Strutting
Fascism
Swaggering Militarism
and
"We work for the moral and traditional values which Socialists
neglect and despise…." – Benito Mussolini
By Gaither Stewart in Rome
It’s their strutting. That detestable image of the strutting
that links them, the strutting and prancing Fascists and their
swaggering and parading military cousins, up front for their
conveniently concealed corporatist controllers. A strutting
and swaggering couple they are, Fascism and the entrenched
class of war. Their distorted visions of gallantry and nation
come so naturally to both. The spick and span generals,
employers of mercenaries and killers, chin in, chest out, and
their majors and their colonels (especially the generals in
the offices and the majors in the tents), thick chests covered
with ribbons and medals and rows of multicolored
decorations—awarded for killing. And the political Fascists!
Defiant chins thrust forward, hard fists clinched, swaggering
and prancing and strutting across the stages of piazzas
nations and continents—in support of the killing.
For God’s sakes let’s don’t waste time on the propaganda of
“supporting our troops over there!” Or defense of America’s
values! Or the future of our children! Or the war on
terrorism! Let’s don’t waste words on that. As if in their
strutting and blustering they had a monopoly on care for our
sons! Let the generals and the industrial-military complex and
our new administration (hopefully) support our boys “over
there” in the only way that really counts—by bringing them
home.
But here let’s zero in on strutting Fascism in its dreams of
glory and on its corporate partners and their dreams of a New
World Order. Let’s call a spade a spade. I have in mind the
word Fascism that we progressive writers often use as an
epithet. Or sprinkled here and there in our labels of protoFascist, crypto-Fascist, neo-Fascist and today, in Italy,
post-Fascist. An old word whose essence, whose very
quintessence, has remained largely the same while the word
itself has acquired such negative connotations that Fascists
themselves deny their heritage, as recently the neo-Mayor of
Rome, the neo-Fascist Gianni Alemanno, who in an interview
with the English press denied he was ever a Fascist, recalling
the disciple Peter denying he ever knew his master, Jesus.
Since their emergence in Italy Fascists have liked to claim
that they too are of the Left. Specious claim. Bizarre
conclusion. We have to keep in mind that that is a Fascist
claim. It has little to do with social or political or even
theoretical reality. That Fascism like Socialism was a mass
movement by no means makes it Left. Historical Fascism in
Italy and Nazism in Germany set out as mass movements because
they were in political competition with leftist movements. As
such Nazi-Fascism was obligated to appeal to the masses, to
the collective, to that extent becoming social. In that sense
Fascism began as a mass collectivist movement, but only up to
the historical point when it mutated into the Corporatism that
Mussolini claimed as its true name.
Once in power Fascism then shows its true face: it allies with
and mutates into Corporatism, becomes elitist and regiments
the masses. In power it is no longer a collectivist movement.
That Power of any shade or color often goes wrong is a truism.
But that does not mean that all mass movements-systemsideologies are the same. The fact is that Fascism and Nazism
arose chiefly in opposition to Communism. Fascism in practice
will always be of the Right, Socialism-Communism of the Left.
After the fall of Soviet Communism two decades ago some
European intellectuals and political scientists proclaimed the
end of ideologies, that the terms Left and Right no longer
made sense and were old-fashioned, that they were actually the
same. This is dangerous speculation and lie. The words for the
two political poles were in vogue from the French Revolution
up until the onset of the American counter-revolution not many
years ago when American conservatives declared them
politically incorrect. Though the Democratic and Republican
parties in the United States contain qualities of both Left
and Right, a little of this, a little of that—with the result
that both parties are the same—no political movement with a
genuine ideology is or can be both Left and Right, a negative
which in turn confirms the validity of the dichotomy.
Until the French Revolution society was divided vertically,
with Power at the top, which filtered down through the
hierarchy to the voiceless peasant-slave. The great social
division has always been between property holders—today’s
capitalists—and the landless—today’s working class, or simply
between the rich and the poor. The Revolution instituted a
more democratic horizontal Left-Right division, intended to
limit and control Power. Reaction is Power’s nostalgia for
return to the old system, which is what happens in FascismCorporatism: return to a vertical society.
Just as the
property holders and the landless, today’s capitalistscorporations on one hand and workers on the other, so also
Left and Right, are and always will be by definition in
opposition.
Right, or in this case Fascism, believes in the superiority of
its cultural heritage and the past of nation, people, race and
traditions, in defense of which it relies on militarism. An
extreme right-winger rejects equality, wants as little change
as possible, is skeptical about political systems and
international rules and is committed to a society of hierarchy
and meritocracy.
