They had lost touch, in modern parlance, and so were rejected by the working men of Europe. Worse still, the existing conservative elite, raised to believe they had a right to rule, had no idea how to communicate with the common man. Most of the uneducated masses had no idea how to use Democracy to their advantage, and many rejected it altogether, either through allegiance to Communism or fascism. The advent of universal suffrage after the First World War was key. But in order to take root fascism needs the correct conditions.
There had been precursors, nationalists morphing into authoritarians racialists uniformed thugs seeking to protect their status (he points out the Ku Klux Klan as an interesting early example). Paxton is at pains to point out that fascism did not occur in a vacuum. What might that ragtag gang of disaffected socialists, intellectuals, futurists and First World War veterans have thought had they been confronted with the images of horror which their ideology would produce?
Within 25 years the ideology had wrought the worst suffering the human race had ever seen, or even been able to imagine. Benito Mussolini convened the first meeting of his Fascist Party, with around one hundred followers. Fascism lives on in many forms, like a deadly virus frozen in arctic ice, waiting for the thaw to reanimate.īut what is fascism? Where does it come from? How can we spot it in its early stages? In his study The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert Paxton attempts to draw together the disparate strands of research into what he calls “The major political innovation of the 20th Century, and the source of much of its pain.”ĭeeply concerning, to even a casual observer, is how closely the conditions which enabled the rise of fascism in the 1930s resemble the modern world.įascism was born in a Milanese meeting room on 23rd March, 1919. To label someone a Fascist today has lost all meaning, so often is that insult hurled, but the political ideology of fascism again presents a clear and present danger. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances - every day, in every part of the world.” Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. “It would be so much easier for us,” wrote Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay Eternal Fascism “if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple.
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