The Fascists (just talking about Italy here) lived in a Catholic country. You can round up and terrorize and imprison and occasionally shoot all the Communists but you can't do that to all the Catholics. Instead you make deals with them, forge alliances with Catholics you think you have political commonalities with, etc. You know -- politics. The Nazis can kill all the Jews but they can't kill all the Lutherans, so they just have to hold their noses and deal with those filthy God-believers and their Judaic religion.
--- On Tue, 7/8/08, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> 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.
>