The Left, reformist or revolutionary, stands for emancipation
from the past and for change. Yet it is nonsense that advocacy
of change automatically places one on the Left. In the case of
Italy, Fascism’s brief exploitation of the Futurist movement
in the arts in order to execute its revolution did not make it
Left. Fascism too wanted to re-make society, but by glorifying
and
worshipping
the
past.
In
fact,
a
kind
of
Sicilianism—change everything so that nothing changes.
Though some attitudes, positions and values are
interchangeable, there is a limit. War obviously belongs to
the Right. War is a typically Fascist manifestation emerging
from its worship of militarism and expansionism. War is no
minor political slipup, as American Democrats should know by
now. Historically war is all determinant. War has already
destroyed the foundations of the American republic and
undermined American democracy itself. The position on war of
America’s Democratic Party today is a Right position, as is
its position on social justice. Right positions inevitably
cause increased social injustice, social clash and war.
Likewise the pro-war position of European Social Democracy at
the outbreak of World War I led directly to its political
decline, the birth of Fascism-Nazism, to the predominance on
the Left of the Bolsheviks, and indirectly to the birth of
Socialism in one country and Stalinism.
Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004), a major Italian political
philosopher, determined that the major distinction between
Left and Right is the relationship of each with equality.
Though not every social-political view can be classified as
Right or Left, as a rule Left tends toward everything that
strives for equality among men; Right tends toward inequality.
In practice the more one rejects equality, the more Right one
is. Or, more forcefully, Right favors forms of the hierarchies
dividing men. The distinction on the question of equality is
clear, uncompromising and on target. It’s one or the
other—Left or Right. They are not interchangeable. Despite
Fascism’s claims that it too is “Socialist” and despite
Hitler’s appropriation of the word in National Socialism, and
despite Left’s frequent electoral claims that it too is middle
of the road, both ideologies, if they are genuine, are one or
the other. Neither Left nor Right can be middle of road.
Some political philosophers in Europe and the USA describe the
basic divisions between the Left and Right with the
comfortable categories of Progressive and Conservative. In my
opinion those common words are not satisfactory. Right can be
progressive on certain limited themes, while the broad Left to
achieve and maintain political power becomes conservative as
seen in the Left of America’s Democratic Party or in much of
contemporary European Socialism. To repeat, both Nazism and
Stalinism used the word Socialist freely and in the end
created parodies of socialist states.
Today, Left considers the Center a disguised Right; the Right
believes the Center is a cover for the Left. In the political
confusion of contemporary Italy, both the neo-Fascist Right
and the Socialist Left have moved gradually toward Center
positions. The Center, or the Third Way, is often a cover for
one or the other positions. That Third Way is often labeled a
“conservative revolution,” as if social ambivalence could
prevail over genuine Left or genuine Right. In the long run
also the Center is obligated to assume positions reflecting
either Left or Right.
So it is one or the other, Left or Right. Even though one does
not eliminate the other, one or the other predominates in a
given society in a given moment. Times change but the basic
dichotomy remains.
The most blatant example of ignoring the Left-Right political
reality is the USA, the world’s most powerful country
controlled by a one-party system, which in effect ignores the
words Left and Right. America’s Republican and Democratic
parties stand shoulder-to-shoulder on the Right, bolstered by
religious extremists, secret militias and the flag-waving
false patriots. Though the Democratic and Republican parties
in the United States contain a little of this, a little of
that—with the result that both parties are practically the
same—no political movement with a genuine ideology is and can
be both Left and Right. Some positions and values can be
exchanged and integrated in diverse systems, but there is a
limit.
No one genuinely on the Left (in the Democratic Party,
Liberals or Social Democrats) can defend Anglo-American
conservatism or the liberalism-conservatism-CorporatismMilitarism-Fascism alliance. One forgets that there are limits
as to what politics can accomplish. The open spaces the US
political system leaves vacant have been occupied by the allpowerful, elitist, anti-human, militant and militaristic
industrial-military complex of the modern corporatist state.
In sum, the combination creates the authoritarian system. It
is that extra-political vacuum (where there should be a Left!)
which creates space for the populism and demagoguery of
Fascism. America’s two interdependent parties have exchanged
political and social values like merchandise. The result is
that the one-party system based on the great euphemism of
democracy—now a façade, fake and mendacious—stands as the
banner and standard of the great American Counter-Revolution.
Historical Fascism
If one behaves like a swaggering Fascist, speaks like a super
nationalistic Fascist, acts like a Fascist bully, he must be a
Fascist. We feel a certain solace in just pronouncing the
epithet, “fuxxx Fascists!”
