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The Anatomy of Fascism

This book delves into the political ideology of fascism, examining its roots, key features, and the ways it has influenced societies and governments throughout history. more

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Robert O. Paxton
Robert O. Paxton

Robert O. Paxton is a renowned American historian known for his research on 20th-century European history, particularly the history of France. His works delve into the historical background of totalitarianism and racism, significantly influencing the understanding of modern political and social movements. more

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“Not unlike Mussolini in his early laissez-faire period with Alberto De Stefani, Hitler named as his first minister of finance the conservative Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk. For a time, the Führer left foreign policy in the hands of professional diplomats (with the aristocratic Constantin von Neurath as foreign minister) and the army in the hands of professional soldiers. But Hitler’s drive to shrink the normative state and expand the prerogative state was much more sustained than Mussolini’s. Total master of his party, Hitler exploited its radical impulses for his own aggrandizement against the old elites and rarely (after the exemplary bloodbath of June 1934) needed to rein it in. Another suggested key to radicalization is the chaotic nature of fascist rule. Contrary to wartime propaganda and to an enduring popular image, Nazi Germany was not a purring, well-oiled machine. Hitler allowed party agencies to compete with more traditional state offices, and he named loyal lieutenants to overlapping jobs that pitted them against each other. The ensuing “feudal” struggles for supremacy within and between party and state shocked those Germans proud of their country’s traditional superbly trained and independent civil service. Fritz-Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg, a young Prussian official initially attracted to Nazism, lamented in 1937 that “the formerly unified State power has been split into a number of separate authorities; Party and professional organizations work in the same areas and overlap with no clear divisions of responsibility.” He feared “the end of a true Civil Service and the emergence of a subservient bureaucracy.” We saw in the previous chapter how the self-indulgently bohemian Hitler spent as little time as possible on the labors of government, at least until the war. He proclaimed his visions and hatreds in speeches and ceremonies, and allowed his ambitious underlings to search for the most radical way to fulfill them in a Darwinian competition for attention and reward. His lieutenants, fully aware of his fanatical views, “worked toward the Führer,” who needed mainly to arbitrate among them. Mussolini, quite unlike Hitler in his commitment to the drudgery of government, refused to delegate and remained suspicious of competent associates—a governing style that produced more inertia than radicalization. War provided fascism’s clearest radicalizing impulse. It would be more accurate to say that war played a circular role in fascist regimes. Early fascist movements were rooted in an exaltation of violence sharpened by World War I, and war making proved essential to the cohesion, discipline, and explosive energy of fascist regimes. Once undertaken, war generated both the need for more extreme measures, and popular acceptance of them. It seems a general rule that war is indispensable for the maintenance of fascist muscle tone (and, in the cases we know, the occasion for its demise). It seems clear that both Hitler and Mussolini deliberately chose war as a necessary step in realizing the full potential of their regimes. They wanted to use war to harden internal society as well as to conquer vital space. Hitler told Goebbels, “the war . . . made possible for us the solution of a whole series of problems that could never have been solved in normal times.”

WarPowerConfusionFascismRadicalizationNormative StatePrerogative State
Book:The Anatomy of Fascism
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“Nazi officials felt free to take more violent action than they had done in the western campaigns of 1940, first against the enemies of the regime, then against fascism’s conservative allies, and eventually against the German people themselves, in an ecstasy of terminal destruction. Whereas in traditional authoritarian war regimes, the army tends to extend its control, as it did in the German Reich during 1917–18 and in Franco’s Spain, the German army lost control of occupation policy in the east after 1941, as we have seen, to the Nazi Party’s parallel organizations. Party radicals felt free to express their hatreds and obsessions in ways that were foreign to the traditions of the state services. The issue here is not simply one of moral sensitivity; some officers and civil servants were appalled by SS actions in the conquered territories, while others went along because of group solidarity or because they had become hardened. It was to some degree an issue of turf. It would be unthinkable for a traditional military dictatorship to tolerate the incursions of amateurish party militias into military spheres that Hitler—and even, in Ethiopia, Mussolini—permitted. Here we enter a realm where the calculations of interest that arguably governed the behavior of both the Nazis and their allies under more ordinary circumstances in the exercise of power no longer determined policy. At this ultimate stage an obsessed minority is able to carry out its most passionate hatreds implacably and to the ultimate limit of human experience. Liberation from constraints permitted a hard core of the movement’s fanatics to regain the upper hand over their bourgeois allies and carry out some of the initial radical projects. At the outposts of empire, fascism recovered the face-to-face violence of the early days of squadrismo and SA street brawling. One must resist the temptation at this final stage to revert to a highly personalized way of looking at the exercise of power in fascist regimes, with its discredited notions of hoodlums kidnapping the state. The Nazi regime was able to pursue the war with ever mounting intensity only with the continued complicity of the state services and large sectors of the socially powerful. Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat. Prolonged fascist radicalization over a very long period has never been witnessed. It is even hard to imagine. Can one suppose that even Hitler could keep up the tension into old age? Arranging the succession to a senescent fascist leader is another intriguing but, so far, hypothetical problem. The more normal form of succession to a fascist regime is likely to be decay into a traditional authoritarianism. At that point, there can be progressive liberalization as in post-Franco Spain or perhaps revolution (as in post-Salazar Portugal). But orderly succession is clearly far more of a problem with fascism than with other forms of rule, even communism. Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing. In the long run, therefore, it was not really a solution to the problems of frightened conservatives or liberals. The final outcome was that the Italian and German fascist regimes drove themselves off a cliff in their quest for ever headier successes. The fascisms we know seem doomed to destroy themselves in their headlong, obsessive rush to fulfill the “privileged relation with history” they promised their people.”

