Japan was the _first_ power to launch the series of aggressive wars that culminated in WW2 - in Manchuria, 1932. It provoked the first big crisis of the British-dominated League of Nations. And the Japanese regime that launched this aggression sill had "party" (limited parlimentary) government! Therefore, I would characterize Japan as protofascist in the period 1932-35. But Japanese fascists "on the ground" in Manchuria launched the war. (Party government was itself an aberation of the old oligarchical Meiji regime, where party governmet only appeared during the "liberal" Taisho period of the 1920's and disappeared in 1935. It was therfore not one of the "traditional institutions" to be preserved by Japanese fascism):
The Anatomy of Fascism Robert O Paxton Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 336pp, £20 ISBN 0713997206 Reviewed by Terry Eagleton
.... Exactly what fascism consists of, however, is far less clear. In some leftist circles, the word is lobbed loosely around to vilify anyone in the cramped space to the right of Conrad Black. Yet fascists are radicals, unlike right-wing conservatives. Conservatives believe in God, tradition, the monarchy, civilisation and the individual, whereas fascists are pagan, primitivist, collectivist state-worshippers who prefer jackboots to crowns. ....
NOT true. The opposite is true: The "pagan" Nazis are the aberration, the norm was set by the "founder", Fascist Italy, which elevated the power of both the Italian monarchy (in whose name it dictated) and the Catholic Church.
The word "is not lobbied around" loosely or without thought. Wouldn't we want to nip fascism in the bud? Doesn't that mean identifying and politically destroying its progenitors before they become full-fledged fascists - as they did in Japan? Not only everyone to the right of Conrad Black, but Black himself? Isn't this made even more urgent in an objective political and economic situation that grows palpably worse every year?
But if we listen to Paxton or others, we'll have to wait from the full fascist road show to appear before doing anything. Then it will be too late. Me, I'd rather err on the side of being safe.
..........
Fascists admire
productive workers (including productive capitalists) and denounce
effete aristocrats and the idle rich; conservatives tend to champion
both groups, among whose ranks they themselves can frequently be
found. Ezra Pound was a fascist, but T S Eliot was a conservative.
Fascists strut, while conservatives lounge.
>From a right-wing
viewpoint, there is not much to distinguish fascists from Marxists,
except that fascists are marginally more tolerable.
.......... Again, facile stereotypes: "effete aristocrats and the idle rich" were some of the principal elements of the _leadup_ to fascism, principal "protofascists". Again, this was especially true in Japan. The rest is silly or nonsequiter
.......... Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future. This includes ditching conventional distinctions between political left and right, a point that ought to worry partisans of the Third Way rather more than it seems to. .........
The last sentence it right on the mark: The essentially Thatcherite Third Way of ex-leftist Laborite neoliberals and their Tory lookalikes, lodged in the "Anglosphere" are one of the three incubi of a global protofascist movement, the other two being the American/Israeli Likud and the American Christian Zionist fundamentalists.
Christopher Hitchens ought to worry.
......... Fascism is an anti-political kind of politics, which elevates national unity over class distinctions, gut prejudice over ideological debate, and race over reason. Its leaders tend to be grubby lower-middle-class yobbos with unstable mentalities and criminal records. .........
As opposed to what we have at present?
......... They are the kind of uncouth bruisers whom cultivated patricians allow into their drawing rooms only with reluctance, and only when they need to use them to smash the socialists. .........
"Uncouth bruisers" have always been seen "in the drawing rooms" of the capitalist class: Who were the private armies of Pinkertons used to attack the massive strikes of the 1880's in the United States? But was this "fascism"? No.
Fascists always of necessity smash all working class, socialist, communist, etc., movements because they are an obvious fundamental roadblock on the road to a revived imperialism. But attacking working class organization is not the raison d'etre of fascism; on the contrary, fascism grows most virulently in the _absence_ of a working class opposition. Again Japan: the JCP was thoroughly (and viciously) repressed during the "liberal" Taisho 1920's, not during the fascist '30's, where they merely "remained" repressed.
.......... Paxton wisely renounces the attempt to isolate an "essence" of fascism. For instance, it does not seem to be anti-Semitism, which even Mussolini fully embraced only after 16 years in power. ..........
Of course, many of today's protofascists are stridently "pro-Semitic". Actually, a national/cultural/race supremacist ideology is the one constant thread for fascism and its progenitors. That is because fascism is _essentially_ a project of a _weak, marginal or revanchist IMPERIALISM_ (see below).
.......... What are they, though? Fascism means military dictatorship, but not all military dictatorships are fascist. ..........
And not all fascisms are military dictatorships - in fact, none are really. Military rule is reserved for the territories conquered by the fascist-led imperialism. Fascism rules the metropole by means of extralegal state terrorism at the margins.
But _militarism_ is obviously a second key ideological thread of fascism and its progenitors. Again, this is because fascism is a project of a revanchist imperialism (getting the message? ;-)
.......... There is more to fascism than brute authoritarianism, which is one reason why Paxton rules Vichy France, Franco's Spain and Salazar's Portugal out of his definition. .........
