiced for their own sake.
Fascist leaders are concerned only with power. Usually indeed they claim to be serving some national cause and boast of their patriotism. But this nationalism is not essential and the few avowed survivors of Fascism now present themselves as having been “good Europeans’ before NATO and the rest of it were ever thought of. Fascists will use any ideological cover so long as it brings them nearer to dominance over others. What do Fascist leaders do with their power when they get it? Mainly they destroy the obstacles to its unrestricted exercise. Fascists hate the Christian churches, the law courts, the trade unions, not as rivals but simply as brakes. They have nothing to put in the place of these institutions. Fascist law is merely the rule of the stronger. Fascist creeds are a jumble of dark emotions, incoherently expressed. Fascists morals, too, simply provide unlimited sexual gratification for males whose appetites are usually greater than their powers.
Is Fascism necessarily anti-Socialist or even anti-Communist? In the days when Hitler was coming to power much play was made with the idea that Fascism was the last defence of a declining capitalism. As a matter of fact, capitalism seems to get along much better in a sensible democratic community. It is true that the rich retain their riches in a Fascist stae and even add to them. Probably the capitalist classes in Germany and Italy are still proportionately better off than their counterparts elsewhere as the result of Fascist rule. But though the capitalists keep their wealth, they lose their power just like everyone else and as individuals they are equally exposed to the irrational tyranny of the Fascist bosses. Many German magnates had time to decide in a concentration camp that they had been ill-advised to finance Hitler.
Other writers turn the analysis upside down and make out that Fascism and Communism are indistinguishable. This is an unnecessary confusion. Fascism sometimes parodies Communism just as it parodies almost everything else, but it lacks the practical economic aims which make Communism a rational, though materialistic, creed. What Fascists like in socialist measures is the power they offer, not the results they produce. Where socialists, let us say, might advocate rationing in order to secure fair shares, Fascists rejoice in the regimentation involved.
A final point is often ignored. Even Fascist leaders cannot be irrational all the time. If they were, they would be certified and locked up before they had started on their political career. Since, by definition, they have no rational principles, they are wholly selfish in their sane moments. There is no example on record of an honest Fascist leader. All of them — Hitler, Mussolini, their followers and imitators without exception — grabbed at wealth as well as power. When you find a political community in which all the leaders are corrupt, you may guess that it is on the way to Fascism. Indeed, Fascists in power (or out of it) plunder on such a gigantic scale that one is tempted to believe that they are rational after all — cheats and swindlers, not psychopaths. But this is wrong. Fascism is the irrational made vocal, and therefore any attempt to reduce it to rational terms defeats itself.
Source: Politicians, Socialism and Historians, pgs 109-111.
