I think this interpretation leaves something out -- the experience of WWI, which was interpreted by many people as indicating the complete bankruptcy of 19th-century European civilization and its "liberal" values. The Decline of the West and all that. While saying this, I do not mean to underemphasize the anti-Bolshevik nature of Fascism, but I think your reading is a little Communist-o-centric, to coin a very ugly word.
--- On Tue, 7/8/08, Marvin Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
> There have always been conservative intellectuals
> distressed by the social
> and economic levelling impulses of the so-called culturally
> impoverished
> lower classes. The mid 19th to mid 20th century labour and
> socialist
> movement, asserting the claims of workers and secular
> society and the
> equality of women and oppressed nations and races - all
> anathema to
> conservatives - was by far the most advanced historical
> expression of this
> tendency.
>
> Fascism was a militant reaction on the right to the threat
> to the
> established order represented by the militant movement of
> the left in the
> wake of the Russian Revolution. Frustrated by the failure
> of conservative
> autocracies and parliamentary regimes to contain the
> "bacillus", where Jews
> were conspicuous, it was as natural for conservative
> intellectuals to
> embrace fascism as it was for liberal intellectuals to move
> towards
> communism in these highly polarized circumstances. The
> "lust for community"
> became a vicarious identification with "The
> Class" in the one instance and
> with "The Nation" in the other. Heidegger's
> and Pound's political evolution
> can't be understood outside this context. Thought is
> shaped by social
> context, and is not independent of it - a truism maybe, but
> one which is
> sometimes curiously overlooked in our own understanding of
> the various
> currents in cultural and intellectual history.
>
>
>
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