George Lyndow: Front Fighter

George Warner Lyndow (1900-1975) was an American fascist who despite being persecuted for his beliefs, bounced back and almost single handedly preserved and promoted fascism in America after World War II.

A native of Vermont, Lyndow was the son of a lumber company executive. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, he joined the army and fought in France. Like many future fascists, the war had a profound effect on Lyndow who conceived of the kind of man forged in the trenches of the Great War as a creative and dynamic warrior; a man who recognized violence as a creative force and who was willing to risk all and sacrifice all for a great, transforming cause. As a result, these new men – fascist men -- were the only ones worthy of positions of power and prestige, unlike their crafty and conniving liberal parliamentary predecessors who were adept at starting wars but let others fight them.

After graduating from Amherst, Lyndow moved to New York and pursued a writing career. His first book The Dead, the Dying and the Damned had originally been written as a true account of his experiences in the war. However, his publisher suggested he turn it into a novel to better reflect Lyndow’s talent for dramatic narration. It proved to be a boon for the young writer as the novel sold well. In addition to a raft of articles, Lyndow produced several other books in the1920s.

It was in the 1920s that Lyndow became enamored of fascism. Fearing Bolshevism would consume Western civilization; Lyndow was impressed with the Italian Fascists’ success against them. Noting that Mussolini shared his views on war only drew him closer. Lyndow was so keen on fascism that he studied Italian and made two trips to Italy to see fascism for himself and to gather material for articles. In 1931 he published an article in 20th Century magazine titled, “Fascism: What it is and What it is Not” which stirred so much reader comment that Lyndow turned it into a 1933 book: The Future is Fascism.

By the early 1930s, Lyndow’s writing career began to wane and, with a wife and two children to support, he took outside jobs to make ends meet in the hard days of the Depression. Times were also hard for men of his convictions. “The fascist has no sanctuary in the political wilderness of this America,” Lyndow wrote in 1936 and wander he did. At various times he supported Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal (which he believed did not go far enough), Sen. Huey Long’s “Share the Wealth” movement, Father Charles Coughlin’s National Union for Social Justice (Lyndow introduced Coughlin at a rally in Rochester, NY and was a staff member on his presidential campaign), William Dudley Pelley’s Silvershirts and Wyman Yates’ Blueshirts. In 1937 Lyndow began publishing a bi-weekly, six-page mini-tabloid called Spearhead which offered support for fascism at home and the Mussolini and Hitler regimes abroad. At its height in 1940, Spearhead had 40,000 subscribers nationwide.

When the U.S. joined World War II, Spearhead was shut down by the federal government and Lyndow was arrested on charges of sedition. He was convicted of those charges in 1942 and sent to an internment camp at Seagoville, Texas (also located in that camp were American fascist sympathizers Wyman Yates, Theodore Andricks and John Travers as well as British BUF member Anthony Trumpington). Ironically, Lyndow’s eldest son, Paul (born in 1924), was killed fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. His father’s request to attend the funeral was denied.

After the war, Lyndow looked to start life over at almost 50. His wife had divorced him after his sedition conviction and, with no family reconciliation possible; he moved to Los Angeles in 1946 and took a job with Ostrum Printing. In 1951, Lyndow started a newsletter he called Frontline which was primarily an anti-communist publication. By placing ads for Frontline in various right-wing publications, he soon found a large group of subscribers and churned out weekly editions. He received some financial backing from wealthy Southern California businessman and anti-communist John Tunnison. With this infusion of cash, Lyndow established Spearhead Press (a tribute to his old 1930s broadsheet).

Spearhead Press started by reprinting a range of books on a variety of topics whose copy writes had run out and were considered in the public domain. By the mid-1950s the venture had proved so successful that Lyndow began publishing books by political authors, many of whom were supporters or were sympathetic to fascism. The writers for whom Lyndow provided an outlet reads like a who’s who of post-war fascism: Lawrence Dennis, Theodore Andricks, John Travers, Anthony Trumpington, Harold Lomax, Robert Thorwyn, Charles Ciroan, Orazio Zumez, Ronan O’Gara and Rex Burchill (William Jenkins). It was also about this time that he began bending Frontline more toward the fascist/Third Positionist point of view and spiced its contents with the writings of Dennis, Travers, Ciroan, Oswald Mosely, Paul LeLonde and Olis Danis.

Lyndow also used Spearhead Press to publish his own books: Confessions of an Enemy of the State (the account of his trial and imprisonment), False Glory: America in World War II and How We Got Here, How We Can Get Out (revisionist look at the 20th century/Cold War). He also published a valuable compendium of fascist/synarchist essays in Between the Monoliths: An Anti-Communist, Anti-Capitalist Reader.

Throughout the 1950s and into the mid-1970s, Lyndow was often a guest on issues-oriented radio programs. He made several guest appearances on local television shows around the country as well. In 1967, Lyndow turned Frontline and Spearhead Press over to his close associate, Robert Throwyn and retired. He died at his home in Costa Rica in 1975.

