Fascism

"Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists, a revision which developed in successive stages, so that these Marxists gradually stopped thinking of themselves as Marxists, and eventually stopped thinking of themselves as socialists. They never stopped thinking of themselves as anti-liberal revolutionaries."

"If the Fascist ideology cannot be described as a simple response to Marxism, its origins, on the other hand, were the direct result of very specific revision of Marxism. It was a revision of Marxism and not a variety of Marxism or a consequence of Marxism... It was the French and Italian Sorelians, the theoreticians of revolutionary who made this new and original revision of Marxism, and precisely this was their contribution to the birth of the Fascist ideology."

"Fascism rebelled against modernity inasmuch as modernity was identified with the rationalism, optimism, and humanism of the eighteenth century, but it was not a reactionary or an anti-revolutionary movement in the Maurrassian sense of the term. Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology."

"That is why so many Sorelians, like many people on the Left both before and after the war, slid into fascism. When these leftists of all shapes and colors came to the conclusion that the working class had definitely beaten a retreat, they did not follow it into this attitude. Their socialism remained revolutionary when that of the proletariat had ceased to be so. Having to choose between the proletariat and revolution, they chose revolution; having to choose between a proletarian but moderate socialism and a nonproletarian but revolutionary and national socialism, they opted for the nonproletarian revolution, the national revolution."

"Thus, it was quite natural that a synthesis would arise between this new socialism [fascism], which discovered the nation as a revolutionary agent, and the nationalist movement, which also rebelled against the old world of conservatives, against the aristocrats and the bourgeois, and against social injustices and which believed that the nation would never be complete until it had integrated the proletariat. A socialism for the whole collectivity and a nationalism that, severed from conservatism, proclaimed itself as being by definition the messenger of unity and unanimity thus came together to form an unprecedented weapon of war against the bourgeois order and liberal democracy."

"The Fascist and Syndicalist species were characterized by the first appearance of a type of man who "did not care to give reasons or even to be right", but who was simply resolved to impose his opinions. That was the novelty: the right not to be right, not to be reasonable: "the reason of unreason.""

"Fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy."

"Sometimes, when I tell people that I study authoritarian personalities, they say things like, "Oh, you mean neo-Nazis and the Klan." When these people are psychologists at conventions or the president of my university, I say "Right," because I know they will probably instantly forget whatever I reply. But I am more forthcoming with others. Most people seem surprised when I say, "No, I study normal folks, not Nazis." Few people, unless they are familiar with the history of fascism, understand that people as ordinary as you and I, and our friends and neighbors, might bring down democracy if the going got tough enough. But we are the people who, driven by fear and cuddling in our own self-righteousness, could create the wave that would lift the monsters among us to power. And once the monsters acquire the powers of the state, their evil explodes. Can one credibly talk about fascism in the North American context as we approach the year 2000? Is it even remotely possible that the horrors of Nazi Germany could someday occur in Canada or the United States? When I talk about prefascist personalities, do I seriously propose that many North Americans could act like Hitler, Himmler, Hoess, and so on? [...] although the Nazis did monsterous things, it is a mistake to think that only ardent fascists and psychopathic killers became Nazis. Adolf Eichmann struck some as a bland person, not particularly anti-Semitic, who basically wanted to advance his career and so worked hard to impress his superiors. His evil was "banal." I can also imagine that many of those who made the arrests and transported the victims to the death camps would have been described as "good, decent people" by their families and neighbors. So would many of those who ran the slave labor camps in which hundreds of thousands of prisoners perished and maybe even the SS soldiers who massacred whole villages. You can be an ordinary Joe, or Lieutenant Calley, and still do terrible things. One of the first things Americans learned about the militias, in an Associated Press story dated April 27, 1995, is that they were "ordinary people who feel pushed.""

"Most people believe the twentieth century was defined by the death struggle of communism versus capitalism, and that fascism was but a hiccup. Today we know better. Communism was a fool's errand, the followers of Marx gone from this Earth; but the followers of Hitler abound and thrive. Hitler, however, had one great disadvantage. He lived in a time when fascism, like a virus, like the AIDS virus, required a strong host in order to spread. Germany was that host, but strong as it was, Germany couldn't prevail. The world was too big. Fortunately, the world has changed. Global communication, cable TV, the internet. Today the world is smaller, and the virus no longer needs a strong host in order to spread. This virus is airborne. ... One more thing; let no man call us crazy. They called Hitler crazy, but Hitler wasn't crazy. He was stupid. You don't fight Russia and America. You get Russia and America to fight each other, and destroy each other."

"Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, with which no interpretation has been able to come to grips (neither the Marxist one of political manipulation by dominant classes, nor the Reichian one of the sexual repression of the masses, nor the Deleuzian one of despotic paranoia), can already be interpreted as the "irrational" excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a "political aesthetic of death" at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn't been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism's cruelty, its terror is on the level of this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational, which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that."

"The [Italian Fascist] regime had created an imaginary Spartan country, in which all men had to make believe they were heroic soldiers, all women Roman matrons, all children Balilla (the Genoa street urchin who started a revolt against the Austrian garrison in 1746 by throwing one stone). This was done by means of slogans, flags, stirring speeches from balconies, military music, mass meetings, parades, dashing uniforms, medals, es, and constant distortions of reality. The Italians woke up too late from their artificial dream, those still alive, that is, hungry, desperate, discredited, the object of derision, cornuti e mazziati, or "cuckolded and beaten up," governed as in the past by contemptuous foreigners in a country of smoking ruins and decaying corpses, in which most things detachable had been stolen and women raped."

