| Fascism...What Is It? | for everyone |
The
term 'fascism' is widely used in the blogosphere to describe the
increasingly authoritarian New World Order and the militarisation of
foreign policy of the Bush/Blair alliance post 9/11 and the
Anglo-American empire. But does fascism really mean anything at all?
Some writers have objected that fascism is often used as a general term of abuse for things we don't like. They complain that the term is overused and has lost it's original meaning and some have cast doubt on whether modern late capitalist societies like the US and the UK are in any meaningful sense fascistic?
Of the posts that liberally apply this stigmatised epithet my own blogs have been amongst the worst offenders.
I have in the past condemned policy initiatives as fascist and have frequently applied the label to US and UK foreign and domestic policies as a shorthand term for the excesses of corporate capitalism.
Has this been a misguided critique of the governments and corporations that wield such great power in the world?
Is it correct for example to label the contemporary United States as a potentially fascist or neo-fascist country with similarities to the earlier emergence of that political ideology in Germany, Italy, Spain or Japan during the 1930s?
In order to evaluate this characterisation of today's global political developments we must I think go back to basics.... in an attempt to outline what fascism is and where it originally came from.
Are there in reality many forms of fascism, are they part of a family of ideological positions that share certain features that justify the designation?
These are all questions that I will attempt to address in this short analysis of the origins and meanings of fascism. with the intention of examining the proposition that Barack Obama and Gordon Brown represent a dangerous trend and incipient form of neo fascism that could again immerse the world in total warfare.
The Birth of Fascism
Fascism is the defining ideology of the twentieth century although it's roots lie in European history that go back somewhat further than that.
Liberalism can be said to be the political ideology that reached it's full flowering in the eighteenth century. Socialism and feminism were nineteenth century social and political movements that also have roots that predate their full flowering as distinct political orientations emerging during the industrial revolution. These political movements are all of course coterminous with the evolution of capitalism and the world we have inherited in the twenty first century.
Fascism was the endpoint of urbanisation and industrialisation closely associated with the ossification of the nation state as the primary form of socioeconomic and political organisation in the modern world. Fascism is the child of modernity nurtured at the breast of the evolving capitalist nation state and a reaction to competing ideologies, especially socialist internationalism and the anti-statist anarchist movement that had developed during the latter half of the 19th century.
In many ways fascism is contradictory and it's various local historical manifestations have defied a universal definition.
German fascism of the sort championed by Hitler's Nazi regime during the 1920s-1940s has for example similarities with other fascist movements, but also some very significant differences. This could be said of every manifestation of fascism wherever it has appeared, there is a family resemblance... but also local variations which has meant that whilst fascist parties have certain defining features, none of them are identical and all of them have local idiosyncrasies that can confound comparisons.
When we speak of fascism we are describing certain common ideas that have been put together in a variety of combinations that suit local circumstances at particular times during the history of the nation states where it has found a home. Fascism shares commonalities with other members of the political family from which it comes and is most particularly related to national popularism and the traditional conservative patriarchal capitalist parties... who have traditionally made way for it.
It's fundamental nature is ultranationalistic and this of course is one of it's defining characteristics. It is also totalitarian and resistant to all competing ideologies which it seeks to abolish, historically that means socialism and feminism, but has also included at times, a general antipathy toward capitalism and liberalism as well.
It can be both conservative and revolutionary, fascism seeks to preserve an assumed natural order whilst at the same time overthrowing traditional institutions of the conservative nation state, including the power of monarchies, oligarchies and the landed aristocracy.
In some of its manifestations fascism appears to be an arm of corporate capitalism, in other forms it seeks to limit the power of the capitalist classes and bring them to heel according to national interests.
What we are dealing with here then is a complex and slippery phenomenon that analysts have widely disputed and disagreed about over the past 50 plus years.
Nevertheless fascism is I believe a real and ever present danger in the world today.
As a lifelong antifascist I have posted this blog in the spirit of 'know thy enemy' which is a slogan that has some potential survival value I think.
Although the true origins of fascism are hotly debated, the term does mean something and I think it can be pinned down to a specific event..... the Franco Prussian War 0f 1870-71.
The defeat and humiliation of France by the German Prussian armies lit a flame in the French psyche which was nurtured into life as fascism, first in France and then across the whole of Europe and far beyond to Asia and the Americas.
