THE NATURE OF FASCISM

From Another Outstanding "Great Issues" Lecturer, Seniors Hear that the Wa r Must Go On Against the Fascist Tendencies Still Alive in All Nations

MY SUBJECT TODAY is the nature of Fascism, not the origin of Fascism, not an account of how it got into the world and almost conquered it, not a sketch of the great personalities whose demoniac inspiration gave force and impetus to a movement which twenty years or so ago began to sweep through the world and gathered increasing force and increasing authority for the next twenty years. By-1939 the world was full of friends of Fascism, sympathizers with Fascism, appeasers of Fascism, people who felt that this was the new doctrine that was going to supplant Western Democracy and ruin forever the chances of Communism's becoming the dominant political principle in Western Europe. Today the two chief Fascist states, Germany and Italy, are in ruins. The leaders of the Fascist movement have either committed suicide or been publicly executed, some of them, Mussolini himself, at the hands of an enraged mob.

In one sense it looks as though Fascism were dead, but in another sense we know that Fascism is still alive because the factors that created Fascism and nourished Fascism are still at work. There are centers of Fascist infection still in operation in Portugal, in Spain, in the Argentine, above all in Italy and Germany because the mere execution of leaders and even the ruin of the Fascist state cannot demolish Fascism as an idea. You can only demolish a bad idea by a better idea. The idea of Fascism is still alive in the world and some of the forces upon which Fascism drew are universally present in the human soul. So, though I am dealing mainly with the nature of Fascism, as one finds it exhibited in the recent history of Italy and Germany, I am also dealing with the Fascist in each one of us, because it's that point, the fact that there is something in human nature which responds to the worst aspects of the Fascist creed, that makes it a danger even in Democratic countries. We made the great mistake of not making war on Fascism itself. We made war only upon the Fascist states and therefore have lacked the full understanding of our task, and above all failed to realize that the war must go on even though the states themselves are in ruin, for out of that very ruin may spring something even worse.

Now, how shall we define Fascism? That is the chief task this morning. The word is often used all too loosely, as when Mr. Henry Wallace uses the word Fascism to characterize a Tory or a reactionary in political affairs. That's an abuse of the word Fascism, just as it was equally an abuse to characterize somebody who believes in larger families or the encouragement of family life as a Fascist, because it happens that Mussolini and Hitler had also spoken out in favor of the family and a larger birth rate. I remember discussing the subject of Fascism with an eminent German scholar in Miinchen in 1932 and he was inclined at that moment to depreciate it. He said: "It's like the measles, it's a disease which we had here in the South; we got over it and they are now getting it in the North. It will soon be over." Well, within another year Fascism was in power. But it would be useful if we were able to treat Fascism like a disease and identify its symptoms.

Now, no one symptom usually establishes a disease. Take measles themselves. If you have a runny nose, that may mean that you have a cold. If you have spots on your body that may mean that you have the hives, and if you have a high fever that may mean influenza. But if you have high fever and spots on your body and a runny nose and weak eyes and in addition have a characteristic smell associated with measles, then the likelihood is that you have caught the disease and it's going through your whole system. I want to pick out the group of symptoms, or syndrome, as they say in medicine, that characterizes the Fascist disease in the body politic. I want to deal with the political, the moral, the psychological characteristics of Fascism so that we may be able to identify Fascism when we see it—and to identify latent Fascist tendencies in our own life before they become united in this total scheme which we call Fascism. Every characteristic of Fascism as I will present them, and as you will see, is present in non-Fascist states. In a partial or quiescent state they exist in every political organization.

