A 'New Idea' That Failed
DRAPER, ROGER
Writers & Writing A 'NEW IDEA' THAT FAILED BY ROGER DRAPER WRITERS OF BOOKS on Communism have always had their subject matter defined for them by the Comintern, the international Communist...
...Slovakia, and (in spite of the Left-Center coalition's victory in the recent election) Italy...
...Indeed, the author does not say so, but the social profile of Fascist parties in those days resembled that of the student movement here and abroad in the 1960s...
...Even if this were true, it would not necessarily follow that liberal societies are in grave danger, because the purely political aspect of fascism has been weak from the start...
...on the whole fascism presented itself as the wave of the future and extolled technological progress...
...For all that, no nation with a really developed and long-standing liberal democratic system succumbed internally...
...He contends that the traditional lumpenproletar-ian and antimodernist stereotype is not representative...
...fascism" in those countries...
...Not Payne...
...Payne focuses on both the Italian and the German prototypes, but he is at pains to stress that Fascist and National Socialist parties were quite distinct...
...Mussolini's regime brought political charges against very few people and actually acquitted the great majority of them...
...Beyond the public, legal and parliamentary forces of the extreme Right, a "permanent subculture" of fascism continues to haunt us...
...In the long run, Payne insists strongly, the motley collection of parties and movements that marched under Fascist banners, even when reinforced by allies on the extreme Right, was hardly a match for the Third International...
...Slovakia and Croatia produced movements with a strong Christian component—Orthodox in the first case...
...Writers & Writing A 'NEW IDEA' THAT FAILED BY ROGER DRAPER WRITERS OF BOOKS on Communism have always had their subject matter defined for them by the Comintern, the international Communist church militant...
...Pat Buchanan appears to be their contemporary representative...
...Romania...
...Political prisoners usually numbered in the hundreds" in Italy, and "the total never amounted to more than a few thousand—rather than...
...Nevertheless, weak parliamentary systems were replaced not by corporate states but by "syncretistic, semipluralist forms of Right-wing dictatorship, normally without a developed single-party system and usually without a revolutionary new Fascist-type component...
...Consequently, anyone aiming to address the phenomenon must not only sift through the whole extreme Right but also prove that what Payne calls "generic fascism" really existed— that we are not dealing merely with a multitude of specific and quite varied parties...
...It was the "new idea" of the interwar period, and for most of that time the extreme Right seemed to be in the ascendant...
...Hitler in Vienna, in the years leading up to World War I, was a perfect specimen of the type...
...Hungary...
...Mussolini's "favorite and most influential" mistress was the Jewish Margherita Sarfatti, and well into the 1930s his party had an astonislungly disproportionate number of Jewish members: Of a total Jewish community of about 47.000, no fewer than 10,215 adults belonged to it in 1938...
...Mussolini himself famously said that "Fascism is not for export," though he did try to help allies in Spain and Austria, and in the early 1930s tentatively started to organize a sort of international—excluding the Germans, by the way...
...tens and hundreds of thousands, as in Nazi Germany" Payne argues, moreover, that until the late 1930s Hitler's "mystical racism" was rejected or ignored by many West European Fascist parties, particularly the Italian one...
...Payne suggests instead a three-part taxonomy...
...they were able to clear an electoral threshold of 20 per cent only in Austria...
...Roman Catholic in the others—that makes them hard to describe as more than semi-Fascist...
...Croatia...
...By and large, insists the author, "ev en at the height of the so-called Fascist era...
...Hitler persecuted opponents relentlessly...
...Germany...
...To be sure, urban skinheads and the Montana militias do correspond to certain traditional Fascist stereotypes...
...Both conventional authoritarians and the radical Right tended to be ultra-Catholic...
...The "radical Right" demanded a profound albeit usually vague transformation of society, yet unlike Fascists and National Socialists did not seek to achieve it through mass action...
...these grouplets, typified by the Action Francaise, were specifically hostile to democracy...
...As Payne rightly argues, it was in Weimar Germany and Italy, in the immediate aftermath of World War I. that parties could agitate freely enough to develop into serious contenders for power...
...Fascists and National Socialists achieved power by their own efforts in just two countries, both democratic...
...These regimes, Payne demonstrates, "served more as a barrier against, rather than an inducement for...
...Does the taint of fascism hang over this whole political landscape, from Marshal Mannerheim's Finland (a German World War II ally that had Jewish officers in its Army) to Hitler's Germany...
...The experience of the past suggests that in the absence of an external stimulus (like the rise of Nazism in the 1930s) these parties probably do not presage full-blown fascism or national socialism—although history also implies that if such a stimulus appeared they might be capable of committing the most gruesome atrocities...
...They nonetheless mounted their own home-grown holocausts, without much German prodding...
...The Communists are not alone in claiming to think so...
...TODAY IN GERMANY and other places, including the United States, would-be storm troopers are saying, "We're back...
...Not a single Fascist or National Socialist party managed to do what the Communists did more than once: stage a successful coup d'etat or civil war...
...Lumpenpro-letarians such as these have long exhibited ultra-Rightist proclivities...
...The fatal term Fasci, meaning "union," "league," or "band," had been kicking around in Italian radical circles since the 1870s...
...The Spanish insurgency was mounted by a military in which the Falange was relatively weak...
...What's more, the fascism of the 1990s is different from its predecessor in a way that adds to its ineflfectuality: Both here and in Europe, all varieties of the extreme Right now chiefly voice the rage of poor native stock whites...
...Thus a number of specialists view fascism as the vehicle of those who have lost out to the forces of modernization...
...In country after country, Payne shows, "The social sector proportionately most susceptible to lending support to Fascist movements would seem to have been university students...
...Furthermore, contemporary rural Right-wing extremism is generated in part by resentment at a world many of its adherents see as being out of control, and it is widely argued that historical fascism drew upon this kind of anger as well...
...Some Rightist organizations were authoritarian without insisting on extensive changes in the domestic institutional order...
...If not all Fascists bear a great deal of blame for the emergence of a genocidal form of anti-Semitism, however, it is true that the very worst excesses were by no means confined to the relatively small number of unambiguously Fascist or National Socialist groups...
...In 1931, the Nazi student organization had the backing of six out of 10 German undergraduates, and young people in general also leaned heavily toward fascism...
...I There was certainly a pronounced Rightvvard drift to politics in the intervvar years...
...One thing that united both Fascists and National Socialists, as well as their rivals on the extreme Right, was an intense and combative nationalism...
...Italy, and Romania...
...Hitler and Mussolini took over the reins of government through backdoor deals...
...But "electoral insignificance" has reduced it to mounting "sporadic, desperate essays in terrorism that lead nowhere...
...Many of the groups that called themselves Fascist or National Socialist—Mussolini's and Hitler's were neither the first nor the only such entities—did so casually...
...all the other Fascist regimes were installed by German arms after 1939...
...One thing is certain: Fascism was born in and mainly confined to Europe...
...If there was such a thing as generic fascism, as Payne nonetheless urges, it was important wholly as a result of the Nazi seizure of power in the strongest state on the Continent...
...Since there has never been a corresponding church at the opposite end of the political spectrum, "fascism remains probably the vaguest of the major political terms," observes Stanley G. Payne in A Histoiy of Fascism, 1914-1945 (University of Wisconsin Press, 592 pp., $39.95...
...Mussolini started in politics as a Socialist, and Payne shows that the original Fasci Italiani di Combattimento was founded in 1919 as a Left-wing nationalist front and then drawn in the opposite direction by forces beyond Mussolini's control...
...Fascist and National Socialist parties "were quite unsuccessful...
...Never, even in Italy and Germany, could Fascists muster a majority of the vote...
...By contrast, fully developed fascism, and still more national socialism, was marked by strong "pagan" propensities and the political mobilization of the populace at large along semi-military lines in mass parties that consciously imitated Leftist models...
...But in practice that too was a source of disagreement: Between states with significant Fascist or semi-Fascist movements—Spain and Portugal, Hungary and Romania—there were intense territorial conflicts...
...they had little in common with the core movements in Italy and Germany...
...As the author notes correctly, during the War "Jew s generally found safe haven in Italy, as well as in the Italian occupation zones in Yugoslavia and southeastern France...
...Youthfulness gave the Fascists a spurious air of dynamism, and the high percentage of educated men in their ranks made it possible to see them as instruments of government—something that cannot be imagined in 1996...
...Thus, with Germany's defeat and discrediting in 1945, the fundamentally anemic forces it had led inevitably went into decline...
...Authoritarian nationalists whose threats are directed mainly at immigrants and neighboring countries have become a force in Hungary...
Vol. 79 • May 1996 • No. 2