George Lyndow almost single-handedly kept the flame of fascism burning in America at a time when it was considered dead and buried. He also helped foster two new aspects of fascism – Synarchism and Third Positionism – by giving them a voice. Many brave and intelligent fascists from America and beyond would have been forever silenced were it not for his efforts.

Synarchism

Synarchism (from Greek meaning “to rule together”) is a form of corporatism that has changed forms over the years and nearly faded out after World War II except for a handful of proponents who managed to breathe life back into the concept. The key problem with turning synarchism into a viable political option is its very name.

The earliest recorded use of the term “synarchy” comes from Thomas Stackhouse an English clergyman who used the word in his New History of the Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity published in two folio volumes in 1737 to describe the system of Heaven. Harvard historian and sinologist John K. Fairbank also used the word synarchism in his 1953 book Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 and in later writings, to describe the mechanisms of government under the late Qing dynasty in China. Fairbank defined synarchy as a form of rule that co-opts existing elites and powers, bringing them into the system and legitimizing them through a schedule of rituals and tributes that gave them a stake in the Chinese regime and neutralized any risk that they might rebel against the monarchy.

The most substantive early use of synarchy comes from the writings of Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), who used the term in his 1882 book La France Vraie. St Yves considered the medieval Knights Templars to be ultimate synarchists of their time and consequently drew on Templar ideals when formulating his ideas. Alarmed by the emergence of anarchist movements, Saint-Yves, an occultist, elaborated a political-theological formula which he believed would lead to a harmonious society by viewing it as an organic unity. He advocated overcoming social differentiation and hierarchy through co-operation between social classes which would transcend conflict: Synarchy, as opposed to anarchy. Specifically, Saint-Yves envisioned a European society with a government composed of three councils, representing economic power, judicial power, and the scientific sector. The structure would be bound together by a metaphysical chamber. In this form of synarchy, political power effectively rested with secret or, esoteric societies composed of oracles. An elite of enlightened initiates would rule from behind the scenes and insure synarchy no matter which political party held power in a state or even what political system that state has. Saint-Yves believed spiritually superior earthly elite would use the oracles to communicate with an ethereal elite. He himself claimed that he was in touch with these beings, and that they actually gave him the principles of synarchy.
Saint-Yves' successor, Gerard Vincent Encausse “Papus,” founded the Saint-Yves School of Occult Sciences, and began a recruiting drive for a secret society, which he called the Synarchy Government. In his 1894 book Anarchie, Indolence and Synarchie, Papus spelled out an ambitious scheme to recruit all of the leaders of industry, commerce, finance, the military, and academia, to a single force, aimed at destroying the anarchist movement. Both Saint-Yves and Papus envisioned a global Synarchist empire, divided into five geographic areas: 1. the British Empire; 2. Euro-Africa; 3. Eurasia; 4. Pan-America; 5. Asia.

Lyndon LaRouche, leader of a controversial movement on the fringe of American politics, has conjured up a conspiracy theory of synarchy based upon the ideas of Saint-Yves/Papus. He claims that synarchism is an international movement born after the Versailles Treaty, which was financed and directed by financial groups belonging to the top international banking community. Its aim is essentially to overthrow the parliamentary regimes which are considered insufficiently devoted to the interests of the synarchists and substitute them with authoritarian regimes that are more easily controlled. This group installed fascist regimes throughout Europe during the Great Depression in an effort to maintain world order and prevent the repudiation of international debts. LaRouche claims U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney as a modern “synarchist", and claims that “synarchists” have “a scheme for replacing regular military forces of nations, by private armies in the footsteps of a privately financed international Waffen-SS-like scheme, a force deployed by leading financier institutions, such as the multi-billions funding by the U.S. Treasury, of Cheney's Halliburton gang.”

However, there is another, far less mystical version of synarchy as well. Impressed with Saint-Yves' political concept but not buying the esoteric feature, French Catholic philosopher and military strategist Dupont D’Ivry (1839-1915) looked to rescue synarchy from the occultists and turn it into a practical political force. D'Ivry, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War viewed with trepidation France’s unraveling as a result of the conflict and feared a future armed clash would bring about a repeat of the Paris Commune on a larger scale. His 1878 book, War and Uprising explored these themes. To more closely knit French society together, D’Ivry advocated Saint-Yves’ ideas of a congruous, organic society which overcomes its class differences through co-operation. However, D’Ivry’s synarchy would accomplish this through a re-organized state and economic structure. Borrowing a pinch from Otto von Bismarck’s Welfare State, a sample of Pope Leo XIII papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, a taste of American Henry George’s Single Tax theory and a helping of syndicalism, some ideas from Hegel, the American Revolution, mercantilism and the Medieval Guild system, D'Ivry brewed a heady new stew of synarchy that gave every strata of society a stake in the synarchist republic. Using the human body as a metaphor for the organic society of synarchism, D'Ivry noted that members of a society are like organs of a living body. They cannot live outside society and within it, each performs its own function or the body dies. “A peasant is as different from a priest as the stomach is different from the liver but each is important to the overall whole,” he wrote in his 1901 manifesto for synarchism, Synarchy; The New Social Contract. At the center of the syrarchic body is the biological family which functions as a micro of the macro and the state, which functions as the brain.

