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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE ORIGINAL AXIS OF EVIL  
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Samantha Power
May 2, 2004
The New York Times
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_ This review is 20 years old, but it is nevertheless especially
relevant to the United States at this political moment. _

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The Anatomy of Fascism
Robert O. Paxton
Vintage
ISBN: 9781400033911

Fascism, to hear President Bush tell it, has been revived by Islamic
militants. ''The terrorists are the heirs to fascism,'' he has said.
''They have the same will to power, the same disdain for the
individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with
in just the same way. Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be
appeased: they must be defeated.''

In this statement, Bush laid out his checklist for what constitutes
fascism. Such checklists are required because fascism -- unlike
Communism, socialism, capitalism or conservatism -- is a smear word
more often used to brand one's foes than it is a descriptor used to
shed light on them. Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia
University and the author of several books, including ''Vichy
France,'' is not the first scholar to wade into a definitional and
historical quagmire in order to answer the question, What is fascism?
Indeed, his book ''The Anatomy of Fascism'' -- which doubles as a
history and a sustained argument -- is not the most original study of
the subject. But it is so fair, so thorough and, in the end, so
convincing that it may well become the most authoritative.

Why should readers care about fascism? Paxton offers one answer at the
outset. ''Fascism was the major political innovation of the 20th
century, and the source of much of its pain.'' But in exploring how
such uncouth nobodies as Hitler and Mussolini introduced what the
Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce described as an
''onagrocracy'' -- or ''government by braying asses'' -- he also hopes
to enable us to recognize ''what the 21st century must avoid.''

''The Anatomy of Fascism'' is the work of a distinguished scholar who
has sifted through the primary sources, the tomes and the trends in an
effort to synthesize and even settle prior debates. His main emphasis
is on Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, but in order to
demonstrate why certain fascist movements were able to seize power
while most remained marginal, he contrasts these ''successes'' with
fascist sputterings in Britain, France, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and
elsewhere.

 

Paxton proceeds chronologically, tracing how fascist movements are
born, take root, assume power, govern and self-destruct. At every
stage he explores the interaction among the leader, the state, the
party and civil society, examining the symbiosis between socioeconomic
conditions and the political agents who seized upon and shaped them.

World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 contributed mightily
to the advent of fascism. The war generated acute economic malaise,
national humiliation and legions of restive veterans and unemployed
youths who could be harnessed politically. The Bolshevik Revolution,
but one symptom of the frustration with the old order, made
conservative elites in Italy and Germany so fearful of Communism that
anything -- even fascism -- came to seem preferable to a Marxist
overthrow.

Still, Paxton retains an important capacity for incredulity. How on
earth was it that Benito Mussolini, who won a mere 4,796 votes out of
315,165 in the 1919 election, could find himself appointed prime
minister in 1922? The answer, Paxton makes clear, was not Mussolini's
policy platform. ''They ask us what is our program,'' Mussolini said.
''Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy.'' Rather, it was the
societal ills, the conservatives' fear of a Communist revolution, the
paralysis of Italy's liberal constitutional order and the violence
inflicted by fascist militia -- violence that made the state eager to
co-opt the violent themselves.

How could Hitler, whose Nazi Party placed ninth in 1928 (with only 2.8
percent of the popular vote), soar to first in 1932 (with 37.2
percent)? In Germany, storm troopers intimidated enemies, Hitler
himself delivered mesmerizing harangues and the Nazi Party became a
catchall movement that appealed to those Germans from all classes who
were disillusioned with the bankrupt mainstream parties.

But none of this was enough to bring about fascist rule. One of
Paxton's main contributions is to focus less on the ''Duce myth'' and
the ''Führer myth'' and more on the indispensable ''conservative
complicities'' behind the fascist takeovers. Paxton debunks the
consoling fiction that Mussolini and Hitler seized power. Rather,
conservative elites desperate to subdue leftist populist movements
''normalized'' the fascists by inviting them to share power. It was
the mob that flocked to fascism, but the elites who elevated it. ''At
each fork in the road, they choose the antisocialist solution,''
Paxton writes. King Victor Emmanuel III responded to Mussolini's
''gigantic bluff,'' the Black Shirt march on Rome, not by imposing
martial law but by offering him the prime ministership. And in 1933 it
was the ambitious German Catholic aristocrat Franz Von Papen,
believing he would be the one who gained power, who arranged the deal
that gave Hitler the chancellorship.

Fascists never assumed power in countries where governing structures
functioned ''tolerably well,'' where conservatives retained confidence
or where local fascists remained ''pure'' by avoiding political
compromise or elections. ''It was not enough to don a colored shirt,
march about and beat up some local minority to conjure up the success
of a Hitler or a Mussolini,'' Paxton writes. ''It took a comparable
crisis, a comparable opening of political space, comparable skill at
alliance building and comparable cooperation from existing elites.''

Fascist movements and regimes are different from military
dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. They seek not to exclude, but
rather to enlist, the masses. They often collapse the distinction
between the public and private sphere (eliminating the latter). In the
words of Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi Labor Office, the only
private individual who existed in Nazi Germany was someone asleep.
And, crucially, their durability depends on their ability to remain in
constant motion. It was this need to keep citizens intoxicated by
fascism's dynamism that made Mussolini and Hitler see war as both
desirable and necessary. ''War is to men,'' Mussolini insisted, ''as
maternity is to women.''

Paxton leaves his readers with a working definition of fascism:

''A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with
community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults
of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed
nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration
with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues
with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals
of internal cleansing and external expansion.''

Fine-tuning definitions, however, is less important for the future
than identifying and neutralizing fascist threats. This recognition
will come, Paxton believes, ''not by checking the color of shirts''
but ''by understanding how past fascisms worked.'' We should ''not
look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their
swastikas,'' he writes; nor should we look for hate crimes and extreme
nationalist propaganda. Rather, we should address the conditions and
the enablers -- political deadlocks in times of crises, and
conservatives who want tougher allies and elicit support through
nationalist and racist demagogy.

For every official American attempt to link Islamic terrorism to
fascism, there is an anti-Bush protest that applies the fascist label
to Washington's nationalist rhetoric, assault on civil liberties and
warmaking. Paxton's study has made it no less likely that the label
will be appropriated. But the lasting contribution of this splendid
book is to remind us that fascism, if it returns, will do so not
simply because of a rousing leader, but because of his timid
accomplices.

* Fascism
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