Fascism is not dead. The revelations now coming out of Iraq
about Baathist atrocities lend this observation particular point; Saddam Hussein
was able to successfully imitate Hitler for three decades. Baathists
using similar methods still run Syria, and elsewhere in the Islamic
world there are militarist/authoritarian tendencies that run
uncomfortably close to fascism.
Recent events — including the fall of Saddam Hussein's
regime and Glenn Reynolds blogging on Pio Moa's The Myths of the
Civil War have inspired me to dust off some research and
writing I did a while back on the history of fascism. Some of the
following essay is about the Spanish Civil War annd Francisco Franco,
but much of it is about the history and structure of fascism.
Pio Moa's thesis is that the Spanish Civil War was not a usurping
revolt against a functioning government, but a belated attempt to
restore order to a country that had already collapsed into violent chaos
five years before the Fascists landed in 1936.
I've studied the history of the Spanish Civil War enough to know
that Moa's contrarian interpretation is not obviously crazy. I had an
unusual angle; I'm an anarchist, and wanted to grasp the ideas and
role of the Spanish anarchist communes. My conclusions were not
pleasant. In short, there were no good guys in
the Spanish Civil War.
First, the non-anarchist Left in Spain really was pretty
completely Stalin's creature. The volunteers of the International
Brigade were (in Lenin's timeless phrase) useful idiots, an exact
analogue of the foreign Arabs who fought on in Baghdad after Iraqi
resistance collapsed (and were despised for it by the Iraqis). They
deserve neither our pity nor our respect. Insofar as Moa's thesis is
that most scholarship about the war is severly distorted by a desire
to make heroes out of these idiots, he is correct.
Second, the Spanish anarchists were by and large an
exceedingly nasty bunch, all resentment and
nihilism with no idea how to rebuild after destroying. Wiping them
out (via his Communist proxies) may have been one of Stalin's few good
deeds.
Third, the Fascists were a pretty nasty bunch too. But, on the whole,
probably not as nasty as their opponents. Perceptions of them tend to
be distorted by the casual equation of Fascist with Nazi — but
this is not appropriate. Spanish Fascism was unlike Communism or
Italian and German Fascism in that it was genuinely a conservative
movement, rather than a attempt to reinvent society in the image of a
revolutionary doctrine about the perfected State.
Historians and political scientists use the terms "fascist" and
"fascism" quite precisely, for a group of political movements that
were active between about 1890 and about 1975. The original and
prototypical example was Italian fascism, the best-known and most
virulent strain was Naziism, and the longest-lasting was the Spanish
nationalist fascism of Francisco Franco. The militarist nationalism
of Japan is often also described as "fascist" .
The shared label reflects the fact that these four ideologies
influenced each other; Naziism began as a German imitation of Italian
fascism, only to remake Italian (and to some extent Spanish) fascism
in its own image during WWII. The militarist Japanese fascists
took their cues from European fascists as well as an indigenous
tradition of absolutism with very similar structural and psychological
features
The shared label also reflects substantially similar theories of
political economics, power, governance, and national purpose. Also
similar histories and symbolisms. Here are some of the commonalities
especially relevant to the all too common abuse of the term.
Fascist political economics is a corrupt form of Leninist socialism.
In fascist theory (as in Communism) the State owns all; in practice,
fascists are willing to co-opt and use big capitalists rather than
immediately killing them.
Fascism mythologizes the professional military, but never trusts it.
(And rightly so; consider the Von Stauffenberg plot...) One of the
signatures of the fascist state is the formation of elite units (the
SA and SS in Germany, the Guardia Civil in Spain, the Republican Guard
and Fedayeen in Iraq) loyal to the fascist party and outside the
military chain of command.
Fascism is not (as the example of Franco's Spain shows)
necessarily aggressive or expansionist per se. In all but one case,
fascist wars were triggered not by ideologically-motivated aggression
but by revanchist nationalism (that is, the nation's claims on areas
lost to the victors of previous wars, or inhabited by members of the
nationality agitating for annexation). No, the one exception was
not Nazi Germany; it was Japan (the rape of
Manchuria). The Nazi wars of aggression and Hussein's grab at Kuwait
were both revanchist in origin.
Fascism is generally born by revolution out of the collapse of
monarchism. Fascism's theory of power is organized around the
`Fuehrerprinzip', the absolute leader regarded as the incarnation of
the national will.
But...and this is a big but...there were important difference
between revolutionary Fascism (the Italo/German/Baathist variety) and the
more reactionary sort native to Spain and Japan.
The Italo/German/Baathist varieties were radical, modernist
ideologies and not (as commonly assumed)
conservative or traditionalist ones; in fact, all three of these
examples faced serious early threats from cultural-conservative
monarchists (or in Baathism's case, from theocrats).
But Japanese and Spanish Fascism were a bit different; they were
actually pro-monarchist, conservative in essence,
aimed at reasserting the power relationships of premodern Spain and
Japan. In fact, Spanish Fascism was mostly about Francisco Franco's
reactionary instincts.
After the fall of the Second Republic in 1931 Francisco Franco
had rather better reason than Hitler ever did to regard the
Communist-inspired left as a mortal threat to his country; a wave of
`revolutionary' expropriations, massacres, and chaos (unlike the
opera-bouffe capitulation of the Italian monarchy or the relatively
bloodless collapse of Germany's Weimar Republic) followed. Obedient
to what remained of central authority, Franco sat out the undeclared
civil war for five years before invading from Morocco with Italian and
German help. His belief that he was acting to restore a pre-1931 order
of which he was the last legitimate respresentative appears to have
been genuine — perhaps even justified.
The declared portion of the Spanish Civil War lasted from 1936 to
1939. It has passed into legend among Western leftists as a heroic
struggle between the Communist-backed Republican government and
Nazi-backed Franco, one that the good guys lost. The truth seems
rather darker; the war was fought by two collections of squabbling,
atrocity-prone factions, each backed by one of the two most evil
totalitarianisms in human history. They intrigued, massacred,
wrecked, and looted fairly indiscriminately until one side collapsed
from exhaustion. Franco was the last man left standing.
Franco had no aspirations to conquer or reinvent the world, or to
found a dynasty. His greatest achievements were the things that didn't
happen. He prevented the Stalinist coup that would certainly
have followed a Republican victory. He then kept Spain out of World
War II against heavy German pressure to join the Axis.
Domestically, Spain could have suffered worse. Spanish Fascism
was quite brutal against its direct political enemies, but never
developed the expansionism or racist doctrines of the Italian or
German model. In fact it had almost no ideology beyond freezing the
power relationships of pre-Republican Spain in place. Thus, there
were no massacres even remotely comparable to Hussein's nerve-gassing
of Kurds and Shi'as, Hitler's Final Solution or Stalin's far bloodier
though less-known liquidation of the kulaks.
Francisco Franco remained a monarchist all his life, and named
the heir to the Spanish throne as his successor. The later `fascist'
regimes of South and Central America resembled the Francoite,
conservative model more than they did the Italo/German/Baathist
revolutionary variety.
One historian put it well. "Hitler was a fascist pretending to
be a conservative. Franco was a conservative pretending to be a
fascist." (One might add that Hussein was not really pretending to be
about anything but the raw will to power; perhaps this is progress, of
a sort.) On those terms Franco was rather successful. If he had died
shortly after WWII, rather than lingering for thirty years while
presiding over an increasingly stultified and backward Spain, he might
even have been remembered as a hero of his country.
As it is, the best that can be said is that (unlike the truly
major tyrants of his day, or Saddam Hussein in ours) Franco was not a
particularly evil man, and was probably less bad for his country than
his opponents would have been.