Surprisingly, Dupont D’Ivry and his version of synarchy is largely forgotten even though it influenced fascist and non-fascist movements around the world including Mussolini and the Italian fascists and Futurists, the National Fedayeen in Egypt, Distributism, National Socialism, Elciran Pamil’s Ergenekon movement in Turkey, Dualism, Nadir Pasdaran in Iran, The Canadian Synarchist Party, Chandra Bose, Salizar in Portugal, Oswald Mosely, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, Ali Lettelli in Lebanon, Arthur Thatcham in Australia, Syria’s Muhammar Faravahar, Charles Ciroan and many others.

Among those who took D’Ivry’s concepts up were the members of Mexico’s National Synarchist Union. The party was founded in May 1937 by a group of Catholic political activists led by Jose Antonio Urquiza. Borrowing heavily from Synarchy; The New Social Contract, the group published the Sinarquista Manifesto, which listed their opposition to the policies of the government of PRI and President Lazaro Cardenas. “It is absolutely necessary that an organization composed of true patriots exists,” the Manifesto declared, “an organization which works for the restoration of the fundamental rights of each citizen and the salvation of the Motherland. As opposed to the utopians who dream of a society without governors and laws, Synarchism supports a society governed by a legitimate authority, emanating from the free democratic activity of the people, that truly guarantees the social order within all find true happiness.” In addition to D’Ivry’s ideas, the ideology of the Mexican Sinarquistas was rooted in conservative Catholic social thinking of the 1920s and ‘30s and based heavily on the synarchism articulated by D’Ivry. It stressed social co-operation as opposed to the class conflict of socialism, and hierarchy and respect for authority as opposed to liberalism. In the context of Mexican politics, this meant opposition to the centralist, semi-socialist and anti-clerical policies of the PRI regime.

The Mexican Sinarquistas stirred fears of fascism on the American doorstep and U.S. Intelligence analysts kept a watchful eye on the movement during World War II. In a declassified U.S. report dated April 22, 1942, Raleigh A. Gibson, First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, sent the U.S. Secretary of State an English translation of an editorial from El Popular, the newspaper of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, published on April 21, 1942. It reads in part as follows:

The French sinarquistas rushed into furious strife against French and European democracy; those of Mexico organized to combat Mexican and continental democracy. The French sinarquistas were adopted by Abetz, the Ambassador of Hitler in France; the Mexican sinarquistas were recruited, were given a name, were educated and directed by Nazi agents in Mexico and by Falange directors who are working illegally among us. And this is so apparent, so conclusive, that it eliminates the need of concrete proofs of the organic connection between them. The fundamental proof is that sinarquism is not a unique and exclusive Mexican product, as its leaders untruthfully argue. That Sinarquism, even bearing the identical name, does exist in other parts of the world and is an international movement formed by those who are under the supreme orders of Hitler.

In 1946 the movement regrouped as the Popular Force Party. In 1951, however, when it was clear that the more moderate National Action Party (PAN) had become the main party of opposition to the PRI government, the Synarchist leader Juan Ignacio Padilla converted the movement to an “apolitical” one promoting conservative Catholic social doctrine, promoted through co-operatives, credit unions and Catholic trade unions. Synarchism revived as a political movement in the 1970s through the Mexican Democratic Party. The party then suffered a split in 1988, and in 1992 lost its registration as a political party. It was dissolved in 1996. There are now two organizations, both calling themselves the Uniacional Sinarquista. One has an apparently right-wing orientation, the other is apparently left-wing, but they both have the same philosophical roots.

Because of Saint-Yves and D’Ivry, synarchism has a long history in France and has been at the heart of several conspiracy theories in the years after World War II. According to former OSS officer William Langer’s 1947 book Our Vichy Gamble, French industrial and banking interests had, “even before the war turned to Nazi Germany and looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism ...These people were as good fascists as any in Europe... Many of them had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ‘synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.” This view was originally based on the discovery of a document called Pacte Synarchique following the death of Jean Coutrot, former member of the Groupe X-Crise group, in May 15, 1941. According to this confused document, a Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire had been founded in 1922, with the aim of abolishing parliamentary government and replacing it with synarchy. This has lead to the belief that La Cagoule (from cagoulards, the “hooded ones”) was the armed branch of French synarchism, and that some important members of the Vichy Regime such as Pierre Pucheu, Jacques Barnaud, Gabriel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Yves Bouthillier, François Lehideux or Henry Du Moulin de Labarthète were synarchists. An investigation was in fact ordered by the Vichy government, leading to the Rapport Chavin but no evidence for the existence of the Mouvement Synarchiste d'Empire was found. Most of the presumed synarchists were either associated with the Banque Worms or with Groupe X-Crise and were close to Admiral François Darlan. This also led to the belief that synarchists had engineered the military defeat of France for the profit of Banque Worms. Historian Annie Lacroiz-Riz wrote a 2006 book on this subject, titled Le choix de la défaite : Les élites françaises dans les années 1930 (The Choice of Defeat: the French elites in the 1930s). These theories have been dismissed as a “work of a paranoid imagination which wove together the histories of three disparate groups of activists, creating a conspiracy among them where none existed.” In fact, some historians suspect that the Pacte Synarchique was a hoax created by some members of La Cagoule to weaken Darlan and his technocrats and that the Movement Synarchique d’Empire never existed. According to this view, the Vichy regime would have found the conspiracy theories about synarchy convenient to justify the repression of secret societies such as freemasonry, and thus did not bother to dispel the rumors concerning synarchy.