Fascism is not only a political movement it is a cultural phenomenon, it came to life on the back of technological innovations during the period of global industrialisation, the telegraph and other innovations in communication, the transport systems, new military technologies and the social dilemmas that accompanied the unprecedented growth of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
One very significant event in it's evolution was not an overtly political or economic one, it was a cultural one in the popular form of a novel, a creative work of fiction.
The author was Maurice Barrés (19 August 1862 – 4 December 1923) and the bestselling book was Le Jardin de Bérénice (1890) in which he portrays France as more than the rational democratic liberal republic proclaimed by it's revolutionary Enlightenment founders, but rather a spiritual homeland out of which the French sprang from the very soil of France, and thus imbued with a unique and special spirit that immigrants and outsiders could never share.
This organic nationalism in the aftermath of France's complete capitulation to Prussia touched a raw nerve amongst it's mass readership. The Franco Prussian War was not only the breaking of France.... it was the making of Germany (into a unified nation state) where fascist ideas were to become the ideology of choice in the aftermath of more war and economic collapse fifty years later.
As an interesting factoid, Wikipedia notes that during the Franco-Prussian War;" the invention of the telegraph cable had changed the dynamics of warfare and the Prussians did not neglect this important aspect. They went to work in a severely scientific and business-like way. In Paris they discovered subterranean lines of wires which they cut. They also found some in the cellars of Meudon. Doubtless before they were destroyed they were made to furnish a wealth of intelligence to benefit the besieging army."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War
In that sense the the Franco-Prussian war was a conflict fought at the cutting edge of technology, the first modern techno-war which involved air power and electronic spying. The siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war is usually quoted as the beginning of the practical use of balloons for military purposes.
It also changed the political complexion of France in it's aftermath/
Barrés represented a new spirit amongst French nationalists, a mystical attachment to the soil, an exclusive and excluding form of ultranationalism that was at least in part, assisted by such current and diverse theories as Jungian psychology, Nietszchean philosophy and the entire cultural movement of modernism with it's assumptions about social progress and the predominance of the state.
Barrés set the tone for fascism with his antisemitic and etnhic national populist writings, in his novels, his contributions to the French media and his political activism.
"As a young man, Barrès carried his Romantic and individualist theory of the Ego into politics as an ardent partisan of General Boulanger, locating himself in the more populist side of the heterogenous Boulangist coalition. He directed a Boulangist paper at Nancy, and was elected deputy in 1889, at the age of 27, under a platform of "Nationalism, Protectionism, and Socialism", retaining his seat in the legislature until 1893, when he was defeated under the etiquette of "National Republican and Socialist" (Républicain nationaliste et socialiste). From 1889, Barrès' activism overshadowed his literary activities, although he tried to maintain both......
Barrès then assumed the leadership of the Ligue de la Patrie française (League of the French Fatherland), before taking membership in the Ligue des Patriotes (Patriot League) of Paul Déroulède. In 1914, he became the leader of the Patriot League.
Barrès is considered, alongside Charles Maurras, as one of the main thinkers of ethnic nationalism at the turn of the century in France, associated with Revanchism — the desire to reconquer the Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the newly created German Empire at the end of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War (Barrès was aged 8 at that time). In fact, he himself popularized the word "nationalism" in French.
He pleaded for a direct democracy and personalisation of power, as well as for the implementation of popular referendums as done in Switzerland.[10] In this nationalist frame, anti-Semitism was to be the cohesive factor for a right-wing mass movement."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Barr%C3%A8s
In this sense fascism represents a quasi-religious movement, a spiritual conviction that the soil upon which we are born imparts a special quality into the very fibre of our beings. A romantic belief that the history of the nation forms the very soul of the individual and constructs him or her in a way that others cannot attain nor even fully conceive of.
These ideas were culturally derived and the ethnic nationalism they inspired was a mish mash of scientific beliefs most especially eugenics, artistic movements like futurism, racial stereotyping and most particularly antisemitism, popular historical myths, national grievances and real economic exigencies like the Great Depression.
In his book Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (2002:31) Kevin Passmore defines fascism in the following way.
"Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation, defined in exclusive biological cultural and/or historical terms, above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritising class or gender as rather than nation.
That is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right. Fascism is also a movement of the radical right because the defeat of socialism and feminism and the creation of a mobilized nation are held to depend upon the advent to power of a new elite acting in the name of the people, headed by a charismatic leader and embodies in a mass, militarized party. Fascists are pushed toward conservatism by the common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests, family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service- where the interests of the nation are considered to require it.
Fascist radicalism also derives from the desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority.