And Japan? Wrong. Vichy, Franco, Salazar (all colonial empires, recall!) - fascist. (Vichy, Hungary, Croatia and Romania were also German-backed fascist puppet regimes).
Kemal Mustafa Ataturk regime in Turkey was _not_ a fascist regime, since it had no colonial empire and pursued no broader imperialist projct. It was rather a Turkish nationalist republican movement.
........ Instead, he sees fascism as a mass-based form of militant nationalism, one working in uneasy alliance with the usual elites, which pursues policies of internal cleansing and external expansion so as to unify and regenerate what it regards as a victimised, humiliated nation. ........
Close, but no tamale: a "victimized, humiliated _imperialist_ nation.
........ It springs from a major crisis of the liberal capitalist order, and elevates cultural particularism over democracy, individualism and universal rights.
........
Again, no, it emerges from a crisis of a liberal imperialist order.
.......
More seriously for Paxton, it is a definition which is compatible with a case that he largely rejects: the leftist contention that fascism emerges chiefly as a reaction to the threat of socialist revolution from a capitalism plunged into dire crisis.
Against the simple-minded notion that fascism is merely a capitalist ploy, Paxton shows how reluctant capitalist classes have been forced to resort to it. Yet it is scarcely surprising that the system is loath to betray its own liberal roots quite so brazenly, and will do so only under extreme pressure. Anyway, Paxton admits that "fascism is inconceivable in the absence of a mature and expanding socialist left". .........
No, fascism is quite conceivable "in the absence of a mature and expanding socialist left" - otherwise we shouldn't have much to worry about today, no?
.......... If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class grouses, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact. The disgruntled petite bourgeoisie were taken for the longest ride in their unenviable history. With breathtaking insolence, the fascists used aspects of their ideology to prop up the very state that they found so oppressive. ..........
This last part cooresponds to what I've said here: preservation and elevation of the most traditional institutions of the metropole.
.......... The book could have said more about the curious time-warping involved in fascism - the way in which it is archaic and avant-garde, mythological and technological, at the same time. In this, it resembles the cultural modernism with which it had intimate (if ambiguous) relations. The Holocaust was both barbarism and the triumph of a "scientific", full-bloodedly modern rationality. If it was a revolt against Enlightenment reason for some thinkers, it was the consummation of it for others. Old-fashioned pogroms, Paxton points out, would have taken 200 years to complete what the Nazis' more advanced technology achieved in three years. ...........
This is just a typical expression of the contradictions of an extreme political reaction in a senile quest to relive the former glory of colonial empire, already becoming impossible in the early 20th century and now no longer possible in our own time.
......... Given that fascism is among other things a carnival of unreason, it would be odd to expect from it a coherent theoretical case. As Paxton recognises, its approach to ideas is shamelessly pragmatist: truth is whatever works to inspire the Volk and unite the nation. At the same time, however, fascist movements ascribe an extraordinary priority to ideology - far more so than with conventional modern politics. .........
You mean, more pragmatic - and therefore, more ideological - than the Americans? The Americans are the most ideological people on Earth today.
..... The Nazis' genocidal project, for example, tied up precious military and economic resources, and also disposed of men and women whose skills could have contributed to their war effort. Stalin slaughtered Ukrainian peasants because they were Jews. .....
Boy, what a facile mishmash. Imperialism in a vain quest for colonial "Empire" by definition ties up "precious military and economic resources". A genocidal project is not required, and genocide (as with crushing all working class organizations) is not a necessary element of fascism, although more likely to happen.
As for the Stalinist Soviet Union, that's another subject. Suffice to say that it was neither "fascist", "imperialist", nor an "Empire", evil or otherwise, regardless of what the CIA thinks.
..... It remains to be seen whether the world will revert to fascism. But there are certainly signs that a planet well stocked with authoritarian capitalist regimes is on the cards. Liberal capitalist nations are becoming more authoritarian under the threat of terrorist attacks, while societies which were already authoritarian, such as China, are turning capitalist. The two systems are meeting each other, so to speak, coming the other way. Meanwhile, the globe is well furnished with capitalist set-ups that were never liberal in the first place, as well as with regimes whose former colonial proprietors exported market forces to their shores while forgetting to include democratic institutions in the cargo. The assumption that the free market and political democracy go naturally together was always pretty dubious, and fascism is one dramatic refutation of it. But we might now be moving deeper into a world where the two go together like a horse and cabbage.
Terry Eagleton's most recent book is After Theory (Allen Lane) ......
And we might be moving there faster than Eagleton or Paxton think.
To recap: Fascism is fundamentally a phenonenon of weak, marginal, declining or partially defeated imperialisms. Everthing else flows from that one fact. A liberal imperialism that slides unchecked into an unresolvable crisis WILL devolve into fascism. Every time.
That is something to think carefully about as we gaze upon our own extraordinary scene. By many measures, U.S. imperialism is a good deal weaker than it lets on, and it is clearly headed for defeat in the Middle East if it doesn't _further radicalize rightward_ its present course.
And, it should be needless to say - but apparently not, given all this blather about 'Empire" - that the imperialist quest for colonial empire, already utopian inthe 1920's, is completely beyond the pale in our post-colonial, post-Empire age.
-Brad Mayer