Even though a U.S. military intelligence report, dated July 27, 1944, from the military attaché in Algiers, warned of synarchist penetration of the upper echelons of the Free French government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in Algeria, synarchy never emerged in France. In fact, after World War II, fascism lay in ruins both physically and philosophically as the world narrowed down to a battle of two opposing ideologies: Communism and Capitalism.

However, in the 1950s, a synarchist remnant slowly emerged from the ashes from the surprising locale of the United States. Spenglarian American philosopher Francis Parker Yockey (1917 –1960) sparked the re-emergence with his classic 1948 book Imperium. South African-born American philosopher Charles Ciroan (1930-2002) proved a direct descendent of Dupont D'Ivry with his inspiring and strongly synarchist tomes The Origins of Destiny (1958) and Heed the Thunder (1962). Other American synarchists included journalist/publisher Robert Thorwyn and soldier/activist Theodore Andricks. Argentina produced writer Orazio Zumez, from Ireland came guerilla leader Ronan O’Gara and Norway had Steinar Arneesen. Several synarchist political parties have been established and at least one glossy magazine, New Zeland’s Outlook, has a synarchist point of view.

The idea endures.

Charles Ciroan, father of Synarchism

Charles Artimus Ciroan (1920-2002) was a writer, philosopher and teacher. He was the foremost proponent of a post-World War II form of fascism called Synarchism which combined elements of corporatism with Third Position foreign policy.

He was born in Pretoria, South Africa the son of a Belgian geologist father and an American mother. After serving in the South African Army, Ciroan migrated to the United States to study international law at Georgetown University. Although he was against the conflict, when the U.S. entered World War II, Ciroan volunteered for duty and was assigned to the Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) and made a Field Intelligence Officer. His position had him conduct “first contact” field interrogations of enemy soldiers and officers, analyze the information he culled and write reports for Army Intelligence. He served in North Africa, Italy and in France.

After the war, Ciroan was asked to join the American effort to prosecute Nazis for war crimes. Instead, he went to work for Oskar Manderscheid’s group which was organized to defend the accused. This stunned those whom Ciroan had worked for because he was considered a superb officer and intelligence operative who could have had a substantial career in the post-war CIA. But Ciroan not only opposed the trials but felt that the U.S. was duplicitous in war crimes of its own (Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, among others) and lacked the moral authority to stand in judgment of the vanquished.

Ciroan was not a Nazi, but, like many in the 1930s, he had admired Mussolini’s corporate state. He arrived at his sympathy for fascism through Nietzsche, American philosopher William James, Catholic Distributism and Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre’s ideas about Synarchy.

His principled stand against post-war U.S. policy hurt Ciroan’s career hopes and put him under both CIA and FBI surveillance from 1945 to 1973. An anti-communist, he tried to join Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s legal team as an investigator but was turned down for his link to Manderscheid and the Nazi defense team. He ultimately carved out a career in academia from the early 1950s to the mid-1980s.

Ciroan scorned democracy as promoting a heard mentality that aimed at the lowest common denominator and creating instability. He was also an elitist who realized that men naturally organize themselves in hierarchies. Although he had come to admire capitalism’s ability to deliver the goods, he saw it as more revolutionary than communism and totally destructive of sound traditions.

This distrust of democratic capitalism led him to develop Synarchism. Synarchism can best be described as a pragmatic form of corporatism that relied on many market-driven strategies as well as a management approach known as Telesis, defined as an intelligent planning of the means to achieve a desired end. Synarchism rejected the imperialism and militarism which so characterized interwar fascism. It also sought to steer a third way between the either/or of Soviet communism and American state capitalism in the Cold War era. Naturally, both these ideas were highly controversial and well outside the mainstream of American political thought in the 1950s. However, from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, he did find a considerable audience of devoted students who would later attribute Ciroan to having a profound influence upon them. This influence was surprisingly broad and included members of the New Left as well many right-wingers as well.