Fascism is not, as you may perhaps be inclined to suppose, the invention of a few great men like Hitler and Mussolini. They played a decisive part in the development of Fascism. They incarnated Fascism in their own persons and gave everybody a notion of what it was to be a Fascist. But Fascism goes much deeper than the movement which broke out at the end of the first World War. It was a part of a much deeper moral disintegration which was observable in Western Europe as early as the 1860's. If you will read Dostoevsky's Letters from the Underworld, particularly the first part, written in 1864, you will find a description of the Fascist personality, almost an embodiment of Hitler himself. And the characteristic challenge that Fascism was to utter to the civilized world, a refusal to accept the values which civilization over thousands of years has established as essential human values, and a positive acceptance of all the things that civilization rejects—a tendency towards cruelty, a tendency towards violence, a delight in bloodshed, all those things were described and prophesied by Dostoevsky in the Letters from the Underground in 1864. During the same decade the great Swiss historian, Jacob Burckhardt, both in his letters and his essays, predicted the rise of a new kind of barbarian war-band within Western European society. And long after them, in 1918, Oswald Spengler, the author of The Decline of the WesternWorld, announced that the age of Caesarism was at hand, in which power would be concentrated in men of ruthless will, who would rule the world by force and terror and make civilized people their prey.

Burckhardt's characterization of what was going to happen is worth quoting. He said that the "sudden change from Democracy will no longer result in the rule of the individual despot or he would be put out of the world with dynamite and so forth, but in the rule of a military corporation, and bv it methods will perhaps be used for which the most terrible despot would not have the heart."

FasThat was a political anticipation of cism in the 1860's. It shows that certain forces were already latent in Western society and observable to sensitive observers. So that the coming of Fascism wouldn't have been a matter of astonishment to either Dostoevsky or to Burckhardt.

What then is Fascism, politically speaking? Briefly, Fascism is the counter-revolution against 18th Century liberalism and humanitarianism. It's a revolution against liberty, against equality, against fraternity, and it's a deliberate espousal of despotism, of status and authority, and of slavery. At the time that the words of the French Revolution were spoken people thought that a permanent step upward had been made in human life, that there was no possibility of slavery or of terrorism recurring as deliberate methods of government. Well, as a matter of fact, terrorism recurred in the French Revolution itself, at the end of it. And so far from being wiped out by the forces of progress in the igth Century, these evils came back and were deliberately chosen as the doctrine of a new creed which set out to conquer the world. Fascism, then, first of all, is a deliberate assault on democracy and freedom in the name of absolutism and servile obedience. It rests on the principle of dictatorship not by a single man but by a single minority group, the party. The Fascist party, the National Socialist Party in Germany, is the organ of the dictatorship. On top of the party, representing it symbolically, exercising authority and to a great degree exercising actual power, is the leader himself. The principle of leadership, of complete unification in a single and absolute authority, is the basis of the Fascist state.

We know a little about that from our own experience in America. There are cities, there are counties and states, in the United States where if you want any political matter accomplished you have to see the Boss. The Boss embodies political power and authority. He tells who is to be judge. He sees to it that if one of his followers commits a minor crime he is absolved and if he commits a major crime that he goes before the "right" judge. That sort of thing is done in our country. A certain amount of concentration of political power surreptitiously—and, of course, unconstitutionally—takes place. But in Fascist countries the state itself legally fosters such a concentration of power and gives the Leader absolute control. That is one of the penalties that Democracy suffers when it does not mind its own business. If you don't mind your business it's very sure that somebody else, if there is important business in hand, will arrange "for good and valuable considerations" to mind it for you. In the recent book by the Democratic boss, Ed Flynn, one of the respectable and probably very honest bosses, he nevertheless says, in effect, "People like me will continue to exist and perform our special functions until the electorate is really interested in the business of government and gives as much time as we do to seeing that it works."

The Fascist system is able to concentrate its power because its ideal state is a war state. Fascism is an effort to make the concentration of responsibility and executive action which is necessary for the successful prosecution of a war the normal, day-today process in the lives of the people it governs. The Fascist state is therefore a totalitarian state: a closed state completely under the control of the government. No trade or intercourse can take place without permission of the government, no travel outside the boundaries of the state without the sanction of the government. In every respect the principle of control is carried out through the social and economic organs of a country's life. But in order to make this control tolerable the Fascist state has to simulate war even when war does not exist. In a sense Fascist government is crisis government and it has to create crises from day to day in order to justify its continued arrogation of power.

Now, power ordinarily spreads out and distributes itself among the associations and groups and corporations that carry on the effective life of a country. To maintain its position of absolute authority the Fascist government must, and prides itself onthe fact that it must, suppress freedom of speech, and an equally important freedom, freedom of association. One of the first acts of Fascism is to get rid of inconvenient, independent groups, such as trade unions, the Masonic Orders, the monasteries, ruthlessly suppressing these various rival organs of association. Then in order to make the suppression more effective, because there are always courageous people in every country who will defy such prohibitions, the Fascists create concentration camps and a universal spy system to hound out those who even in the privacy of their homes would verbally challenge the rights of the so-called new order. Concentration camps become a regular method of government and terrorism, terrorism leading finally to extermination, becomes an ordinary part of public policy in a Fascist state. You might describe Fascist government most briefly by saying that it is government by martial law. Now any fool can govern by that means; but only a fool would mistake the process for government. The whole problem of orderly government is precisely the problem of bringing together people of diverse interests, diverse aptitudes, of diverse philosophies and beliefs, and out of their differences and conflicts, even out of their antagonisms, creating a common policy, creating measures and acts which represent them as a whole. The method of Fascist government is the method Alexander used in the famous case of the Gordian knot, which nobody could untie, because everybody had been patiently pulling at the strands trying to untie the knot and at the same time preserve the rope. Alexander showed that it was a very simple matter. All you had to do was to take your sword and slash through the knot. That method untied it very easily. But the rope thereafter was worthless. That's exactly the nature of the political solution of absolutism in the modern state. You can rule with absolute authority, with unquestioned obedience, provided you are willing to eviscerate all that makes a community human, all that works through the force of willing association, of rational understanding, of cooperative action and common sense.

Now, I have dealt with the political side of Fascism. It is aided and abetted by a very characteristic psychological attribute, which in the large one may call "regres- sion to infantilism." The leader under the Fascist system becomes not merely the father but the god of the nation. What the leader does is always right. What the leader says is supposed to be divinely in- spired; at least it is the final, unquestion- able source of authority. The leader will take all responsibility from those who are led. Therefore, the real price of Democ- racy, the necessity to exercise one's judg- ment, the necessity to act as a free adult person and to make choices, is counter- acted by the simple method of becoming a child again; an obedient child waiting for the word of the leader. Now, don't think that that is altogether a symptom that could be found in Nazi Germany and Fas- cist Italy and nowhere else. On a recent Gallup Poll to discover what the people of the United States thought about controlling the atomic bomb, over 50% of those who replied said that they thought the government would solve the problem. They didn't know anything about it and apparently they didn't want to know anything about it. They just took for granted that the government, without any aid or counsel from the citizens of the United States, would have the problem in hand and would do whatever was necessary. Well, that was the same theory that made the people of England trust Mr. Stanley Baldwin when he insisted on keeping England disarmed in the face of the growing Fascist threat. And that attitude is a very dangerous attitude to be fostered in democratic society such as ours, in which leadership is timely, effective, and intelligent only to the extent to which it is supported by the critical appraisal and rational undemanding of all the electorate, and not just a few pressure groups working on top.

Along with this infantile reversion to the leadership principle goes a general breakdown of respect for reason and science and in general for the higher functions of life, as exhibited in the humanities and in religion as well as in scientific disciplines. Since whatever the leader says is so, if he chooses to believe quackery in medicine, quackery becomes as authentic as science; if he chooses to guide his affairs by recourse to astrology, astrology becomes a reasonable science. There is no superstition which may not be fostered and which indeed was not fostered in the Fascist states once the belief in the cooperative action of diverse minds, which is the technique of science for checking results and keeping people from indulging in wishful thinking, is lost. And with this goes loss of contact with reality. Delusional thinking becomes very common in Fascist states. One of the favorite doctrines by which Hitler rose to power was the notion that the economic system in Germany didn't work after the first World War, not because of the results of the war itself, not because of the results of inflation, not because of the trade barriers which were being erected all over the world, but because the Jews supposedly controlled it. That was the delusional answer to a very complicated economic situation. At no point did it correspond with objective reality; for by 1930 Germany had recovered more completely from the war than any other country.