Fascists seek to ensure the harmonisation of workers and women's interests with those of the nation by mobilizing them within special sections of the party and/or within a corporate system.
Access to these organisations and to the benefits they confer upon members depends upon the individuals national, political and/or racial characteristics.
All aspects of fascist policy is suffused with ultranationalism."
It is my view that conditions for a resurgent fascism now exist all around the world and particularly in the United States. The ongoing meltdown in the finance industry creates conditions for national populism to flourish in the face of tumbling capitalism. Resistance to right wing governments and the strategies they themselves employ to survive has traditionally been a clarion call to the fascist cause.
Nationalism is a powerful motivator, we are born into societies that inculcate our social conditioning from day one. Sporting events and international competition reinforces our sense of national identity and the media, government, education system and popular culture further hammer home our national version of the global capitalist message.
There is nothing new about globalisation, it has been going on since human beings first left the cradle of humanity in Africa and traded along migratory routes where centres of commerce were first established.
Fascist governments and organisations see this intrinsic characteristic of humanity as dangerous and subversive to the national interests. Isolationism and trade disputes are the first step on the slippery slope to fascism fuelled by illusory obsession with the nation state as mythical earth mother/fatherland.
This first post in an intended series on fascism in the contemporary world has sought to attempt to concretise our abstractions and operationalise some of our concepts.
We are left with a quasi-spiritual identification with the land of our birth and an overwhelming sense of national mission mobilized around our own needs and absolutely no-one elses.
In future posts I intend to consider these absolutist and nationalist trends as they emerge in the politics of the Anglo-American empire and in the context of an unprecedented crisis in welfare capitalism.
I could of course also discuss the rise of fascism in Russia and in other places too....( it is likely that we will touch upon these developments in the course of this discussion) but for now I will restrict my comments to the west in general and the US and UK in particular.
My thesis is that the conditions for the rise of the extreme right are in place and we should be fully aware of the dangers that face us all in the so-called democratic countries of the capitalist west.
It is my belief that the material and ideological conditions for such a resurgence are now in place in the post 9/11.... post Bush epoch of economic crisis and the craving for charismatic leadership in the western world.
Some writers have objected that fascism is often used as a general term of abuse for things we don't like. They complain that the term is overused and has lost it's original meaning and some have cast doubt on whether modern late capitalist societies like the US and the UK are in any meaningful sense fascistic?
Of the posts that liberally apply this stigmatised epithet my own blogs have been amongst the worst offenders.
I have in the past condemned policy initiatives as fascist and have frequently applied the label to US and UK foreign and domestic policies as a shorthand term for the excesses of corporate capitalism.
Has this been a misguided critique of the governments and corporations that wield such great power in the world?
Is it correct for example to label the contemporary United States as a potentially fascist or neo-fascist country with similarities to the earlier emergence of that political ideology in Germany, Italy, Spain or Japan during the 1930s?
In order to evaluate this characterisation of today's global political developments we must I think go back to basics.... in an attempt to outline what fascism is and where it originally came from.
Are there in reality many forms of fascism, are they part of a family of ideological positions that share certain features that justify the designation?
These are all questions that I will attempt to address in this short analysis of the origins and meanings of fascism. with the intention of examining the proposition that Barack Obama and Gordon Brown represent a dangerous trend and incipient form of neo fascism that could again immerse the world in total warfare.
The Birth of Fascism
Fascism is the defining ideology of the twentieth century although it's roots lie in European history that go back somewhat further than that.
Liberalism can be said to be the political ideology that reached it's full flowering in the eighteenth century. Socialism and feminism were nineteenth century social and political movements that also have roots that predate their full flowering as distinct political orientations emerging during the industrial revolution. These political movements are all of course coterminous with the evolution of capitalism and the world we have inherited in the twenty first century.
Fascism was the endpoint of urbanisation and industrialisation closely associated with the ossification of the nation state as the primary form of socioeconomic and political organisation in the modern world. Fascism is the child of modernity nurtured at the breast of the evolving capitalist nation state and a reaction to competing ideologies, especially socialist internationalism and the anti-statist anarchist movement that had developed during the latter half of the 19th century.
In many ways fascism is contradictory and it's various local historical manifestations have defied a universal definition.
German fascism of the sort championed by Hitler's Nazi regime during the 1920s-1940s has for example similarities with other fascist movements, but also some very significant differences. This could be said of every manifestation of fascism wherever it has appeared, there is a family resemblance... but also local variations which has meant that whilst fascist parties have certain defining features, none of them are identical and all of them have local idiosyncrasies that can confound comparisons.
When we speak of fascism we are describing certain common ideas that have been put together in a variety of combinations that suit local circumstances at particular times during the history of the nation states where it has found a home. Fascism shares commonalities with other members of the political family from which it comes and is most particularly related to national popularism and the traditional conservative patriarchal capitalist parties... who have traditionally made way for it.
It's fundamental nature is ultranationalistic and this of course is one of it's defining characteristics. It is also totalitarian and resistant to all competing ideologies which it seeks to abolish, historically that means socialism and feminism, but has also included at times, a general antipathy toward capitalism and liberalism as well.
It can be both conservative and revolutionary, fascism seeks to preserve an assumed natural order whilst at the same time overthrowing traditional institutions of the conservative nation state, including the power of monarchies, oligarchies and the landed aristocracy.
In some of its manifestations fascism appears to be an arm of corporate capitalism, in other forms it seeks to limit the power of the capitalist classes and bring them to heel according to national interests.
What we are dealing with here then is a complex and slippery phenomenon that analysts have widely disputed and disagreed about over the past 50 plus years.
Nevertheless fascism is I believe a real and ever present danger in the world today.
As a lifelong antifascist I have posted this blog in the spirit of 'know thy enemy' which is a slogan that has some potential survival value I think.
Although the true origins of fascism are hotly debated, the term does mean something and I think it can be pinned down to a specific event..... the Franco Prussian War 0f 1870-71.
The defeat and humiliation of France by the German Prussian armies lit a flame in the French psyche which was nurtured into life as fascism, first in France and then across the whole of Europe and far beyond to Asia and the Americas.
Fascism is not only a political movement it is a cultural phenomenon, it came to life on the back of technological innovations during the period of global industrialisation, the telegraph and other innovations in communication, the transport systems, new military technologies and the social dilemmas that accompanied the unprecedented growth of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
One very significant event in it's evolution was not an overtly political or economic one, it was a cultural one in the popular form of a novel, a creative work of fiction.
The author was Maurice Barrés (19 August 1862 – 4 December 1923) and the bestselling book was Le Jardin de Bérénice (1890) in which he portrays France as more than the rational democratic liberal republic proclaimed by it's revolutionary Enlightenment founders, but rather a spiritual homeland out of which the French sprang from the very soil of France, and thus imbued with a unique and special spirit that immigrants and outsiders could never share.
This organic nationalism in the aftermath of France's complete capitulation to Prussia touched a raw nerve amongst it's mass readership. The Franco Prussian War was not only the breaking of France.... it was the making of Germany (into a unified nation state) where fascist ideas were to become the ideology of choice in the aftermath of more war and economic collapse fifty years later.
As an interesting factoid, Wikipedia notes that during the Franco-Prussian War;" the invention of the telegraph cable had changed the dynamics of warfare and the Prussians did not neglect this important aspect. They went to work in a severely scientific and business-like way. In Paris they discovered subterranean lines of wires which they cut. They also found some in the cellars of Meudon. Doubtless before they were destroyed they were made to furnish a wealth of intelligence to benefit the besieging army."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War
In that sense the the Franco-Prussian war was a conflict fought at the cutting edge of technology, the first modern techno-war which involved air power and electronic spying. The siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war is usually quoted as the beginning of the practical use of balloons for military purposes.
It also changed the political complexion of France in it's aftermath/
Barrés represented a new spirit amongst French nationalists, a mystical attachment to the soil, an exclusive and excluding form of ultranationalism that was at least in part, assisted by such current and diverse theories as Jungian psychology, Nietszchean philosophy and the entire cultural movement of modernism with it's assumptions about social progress and the predominance of the state.
Barrés set the tone for fascism with his antisemitic and etnhic national populist writings, in his novels, his contributions to the French media and his political activism.
"As a young man, Barrès carried his Romantic and individualist theory of the Ego into politics as an ardent partisan of General Boulanger, locating himself in the more populist side of the heterogenous Boulangist coalition. He directed a Boulangist paper at Nancy, and was elected deputy in 1889, at the age of 27, under a platform of "Nationalism, Protectionism, and Socialism", retaining his seat in the legislature until 1893, when he was defeated under the etiquette of "National Republican and Socialist" (Républicain nationaliste et socialiste). From 1889, Barrès' activism overshadowed his literary activities, although he tried to maintain both......