Yet the word Fascism has not always been politically
derogatory. Not by a long shot. Within a decade early last
century the word Fascism came to be applied to a cluster of
similar nationalist-militaristic movements in Europe, the most
important of which were the original Fascism in Italy and
Nazism in Germany, or National Socialism. In a wave of
revolutionary nationalism, Fascism first emerged in an Italy
ravaged by World War I. The swaggering strutting nationalistic
movement of Mussolinian Fascism had no precise forerunners
from the 19th century, as did Socialism and Communism, but it
was soon admired and imitated by like-minded movements across
Europe and in the USA.
William Dudley Pelly’s Nazi-supported Silver Shirts organized
in the 1930s in the town of Asheville, NC where I grew up was
the most influential, most violent, most anti-Semitic of
native American Fascist organizations, with allegedly some two
million members and with whom today’s Right still has
ideological bonds. America’s Fascists favored Nazi Germany and
Fascist Italy in WWII. Religion and intense hatred of
minorities bond Christian Identity and rightwing extremists
with the former Silver Shirt movement. TV evangelists of the
likes of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell have followed the
same format—hate of Communism, Jews, gays, abortion, welfare,
unions—in favor of the corporate-clerical state.
With the rise of the power of corporations came also the rise
of the modern military-police profession cast in a new role.
As did former monarchs, modern corporations and their
stockholders need the military-police control mechanism in
order to ascertain that the populace never rises up in
protest. Their marriage is the heart of Fascism. Fascism in
practice is thus the protective shield for Corporatism. For
every Corporate-Fascist state inevitably erects a police state
to regulate and finally enslave its people. The most striking
historical examples were the Italy and Germany last century.
Today it is the USA and its proxy puppet governments around
the world.
The term Fascism derives from the Italian fascio, or Latin
fasces, in reference to the bundle of rods that symbolized the
authority of the Republic of ancient Rome. The term was used
occasionally in the late 19th century for new radical
movements combining strong nationalism, aggressive activism
and violence and “authoritarianism”, another term coined by
early Italian Fascists, signs of which have reappeared today
in contemporary Berlusconian Italy.
Revolutionary Italian nationalists after WWI used the word
fascio for the movement that in 1921 became the Fascist Party.
Wearing a black shirt, the color of Fascism, Benito Mussolini
recruited a fascio di combattimento, or combat group.
Mussolini did not found Italian Fascism but he insinuated
himself into its leadership and became its supreme Leader, Il
Duce. His combat fasces and the drums of authoritarianism
created an atmosphere in which Fascist dictatorship was wildly
perceived as the only salvation of strife-ridden Italy, a
strategy eerily echoed today in Berlusconian Italy. Mussolini
became modern Europe’s first Fascist leader, Italy’s prime
minister and dictator from 1922 to 1943.
In the widespread post-World War I disenchantment and in
Europe, Mussolini’s revolutionary spirit and his Fascist model
were contagious and spread over Europe and to the USA. Based
on a corporatist and totalitarian vision of the state, Fascism
then as today has considered itself a third way between
capitalism and Socialism-Communism.
Benito Mussolini offered this authoritative definition of
Fascism:
"Fascism is a great mobilization of material and moral
forces. What does it propose? We say the following without
false modesty: To govern the nation. With what program? With
a program necessary to guarantee the moral and material
grandeur of the Italian people. Let’s speak clearly: It’s of
no import if our concrete program is somewhat convergent with
that of the Socialists as far as the technical,
administrative and political reorganization of our country is
concerned. We work for the moral and traditional values which
Socialists neglect and despise…."
Corporatism was so much the heart of Italian Fascism that
Mussolini insisted that Fascism should in fact be called
Corporatism because it is a merger of the nationalist-military
state and corporate power. His words struck a chord in the
hearts of European and American capitalists in the 1930s and
40s, just as they still do today. For if one bothers to look
the traits of Fascism are highly visible in Corporatism. What
are corporations anyway? Corporations are legally named
persons, fictitious persons that have gained more rights than
individual human beings.
By nature corporations are thirsty for power. They are
insatiable. Growth and more power are their mottos. As
corporations acquire more power, they and their lobbies come
to control also the puppet government and thus the real people
of flesh and blood whose rights cannot but deteriorate. The
goals of corporations, their raison d’etre and the twin
pillars of their existence, are growth and greater and greater
profits. In the capitalist state the “government of the
people” becomes a fiction and morphs into corporate rule. In
that sense US liberalism has considerable overlap with
Fascism. The word Corporatism fits well the social-political
setup in the USA and most of Europe today and in that sense is
an heir of Fascism.