These self-created delusions, fortunately, were responsible for the early breakdown of Fascism. It was Hitler's delusions about England, his notion that they were a corrupt and effeminate nation, that caused him to miscalculate his plans for invasion and to center on Russia when he should have been thinking about England. And, similarly, it was delusions about Russia which caused him to make the most fatal mistake that he made, probably, in the course of the whole war: the invasion of Russia. So one sees in the very psychological character of Fascism one of the profound causes for its failure. One cannot make mature decisions on an infantile basis—pathology does not pay.

But the worst phase of Fascism's psychological regression, deeply bound up with its essential morbidity is the deliberate practice of torture of its enemies or victims; an attitude whose fiendishness revealed depths of depravity and brutality hitherto only ascribable to those who were completely demented. The fact that ordinary men and women were engaged in these practices, the fact that scientific men, even physicians, participated in mass torture and mass extermination, that the directors of the IG Farben company willingly cooperated in the Nazis' horrible campaign, only exposes the moral nihilism and psychological regression our civilization is now threatened with. There are disturbing symptoms of the same kind visible even in our democratic world: not alone in recurrent reports of police brutality and the use of the third degree, but in such an incident as took place in New York recently when a lame man was mugged and beaten in a crowded street, where he called loudly for aid, without a single bystander coming to his rescue. The movies, the radio, the crime story have inured us to unrestrained sadism, and by this fact we are that much nearer to the pathology of Fascism.

Now I come to the moral characteristics of Fascism. The chief of these is contempt for man. From Machiavelli to Mussolini, a deep contempt for man has characterized all absolutist theories of government. If man is corrupt, if he is incapable of any decency, any honesty, to say nothing of any nobility, then he can be governed by fear and force because nobody will ever have the courage to defy such measures when they are applied with sufficient ferocity. Along with this contempt for man goes a disbelief in human values, particularly in the values of love, mercy, pity, tenderness, peace, all the things that make man deeply human; the qualities that connect not only with his own humanity but with his very mammalian past, are spat upon by the Fascists. And man is regarded as essentially—and these are Fascist words —essentially a beast of prey. And third, another sign of Fascism's moral nihilism is a belief in the complete relativity of right and wrong. Right and good are what the group in power says that they are. Bad is what is of no use to this particular group. Right is the custom of the country. Wrong is what people do in other countries. This is a denial of the possibility of there being any universal laws of right and wrong which are common to humanity as a whole and common to all civilized times, whether the sth Century B.C. in India or the 20th Century A.D. in the Western World.

This skepticism, this cynicism, this nihilism, are not purely Fascist inventions. Similar doctrines have often been taught during the last generation in the halls of schools and universities throughout America. But that doesn't make them any more sacred or any more truthful as an interpre\ation of human history. The fact is that there are universal values. The fact is that the major religions and ethical systems do agree on what is right and what is wrong and that the incidental changes from country to country and from time to time, the incidental variations in emphasis, are as nothing compared to the points on which there is almost unqualified unanimity, certainly during the last 2500 years.

Finally I come to the social symptoms of Fascism. And here again we have merely an intensification of an attribute which has become common throughout the Western World since the 19th Century: the idolization of the tribe, the making of a religion out of nationalism. Now the nation is a fact. There are different nations in the world. And love for one's own country is a fact, too, and not a disreputable one. My permanent home is in a village called Amenia. I know that there are better landscapes than those around Amenia, and that in many other places, in Hanover or Norwich for instance, I will find people equally sound, equally good. But I have a very particular liking, an innocent liking, for my permanent home and for the village around it. That is the substantial basis for patriotism. Patriotism becomes inimical to the other things that men hold in common when it assumes that this love for one's soil and one's neighbors makes the soil actually better than in some place else and makes one's neighbors actually nobler and more interesting people than they are elsewhere. That's a superstition. We are all members of the human race. It's no virtue to be born in a particular place, or to. boast a particular color of one's skin, or to speak a particular language. All these things are natural events but they are nothing to pride oneself specially upon.