In addition to hundreds of articles on a wide variety of subjects, Ciroan published several books which incorporated Synarchism in their themes. His first book, the scholarly Monarchy, Empire and Republic was published by the mainstream Beacon Books in 1955. Subsequent books, The Origins of Destiny (1958) and Heed the Thunder (1962) which were less academic and more overt in their examination of fascism and synarchy, were published by American fascist George Lyndow’s Spearhead Press. His books, while brilliant, entertaining and highly readable, were also far-rambling polemics which placed every point within the context of history and philosophy. Lyndow claimed that Ciroan helped Francis Parker Yockey pen his fascist opus Imperium. In fact, Imperium bears such a striking similarity to earlier Ciroan works that some feel he wrote it himself although Ciroan always denied it.

A devout Catholic, Ciroan married twice (his first wife, Naomi Lavan died in 1957), and fathered three children. He died of cancer at his retirement home in Florida in 2002 while working on his memoirs, which, tragically, he had yet to finish.

Many of those who have written about Charles Ciroan have put their gross ignorance of him and his beliefs on ample display. Because he was sympathetic to corpratism and helped defend Nazis at the Nuremberg trials, commentators put two and two together and came up with eighteen. Ciroan was a staunch anti-Nazi and condemned the Italian Fascists for allying themselves with him. His feelings about the Nuremberg trials were virtually the same as Sen. Robert Taft who condemned them as victor's justice in which the people who won the war were the prosecutors, the judges and the alleged victims, all at the same time. Taft condemned the trials as a violation of the most basic principles of American justice and internationally accepted standards of justice. But Ciroan went futher to note that the allies had also committed crimes during the war -- crimes of policy -- and that vetoed any moral authority they had over the Nazis. Ciroan pointed out (the charge is in his books and well substantiated) that the USSR had helped start the war and had divided Poland between it and Germany, how could it sit in judgement of the Germans who were once their allies?

As stated, his principaled stance ruined any hopes he had of a real career in American politics and government. He could have been a real boon to the anti-communist cause and McCarthy personally could have used his expertise. Ciroan could have been the head of the CIA, secretary of state or a terrific senator, but it never happened. He often said he never regretted his stand or the fallout it caused, but a trace of disappointment was always evident.

Fascists in Unusual Places

Many familiar with his name and his work would be surprised to find writer and political critic Herbert Croly (1869-1930) listed as a prophet of fascism. Croly is more closely associated with the Progressive era in American politics, but his work had a definate fascist slant to it and it could be better said that he was a pre-fascist thinker.

Croly was considered the dean of American political commentators. Walter Lippman called him, "the first important political philosopher who appeared in America in the 20th century." He authored the influental books The Promise of American Life (1909) and Progressive Democracy (1914) and founded the influential magazine The New Republic. It was in the pages of The New Republic Croly praised and defended Italian fascism, calling it a true "people's community" in which the common good was placed ahead of the private benefit.

Influenced by French Positivism, Croly was an attacker of big capitalist trusts and an advocate of state power for the people. He was a critic of American materialism and capitalism which he claimed were tearing the country apart. He saw individuality as chaotic: "An individual has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed." In war, he saw the possibility to mobalize society and advance fascism. War to him was a "social tonic," in which the impurities were cleansed at the spirit was reborn.

Croly's influential book The Promise of American Life was one of the founding documents of modern statism. It influenced Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Although it sold a mere 7,500 copies, Croly's opus reached a small but formidable and visonary elite who would provide the brain power behind a gradual statist takeover of the American government. All the hallmarks of fascism are found in The Promise of American Life: social militarism, national regeneration, vangaurd elites, unifying national myths, contempt for parlimentary democracy, a form of national socialism, military expansion, hostility towards individualism and many other themes fascists hold dear.

Like the fascists of the interwar period, Croly believed particularly in the need for national organization that went beyond economic considerations to affect the very souls of a nation's citizens. He saw that capitalism compromised men in their successes as much as their failures; that it reduced them to a common grabbers and denied them a fully realized life. Croly was concerned about the problem of what is today called "atomization," the condition of a teeming, disjointed mass of people who are disconnected from the essential sources of social significance, lost in themselves and their needs and wants. “An individual,” he wrote, “has no meaning apart from the society in which his individuality has been formed.” As a result, he believed the U.S. Constitution should be abolished in favor of the will of governing elites.

As a result, Croly, like fascists, saw the need for a national purpose that the nation arose out of unity of purpose, rather than unity of organization. He hated the ideal of limited government, opting instead in favor of a fascist-style combination of elite power in the form of commissions (similar to fascist corporations) to regulate and plan mass democracy. Frustrated with constitutional limits on state power Croly wrote, “It remains ... true ... that every popular government should in the end, and after a necessarily prolonged deliberation, possess the power of taking any action, which, in the opinion of a decisive majority of the people, is demanded by the public welfare.” For him America’s competitive position in the world required putting affairs of state into the hands of trained managers and scientists under a strong leader.