Mussolini, I believe, would feel quite comfortable in the
NATO-European Union-USA-European arena today. The merger of
the military-industrial complex and the political world in the
USA is the most contemporary example of the concept of
Corporatism-Fascism. In their penetrating, pervasive and
increasingly authoritarian interventions in socio-economic
life today’s governments in America and Europe are in fact
examples of Fascism in action. Moreover, it should be noted
here that while Fascism in its Mussolinian origins was
nationalist, today it is global. Globalization is no less than
Mussolini’s Fascism-Corporatism in action on a world scale.
It’s no wonder that from its inception Fascism violently
opposed Socialism and Communism. Anti-Communism and antiSocialism have been the US corporate-political policy since
the rise of workers movements in the middle of the 19th
century. The original Fascism itself was born in part as a
reaction to the Russian Revolution, in part in opposition to
the rise of the ideal of liberal democracy. From the start
Fascism everywhere combined ideological aspects of the extreme
Right such as nationalism, militarism, expansionism and
meritocracy (the latter is much in vogue today in Berlusconian
Italy) and idealist elements borrowed from workers movements
such as the primacy of labor, social and unionist revolution.
The very word Nazi derived from the name of Hitler’s National
Socialist Party, reflecting its emergence from and support by
the petty bourgeoisie. And still today, Italian neo-Fascists
describe their movement as social and named their postMussolinian political party, the Italian Social Movement.
Antonio Gramsci, the political thinker, philosopher and cofounder of the Italian Communist Party, in an article “Little
Fascists” (Piccoli fascisti) in Ordine Nuovo, January 2, 1921,
linked the Fascism of his time to the petty bourgeoisie, at
the time called the shopkeepers’ class, perhaps closest to the
American liberal upper middle classes today.
"In this its last political incarnation which is ‘fascism’,
the petty bourgeoisie has revealed its real nature as a
servant of capitalism and landed property. But it has also
shown that it is fundamentally incapable of playing any
historic role: the people of monkeys fill the news, does not
create history, leaves traces in the newspapers, does not
offer materials for books. The petty bourgeoisie, after
having ruined Parliament, is now ruining the bourgeois state:
it substitutes private violence for the authority of law…."
In one of Gramsci’s famous quotes Fascism was described as an
attempt to resolve production and trade issues with “machines
guns and revolver shots.
“Productive forces have been ruined and wasted in the
imperialistic war: twenty million men in the flower of youth
and energy have been killed; the thousands of links that
united world markets have been violently destroyed; the
relations between countryside and city, between metropolises
and colonies, have been turned upside down; the streams of
emigration that periodically re-established unbalance between
an excess of population and the potentiality of the means of
production in single nations have been profoundly upset and no
longer function normally….Yet there exists a small layer of
population in all countries—the petty and middle
bourgeoisie—that believes it can resolve these gigantic
problems with machine guns and revolver shots, and this small
layer fuels fascism, supplies manpower to fascism.”
The roots of Fascism are European, linked to the birth of mass
society after WWI, especially in those nations in
transformation, which were conditioned by political and
economic weakness as were Italy and Germany defeated in the
Great War. Labeled by Thomas Mann the “moral sickness of
Europe” of the epoch, Fascism found particularly fertile
ground in Italy and Germany. Fascism is not based on any one
class. It draws support from all. It is the result of wayward
moral conscience and drunken decadence produced by the horrors
of war and it affected most countries that participated in the
conflict—that is much of the world.
Yet, as Gramsci noted, the petty bourgeoisie provided
Fascism’s most ardent supporters. This relationship of
Fascism-middle class is essential, central, in order to grasp
the nature of Fascism at all latitudes. It was the common
denominator between Italy and Germany. This relationship
distinguishes Fascism from similar regimes and movements
elsewhere which though often called Fascist are only
marginally so. This relationship also explains the mass
support Italian Fascism and German Nazism acquired, the
reputation as mass movements, for regimes that in power could
only develop based on a police state, terror and a monopoly of
mass propaganda.
Fascism As Corporatism
There is some truth to the claim that liberalism created
Fascism. The Italian petty bourgeoisie created Mussolinian
Fascism and still today, 2008, the same petty bourgeoisie in
Rome’s borgate, the vast poorer and workers’ districts, are
the backbone of Italy’s neo-Fascism and Berlusconian populism.
In Mussolini’s time, the wealthy upper classes abetted and
encouraged Fascism’s emergence, confident that it could
control it. To a certain extent and for a certain time it did.