Nationalism, however, in the Fascist form, not merely becomes a religion, a savage cult, but hatred for the foreigner reaches a point almost of paranoia in the Fascist ideology. Fascism encourages delusions of grandeur about the national group and its destiny, and glories in the notion that they either have sprung from some divine beginnings or that they are about to conquer the world and establish the godhead of their leader and his master-race. This exaggerated nationalism, with its shameless self-admiration, is also associated with something which is equally characteristic of a paranoid psychology, with a tendency toward isolationism, a suspicion of everything foreign and a rejection of outside help and cooperation of any kind. And here again, it isn't only in Italy or Germany that we find the doctrine of isolationism, an attitude of suspicion and distrust and hatred of the foreigner coming to the front, and becoming potentially an active political doctrine. There are daily newspapers of wide circulation which spread an identical doctrine in the United States: there is at least one eminent American historian, whose words have been widely read and praised, who exhibits the same tendencies.

And finally there is a specially ugly contribution of Nazism which also has its equivalent all through the world, the picking out of a particular minority group, a class, a race, or a religion, or in the case of the Fascist attack upon the Jews, both a religion and a race, and transferring all the aggression that the tribal group feels against foreigners generally to this one minority. It's always safe to attack a small minority, because they can't strike back. And in the case of the Nazis, the attack upon the Jews was also accompanied by an attack upon all races which were to be considered of non-Aryan origin. Now, the word Aryan is unknown to anthropological science. It's another delusional creation of Nazi science and psychology. And it was on the basis of this fake science that the notion of German superiority was established. Hitler only added to that notion the proposal to enslave or exterminate all "inferior" nations. That was a logical conclusion of the racial fallacy. If there are as deep differences between races as between mankind and the animals—and that, I would remind you, was a popular doctrine in the southern states of the United States before the Civil War—if this is so, then the lower races should logically either be enslaved like domestic animals, or actually exterminated as the Nazis exterminated some five to six million Jews, and a great many million Poles and Dutchmen and Frenchmen besides.

Now I have come to the end of this analysis of the Fascist syndrome. No single one of these symptoms constitutes Fascism. Fascism is not totalitarianism by itself. It's not dictatorship by itself—there were dictatorships in South America from the beginning of independence there but there was no Fascism until the present day. Nihilism 'in morals is not Fascism. Fascism is not

just terrorism or sadism. Fascism is not just racism, neither is it just tribal nationalism. But when all of these symptoms are gathered together, when they are made the basis of a political doctrine, of an educational system, and of a deliberate code of daily action, then you have Fascism. Independently each of these symptoms is disturbing and disruptive to the body politic. When they group together and take possession of a nation's soul they become the unmitigated danger to civilization and humanity that Fascism was during the 1920's and '30's and '40's.

Now the ideological roots of Fascism, the soil out of which it grew, are very old and they are part of our general heritage. The Fascist state, curiously enough, has been described again and again as the very form of the Utopia from Plato to Cabet and even later writers. And the Fascist principle of force and fraud you will find in Machiavelli; the apology for absolutism in Thomas Hobbes; the notion that true freedom is obedience you will find in Fichte; the notion of the state as god you will find in Hegel; the notion that the leadership principle is the one thing capable of saving modern society you will find along with an open and indecent justification of brutality in Thomas Carlyle; and so on. .

Why is it, though, that these various ideological roots didn't begin to burgeon until our own time? That's an extremely important question. I can only indicate very briefly my own tentative answer to that. The first reason I think was the failure of political Democracy to move on to fulfill its promise in terms of an economic and social Democracy. If you will read De Toqueville you will see that the greatest political thinker of the 19th Century, surely the greatest interpreter of Democracy, saw that as one of the essential fulfillments of the Democratic conception of life. And the fact that political Democracy faltered at that point and did not develop appropriate economic institutions is very much like the failure of Christianity to develop typically Christian institutions which would be universal throughout our society in economic practices as well as in religious practices. Only belatedly has government by voluntary cooperation and consent begun to supplant the absolute leadership principle in, for example, factory management.

Second," science and the machine during the last two or three centuries have created an impersonal world in which the individual finds himself lost, helpless, and alone. He finds himself overwhelmed by knowledge he cannot master, governed by events over which he has no control. He finds in himself a need to simplify life so that he may rationally grasp it and control it again. Burckhardt, the Swiss historian, who was so marvelously foresighted in his analysis of Fascism, also predicted the coming of the Terrible Simplifiers.

