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.
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.
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