Until Fascism in power showed its true face and controlled the
controllers. Yet Mussolini insisted on the name of Corporatism
instead of Fascism. Today, capitalism is both partner and
controller of American Corporate Fascism as were capitalists
in Europe and the USA in the 1920s and 30s.
Even a superficial analysis of the state created by the
Corporate Fascism-middle class symbiosis of three-quarters of
a century ago shows clear analogies with the American form of
Corporatism today. Though not yet widely identified as such,
Fascism is already in place in power in this great and
powerful Corporatist state. American Corporatism has created
the bases of its police state as Corporatism did in Fascist
Italy and Nazi Germany. The state relies on terrorism to
create the threat from external enemies created by the state
itself. Hitler’s burning of the Reichstag in Berlin for which
Communists were blamed was Nazi Germany’s Twin Towers. The
American corporatist state uses establishment media and
acquiescent intellectuals for its mass propaganda a la
Goebbels to maintain the false consciousness and the
Americanism image. The subservient media and compliant
intellectuals serve to create the myths of the elusive
American dream and the mythical American way of life of
comfort and ease—in sum, Americanism—and to assure the consent
of the masses in the interests of wealth, power, and
privilege.
Fascism is thus a product of capitalist society, an antiproletarian reaction to protect the social relations reigning
in capitalist production. Fascism is the falange Italy’s Prime
Minister Silvio Berlusconi speaks of today to break workers
movements in the interests of capital. Mussolinian Fascism and
German Nazism organized the nation spiritually by intense
radical demagogic propaganda, military build-up, the creation
of a mass social base and centralized government. In a similar
fashion the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan governments of
the 1980s marked the revival of the process of Corporatism,
the crushing of any illusions of a welfare state in the USA
and the weakening of the foundations of social democracy in
Great Britain.
Once firmly in power Fascism always carries out a palace
revolution in order to further regiment the masses while
leaving capital free to dispose of plus value as it desires.
In this sense the corporate state crushes class struggle and
guarantees the monopoly organization of capital. During the
acme of his power in the early 1930s Mussolini repeatedly
claimed that within a few years all of Europe would be
Fascist. Though I am little inclined to dwell on affinities
between Mussolini and Lenin, still, in the 20th century the
great ideological movements were in competition for the souls
of the masses.
Mussolini believed firmly in the
fascistization of the world as Lenin did in world Socialist
revolution. In that respect Fascism was counter-revolutionary
and reactionary despite its claims that it was social and
revolutionary.
One question remains: the difference between Fascism and
Nazism. Can one distinguish between them qualitatively,
recognizing however the same essence in each? Or are they
perhaps different movements also in essence? Mussolini
believed they were different. Subsequent history has also
differentiated between them. The Polish Pope John Paul II said
at the end of his life that Nazism was the supreme evil of the
century. Though history in general tends to consider Fascism a
variation of other authoritarian regimes, one might add,
closest to the USA today, I prefer to leave them together,
wrapped in each other’s arms, one comforting the other.
In contrast to Socialism, both Fascism and Nazism were from
the start extremely nationalistic, attempts to perpetuate the
heredity of a people, a nation, a race. Socialism-Communism,
despite its failures to live up to that promise, was
internationalist by nature; in the long run Soviet Communism
became nationalistic, even though that mutation came be blamed
on the capitalist encirclement. That encirclement was real,
not a scarecrow as is terrorism and security today. It really
happened. Fascism on the other hand goes far beyond
traditional nationalism. It perceives of the nation not as the
hereditary container of values but also as a future of power.
For Fascism, history is not perceived as loyalty to values but
as history’s continuing re-creation over and over again, which
requires for its fulfillment the crushing of anything standing
in its way. Hitler himself recognized Italian Fascism as the
first movement that fought against Marxism and Communism, in
his view, from a non-reactionary point of view.
In the USA the choice of individualism and the privation of a
solid and stable workers movement capable of political power
in the name of social justice are dissonant with social
development and social justice. In Europe the diverse
histories of workers movements had close relationships and
inter-connections with the rise of the nation states.
Therefore the flagrant divergence of the model of the federal
state projected by the USA from that of Europe. Therefore the
pernicious halo around the now fictitious American dream and
Americanism, which provide the permanent foundations for an
enduring Corporatist-Fascist state.
-Based in Rome, Gaither Stewart, journalist and writer, well
known for his dispatches and essays from Europe, is Cyrano’s
Journal’s Senior Editor & Special European Correspondent. He
contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.