Barrès then assumed the leadership of the Ligue de la Patrie française (League of the French Fatherland), before taking membership in the Ligue des Patriotes (Patriot League) of Paul Déroulède. In 1914, he became the leader of the Patriot League.
Barrès is considered, alongside Charles Maurras, as one of the main thinkers of ethnic nationalism at the turn of the century in France, associated with Revanchism — the desire to reconquer the Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by the newly created German Empire at the end of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War (Barrès was aged 8 at that time). In fact, he himself popularized the word "nationalism" in French.
He pleaded for a direct democracy and personalisation of power, as well as for the implementation of popular referendums as done in Switzerland.[10] In this nationalist frame, anti-Semitism was to be the cohesive factor for a right-wing mass movement."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Barr%C3%A8s
In this sense fascism represents a quasi-religious movement, a spiritual conviction that the soil upon which we are born imparts a special quality into the very fibre of our beings. A romantic belief that the history of the nation forms the very soul of the individual and constructs him or her in a way that others cannot attain nor even fully conceive of.
These ideas were culturally derived and the ethnic nationalism they inspired was a mish mash of scientific beliefs most especially eugenics, artistic movements like futurism, racial stereotyping and most particularly antisemitism, popular historical myths, national grievances and real economic exigencies like the Great Depression.
In his book Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (2002:31) Kevin Passmore defines fascism in the following way.
"Fascism is a set of ideologies and practices that seeks to place the nation, defined in exclusive biological cultural and/or historical terms, above all other sources of loyalty, and to create a mobilized national community. Fascist nationalism is reactionary in that it entails implacable hostility to socialism and feminism, for they are seen as prioritising class or gender as rather than nation.
That is why fascism is a movement of the extreme right. Fascism is also a movement of the radical right because the defeat of socialism and feminism and the creation of a mobilized nation are held to depend upon the advent to power of a new elite acting in the name of the people, headed by a charismatic leader and embodies in a mass, militarized party. Fascists are pushed toward conservatism by the common hatred of socialism and feminism, but are prepared to override conservative interests, family, property, religion, the universities, the civil service- where the interests of the nation are considered to require it.
Fascist radicalism also derives from the desire to assuage discontent by accepting specific demands of the labour and women's movements, so long as these demands accord with the national priority.
Fascists seek to ensure the harmonisation of workers and women's interests with those of the nation by mobilizing them within special sections of the party and/or within a corporate system.
Access to these organisations and to the benefits they confer upon members depends upon the individuals national, political and/or racial characteristics.
All aspects of fascist policy is suffused with ultranationalism."
It is my view that conditions for a resurgent fascism now exist all around the world and particularly in the United States. The ongoing meltdown in the finance industry creates conditions for national populism to flourish in the face of tumbling capitalism. Resistance to right wing governments and the strategies they themselves employ to survive has traditionally been a clarion call to the fascist cause.
Nationalism is a powerful motivator, we are born into societies that inculcate our social conditioning from day one. Sporting events and international competition reinforces our sense of national identity and the media, government, education system and popular culture further hammer home our national version of the global capitalist message.
There is nothing new about globalisation, it has been going on since human beings first left the cradle of humanity in Africa and traded along migratory routes where centres of commerce were first established.
Fascist governments and organisations see this intrinsic characteristic of humanity as dangerous and subversive to the national interests. Isolationism and trade disputes are the first step on the slippery slope to fascism fuelled by illusory obsession with the nation state as mythical earth mother/fatherland.
This first post in an intended series on fascism in the contemporary world has sought to attempt to concretise our abstractions and operationalise some of our concepts.
We are left with a quasi-spiritual identification with the land of our birth and an overwhelming sense of national mission mobilized around our own needs and absolutely no-one elses.
In future posts I intend to consider these absolutist and nationalist trends as they emerge in the politics of the Anglo-American empire and in the context of an unprecedented crisis in welfare capitalism.
I could of course also discuss the rise of fascism in Russia and in other places too....( it is likely that we will touch upon these developments in the course of this discussion) but for now I will restrict my comments to the west in general and the US and UK in particular.
My thesis is that the conditions for the rise of the extreme right are in place and we should be fully aware of the dangers that face us all in the so-called democratic countries of the capitalist west.
It is my belief that the material and ideological conditions for such a resurgence are now in place in the post 9/11.... post Bush epoch of economic crisis and the craving for charismatic leadership in the western world.
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