As stated Croly was an admirerer of Mussolini and Italian Fascism which he saw as the perfect model for America. In January 1927, he wrote an editorial in The New Republic titled, “An Apology for Fascism,” which endorsed an accompanying article, “Fascism for the Italians,” written by philosopher Horace M. Kallen, a disciple of John Dewey and a supporter of progressive pragmatism. In the article Kallen praised Mussolini for his pragmatic approach, and in particular for the élan vital that Mussolini had infused into Italian life. Kallen listed many of fascism's achievements in the field of economics, education, and state administration. Croly's accompanying editorial endorsed Kallen's thesis adding “alien critics should beware of outlawing a political experiment which aroused in a whole nation an increased moral energy and dignified its activities by subordinating them to a deeply felt common purpose.”

Croly also believed that a A rationally planned political order under state administrators would reshape and, to some extent, replace an independent civil society and that such a revolutionary order as the desired conclusion of the historical process. The national state, as he conceived of it, had to encroach on established property rights and social relationships in order to be true to its democratic mission, doing for the people what they otherwise could not do for themselves. "The essence of freedom, and virtue," he proclaimed, "is public service.”

As the great fascist scholar Charles Ciroan wrote, “Often we find fascists in the most unusual places. Herbert Croly is just such a case. One might normally think of him as an enemy of (fascism), in fact, his words show he was one of us in heart and mind.”

Fascism; Whose Verdict?

Today, the entire concept of fascism has lost all meaning for people. For some it is an epithet, useful only for cheap political name calling, for most, it is just a word, a foggy idea from the past. So it might surprise those unfamiliar with the idea that there was a time within living memory when throngs of people around the world embraced fascism as the wave of the future. “Fascism,” notes scholar Brian Anderson, “succeeded in gaining the uncoerced allegiance of ordinary men and women in a way Marxism never did." For them, fascism was a choice; a realistic and desirable alternative to the either, or tyranny of the two great systems of the modern age: democratic capitalism and revolutionary socialism. Fascism won its popularity not only as a viable and much sought after “Third Way,” but also because it challenged and defied the notions of its rival systems. As a result, it has been vilified and attacked by the proponents of both capitalism and socialism not only as irrational, reactionary and unworkable but even evil.

History is written by the victors, so it should come as no surprise that fascism’s epitaph has been authored by those who hated it and were most threatened by it. Since the end of World War II, its enemies have been so successful in hysterically demonizing the very word that merely labeling a political opponent “fascist” automatically places the accused outside the realm of legitimacy and decency.

Fascism’s opponents have managed to poison the political debate by irreversibly linking the idea to the Holocaust, ignoring that anti-Semitism has a deep tradition in Europe and elsewhere. Mass killings of Jews took place long before the concept of fascism was ever formulated and occurred in places like Czarist Russia where fascism never even had a toehold. Though anti-Semitism was a hallmark of Nazism, it played no role in fascism’s primary model, The Mussolini government that managed in Italy through the 1920s and 30s. Nor was it a feature of Francisco Franco’s fascist government in Spain that emerged in the late 1930s or other governments that were fascistic. With this in mind, equating anti-Semitism with all fascism lacks credibility.

And yet, years later, despite the hysteria, the slanders and false characterizations fascism retains the power to fascinate and stir debate. This is because it is a phenomenon rather than a catalog of beliefs, a force with more appeal than its detractors care to admit. As such it possesses a magnetism that makes it unique and separates it from the herd of staid political ideas. Its emotional appeal lies in its celebration of the nation and its people. Its pragmatic appeal lies in its remarkable flexibility which allows fascism to adapt to a wide range of different circumstances. An assortment of popular leaders in countries across the globe have implemented and tailored fascism to fit their national culture and solve their own exceptional set of problems. As a result, Italian fascism does not look like Nazism in Germany which differs from forms of fascism elsewhere.

This flexibility is part of the genius of fascism because it challenges and overcomes conventional distinctions like those between Right and Left, East and West which the powers-that-be find dangerous and disturbing, It offers a kind of synthesis of opposites in which fascism can be both nationalist and socialist, revolutionary and conservative, Left and Right all at once, thus building bridges between factions and individuals where doctrines like democracy creates rifts. This kind of synthesis resonates today when the old political notions of Left and Right are disintegrating and losing their meaning in the post-Cold War era.

This is dangerous because fascism opens up a new path, provides people with an alternative, an option, a Third Way. Initially, it navigated the straights between capitalism with its globalist intentions and socialism with its internationalist aspirations. Fascism’s synthesis took the most moderate of the paths because it lacks the extreme individualistic nature of capitalism and the extreme collectivist impulse of communism. “If we interpret the conventional labels Right and Left as referring to the preferences for independent private business versus collectivism,” observed sociologist Stanislav Adreski, “then in the alignment of the political parties in most countries of Europe the fascists appeared at the centre of the continuum with the conservatives and liberals at one end and the communists and revolutionary socialists at the other.” The fascists stood between both tyrannies in an attempt to keep either from crushing man under their opposite, but equally soulless, materialist systems. “Fascism,” Spanish fascist Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera said, “was born to inspire a faith not of the Right (which at bottom aspires to conserve everything, even injustice) or of the Left (which at bottom aspires to destroy everything, even goodness), but a collective, integral, national faith.”

