Fascism. David Renton

To Payne, the fascist ‘style’ includes such traits as its emphasis on violence, its exaltation of men above women and its positive evaluation of the young against the old. Payne’s definition is worth quoting in full, since it constitutes a political science counterpart to Ian Kershaw’s historical definition of fascism in power that was cited earlier:

      A. The Fascist Negations

      • Anti-liberalism.

      • Anti-Communism.

      • Anti-conservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were more willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly the right).

      B. Ideology and Goals

      •Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state.

      •Organisation of some new kind of regulated, multi-class, integrated national economic structure.

      • The goal of empire.

      •Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed.

      C. Style and Organisation

      •Emphasis on aesthetic structure ... stressing romantic and mystical aspects.

      • Attempted mass mobilisation with militarisation of political relationships and style and the goal of a mass party militia.

      • Positive evaluation and use of ... violence.

      • Extreme stress on the masculine principle.

      • Exaltation of youth.

      • Specific tendency towards an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command.⁹⁶

      Payne insists that the fascists were revolutionaries, albeit with a different idea of revolution from their Marxist adversaries. In this model of fascism, the goal that Hitler and Mussolini’s regimes set themselves was the subordination of everything in society to an authoritarian state, based on romance, myth and mass mobilisation. In Roger Griffin’s conception, which shares with Payne an emphasis on fascism’s roots in ideas, fascism in its purest form was a variety of palingenetic nationalism. Griffin argues that under fascism the nation ‘is in crisis and needs to be saved from its present state of disintegration and decadence through the agency of a vanguard made up of those who are keenly aware of the current forces that threaten it and are prepared to fight them’.⁹⁷

      These models are said to correspond not merely to how various political scientists in our own day have understood fascism but, more particularly, to what Hitler and Mussolini thought was the purpose of their regimes. ‘The premise of his approach’, writes Roger Griffin, ‘is to take fascist ideology at its face value and to recognise the central role played in it by the myth of national rebirth to be brought about by finding a “Third Way” between liberalism/capitalism and Communism/socialism.’ Griffin insists that this method is necessary: ‘One of the advantages of the new consensus is that it brings fascism in line with the way other major political “isms” are approached in the human sciences by defining it as an ideology inferable from the claims made by its own protagonists.’⁹⁸

      But why should it be necessary to understand fascism through the fascists’ historical views of themselves? Surely, when writing about any political ideology, the historian is obliged to be critical. This is a minimal expectation, akin to the position of a voter in any ordinary election who learns the limits of taking political language as it comes. The formal pronouncements of any leader must be compared to those around them. If, during a British general election, a politician says they are in favour of universal healthcare, or if, in an American election, a politician tells you they support freedom, these are not programmes for government. Such phrases served no greater function than to echo contributions made by other candidates. They are the price a politician pays to enter the game. Any voter learns to discount certain terms because they are ubiquitous. In an election where every party is promising to increase spending it matters which party would increase spending the most. Or, in conditions of austerity, you need to know who will cut fastest.

      The words of any leader must be weighed against their practice. There is a duty to analyse all ideologies from the outside, and this is especially true of fascism, a political tradition which from its inception set out to kill millions.

      It is just about possible to imagine a society which, on some objective measurement, achieved the cultural revolution set out by Payne and Griffin. After all, under Hitler art was taken out of its previously limited role as a specialist terrain of artists and used in every imaginable sphere of life – in architecture, in art, in posters, in music, in the staging of mass rallies. Mussolini did annexe colonies for Italy in Africa. But to say that fascism succeeded in establishing an empire without noting that the empire was used to carry out the Holocaust, or to say that it achieved a dominance of visual spectacles over politics without asking how those spectacles contributed to the stabilisation of a murderous regime, is not to explain fascism. Rather, it is to choose a form of blindness in which historians are incapable of seeing fascism except from a single perspective. Those who adopt the New Consensus remain trapped forever looking at the past only through the eyes of the intellectuals who shilled for fascism. Their approach prevents them from ever seeing fascism through the eyes of its victims.

       Opposition and Resistance

      The question of how the fascist regime might be defeated was a central concern of the interwar Marxists. Several recent historians, including Omar Bartov and Alf Lüdtke, have argued that in power the Nazi state achieved an extraordinary degree of popular support. Evidence for this view can be found in the letters of junior soldiers, which reveal that they supported the war far more keenly than their counterparts in Italy. It is also true that signs of support were everywhere, in the uniforms and new habits that the Nazis introduced, in the adoring faces at large rallies and in the popularity of Nazi badges and official collections.⁹⁹ However, it is not the case that all Germans supported the regime. Some Germans fully accepted the regime, others were more indifferent. A minority actively opposed the Nazis.

      The best chance for open resistance to the Hitler regime came in the months before Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship, in January 1933. Once Hitler was in power, the chance had been lost. This observation can be confirmed by the remarkable account of Daniel Guérin, a French revolutionary socialist who travelled to Germany in August and September 1932. As a prominent trade unionist and anti-fascist writer, he was given access to the world of social democracy, its supporters and their official meeting-places. He returned in April 1933, hiding the records of his journey in the frame of his bicycle. Guérin found that German Social Democracy had been destroyed, as well as Communist Red Berlin. He described a world in which young unemployed Communists had been won over to the ‘National Bolshevism’ of the NSDAP, while the trade union headquarters were hung with swastikas. Middle-class socialists had capitulated to the regime, if they could, and the convinced opponents of the regime were mostly in jail or dead. By April 1933, the Nazis had appropriated even the songs and the flags of the defeated Socialists, and, in Daniel Guérin’s judgement, ‘the workers’ movement resemble[d] in no way what it was a few months ago’.¹⁰⁰

      The failure of the German Socialist Party (SPD), the German Communist Party (KPD) and the trade unions to offer clear resistance before 1933 meant that the opposition to the Nazis was unlike resistance in occupied Europe, without a clear message or a unifying leader, and the Nazis were successful in crushing organised opposition. In power, the Nazi Party was also able to use the authority it had gained from its pact with the traditional elites, in the process of ‘coordinating’ existing state institutions. The second generation of opposition groups, active from 1936 onwards, were opposed by a plethora of state agencies. Having to survive denunciations and infiltrations at home, they also received little help from foreign governments. They organised in a society where any institutions which might have been a base for resistance were crushed.

      Despite these constraints, there was opposition, which existed at several different levels. First, there was organised resistance, acts against the regime with the conscious aim of replacing it. Examples