Chris, you mention fascism was "anti-clerical" but except Spain. I know it might be an anomaly, but there is the famous/controversial Killing Joke t-shirt of Nazis saluting the Pope [http://tinyurl.com/5ant8n]. And if memory serves, the Vatican lifted its usual prohibition on Catholics voting when it came to possibly putting fascists into power in Italy in the 20s or 30s (and the reward was the Lateran Treaty?). I know the Church-State relationship in fascism is more complex than this, however, with the Alfred Rosenberg element wanting to cast off Xianity altogether and re-establish the old Wotan beliefs while other Nazi officials paid lip service to Christianity, probably opportunistically. But what in Nazism or Italian fascism *wasn't* just power-grabbing opportunism...? And what was "real"? That's the head-scratcher.
You claimed that one interpretation of fascism was too "Communist-o-centric." Let's not underestimate how much of fascism was indeed a reaction to communism, though. 1/6 of the world's land mass flew under the red flag in the east. Spain was in the grips of a complicated revolution that involved Stalinists, Trotskyites, and anarchists, whom the Church & State did band together against with air support courtesy Hitler. And that the Nazis had to basically employ much of the sloganeering of socialists -- calling the NSDAP a "workers' party," using red in their flag, the whole ant-capitalist aspect esp. in the Strasserite wing of the Nazi party -- shows to what degree the Nazis were indeed reacting to a milieu that was just drenched in socialist ideas. Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Liebknicht, the short-lived Soviet Republic of Bavaria, the fact that Marx himself was a German -- this scared Germany's industrialists and its ideological right wing witless. It was an advancing tide that demanded swift, firm resistance.
And Mussolini's journey from left-syndicalism to fascism is well known. His vengefulness to his old friends, like revenging oneself on to a jilted lover, played a large part in his crackdown on the left and even his written statements.
The arguments about fascism as "reaction to modernity" I am never too clear on. Almost all books one reads about either fascism or Nazism specifically have a preface, or spend their first chapter, going on, and on, about how many scholars disagree on how to define the term "fascism." That's a whole subgenre of the literature in and of itself. Just agreeing on what fascism is, let alone discussing it without talking past one another.
-B.
Chris Doss wrote:
"But Fascism and especially Nazism were anticlerical. Spain I will give you."