Atheistic and scientific in their approach and driven by a pathological desire for a utopian classless society, the communist sees man as a creature of his social class. The communist ignores all those true factors that make a man what he is – parentage, family, religion, race, language, hometown, region, country – and ask him to throw it all aside to unite with men from the other side of the world with whom he has nothing in common except that that both labor. For the communist those things are mere superficialities which can be overcome. That is because man, to a communist, is a soulless lump of clay for the commissars to shape into whatever they wish. Primo de Rivera, recognized communism as, “an appalling absorption of man into a vast amorphous mass, in which all individuality is lost and the corporeal vestige of each individual soul is weakened and dissolved.”

The capitalist sees man as a “consumer” which is an elegant word for an animal that devours products. Capitalism recognizes only monetary values and is dedicated to the aggressive acquisition of money and material goods. It favors innovation over tradition and therefore destroys conventions that have bound communities for years, even centuries. “We were striking a blow at a mentality which placed the golden calf in the centre and as the main purpose in life,” stated Romanian fascist leader Corneliu Codreanu “Through our daring gesture we turned our backs on a mentality that dominated everything. We killed in ourselves a world in order to raise another, high as the sky... The absolute rule of matter was overthrown so it could be replaced by the rule of the spirit, of moral values.”

Democracy is also the enemy of the people because politicians in a democracy thrive on the lowest instincts of impassioned voters. Democracy is the tyranny of the majority and, as such, an aristocracy of mediocrities. Democracy derives its authority, not from god or religion, not from race, nobility or merit but from the mob. Just as capitalism fragments the economy into bourgeois and proletariat classes, democracy splits society into isolated individuals. Worse yet, as a system, it pulls a nation in different directions as separate parties with rival doctrines vie with each other for the support of the people as power turns over from one party to another, one administration after another, each with their own separate list of goals and objectives.
Unlike its old rivals, fascism sees the nation as an organic whole and uses the state to give the country a unity of aim instead of division along petty party lines. It accomplishes this through an organizational method that has been called corporativism or the corporate state. In this system, relations between a nation’s competing interests are regulated by the government and order is introduced in the economic arena.

The corporate state is the essence of fascism. Historian Maurizio Vaudagna called it, “Fascism’s most original innovation." It works by partitioning society’s competing interest groups into legal associations or corporations and giving them rights under law similar to those of an individual. Legislative power is granted to those corporations representing economic, industrial and professional groups. Both labor and management are joined by a representative of the government who serves as manager between the two. Together, the three sides work out issues of wages, prices and production quotas. In Fascist Italy, for example, business owners, employees, trade union leaders, professionals and other economic groups were organized into cartels according to their industries. These groups were given representation in a legislative body known as the Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni.

By removing the crass element of democratic-style politics from the mix, with its divisive pandering and endless factional quarreling, the corporative system transforms class conflict into class collaboration, ensures social justice, gives workers substantial control of industry and operates to the good of labor, management, the state and the nation as a whole. It moves what is, fundamentally, a negation between rival social and economic factions off the crude and perpetual battlefield of democracy and into the realm rational discussion and resolution.
This joining of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie under fascism represents the best example of the system’s flexibility as a synthesis of opposites. “The fascist idea of the corporate state offered a halfway house between laissez-faire capitalism … and the Marxist programme of expropriation, collectivism and central planning,” declared Adreski. “These fascist policies foreshadowed much of the fundamental features of the economic system of Western European countries today." How ironic and hypocritical that those who derided fascism as irrational, reactionary and unworkable would later adopt its essential form as the cornerstone of their own economic systems after its military “defeat.”

It would surprise many Americans to know that Mexico, an ally of the United States during World War II, operated as a corporate state. The Partido Revolucionario Institutional, or PRI, was founded in 1928 to unite all of Mexico’s political factions after the Mexican Revolution and curb the national infighting that had become murderous. Plutarco Elías Calles (an admirer of both Hitler and Mussolini), organized the PRI to streamline the transference of presidential power and oversee the Mexican economy which it would do for the next 70 years.

The result was unprecedented Mexican political stability as well as an economic expansion known as, “the Mexican Miracle” which saw an average annual growth rate in the economy of six percent between 1940 and 1980. Somehow, the United States not only tolerated but managed a friendly relationship with a fascist government on its enormous doorstep for almost a century, typically without acknowledging it as such. All the while, Mexico managed to stay independent by undertaking the moderate Third Way and refusing to align itself with either the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War. And, when we realize that revolucionario institutional means institutional revolutionary, we, again, see the genius of fascist synthesis at work: revolution and institution in harmonious combination.