FascismRadicalizationEndgame Of FascismFascism Long Term
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“And yet for the three of us, who could perceive it, there was a ferment, an excitement, a need to be ravenous, for something to pick us up and sweep us along, for something to concentrate on. The struggle, for example. Because that was the heart of it. The word struggle contained sex, anger, and dream. We tried to say it under our breath, brazenly, and link it to an action. But at that point opaqueness resumed--the frosting that separated purpose from its fulfillment.”

ViolenceYouthTerrorismYearningRadicalization
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“Ich spüre nicht mehr diese Leichtigkeit, diese Zuversicht, diese Sicherheit, die ich vor vier Jahren fühlte, als ich ankam, um mein Leben hier zu beginnen. Das Israel von damals kommt mir vor wie einem Traum entsprungen. Zu schön, um wahr zu sein. Zu sonnig, zu liebevoll, zu willkommen heißend. Zu friedlich. Das Israel, das ich in den vergangenen Monaten erlebt habe, ist ein Land der Extreme. Wütend. Unversöhnlich. Ein Land kurz vor dem Bürgerkrieg. Milchemet Achim lautet der Ausdruck im Hebräischen, übersetzt heißt das «Brüderkrieg». Ich habe ihn zu oft gehört in den vergangenen Monaten. Tatsächlich ist es ein Konflikt zwischen Nachbarn, Familienmitgliedern, Freunden, zwischen Menschen, die plötzlich zu merken scheinen, dass sie entgegengesetzte Vorstellungen davon haben, wie ihre gemeinsame Heimat aussehen soll. Und die keine Toleranz für jene haben, die das anders sehen. Radikale Politiker – und es gibt auf einmal so, so viele von ihnen – schlagen mit spaltenden Worten auf das Fundament ein, auf den Gesellschaftsvertrag dieses Landes. Sie gedeihen am Hass, am Misstrauen, an der Unvereinbarkeit. Mit vergiftenden Ideen und manipulativen Worten greifen sie das Mosaik der Gesellschaft an, das sowieso schon brüchig geworden ist. Die aufgeheizte Stimmung in diesem Jahr hat mich misstrauisch gemacht, oft Schlimmes befürchtend. Das geht über die normale Muttersorge hinaus. Ich kann das Gefühl nicht mehr abschütteln, dass Israel sich auf einen Abgrund zubewegt, und ich frage mich nicht mehr ob, sondern: Wann gehe ich, bevor ich mitgerissen werde? Doch ich treffe Entscheidungen nicht mehr für mich allein.”

IsraelExtremismPolarizationRadicalizationSocietal Rift
Book:Kein anderes Land: Aufzeichnungen aus Israel
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“Der 7. Oktober hat so viel mehr erschüttert als unser Gefühl von Sicherheit. Wer wir waren, was wir glaubten, wer wir hofften zu sein – das alles spielt seither keine Rolle mehr. Diese neue, sich radikalisierende Welt zwingt uns, unsere Umgebung und uns selbst mit neuen Augen zu sehen: Wer sind wir? Als Volk, als Menschen. Welche Israelis wollen wir sein? Wir müssen uns neu auf die Suche begeben nach dem, was geblieben ist nach dem 7. Oktober von unserem alten Selbst. In der Hoffnung, dass überhaupt etwas geblieben ist.”

IsraelRadicalizationCollective TraumaOctober7
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“«Aber haben wir denn kein Recht darauf, uns sicher zu fühlen?!» Jetzt springt meine Schwiegermutter auf, läuft in die Küche. Sie bleibt an der Spüle stehen, mit dem Rücken zu mir. Dann dreht sie sich um: «1956, 67, 73, 82», sagt sie mit bebender Stimme, «danach erinnere ich mich nicht mal mehr, wie viele Kriege und Auseinandersetzungen es waren. Immer war irgendwas. 1990, 91, im Golfkrieg, da spannten wir Kaugummi auf die Luftritzen am Fensterrahmen, in die Schlüssellöcher, oder Klebstoff. Aus Angst vor einem Gasangriff. Ich saß mit drei kleinen Kindern allein zu Hause, mit Gasmaske, mein Mann in der Reserve … » Sie verstummt. Dann sagt sie mit gepresster Stimme: «Inzwischen weiß ich: Entweder sie oder wir. Wir müssen uns von ihnen trennen, vollkommen, eine undurchdringliche Mauer zwischen uns bauen. Anders geht es nicht.»”

TraumaIsraeli Palestinian ConflictRadicalizationHardening Of The HeartWalls And Borders
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“The media and the internet exist not to transmit knowledge as it is, but to amplify, exaggerate, and embellish the exact reality. Whatever is displayed upon the screens is rendered greater and more dramatic than its true form to attract mass interest. And if a person’s only “source of knowledge” is their screen, then that person may become stranded in a rigid world of black and white, blinded to the spectrum of grays that lie between.”

KnowledgeMediaInternetNewsRadicalDigitalManipulationExtremismRadicalizationDigitality
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