Now there are two ways of simplification: one is simplification by education, by moral control, by application of measure and order to everything we do, the erection of human standards and the arrangement of life in accordance with a hierarchy of values which puts first things first. The-Fascist method of simplification in contrast is simplification downward into infantilism, into barbarism, into sheer bestialism at the very end, as the records of Auschwitz and Buchenwald show. So the proletarian, who was neglected by the political Democracies, and who was the typical outcast of this society, could under Fascism feel himself become a master again by vicarious participation as a member of a master nation, or a master race. And it was in the Fascist countries that Huey Long's boast was achieved, that under his system every man would become a king. The penalty for becoming a king was that you had to show abject obedience to your leader: the "King" became also a slave.

Now the alternative to this regressive and barbarous movement lies in going further along the path of creative political and social development. You can either go downwards into criminality, which is a sort of negative creation, or you can begin to move upwards again and continue the work that the great political revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries started to do. Hitler himself said, two things unite men, either common ideals or common criminality. We have that choice to make. We can find a method of getting together on a criminal level downwards, or by erecting broader goals which we can all participate in, which we can all help to achieve. Fascism chose the criminal method. It gave form to the destructive tendencies in our society, but it masked its infantilism, its sadism, its pervasive taint of pathology, by concern for many matters which the Democracies had neglected. The Fascists were concerned with combatting the dwindling birth rate, as that staunch Republican, Emile Zola, had been concerned a generation before. They sought, on the surface, to revive the home, the family, the country, rural life; many of those abiding decencies and sanities, which had been overlooked or neglected in the great century of industrialization. The Fascists placed emphasis on a common good above mere class interests; and they showed in themselves a readiness to take risks, to assume responsibility, to face tests, which we ourselves were not ready to do until the Fascists thrust war upon us as the only means of our own survival. So,, unintentionally, Fascism performed a service to Democracy. It called attention to weaknesses in the Democratic system and it also showed that government by special interests and pressure groups could not work for the common interest. It showed that the unwillingness to take responsibilities, or to act, which often characterizes Democratic governments, might lead to paralysis, conquest, and enslavement, as it did in France. And reluctance to participate in the government of a Democracy likewise lays the way open to Fascism. Fascism proved all that. But it also proved to us that we have a flexibility and an adaptiveness that Fascism lacks, that in our own Democratic society Ave have created safeguards against the vice of leadership, the vice of absolute government, and, in the final analysis, we justified Democracy in Fascism's own terms, by winning the war for Democracy.

No political society can hope to find a substitute for rational understanding, for intelligent consent, and for voluntary loyalty. Our English and American systems of government grew out of our well-proved knowledge of the corruption and the ultimate weakness of absolute government; they rest on the foundations of a common morality, based on honesty, good faith, and belief in a system of justice which binds the judge as well as the judged. By attacking this elemental morality and elemental political prudence, Fascism signed its own death warrant. At every point, the nature of Fascism was corrupt, and by its corruption, no less than by the military skill of its opponents, it came to an early end.

GREAT ISSUES SPEAKER: Lewis Mumford, Lecturer in the Library, whose analysis of Fascism is printed here, shown leading a student discussion in the Paul Room of Baker Library. Mr. Mumford, one of the country's best known authors and philosophers, last month gave another Great Issues lecture on World Order.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS LABORATORY: An important part of the Great Issues Course is this Baker Library center, where seniors learn to compare news treatment and to use a great variety of printed information sources.

Mr Mumford's lecture on "The Nature of Fascism" was given before seniors in the Great Issues Course on November 6. It was recorded and is presented here just as it was delivered —as a lecture from notes and not as a written article. Mr. Mumford's lecture was the next to-last one in the section of the course entitled "Modern Man's Political Loyalties." He followed Joseph Barnes of the New York Herald Tribune, who compared Soviet and Western concepts of democracy, and preceded Prof. R. M. Maclver of Columbia University, who lectured on the state and the individual.