The European Union which is slowly tying the individual nations of that continent together as an economic force capable of competing with Asia and the United States is the conception of a British fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley. Mosley conceived of a united Europe in his 1947 book The Alternative, the idea for which came, in part, from Germany’s policy toward Europe in the early 1940s. Mosley advocated a union of European states as a Third Force to ensure that, “Europeans shall never be the slaves of either East or West …That we shall not be bought by Wall Street or conquered by the Kremlin." American fascist Francis Parker Yockey also advanced this idea of Europe as a Third Force in his book Imperium. Once again, the haters of fascism have adopted yet another of its ideas without recognizing its contribution. After all, such recognition would beg the embarrassing question, ‘if we have adopted fascism, why did we fight fascism?’

Far from being the irrational, reactionary and evil doctrine that its enemies portray, fascism offers a workable, rational and revolutionary form of statecraft that has been adopted by many of its own detractors who refuse to acknowledge its origins or call it by its true name. In the early 1990s socialism made a dramatic retreat from the scene leaving democratic capitalism seemingly the victor. However, when people and nations who do not wish to sell their souls to capitalism cast about for alternatives to the philosophy of avarice, they will likely cast their lot with the very system their school textbooks preach was evil and irrational. In an odd, ironic way, the fascists may have been defeated in World War II, but fascism lives on.

What is Fascism?

Fascism is corporatism plus militarism. Under the corporatist system society's competing interest groups would be organized into legal associations, or corporations, which have rights under law similar to those of an individual. Legislative power is granted to those corporations representing economic, industrial and professional groups. Both labor and management are joined by a representative of the government who serves as manager between the two. Together, the three sides work out issues of wages, prices, production quotas, quality, distribution, labor standards, etc. and settle any disputes that inevitably emerge between such contending sides. At work in this idea is the Hegelian law of “negation of the negation” wherein the worst elements of each of the competing sides cancel each other another out in the formation of the ultimate result. It is the governmental equivalent of the lion laying down with the lamb.

Through the dynamic syntheis of opposites, fascism creates a new, third way between the constant destabilizing revolution of capitalism and the tyranny of socialism. It seeks the regeneration of the decadent nation through the unity that comes via mass allegiance. Mass allegiance being the mobalizing of both the elites and the people into a single force. It stands for values and policies directly opposed to the old order's rotten and failed philosophy. While dynamic, fascism also recognizes and incorporates the traditional as the foundation of the society thereby blending dynamism with tradition. It stands for patriotism against communism; order and discipline against chaos and anarchy; social justice against exploitation; nationalism against internationalism; national unity against class, race and ethnic conflict; individual effort and creative toil against high finance. Central to this philosophy is the need for a higher form of civilisation, built by a new type of man, the type of man that emerges from fascism.


"Fascism was born to inspire a faith not of the Right (which at bottom aspires to conserve everything, even injustice) or of the Left (which at bottom aspires to destroy everything, even goodness), but a collective, integral, national faith."

-- Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera


Fascism was forged in war and emerged in a ravaged Europe teetering on the brink of all-out collapse and threatened by Bolshevik revolution. The original fascists fought against the pervasive atmosphere of despair, fear and looming tyranny through a creative counter-attack that included persuasion and violence. Violence because the forces that threatened Western civilization used violence. They railed against the political and social changes brought about by World War I and organized into military-style organizations of highly disciplined men that took on the Bolsheviks and beat them back. Militarism can transform man from the modern, capitalist-molded bourgeois simp into the kind of creative warrior the original fascists were. Like them, this new creative warrior should be the kind of man forged in conflict and sacrifice. A man who sees that violence can be a creative force, a man who is willing to risk all and sacrifice all for the cause. This new fascist man must be worthy of positions of power and prestige, unlike the craven, lying phonys we find in democratic countries today, the spineless anti-patriots who fill our univerities then climb the ladder through guile, conceit and lies.

The best of militarism displays the qualities of loyalty, courage and professional devotion to the nation. The military stands guard on the wall in the dark hours so the people can sleep soundly in the knowledge that they are protected. Only this kind of man is worthy of a position of power and prestige, unlike the crafty and conniving liberal parliamentary types who eke out ignoble careers foraging through human waste and seeking to appeal to the worst instincts of men by offering bribes for ballots.

Militarism ceaselessly wages war both against flesh and blood and a spiritual army of evil. An individual, like a nation, cannot resist a foe in the flesh alone and those who go into combat against both are truly fearless and noble. Their souls are protected by an armor of faith just as his body is protected by armor of steel. Thus they fear neither neither demons nor men. Nor do they fear death. Why should they fear to live or fear to die when to live is to live for Christ, and to die is gain? Gladly and faithfully he stands for Christ, but he would prefer to be dissolved and to be with Christ, by far the better thing. The fascist knows that death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

"We cannot ... be content to rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercialism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question ... that in this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities."

-- Theodore Roosevelt