Fascism

 

Arnold Beichman

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times. His updated biography, Herman Wouk, the Novelist as Social Historian, has been recently published.

The existence of fascism in the United States is a favorite theme of American political scientists. Some of them even believe it has already happened here. The American Political Science Association September convention Panel 3 announced its theme: “Is It Time to Call It Fascism?” Professor Dvora Yanow of California State University, Hayward, the panel chairman asked the panel’s question:

Is there a theoretical-definitional grounding to make a claim for the present U.S. administration as fascist, and is it useful, critically, to use that language at this point in time?

My answer: First, fascism had its academic theoreticians but in actual fact fascism, as a concept, has no intellectual basis at all nor did its founders even pretend to have any. Hitler’s ravings in Mein Kampf, Giovanni Gentile’s hortatory article in the Italian Encyclopedia, Mussolini’s boastful balcony speeches, all of these can be described, in the words of Roger Scruton, as “an amalgam of disparate conceptions.” It is about this “amalgam” that Professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr. has written:

Anyone who reads many studies of fascism as a multinational problem cannot but be struck by the frequency with which writers who begin by assuming they are dealing with a unitary phenomenon end up with several more-or-less discrete sub-categories. Regardless of what criteria are applied, it seems very difficult to keep fascism from fragmenting.

In spite of this, there has been a general reluctance to consider what must be regarded as a definite possibility: namely, that fascism as a generic concept has no validity and is without value for serious analytical purposes. . . . The generic term fascism is in origin neither analytical nor descriptive.

The Russian extremist politician, Vladimir Z. Zhirinovsky (whatever happened to him?) was called a “fascist” but as Professor James Gregor wrote: “In what sense Zhirinovsky is a fascist is difficult to say with any intellectual conviction.”

Yet “Fascism” still has meaning in democratic societies as can be seen by the fracas a few years ago over Austria’s Jorg Haidar. Labeling somebody you don’t like a “fascist” is still a popular polemical sport: Call someone a Communist and proof is demanded and even when proof is supplied there is the risk that you will be called a red-baiter; call someone a fascist, that’s enough to convict. In the lexicon of the Left, there is nothing lower than a “red-baiter” but there is no such person as a “fascist-baiter.” We’ve all heard about “Communist hysteria,” especially during the Joe McCarthy years, but there is no such phenomenon as “Fascist hysteria.” The name-calling got a little ridiculous when during the 1969 Sino-Soviet split, the Kremlin and Beijing called each other fascist.

Having combed their literature, Professor Gregor has shown beyond a shadow of doubt the affinities, too long ignored, between fascism and Marxism-Leninism. (It was Don Luigi Sturzo who provided the reductio ad absurdum: fascism was black Communism and Communism was red fascism.) Richard Pipes has written that “Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism.” Recalling that Mussolini began his political career as a distinguished Italian socialist, Professor Gregor writes:

Fascism’s most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy’s most radical “subversives”--the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism.

Even Nikolai Bukharin, the leading Soviet ideologist whom Stalin purged, began to have misgivings about the Revolution and began to allude to the fascist features of the emerging system. Says Professor Gregor:

By the early 1930s, the “convergence” of fascism and Stalinism struck Marxists and non-Marxists alike. . . . By the mid 1930s, even Trotsky could insist that “Stalinism and fascism, in spite of deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena . . .”

Fascist theoreticians pointed out that the organization of Soviet society, with its inculcation of an ethic of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded in form, to the requirements of fascist doctrine.

Left liberals have never dared face the fact that Marxism-Leninism and fascism, Lenin and Mussolini had a common origin.     *

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves.” --D. H. Lawrence