"In spite of Bolshevism's and fascism's different attitudes, above all, private property and nationalism, both fascists and antifascists acknowledged common sources and resulting similarities between Bolshevism and fascism, including their revolutionary ideology, their elitism, their disdain for bourgeois values, and their totalitarian ambitions."

"'s chief claim to political creativity lay in the construction between 1925 and 1939 of the Corporate State, a system purporting to be revolutionary yet socially unifying, to guarantee progress and social justice by bringing employers, managers and workers together within a legally constituted framework."

"This reminded me of what Ignazio Silone said in 1945 soon after he returned to Italy from his Zurich exile: "The Fascism of tomorrow will never say 'I am Fascism.' It will say: 'I am anti-Fascism.'""

"The Nazis were only one among a number of German rightist groups to receive unreliable sympathy and subsidy from Rome. During that decade, figures on the right, impressed by talk of a fascist philosophy, or by events in Italy, or, most significantly, by glad tidings of the routing of the Bolshevik devil, took to borrowing the word 'fascist' from Italian and deploying it in their own language, with somewhat uncertain effect. Among them were Miss , a spinster and Field-Master's granddaughter, and Brigadier-General R.G.D Blakeney, once the manager of the Egyptian state railways and now her rival at the head of the 'British Fascisti'."

"People have their fingers broken. To be insulted by these fascists Is so degrading and it's no game."

"Those who are against Fascism without being against capitalism, who lament over the barbarism that comes out of barbarism, are like people who wish to eat their veal without slaughtering the calf. They are willing to eat the calf, but they dislike the sight of blood. They are easily satisfied if the butcher washes his hands before weighing the meat. They are not against the property relations which engender barbarism; they are only against barbarism itself. They raise their voices against barbarism, and they do so in countries where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat."

"The rout of fascism, in which the Soviet Union played the decisive role, generated a mighty tide of socio-political changes which swept across the globe."

"A number of features of and Nazism/Fascism did show striking similarities, including their revolutionary action and proletarian nation theories, leadership principles, one-party dictatorship, and party armies. Hitler publicly acknowledge his debt to the Bolsheviks when, for instance, proposing to make Munich ‘the Moscow of our movement.’"

"Fascism is an act of contempt, in fact. Inversely, every form of contempt, if it intervenes in politics, prepares the way for, or establishes, Fascism. It must be added that Fascism cannot be anything else but an expression of contempt without denying itself. Junger drew the conclusion, from his own principles, that it was better to be criminal than bourgeois. Hitler, who was endowed with less literary talent but, on this occasion, with more coherence, knew that to be either one or the other was a matter of complete indifference, from the moment that one ceased to believe in anything but success. Thus he authorized himself to be both at the same time."

"Fascism, with its violence, gets rid of everything: it attacks universities, it closes them and crushes them; it attacks intellectuals, represses them and persecutes them; it attacks political parties; it attacks trade union organizations; it attacks all mass and cultural organizations. Therefore, nothing is more violent, more retrograde and more illegal than fascism."

"Capitalist and imperialist countries created the conditions for the rise of fascism in the world."

"What was fascism in Italy, in Germany? The exaltation of racial prejudices. Instead of fighting racial prejudice, which is what a revolution does, fascism exalts prejudice and turns it into hatred."

"Fascism in Italy brought together disparate social forces from a wide range of political backgrounds (socialists, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists, clerical Catholics, nationalists, atheist republicans, former monarchist officers), united by their discontent with the agitation of workers and peasants and the peace treaty (Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919 at the end of the First World War) . There was also a lack of serious programmatic elaboration because fascism originated as a street movement organised by squadrist actions and “punitive expeditions” carried out in retaliation against leagues, chambers of labour, socialist sections and newspapers."

"They tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, ... they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples."

"What a man! I have lost my heart! ... If I were Italian, I am sure I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passion of Leninism. ... Your movement has rendered a service to the whole world. The greatest fear that ever tormented every Democratic or Socialist leader was that of being outbid or surpassed by some other leader more extreme than himself. It has been said that a continual movement to the Left, a kind of fatal landslide toward the abyss, has been the character of all revolutions. Italy has shown that there is a way to combat subversive forces."

"Italy has shown that there is a way of fighting the subversive forces which can rally the masses of the people, properly led, to value and wish to defend the honour and stability of stabilized society. She has provided the necessary antidote to the Russian poison. Hereafter no great nation will be unprovided with an ultimate means of protection against the cancerous growth of ."

"It [fascism] is not a sign-post which would direct us here, for I firmly believe that our long experienced democracy will be able to preserve a parliamentary system of government with whatever modifications may be necessary from both extremes of arbitrary rule."

"Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of communism . . . As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction."

"Despite all the merely verbal declarations to the contrary, the membership, content, and political tactics of the Falange are in open opposition to the national revolution."

"Whoever does not fight the reactionary measures of the bourgeoisie and the growth of fascism at these preparatory stages, is not in a position to prevent the victory of fascism, but, on the contrary, facilitates that victory."

"Fascism is able to attract the masses because it makes a demagogic appeal to their most urgent needs and demands. Fascism not only inflames their prejudices that are deeply ingrained in the masses, but also plays on the better sentiments of the masses, on their sense of justice, and sometimes even on their revolutionary traditions."

"Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain , begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege."