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The Imperial Origins of Fascism: Colonialism, Conservationism, and Eugenics

The first so-called “national socialist” ever to walk the earth was a Frenchman named Marquis de Morès who spent the 1880s attempting to make a fortune in the cattle industry of the US Badlands. With a sharply pointed mustache that hinted to his status as the most infamous duelist in France, Antoine de Vallombrosa, Marquis de Morès et de Montemaggiore, had a flair for adventure and was moved by the storied Wild West. Thirty miles upstream from his plot lived another adventurer and would-be politician named Theodore Roosevelt, a Progressive who sold his cattle to the Marquis for slaughter, packing, and shipment. The two became friendly and visited each other’s houses. They both believed in eugenics, the perseverance of the white race, and the dominion of white civilization over the world. They both hoped to fit the character of the Wild West, gun-slinging cowboys of the rugged interior, but both faced failing businesses and a brutal climate. Their relationship cooled substantially when Morès tried to prop up his failing meatpacking plant by overcharging Roosevelt for his cattle.40

The Marquis rapidly made himself unpopular in town. As the first rancher to put up barbed wire in the Badlands, the Marquis faced the animosity of local cowboys. When he responded by ambushing three drunken cowboys, fatally shooting one Riley Luffsey, the Marquis found himself in jail. Incarcerated, Morès wrote to Roosevelt, blaming him and challenging him to a duel. Roosevelt responded, “I am not your enemy; if I were you would know it, for I would be an open one[.]”41 Not long after their falling out came the brutal winter of 1886–1887, after which both the Marquis and Roosevelt abandoned their respective projects. The latter won appointment to the Civil Services Commission after campaigning for Benjamin Harrison in 1888, and just over five years later, won the election for the police commissioner of New York City. The Marquis returned to France in time to participate in the anti-Semitic riots of the Dreyfus Affair, equipping a gang of “butcher boys” from Paris with cowboy hats and boots and rallying them to the chant of Mort aux Juifs! (“Death to the Jews!”). It must have been a ghastly sight during a period credited for prefiguring the fascism that would emerge in Italy within a couple decades.

Back in the big cities of the United States, ideas of national socialism flowed through intellectual and political circles—particularly through the publication of articles written by and about Morès’s friend Maurice Barrès. Coining the term “national socialism” in 1898 to define an ideology that incorporated the working class into national solidarity, Barrès spread his ideas through political campaigns, French periodicals, and US journals like Scribners and the Atlantic. His work appeared uncontroversial alongside ecology, the spirit, athletics, and the ever-present reality of business, science, and industry. Indeed, this life of vigorous exercise, adventure, and even mysticism would characterize Roosevelt as he rose through the ranks to become president of the United States. Carried out by conservationist Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s philosophy of outdoors recreation intertwined inextricably with his imperialist sense of the supremacy of the white race. The conquest of the West and the Pacific marked a crucial turn in the spread of the white race, the perfection of which became a social responsibility, as well as a science. Roosevelt wrote to a prominent eugenicist named Charles Davenport that “society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding.”42 Whether or not his betters would force the price of his stock down and then sell the steaks dear was, perhaps, a different question for the failed rancher of the Badlands.

Roosevelt’s friend and fellow conservationist-cum-eugenicist Madison Grant would write the important book The Passing of the Great Race not about the hundred million Natives slaughtered in the centuries-long genocide that paved the way for the “conservationist ethic” of pure, unpeopled wilderness, but rather about the “racial suicide” of the noble classes by their acceptance of immigrants and “sub-species.” Addressing his subject with the gravity of scientific objectivity, Grant declared that those seeking “social uplift” do not respond to the realities of “racial limits.” Inferior classes reject the principle of heredity, because they have not inherited noble qualities, while the nationalism of the Global South merely represents the revolt of the “servile classes rising up against the master race”: “[I]f the valuable elements in the Nordic race mix with inferior strains or die out through race suicide, then the citadel of civilization will fall for mere lack of defenders.”43 In time, Adolf Hitler would write to Grant, commending the author for what he called his “bible.”

Later, when Hitler’s armies invaded Poland and then Russia, the Führer would impose on his generals to follow a battle strategy gleaned from the pages of Karl May’s Wild West stories that thrilled him as a child, along with tales of the Boer Wars.44 For Hitler, the conquest of Slavic lands represented the same kind of internal colonization as Manifest Destiny. His desire to create “Lebensraum,” derived from a muddled understanding of geopolitical large spaces (Grossraum) theory and biological racism, presented the Germanic peoples as a colonizing force. Poland and Ukraine were his frontier, Russia his Wild West. As the Waffen-SS systematically exterminated Poles, Slavs, and Jews, German farmers would accompany the push east, effectively colonizing Eastern soil and, in time, transforming the racial and territorial composition into a suitable terrain for the “master race.”

The eugenic concerns that motivated Nazis toward the designation of Jews and “inferior races” as “life unworthy of being lived” were nested in the same framework of homo sacer used to justify the United States’ westward expansion.45 Representing “bare life,” a “sacred man” excluded from the political body who can be killed with impunity, the notion of homo sacer comes from esoteric Roman law, but its modern use originated in a Supreme Court judicial decision. Specifically, the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion formally allowed white settlers to kill those described as “Indians” without being charged of murder.46 Massacres of villages were the norm during the Indian Wars, as was the wholesale displacement of entire tribes to make way for white settlement. Other European colonial efforts created concentration camps in Cuba and in South Africa, which certainly informed later Nazi versions. The notorious paramilitary Freikorps leaders Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck and Hermann Ehrhardt personified a lineage of German patriotic fighters from the German colonial genocide of the Hereros in what is now called Namibia (a virtual obliteration of an entire ethnic group, as many as 100,000 people) to World War I and on to the paramilitary struggles connected to the Nazis’ Brownshirts.47

Italian Fascism was perhaps even more directly linked to the colonization of Africa. Fascists insisted that the conquest of Libya would empower the working class, strengthening the nation in ways socialism could only dream of. Ethiopia became the next target for Fascist conquest—a merciless onslaught that included the use of gas against civilians. Hence, historically speaking, fascism is not derogation from imperialism, but a deepening of it—perhaps even a force majeure, a consequence of the momentum of centuries of crusades, colonialism, and imperialism through which Europe began to colonize itself.

Ecology and the Organic State

Certain forms of agrarian populism and early environmentalism became crucial milieus for the beginnings of a fascist synthesis. The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel, who combined Darwinism and nationalism under the rubric of the supremacy of the “Nordic race”: “[C]ivilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life,” and humanity is only a miniscule part of a huge, interconnected, cosmic web.48 With a pronounced pessimism about the future of humanity on earth, philosopher Ludwig Klages’s essay “Man and Earth” bequeathed the idea of “biocentrism” to the early ecological movement. His theory “anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement…the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature.”49 Much of this destruction, however, was supposedly wrought by Jews through rationalism, urbanization, spiritual oppression, and consumerism.

Biocentrism’s sense of interconnectedness suborned human rights to a quasi-mystical natural whole, which fit well with the “race doctrine” of reactionaries like Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who believed that “there are no human rights, any more than there are rights of the armadillo…. The idea of equal rights is fiction. Nothing exists but forces.”50 Such social Darwinist theories of the nation as natural and biological, as well as romantic and antihumanist, would further inform what became known as the “organic theory of the state,” wherein each and every individual forms a cell in the state’s body and conformity produces health in body as well as state. It was this idea of the nation as an organic totality that would provide the basic theoretical foundation for Nazism.

Organic statism emerged in the influential writings of Ernst Moritz Arndt, who wrote in On the Care and Conservation of Forests, “When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important—shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity.”51 Arndt’s student, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, brought the nationalism within Arndt’s position to a xenophobic pitch: “We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.”52 These ultranationalist theories of blood and soil (Blut und Boden) also made sense to imperialists like Ernst Blüher, a major influence on the later Freikorps, who adored the “conquerors and organizers” in Africa, identifying nature as a system of predator and prey, strong and weak, masculine and feminine, and who saw culture as founded solely on “male society.”53

Even today, as we will see, ecology does not stand entirely on the left. Just as when it was established in the nineteenth century, ecology, like völkisch ultranationalism, is adopted by idealistic youths of left and right persuasions, and does not manifest any specific national socialist doctrine in itself. Ideas of paganism also spread during the lead-up to the fascist synthesis, as rejections of Judeo-Christian logic spread to new incarnations of Norse mythology and interpretive systems of ancient runes said to hold mythopoetic qualities arising from blood and soil. Of course, the pagan, occult, and spiritualist movements did not produce fascism, but when fused with a völkisch, back-to-the-peasant nationalism, they did help construct the belief that Judeo-Christian ethics had corrupted what was essentially European, which could return through the careful production of a new Aryan superman. By the same token, current ecological principles are taken up by fascists who seek to identify migrants as “invasive species.”

As the ecological, spiritual, and utopian currents fused through ultranationalism into a dangerous synthesis, pan-­German regionalism emerged through the ideology of viciously anti-­Semitic Austrian ideologue Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who used student fraternity associations and traditional fencing clubs as the main vehicles for promoting a unification of Austria and Germany under one ethnostate.54 In the cities, Schönerer’s position was embraced by such leading politicians as Karl Lueger, a fierce anti-Semite who would become mayor of Vienna, responsible for conservative, though semi-socialist, policies that modernized the city and served as an early model for Hitler.

Nationalism and Socialism, Collectivism and Individualism

Although fascism is typically identified with collectivism, individualism also historically held an influential role in its germination. In his well-known work, The Ego and Its Own, Max Stirner expresses a deeply held racist view of world history in which the white individual acts as the apotheosis of all human evolution. The evolutionary mission of the white man for Stirner must develop through “two Caucasian ages,” requiring him to first “work out and work off our innate negroidity” and then inner “Mongoloidity (Chineseness), which must likewise be terribly made an end of.”55 The transcendence of the individual to the world spirit has only been realized through the evolution of the human history from Asia to Europe, Stirner insists. “No, my good old sir, nothing of equality. We only want to count for what we are worth, and, if you are worth more, you shall count for more right along. We only want to be worth our price, and think to show ourselves worth the price that you will pay.”56

Because he believed that the state issued a kind of equality that levels all distinction to the lowest common denominator, Stirner would proclaim, “I do not want the liberty of men, nor their equality; I want only my power over them, I want to make them my property, i.e. material for enjoyment. And, if I do not succeed in that, well, then I call even the power over life and death, which Church and State reserved to themselves—mine.”57 Stirner’s self-liberation would come at the expense of Jews, whose religion he saw as tainted and based on an attempt to haggle and smuggle one’s way into heaven.58

Although he died in middle age, Stirner became a relatively popular figure among intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, including the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas about the “superman” remain controversial to this day. In his later notebooks from 1899, Nietzsche declares that the superman comes about as a countermovement to the increasingly “economical use of men.” This countermovement is the expression of a “secretion of luxurious surplus” that “brings to light a stronger species, a higher type.”59 For Nietzsche, democratic society exists in a state of decay, or “passive nihilism”—a bad equality that rejects transcendence, bringing about the need for an accelerated “higher species” composed of the “strong and noble” Napoleon type who transforms passivity into activity.60

Such “active nihilism” embodied by the superman would reduce modern society to nothing and build a new world on its ruins, overcoming base legalism with the spirit of action.61 Yet such a movement cannot proceed without enforcing another tyranny, he would admit.62 Even the principles of anarchy and complete freedom become unfree, he insisted, finding their ultimate ends in nihilism as the consequence of “the political and economic way of thinking.”63 Napoleon is, then, the embodiment of two kinds of nihilism, active and passive, the cure and the disease—the superman comes as the result of the lack of a “higher species” in modern society, only to find in alienation a repetition of the same crisis of modernity.

A new political configuration was being born: part individualist, part collectivist; part nationalist, part socialist. The only thing that could hold such disparate ideological positions together was a syncretic, overarching narrative of domination. Effectively, fascism emerged from a mutual enmity against the compromised system of liberal democracy and a final decision to collaborate in its ultimate destruction.

Social Monarchism and the Early Radical Right

Known as the “Nietzsche of France,” the Marquis de Mòres’s friend Maurice Barrès advocated a quasi-spiritual “cult of myself,” which took the shape of the “sentimental Anarchist with a rebel’s brain and a voluptuary’s nerves.”64 Putting the self forward as “an enemy of the laws,” Barrès preached ancestor-worship and faith in la terre et les morts (the soil and the dead).65 He mourned les deracinés, the people uprooted by modern life, and hoped for the creation of a new community based on traditional Amitiés Françaises (French friendships). Such right-wing “anarchism” became fashionable among a set of nobles of the epoch, like the writer Sibylle Riqueti de Mirabeau (writing under the pen name Gyp), who saw their love of tradition failing as “progress” steamed ahead past the fin-de-siècle with great vitality but toward a questionable destiny. Resigning themselves to the perhaps temporary end of monarchy, these reactionaries pursued an occult notion of aristocracy through which their innate nobility would always elevate them above the plebian drives of democracy.

Among the most important contributors to the reactionary milieu was the bushy-bearded and bespectacled figure of Édouard Drumont, whose self-published, two-volume work in 1886, La France juive (Jewish France), went through more than two hundred editions before its last publication in 1941. Drumont despised both capitalism and Marxism as the workings of Jewish overlords who divorced Europeans from their natural order through a despiritualized materialism advocated first by Adam Smith. As Drumont’s tome made the rounds, illustrated editions appeared depicting the leading anti-Semite as a knight fighting off the new Saracens. ­Anti-Semitism took on the character of a new crusade, where the enemy within “made the press the servant of capital, so that it is unable to speak.”66 By liquidating “Jewish France” and returning to France profonde, the spiritual depths of which lay in the souls of forefathers, rural French families would again be able to speak through a mighty and sacred sovereign. However, the sovereign would rule legitimately as a “people’s tribune,” presiding over an orderly state by fulfilling social needs. Such a state could only come to pass through a socialist revolution against the bourgeois conservative and liberal class. Drumont insisted, “Ces vaincus de la Bougeoisie seront bientôt à l’avant-garde de l’armée socialiste” (“The victims of the bourgeoisie will soon be the vanguard of the socialist army”).67 These victims were not mere proletarian slum dwellers, but rather the lower middle class, the small shopkeepers and skilled workers challenged by proletarian advancement and ruined by the early gentrification of imperial city-planning and department stores produced under Emperor Napoleon III’s regime.

Drumont’s ideas would feed into the radical-right, populist politics of Georges Boulanger, a prominent military figure who played a role in the suppression of the Paris Commune, and then received the blessing of its former right-wing participants and supporters—perhaps most notably the former communard Victor Henri Rochefort and his publication L’Intransigeant. The radical right’s support for a socially responsible monarchy or empire grounded in the national community resonated with Catholic Church doctrine, later made explicit in Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, which called for the transformation of capitalist production into a new corporatist system that included the input of labor syndicates under the state’s patronage (and control).

At this turning point, anti-Semitism stood as the “providential” position of reaction that could destroy ideals of human rights and return Europe to the sovereignty of a futuristic ancien régime. So, as establishment anti-Semitic politicians like Lueger and Boulanger proposed ethnocentric social welfare systems for the petite bourgeoisie and the Catholic Church moved to the left to maintain relevance, a popular strain of revolutionary movements and critical liberals edged toward a “new age” led by the “new man” who could recreate old national myths that guided the world toward a future organized by science and nature together.

Left Authoritarianism

The revolutionary tendencies of the nineteenth century grew in tangled patterns out of conflicting interests. From its partial foundations in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s volonté générale to Maximilien Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, revolutionary Jacobinism held its own potential for dictatorship, ritualized political religion, and terror.68 The ensuing development of utopian socialism, most commonly associated with Henri de Saint-Simon, openly professed the need for a kind of natural hierarchy of producers carrying forward the light of scientific management of society, from the Revolution through Napoleon and into the modern era via industrial development and grand projects that would mold France into an “organic nation.” Saint-Simonianism came to influence leading economists in power like Adolphe Blanqui and his supervisor, Finance Minister François Guizot, whose slogan was Enrichissez-vous! Nevertheless, it also influenced revolutionaries like Adolphe’s brother Auguste Blanqui, who forwarded a conspiratorial strategy of insurrectionary communism while maintaining a chauvinist disdain for other nations like Belgium, indicating a path of nationalism that would be taken by some of his followers.69

Auguste Blanqui joined and formed secret societies that proliferated and often collaborated throughout Europe during the early nineteenth century. Another architect of these was Giuseppe Mazzini, an Italian national-liberal who strove to unite Italy under a single republican system.70 Although the chauvinist tendencies of Blanqui and the nationalism of Mazzini would be rejected by revolutionaries like Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin, other problems like anti-Semitism would not.71

New syntheses that mixed agrarian populism, urban workers’ movements, and elite conspiratorialism began to develop among revolutionaries. On the most fundamental level, the grand populist theories of left- and right-wing collectivism, aggregated into nationalism and socialism, met head-on with individualist theories of the vanguard—the conspiratorial elite and the superman. Russian revolutionaries like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergey Nechayev began to fuse Narodnik populism (similar in some respects to the völkisch movement), Blanquism, Bakuninism, and Marxism into a vanguardist doctrine of the seizure of state power through violent acts, including terror and assassination. After Italy’s “War of Unification,” known as the Risorgimento, revolutionary workers’ associations like Bologna’s Fascio Operaio emerged, which fused Bakuninism with Mazzini’s nationalism.72

Three elements would join to create fascism, then: vanguardist revolutionism, the emergent radical right of Lueger and Boulanger, and a more virulent form of reactionary politics aligned with revolution against liberal democracy. Perhaps the earliest iterations of the fusion of revolutionary left and revolutionary right took place in Barrès’s journal La Cocarde, in print from 1894 to 1895. Among the journal’s contributors were revolutionary syndicalists like Eugéne Fournière, Pierre Denis, and Fernand Pelloutier. The intended audience of Barrès’s newspaper was the educated and underemployed: “We know to whom we speak,” Barrès stated. “To the proletariat of bacheliers, to those youths whom society has given a diploma and nothing else, at the risk of turning them into an urban mass of déclassés. We know we are in agreement with their reflections and, in any case, with their instinct, clamoring for the resurrection of their native lands where they might be gainfully employed.”73 Barrès’s La Cocarde appealed to the young “superfluous man,” the overeducated college graduate who remained alienated from the economic system despite his credentials and ambition. This new disenfranchised elite, thinking “beyond” the opposition between left and right, would set the stage for a revolt of the intellectuals that found two new voices emerging from revolutionary syndicalism and ultranationalism: Georges Sorel and Charles Maurras.

Left and Right

Linking the “vitalism” of scientist Henri Bergson to the revolutionary violence in the form of the general strike, Sorel connected ancient national myths to workers’ solidarity, eventually finding an intellectual ally in Maurras, who had also participated in La Cocarde. Sorel wrote that “the defense of French culture is today in the hands of Charles Maurras.”74 A pugnacious anti-Semite and advocate for “national integralism” through his prominent organization Action Française, Maurras developed a syncretic economic plan attuned to monarchist and military leadership, but inclusive of guilds and trade unions subordinated to a corporate structure under national rule and aligned with critical liberalism. The inclusion of syndicalism in the interests of a new totalitarian state unified by national solidarity was enough for Sorel.

This meeting between radical left and right became more pronounced when Sorel’s leading disciple Édouard Berth joined with a cohort of Maurras named Georges Valois. Formerly an anarchist and associate of Pelloutier, Valois shifted toward the social monarchist tendencies identified with Barrès and Maurras. With Berth, he founded the Cercle Proudhon, a reading group chaired by Maurras. This group would continue to recast the Proudhonist tradition as violently antiparliamentary, as opposed to the nominal reading of Proudhon as a progressive in his early years (and even during his later, explicitly anarchist stage, as a believer in the natural progression of the state toward anarchy).75

The Cercle Proudhon acknowledged the democratic and anticlerical side of Proudhon, avoiding his more egalitarian followers like Joseph Déjacque, while effectively transforming his revolutionary aspects into what they described as a “counterrevolutionary” trend in his thought. Their writings included this urgent “Declaration”: “Democracy is the greatest error of the past century. If we want to live, if we want to work, if we want to possess the highest human guarantees for Production and for Culture, if we want to conserve the accumulation of moral, intellectual, and material capital of civilization, it is absolutely necessary to destroy the institutions of democracy.”76

Capitalism breaks down nations, families, societies, and individuals in decadent service to modern life, the Cercle Proudhon insisted. The Cercle’s new state would would take on a kind of municipal virtue through the resurgence of a natural citizen whose membership in the alternative ultranationalist community subverted commercialism and consumerism. In the “Declaration” of their side project, La Cité française, the circle stated that “one must therefore organize society outside the sphere of democratic ideas; one must organize the classes outside democracy, despite democracy, and against it.”77

This radical program of extrastate social organizing was joined to an elitist belief in hierarchical order. As disagreements within the left between revolutionary syndicalists and reformist socialists intensified, the reaction persisted in drawing the former away from the latter and toward a possible revolutionary collaboration against liberalism and parliamentarism. By stacking elitism on top of a class analysis, statism could remain in the form of national solidarity and personal excellence. Thus, the fusion (or confusion) of collectivism, individualism, and mutualism allowed the Cercle to reason that syndicalist direct action, and particularly the general strike, could establish a popular system of national unity through stratified classes conscious of their place within an organic state. Sorel increasingly abandoned class as anything but an abstract concept, while the political consolidation of the left against anti-Semitism was increasingly undermined and replaced by a call to left-right revolution against the Republic.78 While it is debatable as to whether or not Sorel can be considered a protofascist or fascist, he would later express admiration for Mussolini’s party, and his intellectual interventions produced an ideal space for the “fascist creep.”79

In Italy, Sorel was at the same time lauded as an anti-­Marxist syndicalist by elitist thinker Vilfredo Pareto and labeled “an eminent French Marxist” by influential liberal Benedetto Croce.80 As Sorel’s work pushed away from Marx and parliamentary reformism, he delved into a world of vitalism and myth where only revolution could save civilization from collapse, decadence, and the terminal crisis of intellectual optimism. Between 1907 and 1911, the anarchist news­paper La demolizione—edited by an acquaintance of Mussolini’s named Ottavio Dinale, as well as Sorel himself—hosted important discussions between Sorelian revolutionary syndicalists and anarchists, and included the writings of influential futurist poet and painter Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.81 Mussolini would later identify Sorel as “our master,” although speculation exists regarding Mussolini’s actual adherence to national syndicalism.82

Il Duce took on the reputation of a Blanquist or some kind of individualist, and he remained relatively intellectually irrelevant as the synthesis of nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism took place. In his youth, he had translated two works by Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin into Italian, championed the anarchist Haymarket Martyrs, and defended the reputation of Gaetano Bresci, assassin of King Umberto I in 1900. In a valedictory 1904 article on Kropotkin in the Socialist Vanguard, Mussolini would write that after the revolution, “the State—the committee of defense of the interests of the propertied classes—will have no more reason to exist.”83 Believing in the revolution of the workers and the liberation of rural people, Mussolini operated as a radical socialist in Switzerland. He scolded the revolutionary Carlo Tresca for being too moderate when the two were brief roommates, and he also attempted to befriend Leda Rafanelli, all the while maintaining a deep respect for Errico Malatesta.84 His youthful declarations included such statements as “We acknowledge our heresy. We cannot conceive of a patriotic socialism”85 and an incitement to clear the way for “the elemental forces of individuals, because another human reality outside of the individual does not exist! Why should Stirner not make a comeback (tornerebbe d’attualità)?”86 As he increased in notoriety, Mussolini would settle for a syncretic fusion of Nietzsche and Marx, which he sometimes associated with anarchism, but mostly with socialism.

Statements like these seem to illustrate Mussolini’s egoism in relation to the nationalism, militarism, and syndicalism discussed in increasingly important journals like La Lupa and La Voce.87 This growing movement of national syndicalists remained relatively consistent in calling for a devolution of state authority to syndicates, which would be organized according to a meritocracy that some likened to an aristocracy. However, for fear of overthrowing capitalism only to pave the way for something even worse, these deeply compromised syndicalists increasingly maintained that capitalism and market forces would be built upon through a solidarity based on cultural-linguistic nationality rather than class.

One of the most important connections between Sorel and the growing movement of Italian nationalists was Marinetti, with whom he would remain in close contact. Marinetti’s followers supported the “destructive gesture of the anarchists,” while also establishing a fierce, violent order based on revolutionary ethics that could overcome the boredom and incompetence of everyday bourgeois life. Marinetti’s warmongering support for imperialism, his stark misogyny, and his aestheticization of politics were fueled by an energy and dynamism that obscured his lack of theoretical rigor and made him “the point of connection between all the rebels and dissidents who were organizing themselves at that period in order to overthrow the existing order.”88 Thus, fascism arose from the dissident movement of right and left elements fusing aspects of collectivism, individualism, nationalism, and syndicalism into a kind of aestheticized politics of power, elitism, and authority.

The Red Week and Its Fallout

In 1914, Sorel advanced Croce’s slogan, “Socialism is dead,” after declaring class an abstraction.89 Later in the year, the prime minister of Italy Giovanni Giolitti enacted reforms that conceded to some moderate reformist demands of left-leaning syndicalists. Syndicalist leaders refused to relinquish their demands, leading to a general strike and a mass insurrection, but the state cracked down and the “Red Week” was suppressed.90 The outbreak of apparently Sorelian violence brought an instant excitement to the revolutionary syndicalist ideal but left many further disillusioned with what was viewed as either premature measures of anarchists or the selling-out of spontaneous revolution by syndicalist leaders. Following the failed revolution, many syndicalists came to believe that the vital struggle of the proletariat should take a mythic national form against materialism.

For national syndicalists breaking away from the Italian Syndicalist Union, the violence of revolution had to be tested in “national war” before it could be used effectively against the bourgeois state. For Mussolini, these movements were advantageous but somewhat beyond his peculiar brand of socialism and its rural focus.91 At first, Mussolini seemed, as usual, equivocal about whether or not to support the war (or even nationalism). He had risen to the head of leading socialist journal Avanti! more through his charismatic personality than his theoretical acumen. In 1914, Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini formed the Fascio Rivoluzionario d’Azione Internazionalista with other syndicalists seeking to enter the war. The “international” was dropped from their name soon after, and Mussolini rose to the head of the ensuing group, Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria, in January 1915 after his expulsion from the Socialist Party. He was, by the end of the year, writing about “Fascism” (in quotations); it remains important to note, however, that “Fascism” described a movement that Mussolini neither started nor perhaps even led. It was more deeply connected to the ideas and actions of intellectuals, nationalists, and syndicalists discussed above.

The Squadristi Are Born

The cataclysm of World War I transformed the face of Europe. In Italy, Mussolini’s Fascists took credit for the victory and Austria’s subsequent granting of Southern Tyrol to Italy through the Treaty of Versailles (although they argued it was not enough). A triumphant Mussolini called for a “trenchocracy” made up of veterans to sweep out the technocrats and career politicians in order to make way for a strong state created by the “new man”: an antiegoist elitist who represented, nevertheless, the perfect balance between full individual and collective. The true enemy was not necessarily aristocracy anymore, since the trenchocracy could fill their shoes. Instead, the enemy became the “parasitic” rulers and workers who would not fit into the producerist ethos.92

A series of factory occupations and strikes brought on the “two red years” (biennio rosso) of 1919–1920. By this point, the Sorelian influence had died down, and syndicalists professed a more rationalist model. Mussolini in particular called alternately for workers to model themselves on the French Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labor) and the national councils developed by Kurt Eisner’s Bavarian revolution.93 Amidst the revolutionary tumult, Mussolini joined some hundred other revolutionary syndicalists, futurists, and corporatists in founding the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (FIC—Italian Fasci of Combat). The FIC got its strength from a loosely knit group of spontaneously formed paramilitary organizations of anticommunist street fighters called the Squadre d’Azione, or the squadristi—more widely known as Blackshirts. Their expressed purpose was defending the “national community” (businesses and landowners) from “Bolshevik” worker militancy.

The chief organizer of the squadristi was Roberto Farinacci, who had built up his reputation through the early revolutionary syndicalist years as a violent anti-Semite. Those who formed fasci, or networked political organizations, would also form squadristi, and vice versa, rapidly bringing Fascism a fighting force to attack leftists (and even, to a lesser extent, Catholics and nationalists) in the streets and meeting spaces. The squadristi also developed a broad organizational capacity to absorb disenfranchised members of the public, growing with the help and support of veterans and officers, as well as a “grassroots” orientation through which its members elected their own commanders. Structured in this grassroots way, the squadristi became the bane of existence for leftists and intellectuals who disagreed with Fascism. Villages that supported the left were raided, and revenge attacks became justification for an increasing spiral of vigilantism.

On April 15, 1919, less than a month after the founding of the FIC, a mass rally occurred as part of a one-day general strike. Fascist army veterans attacked workers on their way to the rally, leaving three dead and many times that wounded. The mob, led by Marinetti, then advanced on Mussolini’s former journal Avanti!, which was ransacked and set ablaze. The group stole the press’s sign and brought it to Mussolini’s new press, Il Popolo d’Italia, where he greeted them from the balcony and delivered a speech.94

That September, the ultranationalist adventurer and aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio stormed into the Croatian city of Fiume with 2,000 irregular troops, claiming it for Italy. Scholar Ernst Nolte claims, “for Italy’s younger generation, [D’Annunzio] was Nietzsche and Barrès all rolled into one.”95 Although it was rejected by Italy, D’Annunzio’s irredentist, protofascist occupation of Fiume lasted for a year. The radical aesthetic and ideology of D’Annunzio drew in an assortment of revolutionary nationalists, imperialists, and leftists who rebelled against the established leaders of the Socialists, Communists, and Liberals. After he surrendered and returned to Italy, the Fascists lauded D’Annunzio as a hero, and his aesthetics influenced the movement profoundly. He emerged as a possible rival to Mussolini for power in the Fascist movement but decided to submit to the latter’s authority.

The broad, overlapping space that attracted young radicals to D’Annunzio and the squadristi included the rejection of socialism as it existed in party form, faith in individual strength and purpose akin to the “cult of myself,” sacralized politics, misogyny, and the nihilist’s rejection of the modern in exchange for the radical desire for a “new age.” In less than two years, the movement grew from 31 to 834 fasci; from 870 members to nearly 250,000.96 Among the infamous calling cards of the squadristi were their black uniforms, daggers, black flags—sometimes emblazoned with the skull and crossbones or death’s head (teschio)—their rallying songs, like “Me Ne Frego” (“I Don’t Care”), and Farinacci’s torture tactic of choice: forcing subjects to drink castor oil.

While factory occupations raged on, Mussolini declared, “I accept not only workers’ control of factories, but also the social, cooperative, management [of industry]…I want industrial production to rise. If the workers could guarantee this rather than the owners, I should be ready to declare that the former have the right to take the latter’s place.”97 Mussolini’s platitudes included not only workers’ self-management but also republicanism, individualism, and anticlericalism. In one exclamation in 1920, Il Duce raved, “Down with the state in all its species and incarnations. The state of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow. The bourgeois state and the socialist. For those of us, the doomed (morituri) of individualism, through the darkness of the present and the gloom of tomorrow, all that remains is the by-now-absurd, but ever consoling, religion of anarchy!”98 Fascism was described, then, in terms approximating a different kind of nation, overcoming anarchy and the left by perfecting them and leading them toward the fulfillment of humanity’s spiritual mission. What remained was an elite order of veterans whose confidence and will could lead the country into a new age of national renewal. For these elites, anarchism remained presupposed in a spiritual sense, while the requirements of national unity implied a different political movement beyond the contradictions of anarchism and the state, beyond left and right.

Fascism in Power

Due to the behavior of the squadristi during the “two red years,” Mussolini had been unable to gain a credible following in the syndicalist movement. However, in 1921, Edmondo Rossoni left the third largest trade union organization, Unione Italiana del Lavoro, to set up the Confederation of Fascist Trade Unions. In the elections of that year, the Fascists’ undeniable power led to their admission into the National Coalition led by the aging liberal Prime Minister Giolitti, who believed he could contain them.99 Thirty-five Fascist deputies were elected—enough to destroy Giolitti’s government from within, leading to a new government led by Ivanoe Bonomi, who brokered a deal between Fascists, Socialists, and syndicalist leaders. Having to contend with regional squadristi leaders, Mussolini dissolved and reconstituted the squadristi into a national militia, putting Farinacci in charge of the consolidation of the squadristi into a top-down organization.100 Although Jews joined the Fascists in disproportionately high numbers, the movement grew increasingly anti-Semitic under the influences of Farinacci and leading ideologue Giovanni Preziosi.101 Despite claims that Mussolini’s party did not have strongly racist policies in the early years, its founding principles were explicitly imperialist and directed to nationalist chauvinism.

Fascists promised to subsume the revolutionary syndicalism of radical workers under a corporatist system with an overarching leadership council that advocated for a moderately better social wage for the “national community” while repressing autonomous leftist groups and creating an aesthetics of the “new man”—a modern and scientific actor, albeit mythical, powerful, and heroic, fusing politics, society, and economy into a grand, totalitarian project. By 1922, Mussolini’s party was allied with trade unions numbering half a million members. Yet for all its sindacalismo nazionale, Fascism remained largely a movement of the lower middle classes, particularly lawyers and journalists, backed by a large veterans’ movement.

On October 22, 1922, Mussolini’s squadristi executed a show of force, occupying numerous government posts in northern and central Italy while some other 30,000 Blackshirts marched on Rome. Though many abandoned the march as heavy rains fell, the demonstration presented the spectacle of public disorder and evoked the threat of civil war. King Victor Emmanuel III subsequently appointed Mussolini as the new prime minister, and Mussolini created a new government that included Liberals, Democrats, Nationalists, and the Catholic populist party, the Popolari—though Fascists rapidly engineered parliamentary legislation like the Acerbo Law that ushered in a broad Fascist majority. The liberals Croce and Pareto endorsed the regime, while the party utilized its new infrastructure to convert southern Italy into a Fascist area.102 The influx of members into the party created complications, with breakaway factions centralizing their own “original fascism.”103

Mussolini’s party had achieved success but was seriously compromised. After the militia murdered a respected socialist deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, under orders from Mussolini’s closest advisors, antifascist sentiment swept Europe, but the left could not advance because of complicated divisions between communists and socialists.104 The Italian Communist Party’s principle theorist, Antonio Gramsci, avoided joining an antifascist bloc of anarchists, liberals, and socialists, hoping that an armed working class would better fend off fascist squadristi without liberal or socialist leadership. Meanwhile, other important liberals and nationalists continued to support the Fascist regime.

In 1924, the Comintern released a statement that the era of capitalism in decay caused all noncommunist politics to become “more or less fascist.”105 This disastrous analysis brushed aside fascism’s autonomous character and enabled its further creep by polarizing the entire political field. By the end of 1926, the Fascists had moved more deeply toward totalitarian dictatorship, banning political opposition, censoring dissenting press, incorporating a cultural regime in strict conformity to the political line, and enfranchising a population policy based on what deputy Gaetano Zingali called the “famous demographic quintet” of nuptiality, fertility, mortality, emigration, and internal migration.106 Emigration was curbed, internal migration controlled, and the domestic family encouraged as a part of the cultivation of a new society led by the “new man.” Edmondo Rossini’s Confederation of Fascist Trade Unions maintained the eleven recognized trade unions in Italy, all deprived of the legal right to strike.

Fascism’s relation to crown and altar became increasingly conservative. Victor Emmanuel III remained king, and the institution of the monarchy was subsumed under an increasingly dogmatic Fascism that appealed to universality and eternal principles while suppressing dissent from all sides. Deploying his typically ambiguous rhetoric, Mussolini declared, “The fascist state lays full claim to an ethical character: it is Catholic, but it is fascist; even above all, exclusively, essentially fascist.”107 While many fascists were Catholic, others were atheists, and some were occultists who disliked the compromises of the Lateran Accords, repudiating Mussolini as a demagogue.

Fascism had shocked the world by attaining power in less than five years of formal existence and less than ten years of theoretical existence, yet it was hardly the unified doctrine that Mussolini hoped it would become. It achieved power by exploiting the disillusionment of workers with the leadership of the left and gaining the support of leading liberal and conservative figures like Croce and Giovanni Gentile. In particular, while drawing on disenfranchised members of the working class, Mussolini catered to the fears and anxieties of the lower middle classes and factory owners alike, promising protection from worker agitation while dazzling young intellectuals with thrilling rhetoric of anarchy, revolution, and war. To its young supporters, the legacy of the Risorgimento seemed to resound more with the marching boots of the squadristi than with the hollow echo of liberal politics. For Mussolini’s supporters, Fascism offered them the chance of revolution without economic uncertainty, precariousness, and risk, and the ruling classes could hardly disagree. For those in government and behind corporate desks, it seemed wiser to invite the Fascists into the halls of power than suffer full-scale syndicalist revolution, and that is precisely what they did.

Interlude: Demonstration Effect

Groups across the North Atlantic took notice of Fascism’s rapid rise and adopted parts of its ideology hoping for similar success. In 1923, the year after Mussolini took power, General Miguel Primo de Rivera overthrew the government of Spain and established a military dictatorship based on an admiration for Mussolini’s movement, which he likened to a new spirituality. In the United States, industry saw the Fascists as a viable movement against the rights of labor. That year, the Commander of the American Legion told an audience of legionaries, “If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country’s institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy!… Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.”108 The Du Pont fortune helped finance a paramilitary spin-off group from the American Legion called the Black Legion to brutally put down the socialist movement in the United States. With its membership running up to 30,000 people throughout the country, the Black Legion retained ties to the Ku Klux Klan and the American Liberty League, a front group for corporations to lobby for pro-industry goals in the United States and abroad.

Other paramilitary groups like the Austrian Heimwehr began to take fascist form, while new groups sprung up around Europe. In 1925, Sorel’s formerly anarchist collaborator Georges Valois initiated the Faisceau des combattants et producteurs in France, proclaiming that “The intellectual father of fascism is Georges Sorel.… [W]e are the inventors, and we were copied in Italy.”109 Two years later, university professor António de Oliveira Salazar took part in a coup d’état that established a military dictatorship in Portugal in 1926. He became the corporatist minister of finance influenced by Italian Fascism and assumed the office of prime minister six years later. Also in 1926, military leader Józef Piłsudski took power in Poland and established a corporatist nationalist state.

To the north, Finnish students spearheaded the Academic Karelia Society to call for a fascist irredentist movement against Soviet political and cultural influence, while Per Engdahl in Sweden launched the Fascist Struggle Organization. Eastern Europe developed significant fascist movements and influences as well, with Hungary’s powerful military leader Gyula Gömbös allying himself with Mussolini. In 1927, an anti-Semitic professor launched Romania’s notorious Legion of the Archangel Michael, which would grow through the sacralized political violence advocated by its magnetic young leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, and which expressed itself through bizarre self-mutilation and blood-drinking rituals as well as political assassinations and ethnic attacks. The English Labour Party politician Oswald Mosley soon moved to fascism, creating the British Union of Fascists in 1932, and the next year General Miguel’s son José Antonio Primo de Rivera formed the Falange Española. The most important group that adopted fascism after Mussolini’s March on Rome, however, was a small, radical-right populist party in the mostly Catholic, rural region of Bavaria. It was led by an assortment of cranks, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and occultists. Called the German Workers’ Party, or Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, it was later renamed as the German National Socialist Workers’ Party, or Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), nicknamed the “Nazi Party” by its detractors.

Unlike Italy, World War I ended in total loss for Germany. A naval mutiny turned into a revolutionary movement actuated by the proliferation of workers’ councils throughout the country, which overwhelmed the kaiser’s political order and forced him to abdicate. Rather than build horizontal systems of power sharing, the Social Democrats parlayed their influence in the council movement into a new republican government. The inchoate government remained weak, with revolutionary challenges from the newly formed Communist Party of Germany (KPD) led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who rejected a parliamentary government in league with bourgeois liberals. The Social Democrats brokered a deal with paramilitary veterans’ groups, the most important of which was the Freikorps, to stop the communists and secure governmental legitimacy.

In January 1919, the seasoned Freikorps, their helmets emblazoned with the swastika symbol, were deployed by the new government to put down an eleven-day strike and occupation, known as the Spartacist uprising and led by the KPD. Luxemburg and Liebknecht were arrested, interrogated, and brutally murdered. In Bavaria, workers’ councils had solidified into a “Soviet Republic,” which in April 1919 began to expropriate food and apartments for homeless people and turn factories over to the workers. On May 3, though, the Social Democrats sent the German army and Freikorps into Bavaria to topple the leftist experiment, prompting an orgy of paramilitary street violence involving some seven hundred summary executions, including those of communist leader Eugen Leviné and anarchist Gustav Landauer.

For the German Freikorps, World War I had not ended. The struggle against communism and democracy was its logical continuation: first to purge Germany of those leftists and Jews who had “stabbed it in the back” by overthrowing the government at the decisive moment, and then to mount the assault against France once again, returning Germany to her former glory. Led by well-trained Prussian army officers from the landed classes, the Freikorps stashed their weapons after the war and maintained “labor communities” where they would work together according to rank and drive away Polish migrant labor.110 From their rural base, accentuating manly roots in blood and soil, the Freikorps attacked leftists, assassinated leftist leaders, fought the Polish army in border disputes, and maintained an aggressive war against liberal democracy even while supposedly under its command.

A national assembly was called in the wake of brutal counterrevolution, and in the newly created German republic (named after Weimar, where the constitution was framed and signed) the Social Democrats appeared to dominate the political scene, alongside the “crypto-authoritarian” Catholic Zentrumspartei (Center Party), the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (National People’s Party) close to General Paul von Hindenburg, and the Liberal Democrats.111 In the first decade of the twentieth century, the National Liberal Party, once allied with Bismarck, comprised 47 percent of the Pan-­German League, which Nuremberg prosecutor Franz Neumann called “the direct result of Germany’s colonial policy and the direct ideological forerunner of the National Socialist party.”112 Without the empire and now divorced from the nationalists, the Liberals seemed purposeless and impotent. The Catholic Center Party, which held a traditional grudge against both the Nationals and the Liberals for religious repression, had little desire to aid their rivals. The German Social Democrats in a coalition government felt weakened in their charge to bring about socialism, and the Communist Party militated against them in elections and the streets. Meanwhile, right-wing nationalists saw the succession of the Social Democrats as an indication of the tacit success of the November Revolution and the Bolshevization of Germany.

The Conservative Revolution

A plethora of war veterans like Hermann Goering, Erich Ludendorff, and Hermann Ehrhardt emerged as national heroes, and a new, fighting sense of German ultranationalism grew around the writings of “conservative revolutionaries” (also called “neoconservatives”) like Ernst Jünger. With prose evocative of a modern men’s rights activist, Jünger merged his male gaze with both his weapon and the penetration of women: “I plunge my gaze into the eyes of passing women, fleeting and penetrating as a pistol shot, and rejoice when they are forced to smile.”113 In his writings, and the writings of numerous celebrated World War I heroes now participating in the Freikorps, women in general represent oblivion, forgetting, and abandonment. Proletarian women, in particular, are seen as bestial, communist, dirty, insensitive, and threatening to the men of the Freikorps who inspired the Nazi ethos. Worse still is the presentation of Jews as Salome, Jezebel, and Judith. In these narratives, the threat of rape is ever present for innocent women, although the protagonists torture or kill leftist women without sexual interest.114

Jünger’s accounts of the war, The Storms of Steel and The Adventurous Heart, waxed nostalgic about the heroism of the battlefield, the real arena of the “world spirit,” while identifying the decline of civilization and something on the horizon—an oblivion, joined with the feminization of Weimar, that had to be overcome. This ­Zivilisationskritik (critique of civilization) became Jünger’s trademark, along with a rejection of the Enlightenment in favor of something natural, which he called “deeper Enlightenment.” He sought a romanticized “total mobilization” that would capture the spirits and the will of the workers of the nation in a singular industrial effort to bring catastrophe to the modern world and unseat liberal democracy from global power.115

“In times of sickness, of defeat, poisons become medicines,” he wrote in The Adventurous Heart. “All men and things these days are thronging to a magic zero [magischen nullpunkt]. So it happens that the flame of new life comes to be; it happens that the flame delivers new life; it happens that you have a part of the flame of being.”116 The nihilist approach to the collapse of Weimar Germany is also a vision of a future resurgence of the real Germany, which Jünger’s personal secretary Armin Mohler ascribes to the conservative revolutionary: “[T]he essential core does not decay.… Our hope is placed…in what is left over.”117 This nihilism was echoed throughout the ideology of fascism and sought a total destruction of the present reality, a clearing out of the decadent and parasitic elements that corrupted everything, and a regenerative process that would finally produce something both historic and new—a kind of mythopoetic function of ancestral revival in the present moment.118 Such a utopian idea was attached to the order of the new day, produced by a new man, represented by Jünger in later novels by the character of the Anarch, a paragon of human excellence based on Stirner’s philosophy of the self.

The nihilist egoism popular among conservative revolutionaries spoke to a power vacuum that ostensibly existed within the unrepresented imperial ambitions of the Liberals, the disenfranchised traditionalism of the Catholics, the plebiscitary spirit of populism, and the nationalist return to blood and soil. Numerous reactionary political parties, broadly referred to as the “Patriotic Movement,” formed to attempt to fill this gap, often working with conservative revolutionary veterans’ groups and nationalist paramilitary outfits based in rural strongholds and carrying out campaigns against leftists and on the Polish border. Among these was the German Workers Party. In 1919, the army sent a failed artist and former army corporal named Adolf Hitler to keep tabs on the party. He would embrace the party as his own, taking a leadership role and changing the name to the German National Socialist Workers’ Party. Hitler proposed a totalitarian solution to Germany’s woes that Jünger “not only anticipated but also welcomed,” according to his admiring bio­grapher Gerhard Loose.119

Despite Jünger’s triumphal vision, Germany was struck by crisis. The government attempted to dissolve the Freikorps, which responded by marching on Berlin. The putsch attempt was named after a civil servant named Wolfgang Kapp and was joined by Ludendorff, Ehrhardt, and Waldemar Pabst, the man responsible for the killing of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. After the military refused to act against the putsch, the government fled Berlin and called a general strike, which led to the end of the coup attempt. However, the general strike turned into an armed uprising, and particularly militant workers in the industrial Ruhr region formed a Red Army, putting the government there under worker control. Although they had refused to move against the Kapp putsch, the military joined the Freikorps against the Red Army of the Ruhr, killing and torturing hundreds of people. The leftists fought back bravely, declaring “No atrocities, no revenge, no punishment; only love for humanity and justice!” But the uprising of workers’ and soldiers’ councils ended in bloody oppression.120

Ensuing economic destabilization compelled the Weimar government to ask France for a delay in payment of war reparations, but Germany was instead met with a coordinated occupation of the Ruhr by the French and Belgian armies in 1922. The Social Democrats and trade unions responded to the occupation with “passive resistance,” and the French authorities expelled 100,000 unionists and state officials, along with their families.121 The Ruhr crisis and the ensuing political crisis with France created a political opportunity.

Hitler seized on the model of Mussolini’s fascism, its populist pageantry, and the showmanship demonstrated in that year’s March on Rome. On the eve of November 8, 1923, Hitler proclaimed a “national revolution” at a crowded meeting in a beer hall in Munich, leading General Ludendorff and other paramilitary members of the “Patriotic Movement” in an abortive putsch attempt on the government of Bavaria.122 Though the sardonically named “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich failed, his ensuing trial gave Hitler an important public platform to espouse his anti-Semitic beliefs. During his light jail sentence, he dictated his political manifesto, Mein Kampf, to his deputy Rudolf Hess.

The Nazi “Left” and the Völkisch Movement

While Hitler served his time in prison, the Nazi Party faced a temporary ban, and Nazi organizer Gregor Strasser joined with his brother Otto Strasser and ideologue Artur Dinter to produce a renewed völkisch movement. At the same time, the Communist Party and the Social Democrats recognized at last the threat of fascism controlling the streets through paramilitary force and organized to stop them. The descendants of the Red Army of the Ruhr were the Red Front Fighters’ Alliance, or Roter Frontkämpferbundes (RFB). Established in 1924, the year after the Beer Hall Putsch, the RFB provided among the most effective defensive presences against fascist attacks on leftist meetings and marches, as well as an aggressive paramilitary force to break up fascist meetings. The Social Democrats also developed a paramilitary group along similar lines called the Reichsbanner, which grew to around a million members. These antifascist groups would prove difficult obstacles for the maneuvers of the fascist völkisch movement; as in Italy, they shared similar traits with the fascist movement, like ecological considerations, but with Hitler out of the way and with the Nazi Party banned, its ideological solidity faded away. It became easier for other parties to effectively attract people who might otherwise look to the Nazis.

Although the Strasser brothers organized the industrial workers of the north, rather than the agrarian conservatives of the south, their movement advocated neither capitalism nor Marxism, but something else—a society organized “without masters,” in a natur­al hierarchy based on merit and an organic integration of syndicates and corporations bringing the nations of Europe into a new United States of Europe. The imagined “natural hierarchy” took the form of a necessary meritocracy and work ethic, which rejected bureaucratic and administrative “masters” in exchange for solidarity between workers and leaders. Joining ecology and peasant movements to proletarian revolution, the Strassers’ work “flew the black flag of the postmedieval Peasants’ Wars.” Here, they mirrored the 1923 book Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) written by revolutionary conservative Arthur Moeller van den Bruck.123 In Moeller’s book, originally titled The Third Way, the insurgent völkisch ideology manifested the same “Third Force” of spiritual authenticity present within the German Protestant tradition, which stood as the solution for the problems of the modern world.124 Like many other members of the völkisch and “conservative revolutionary” movement that helped foster an amenable environment for the rise of National Socialism, Moeller also called for a Nietzschean superman to unite Germans in a spiritual collective that would overcome political divisions of right and left through a social revolution.

One example of the intellectual milieu in which the left and right could strangely coexist was “National Bolshevism.” After the Russian Civil War, “émigrés from the White Army” moved to Germany, forging an ultranationalist sense of anticommunist unity between the countries. Some sought to unite with the Nazis to “liberate” their homeland. At the same time, some of the former top brass in the White Army adopted a semblance of socialism in the belief that state communism would eventually turn toward nationalism. Nikolai Ustryalov, for example, recognized the positive national contributions of the Bolsheviks and hoped that they would abandon internationalism in favor of a strong nationalist political economy—a kind of “national-bolshevism.”125

In turn, German fascists created the Association for the Study of Russian Planned Economy (ARPLAN), a sort of think tank devoted to understanding the Soviet Five-Year Plan and its possible relevance for Germany. The ARPLAN National Bolshevik group boasted a right-left ideology and network inclusive of communists like Hungarian revolutionary Georg Lukács. It was also joined by Jünger, Ernst Niekisch, and conservative revolutionary Friedrich Hielscher, all of whom envisioned a Eurasian cooperation stretching from Russia’s frigid Pacific coast to the windswept beaches of Portugal. To some in the Soviet Union, their commitment to revolution seemed deeper than the revisionist Social Democrats—in spite of a nationalistic fervor that contrasted with the Communist Party’s avowed internationalism.126 The year after Hitler was incarcerated for the Beer Hall Putsch, several top Bolsheviks initiated a movement toward a kind of völkisch fascism that they thought could transcend politics. Nikolai Bukharin told the Twelfth Congress of the Russian Communist Party that the NSDAP had “inherited Bolshevik political culture exactly as Italian Fascism had done.”127 Later that year, on June 20, Karl Radek advised the Comintern Executive Committee to scout out common ground between the rank and file in Communist and Nazi groups.

However, the National Bolsheviks were in the minority. The Comintern officially declared that fascism represented “the old game of the bourgeois left parties, i.e. it appeals to the proletariat for civil peace…by forming trade unions of industrial and agricultural workers, which it then leads into practical collaboration with the employers’ organizations.”128 Reeling from their failure to carry out a revolution, the KPD organized to confront the rise of fascism through parliamentary means. Yet Trotsky warned the KPD not to take fascism too seriously and to organize instead against the specter of social democratic collaboration with the bourgeoisie.129 If Trotsky’s stance was understandable given the role of the Freikorps, it mistakenly saw fascism as a servant of the ruling class, rather than a uniquely revolutionary and oppositional collaboration between right and left with an astonishing capacity to exploit conditions of despair, anxiety, and disenfranchisement. It was fascism, not social democracy, that represented a new stage of political crisis for the KPD, anarchists, and social democrats alike. Although Trotsky would later amend his analysis to a more reasonable claim that fascism represented a form of populist, cross-class alliance that served the interests of capital but was not beholden to it, the KPD would continue to attempt to exploit the rise of fascism to their ends against the social democrats, rather than organizing to stifle it. Their equivocal estimation of the Nazi threat, along with the Social Democrats’ role in aiding the Freikorps, would sabotage their own militant antifascist campaigns in the streets.

As ideological splits and confusion over how to deal with fascism emerged, the Nazis attempted to build a mass base through other völkisch, national socialist parties like the National Socialist Pan-German Freedom Movement and the National Socialist Freedom Party. At this point, Gregor Strasser and General Ludendorff were elected to local office, and the former was voted into the Reichstag.130 Völkisch nationalism became an ideological crossover point between neoconservatives and fascists involving detailed discussions on the intricacies of national policy, corporatism, and national dictatorship. With the refounding of the Nazi Party in 1925, most of the national socialist part of the völkisch movement abandoned the cultural approach and returned to Hitler’s political leadership.

Rejoining as a “colleague” rather than a “follower” of Hitler, Strasser firmed up his “socialist” doctrine in a draft program for a projected Arbeitsgemeinschaft of the NSDAP (AG), a workers’ movement within the Party. The draft relied on a basic völkisch national socialism, proposing a national dictatorship over a hierarchical corporatist state that catered to the petite bourgeoisie over landless farmers and industrial workers.131 According to the draft’s proposals, Jews who immigrated to Germany after 1919 were to be deported, and all who remained were to be deprived of citizenship. For Germans, the party would break up large landholdings to better the share of small farmers and would set up a fascist-corporative state with corporate bosses embedded in guilds and syndicates that remained beholden to “national solidarity.” It was similar to the “social monarchism” of Drumont and Barrès or Maurras’s “national integralism.” The traditional sovereign had been replaced by the figure of the modern dictator, a man of action and the people, but he remained the sovereign nevertheless.

Hitler Regains Control

For his part, Hitler condemned the völkisch movement as a half-measure. After a conference in Bamberg in which he asserted his leadership, the party was brought into line and a Führer cult was implemented. The Strassers maintained popularity, but membership in their urban, working-class areas was small compared to rural areas like Schleswig-Holstein where Hitler’s Bavarian ­pseudo-conservatism found an important radical base. To ease the transition, Hitler brought Gregor Strasser into the position of second in command and escalated the party’s propaganda onslaught through massive rituals and ceremonies that built a sense of collective emotional unity. The Nazi Party built an electoral strategy ostensibly to gain power but motivated more by a destructive opposition to the Republic itself. In Strasser’s words, “we are pursuing a policy of catastrophe because only catastrophe, that is, the collapse of the liberal system, will clear the way for those new tasks which we National Socialists name…every strike, every governmental crisis, every erosion of state power, every weakening of the System…is good, very good for us, in order to expedite the death of this System.”132

To defend their meetings and control the streets, Joseph Goebbels and Strasser launched a massive propaganda campaign in support of the brutality of the Sturmabteilung (SA), the party’s “Storm Troopers” paramilitary outfit. Organized by World War I veteran Ernst Röhm, who had joined the Nazi Party before Hitler and achieved the status of major power broker within the larger Patriotic Movement, the SA was perhaps the most visible and controversial aspect of the Nazi Party. The Nazis’ militancy was aided in no small part by the German army: their newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, was purchased in part with the financial assistance of the army; key army figures like Ludendorff supported the Nazis; and the army gave the SA arms as volunteer corps. Although the army officially banned Nazis from enlisting and participating in military exercises, the Nazis continued to infiltrate it and played an increasingly important role in the radical-right Patriotic Movement’s rallies. Nevertheless, the Nazis remained a relatively fringe, extremist branch of the radical right, with the army’s main support firmly behind the traditional conservative Hindenburg.

This changed as the Great Depression swept the world in 1929. NSDAP membership rolls swelled with the new unemployed—now some 40 percent of the population. The SA’s working-class rhetoric and camaraderie brought in new recruits, who were also attracted by the numerous “Storm Centers,” bunkhouses for young men without a home. Providing free room and board, Storm Centers also lent recruits a goal, an ideology inspired by strength, and an outlet for their violent sense of indignation and disenfranchisement. To young militants eager to smash somebody’s face or belt out a boisterous song over tall masskrugs of lager, Storm Centers became the sites of an ongoing party atmosphere, not unlike neo-Nazi skinhead “rat holes” that would develop fifty years later. Violence against Jews, socialists, and communists deemed responsible for the financial chaos escalated severely as the SA became a hub for a young generation that had not experienced war but looked up to the war veterans of the Patriotic Movement.133

Rumors swirled around the SA and their leader Röhm—it was widely known that he was gay and stacked the group’s all-male hierarchy with his sexual favorites. Calling himself the Hochverräter, or “high traitor,” Röhm built up a kind of brutal celebrity that Adorno describes as “characterized, above all, by a penchant for ‘tolerated excesses’ of all kinds,” namely demonstrating masculine toughness.134 A stocky, confident man scarred by the war (the bridge of his nose had been blasted off), Röhm struck an imposing figure of martial invincibility and power. To maintain this toughness, introspection wasn’t allowed, and human concern, if it was permitted at all, was held in utter contempt. The inner horror that such repression and humiliation fostered could only be projected onto out-groups—in particular, women, communists, and other people who “couldn’t take it,” and therefore could not be tolerated. To be part of the SA, one need only believe that man and truth found their sacred union in Nazism. Little else was needed because, as Hitler put it, “One can die only for an idea which one does not understand.”

As the Nazi Party’s membership soared, the Social Democrats lost power in the Reichstag, and the new conservative government banned the Communist Party’s Roter Frontkämpferbundes. While members of the RFB continued to fight illegally, establishing the Kampfbund Gegen den Faschismus (Fighting-Alliance Against Fascism) the next year, their role in the antifascist struggle dwindled significantly. After the banning of the RFB, the Social Democrats’ Reichsbanner continued along with the Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund (ISK), which had been created by a Jewish philosopher named Leonard Nelson and included dissidents expelled by the KPD and SPD. Although the ISK received the support of intellectuals like Albert Einstein and remained a bold effort, its relative isolation from the broader institutions of the left hindered its broader antifascist goals, and its awkward mix of libertarian and authoritarian ideas ensured its relegation to the margins.135 Hence, numerous Germans on the heels of the failed Spartacist uprising in 1919 and the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920 engaged in the struggle against fascism following the shock of the Beer Hall Putsch—perhaps enough to produce a viable revolutionary movement. But the conflicts within and between the parties themselves reversed their potential at precisely the moment when the Nazis came to dominate the Patriotic Movement.

Power Struggle

As the financial meltdown persisted, the votes for the Nazi Party jumped from 2.6 to 18.3 percent, but the Communist Party gained votes as well.136 Seen as radicals who would also work with business, the Nazis could gain ground by winning the allegiance of liberal politicians and the networks they brought with them. One of these was Hjalmar Schacht, who resigned as head of the Reichsbank in 1930 and within the year was meeting with Hitler. He would later be described in the Nazi press as “the man who made the reconstruction of the Wehrmacht [German army] economically possible.”137 Other financial interests—Deutsche Bank, Dresdener Bank, Deutsche Kredit Gesellschaft, and the insurance giant, Allianz—invested in the Nazis, while Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of Hitler’s personal secret service, the Schutzstaffel (SS), organized a group of peculiar businessmen into the Circle of Friends of the Economy to promote business support for the Nazi Party. As the Nazis’ financial clout grew, so did their sway with the military.

Otto Strasser opposed this corporate advance and was expelled from the party in 1930 for supporting workers’ strikes. He created a new group called the Union of Revolutionary National Socialists, also called the Black Front and the Freedom Front, to subvert the Hitlerite faction, but the organization stagnated compared to the successes of the Nazi Party. Although infiltrated and inconsequential in its day, the Black Front would go on to become an important facet of the Nazi mystique for those searching for a redeeming history of Nazism after the war. In the meantime, the KPD altered its position on fascism to be increasingly amenable, viewing a Nazi regime as preferable to the Social Democrats. “First Hitler, Then Us!” became their slogan, and they agreed to collaborate with Hitler’s party on certain combined strike efforts and later a vote of no confidence in the government of Franz von Papen. Both the Nazis and the Communists sought an end to Weimar and a revolutionary, new single-party dictatorship based on a mass movement purportedly in the interests of working people. After a dose of Hitler, the KPD believed, the German people would come to their senses. By July 1932, the KPD began to realize their errors and scrambled to create the Antifaschistische Aktion (AFA—Antifascist Action), but it was too little too late.

In the meantime, Gregor Strasser moved to a more moderate position. With Hitler playing the reactionary elites against one another, Strasser’s violently anti-Semitic and racist ultranationalism joined with his contradictory economic ideas to place him in league with other reactionary and neoconservative leaders of the day. He began to call for a kind of “broad national front” (Querfront) to bring conservatives and reactionaries together in a coalition government under the army led by Kurt von Schleicher.138 The Hitler cult had a challenge from the “moderates,” but it would not last long.

Hitler attained power on the basis of collusion with, and manipulation of, other more established reactionary leaders. A combination of electoral success, parliamentary crises, and palm-­greasing brought Hitler to the chancellorship over Germany on January 30, 1933, just over half a year after the creation of AFA, which the Nazis hastened to disband, moving quickly to shut down the Communist Party and shutter the leftist presses. The SA indulged themselves through brutal beatings of prominent politicians and union leaders, and the state police were taken over by an elite squad picked from the SA and Hitler’s SS. According to the testimonies of a Prussian official named Hans Bernd Gisevius and the chief of the German General Staff, Franz Halder, at the Nuremberg trials, a plan was hatched by Goebbels and Goering to set the Reichstag ablaze, blame the communists, and issue a state of emergency.139

Although the story remains one of the most contested narratives in history, the strategy had an earlier theoretical precedent, at least in juridical form, in the work of Carl Schmitt. A prominent advisor to the Catholic Center Party, Schmitt had secretly worked with former conservative chancellor Franz von Papen as a proxy of the Nazi Party to secure their election in the Reichstag. According to Schmitt’s formula, the sovereign exists by suspending the law, putting forward his own arbitrary rule as the condition through which the law can exist. Hence, only in establishing a “state of exception,” wherein the law could be “suspended,” could a sovereign establish the law as such under his own decision.140 If the Reichstag fire was not set by the Nazis, it still enabled their creep to totalitarian power, as the outraged German people looked the other way while the Brownshirts smashed all opposition.

A huge state apparatus of oppression was set into motion as the Nazis began arresting, torturing, and incarcerating anarchists and members of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties, including those with seats in the Reichstag. In their last move before dissolving, the National Party and the Catholic Center granted Hitler dictatorial powers through a piece of legislation called the Enabling Act, voted on in one of Berlin’s opera houses after the Reichstag fire. The Nazis hastily eliminated the autonomy of state governments and placed authority under the central administration. They then hosted a giant parade, proclaiming the slogan “Honor work, respect the worker,” and occupied the trade union offices the next day, confiscating their funds and sending their leaders to dismal concentration camps. Many would never again know freedom.

Within a year, stagnation on the labor front led to cries for a “second revolution” issued from the SA and even Goebbels’s propaganda machine. Department stores were raided, consistent with the Nazi Party’s initial pseudo-anticapitalist platform. Along with Jewish businesses, synagogues were ransacked and destroyed, while the SA’s leadership militated for a new popular army from the SA to replace the old martial class of the Reich. Rumors spread that Röhm was meeting with reactionary politicians Schleicher and Heinrich Brüning, as well as Gregor Strasser, to create a new cabinet under a new chancellor.

According to his own account given to the Reichstag, Hitler held a meeting with Röhm that lasted five hours: “I informed him that I had the impression from countless rumors and numerous declarations of faithful old party members and SA leaders that conscienceless elements were preparing a national Bolshevist action that could bring nothing but untold misfortune to Germany.”141 The Prussian army establishment and Hitler decided that the only way to retain the certainty of his place would be to dispose of the “second revolution.” In the blood purge of June 29–July 2, 1934, also known as the Röhm Purge and the Night of the Long Knives, the SS murdered the leaders of the SA, along with former chancellor Kurt von Schleicher and his wife in their home, Gregor Strasser, former chancellor Franz von Papen’s personal secretary, and scores of other purported collaborators and accomplices, including Röhm himself. Hitler thus secured the army’s support through a bloodbath, slaughtering both the purported “left faction” and the reactionary opposition. Shortly after Hindenburg’s death from old age, the Reichstag gave Hitler the full powers of the presidency.

The rise of fascism was achieved through intrigue, betrayal, and deceit. Ultranationalism and the leader cult were the grounds for manipulation of gullible opposition on the radical right, while Hitler exploited the weakness of moderates and developed convergences with radical elements of the left. Though the outcome of fascism is an overarching, powerful, and centralized state, its rise is typically attained through paramilitary fighting forces equipped to murder and assassinate, to break strikes and meetings, and to generally disenfranchise the organized left (Socialist parties, Communist parties, large unions and syndicates) from their radical base. Resistance was forced underground, and those who continued to struggle did so however they could—through clandestine publishing, sabotage, assisting the flight of refugees, forming secret syndicates and unions, even adhering to “degenerate” styles and music.

Deceit and Angst

Although fascism is generally typified by its “outcomes,” it should instead be seen as a deceptive movement rarely forthright about its destination. People change as power changes them, and one can never know what the promises of one year will lead to in the next. However, as early as 1919, there were clear signs that Hitler fully intended to become a ruthless dictator. His sleight of hand had been to create a large gap between ideology and action, so that the former could attract idealists to the cause, while the latter could dispose of the unfaithful, leaving an apparently limitless horizon of possibilities within the movement. Both Hitler and Mussolini also positioned themselves prominently as people who respected the rules, despite persistently demonstrating their disregard for the law.

Even in the early 1920s, Mussolini characterized his party as one that could cooperate within the parliamentary system, and until 1935, he took a rather light hand in economic interventions, allowing instead a relatively free rein of big corporations. Italian Fascism in power was heavily supported by conservative and liberal elites, and under its rule, taxes on the rich were lowered, wages were cut, infant mortality increased, and food consumption fell. Their original left-wing rhetoric proved ludicrous as they settled into a largely conservative regime based on family, work, and patriotism.142

Meanwhile, from 1934 to 1936, Nazi Germany launched a totalitarian economic plan involving a massive and unwieldy bureaucracy that proved problematic for large industrialists and small businesses alike. Known as Gleichschaltung, which means coordination or consolidation, the system brought different sectors of culture and economy under the political control of the growing Nazi bureaucracy. The model involved sweeping financial reforms and increased production to boost the economy out of the Depression, but the key to Gleichschaltung did not simply lie in the ordering of labor and concentration camps in time and space. It actualized a “bringing into line” of the Volk’s self-presentation and perception. Labor and recreation regimens toughened up men’s bodies and minds for future war, while the imperative of satisfying men and tending to the tasks of motherhood remained a constant pressure on women.143

The psychology of fascism, and particularly Nazism, was and remains one of overwhelming angst from which some kind of collective catharsis might liberate the individual. As a release from the psychology of angst, youth-centered groups and programs became extremely important. Young Germans were sent for an extended time into the countryside to work in the fields and learn the proper völkisch philosophy outside of the classroom. A neurotic emphasis on hygiene also became critical, as the physician took the dominant aesthetic role in society. “Degenerate” or “unclean” art was banned and books were burned. Jewish people faced increasing terror at home and in the workplace, while the German Reich offered the working class the promise of cleaner, modernized factories in which to spend their hours. In 1935, the notorious Nuremberg racial laws were passed.

Jews could no longer be citizens of Nazi Germany, they no longer had rights, but the Nazis’ popularity continued to rise. As the social programs vaunted the völkisch ideals of the German race, a leader cult developed around Hitler, and the Führer was compared to Martin Luther and even the Messiah sent by God.144 Yet the Führer’s grasp on power remained complicated. He had to contend with different levels of autonomy maintained by other Nazi leaders, the party apparatus, the old officialdom of Weimar, the different regional and central hierarchies, the SS, and the Wehrmacht.145

Disunity

The emergence of fascism in Germany was not immediately embraced by Mussolini, because Hitler’s militarism presented serious pragmatic geopolitical, cultural, and political challenges.146 In 1934, shortly after Hitler took power, Italy brought together fascist and parafascist leaders from all over the world to appreciate a “universal fascism” at a conference in Montreux, Switzerland. It completely failed to unite fascists or even provide a basic platform, and the effects of fascist disunity were present almost immediately. When the Nazis threatened the sovereignty of Austrian fascists by assassinating Prime Minister Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrofascists drew closer to Mussolini, and the Spanish Falangists supported the Rome-Vienna axis of “Southern Fascism,” denouncing the machinations of Berlin.147

In Spain, fascist groups competed with one another within the country, alternately identifying themselves with or against fascism depending on the situation, while excommunicating and denouncing other fascist groups as not fascist enough. The leader of the Spanish Falangists, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, rejected the “fascistized right” represented by Calvo Sotelo.148 Months later, the leader of the Spanish National Syndicalists, Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, abandoned an alliance with the Falange (or was expelled), stating that the dissident communist party, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Marxist Unification Workers’ Party), was more fascist than the right wing.149 The Rome-Berlin axis developed finally in 1936, but even after the Anschluss, the unification of Austria with Germany in 1938, seminal members of the Austrian Nazi Party like Othmar Spann were thrown in concentration camps for diverging from the doctrine of Berlin.150

As Italian Fascists set their sights on the South of France, French fascists equivocated in their support, advocating instead a uniquely French form of fascism. Old French national rivalries with Germany were not conducive to positive relations with the Nazis.151 In Italy, the Italian Fascists Roberto Farinacci and Julius Evola criticized Mussolini’s dictatorship for not being fascist enough.152 As fascism spread throughout Europe, territorial problems increased.

Along with Austrofascism, corporatist regimes were founded in Greece, Hungary, and Romania, while similar movements spread to Japan, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil. In some ways, fascism’s success exposed insuperable problems. Whether it was a pan-German Reich or the vision of a new Roman Empire stretching from the French Riviera to Albania, Greater Romania, the Hungarian “Great Carpathian-Danubian Fatherland,” or even Japanese Manchuria, irredentist claims to broader imperial territories acted like bellows to the flame of fascism that was burning wildly out of control. Smaller nations calling for autonomy were engulfed in the grand schemes of inter-European conquest even as fascists declared themselves proponents of organic “national communalism.”153 Such ideological and geographic crises related to nationalism have always undermined international fascist movements from within, as leftist movements struggle to put out the conflagration from the outside.

Corporations Pick Sides

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began. Following the election of the Frente Popular (Popular Front), violence between fascists and antifascists came to a head, culminating in General Franco’s invasion of Spain from Morocco. First to the defense of the republic were the anarchists, who formed militias and fought against an attempted coup in Barcelona that would have spelled a quick end to the war and their longed-for revolution. The anarchist CNT-FAI (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo–Federación Anarquista Ibérica / National Confederation of Labor–Iberian Anarchist Federation) developed powerful military forces alongside the Socialist and Communist parties, and the world watched as the left struggled valiantly against a looming military power that would have been impossible without significant assistance from anti-Semitic and opportunistic financiers and industrialists.154 Much is made of George Orwell’s criticism of totalitarian regimes and his participation in the fight against Franco, but as late as 1939, he maintained that the British Empire was as bad as the Nazis.155 Britain and the United States did not support the Spanish Republican cause against Franco. Instead, large corporations sent aid to fuel the nationalists against the workers’ movements, while the policy of appeasement proved a miserable failure.

Henry Ford became the leading international figure of the movement toward mass industrialism. Touted as the “Mussolini of Industry” by popular radio commentator H. V. Kaltenborn, Ford was called “the superman” by a Spanish newspaper, and the Nation published an article titled “Henry Ford, Man or Superman?”156 The image of Ford as the great superman relied on his strange brand of conservatism, patriotism, and traditionalism matched by pugnacious anti-Semitism.

German observers of the assembly line dubbed it “Fordism,” and his biography, My Life and Work, was a best seller in Berlin.157 Known for paying his workers above the average wage and pioneering the assembly-line factory model based on rigid order and cleanliness, Ford loathed unions. A company should be united like a country, with class collaboration as the driving motor, he believed. The workers should be treated well but should not have autonomous representation against the bosses. They had their own communities, their own stores, and their own newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, in which Ford inveighed from the editorial section against Jewish plots to conquer the world and undermine white, Western civilization. Ford’s extreme anti-Semitic ideas were circulated in numerous propaganda pieces against Jews. One such work, The International Jew, purportedly held a spot on Hitler’s desk.

During the Spanish Civil War, Ford joined US corporations GM, DuPont, Standard Oil, and Texaco to supply the forces of Franco against the Popular Front, which opposed the attempted coup. When German forces swarmed over Austria, the Sudetenland, and Poland from 1938 to 1939, they were transported in Ford- and GM-built vehicles.158 While the Nazis mopped up in Austria, Ford received the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle. According to a US Senate committee, GM contributed “an integral part of the Nazi war efforts,” and “GM’s plants in Germany built thousands of bomber and jet fighter propulsion systems for the Luftwaffe at the same time that its American plants produced aircraft engines for the U.S. Army Air Corps.”159

A director of the Morgan bank Guaranty Trust, Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, received the Order of the Crown of Italy from Mussolini for his financial efforts securing loans. Murphy also helped finance the American Legion and was heavily involved in the American Liberty League. In one of the more incredible stories in US history, General Smedley Butler came before Congress to accuse the commander of the American Legion Department of Connecticut, Gerald MacGuire, of presenting checks from Murphy and other Wall Street financiers in exchange for Butler’s promise to lead a group like the American Legion in a coup against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Butler’s testimony led to the formation of the House of Representatives’ Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities. The committee brought no charges, however, and MacGuire died soon after at the ripe old age of thirty-seven.160

Other upper-echelon businessmen in the United States who invested in and aided fascist governments included future heads of the CIA and State Department, the Dulles brothers, Joseph Kennedy (father of JFK), and Prescott Bush (father of George Bush Sr.), as well as news media mogul, William Randolph Hearst, who publicized Hitler’s “conquest of the hearts and minds of all classes of Germans.”161 In tandem with the Hearst empire, the National Association of Manufacturers’ (NAM) propaganda arm also sang fascism’s praises.

Populist Fascism in the United States

In addition to industrial and financial elites, with their supporters in groups like the American Legion and NAM, a strong populist base of support for fascism also existed in the United States. The Louisiana politician Huey Long drew comparisons to fascism after insisting on redistributing oil profits to his poor white constituency, although he was more of a run-of-the-mill populist. Nevertheless, after Long’s assassination at the hands of the son of one of his numerous enemies, his Share the Wealth campaign was taken over by his associate, Gerald L. K. Smith, and brought into a coalition with fellow anti-Semite Father Charles Coughlin, whose radio audience reached some three million people during the height of the Depression. Smith and Coughlin both openly advocated for Nazi policies and against US intervention in World War II after the invasion of Poland in 1939.162 Another preacher named Reverend Gerald Winrod, nicknamed the “Jayhawk Nazi,” managed 100,000 subscriptions to his newspapers the Defender and the Revealer.163

By far the largest right-wing populist movement, the second assemblage of the Klan, organized around the slogan of “100 percent Americanism,” attracted millions of members before a rapid decline in the late 1920s. In its wake, a large fascist group called the Silver Shirts emerged, led by a mystical protestant named William Dudley Pelley, who believed in levitation, telepathy, and British Israelism, a bizarre faith that claims English people as the true Israelites and Jews as the spawn of Satan. Anti-Semitic preacher William Bell Riley, the instigator of the modern antievolution movement, encouraged his congregation not to “shiver at the sight of a silver shirt.”164

As Hitler’s militarism ramped up, Nazi sympathizers built a mass anti-intervention movement and enlisted aviator Charles Lindbergh as its spokesperson under the banner of “America First.” In 1936, the son of textile magnate William Henry Regnery returned to the US from university in Hitler’s Germany and joined the America First Committee. The next year, a different textile magnate named Wickliffe Draper founded the Pioneer Fund to promote eugenics in tandem with Nazi scientists, while encouraging the repatriation of nonwhites from the US. Between Regnery’s ensuing Regnery Publishing and Draper’s Pioneer Fund, the fabric of 1930s pro-eugenics “race realism” and academic racism would be woven into the later part of the twentieth century.

By the advent of World War II, however, unquestionably the most dominant, explicitly Nazi group in the United States was the German American Bund. In 1937, the American estimated the membership of the Bund at 250,000, noting that this included an unknown number of self-styled storm troopers, made up of “the combined remnants of the Ku Klux Klan, Gold Shirts, Silver Shirts, Black Legion, Silver Battalion, Pan-Aryan Alliance, and similar organizations.”165 These storm troopers wore the uniforms of the German SA and contained sections that trained youths in combat exercises at camp sites purchased by the Bund outside of major cities across the country, while their führer, Fritz Kühn, preached about the spiritual “rebirth of the German people.”166

The Fall of the Reich

Fascism, in this original, global form eventually fell. Yet it did not fall entirely due to external pressures. Even pragmatic policy choices of finance and trade stood in the way of greater fascist unity and led to the beginning of the end of fascism in Europe. The Greek “Third Hellenic Civilization” supported Italy until its leader Ioannis Metaxas realized that arms deals would be better conducted through German industry.167 Metaxas’s favoritism toward Germany contributed to Italian resentment, leading in part to Italy’s invasion of Greece in 1941. When Italy failed to gain the upper hand, the Nazis had to join the fight, bogging the Third Reich down in an intermovement war that forestalled Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which then had to face winter conditions. When the United States finally entered the war in December, the propaganda machine that had supported fascism retooled its rhetoric around anti­communism and pushed forward into the war effort. The policies of Japanese internment, not to mention using the nuclear bomb on civilian targets, would reveal the extent to which US rejection of fascism would not rule out employing similar methods.

The disastrous invasion of the Soviet Union and the entrance of the United States into the war sealed the fate of the Third Reich and the fascist epoch. The German war machine increasingly relied on slave labor to fuel Germany’s industrial productivity, which expanded inexorably as millions perished on the frontlines. The broad support enjoyed by the Nazi Party in 1940 diminished apace. Italy was invaded and its southern portion occupied in 1943. Hitler survived a conspiracy against his life in 1944 that sent the already paranoid dictator into a grotesque spiral of anxiety. As the processes that brought about the genocide of six million Jews and millions of other political dissidents, Slavs, Poles, Roma and Sinti, LGBQTI people, and disabled people were sped along by bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann, the Soviets and Allies converged on Berlin, and the Reich was officially defeated by May 10, 1945, at the cost of some twenty-one million military lives and thirty million civilians.168

Fascism, a political ideology that began through the fusion of left and right, had been an unmitigated disaster. Leftists drawn to the early flames of fascism either converted or were annihilated—usually both. Rightists too, like François de La Rocque of the paramilitary Croix de Feu, who flirted with fascism in the 1930s, often found themselves burned. Even Valois, among the initial producers of fascism, found himself fighting with the Resistance and perished in a concentration camp. Conservative authoritarian dictators like Francisco Franco, António de Oliveira Salazar, and Ion Antonescu used the violence of fascism for their personal ends but eventually had to suppress fascist groups or risk winding up—like Hitler’s enablers—dead. Following the conflagration, the ruin of Europe, embers still burned among the fascist faithful, who hoped to ignite them anew, this time in purer form, uncorrupted and more elitist, violent, and sacrificial than ever. It is to these embers and their devout guardians, defenders of the “spiritual empire,” that we will now turn.

40 History of this can be found in Hermann Hagedorn, Roosevelt in the Bad Lands (Oyster Bay, NY: Roosevelt Memorial Association, 1921).

41 See Theodore Roosevelt, Letters, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), 92.

42 Theodore Roosevelt, Letter to Charles Davenport (New York, January 3, 1913).

43 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race: Or, the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), xxxi.

44 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), 15.

45 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

46 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2014), 224.

47 In 2002, in an unsettling indication of continuity, US Attorney General John Yoo applied the legal identity of homo sacer to Guantánamo detainees citing the 1873 Modoc Indian Prisoners opinion as precedent. Ibid.

48 Ernst Haeckel, quoted in Janet Biehl and Peter Staudenmaier, Ecofascism (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1995), 8. Web edition available at https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/janet-biehl-and-peter-staudenmaier-ecofascism-lessons-from-the-german-experience.

49 Ibid.

50 Georges Vacher de Lapouge, L’Aryen son Role Social (Paris, 1899), 511.

51 Ibid., 6.

52 Ibid.

53 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 1, Women, Floods, Bodies, History, trans. Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 27.

54 Thorpe, Pan-Germanism, 19–21, 154.

55 Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own, trans. David Leopold (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 62.

56 Ibid., 241.

57 Ibid., 281.

58 Ibid., 285; Stirner likely had no idea that the first rule of the Talmud is to trade fairly. He debases Jews even further, declaring that “they cannot discover spirit, which takes no account whatever of things,” Ibid., 23.

59 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. Kate Sturge, ed. Rudiger Bittner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 177.

60 Ibid., 150.

61 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 33.

62 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Judith Norman, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 77.

63 Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 84.

64 Edward Jewitt Wheller, ed., “Maurice Barrès: The New French Immortal,” Index of Current Literature XLII (January–June, 1907): 401.

65 Ibid.

66 Édouard Drumont, quoted in Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 87.

67 Édouard Drumont, La fin d’un monde: etude psychologique et social, ed. Albert Savine (Paris, 1889), 44.

68 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 70.

69 Georges Sorel’s considerations of Blanqui and Proudhon draw some relevant comparisons. See “Materials for a Theory of the Proletariat,” in From Georges Sorel: Essays in Socialism and Philosophy, ed. John L. Stanley, trans. John and Charlotte Stanley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 250–51, and “Critical Essays in Marxism,” Ibid., 161.

70 L. M. Findlay, “Introduction,” in The Communist Manifesto, ed. and trans. L. M. Findlay (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004), 22.

71 For this interesting history, see Robert Graham, We Do Not Fear Anarchy—We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015).

72 Nunzio Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 43, 67.

73 Maurice Barrès, quoted in Judith Surkis, Sexing the Citizen: Morality and Masculinity in France, 1870–1920 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 98.

74 Georges Sorel, “Quelques pretentions juives (fin),” L’Indépendance 3 (June 1, 1912): 336.

75 Maurras and Valois were also inspired by a fusion of critical liberalism and reaction. They therefore drew on a syncretic ideological constellation of Auguste Comte and Frédéric La Play, as well as Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald, Joseph de Maistre, and René de la Tour du Pin. See Samuel Kalman, The Extreme Right in Interwar France: The Faisceau and the Croix de Feu (New York: Routledge, 2008), 64–67; also Maurice Weyembergh, Charles Maurras et la Révolution française (Belgium: Vrin, 1992), 26–28 & 53–54.

76 Quoted in Charles Maurras, L’Action française et la religion catholique (Paris, 1913), 166.

77 Quoted in Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 84.

78 As early as 1932, foundational thinker of political science Michael Freund could publish Georges Sorel, Der revolutionäre Konservatismus (Frankfurt, 1932).

79 “At the present moment, the adventures of Fascism may be the most original social phenomenon in Italy: they seem to me to go far beyond the schemes of politicians.” Georges Sorel, “Letter to Benedetto Croce in 1921,” quoted in Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism, 243.

80 Although some note that Sorel’s relevance among revolutionary syndicalists was relatively slight, in the words of scholar Zeev Sternhell, “The importance of a work, however, cannot be judged solely on an absolute plane; one should also take into account its influence and its political function. Sorel’s writings represented the conceptual space in which the theoreticians of revolutionary syndicalism evolved.” See Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 20. The principle contemporary influence of a young Antonio Labriola, Sorel ironically provided perhaps a leading impetus to Italian Marxism.

81 Ibid., 234–35; also Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Books, 1996), 60.

82 Richard Drake, Apostles and Agitators: Italy’s Marxist Revolutionary Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 117; see also Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism, 153–54.

83 Benito Mussolini, “Tutti vi dicono che sono anarchico. Nulla di più falso,” in Avanguardia Socialista, April 2, 1904.

84 Philip V. Cannistraro, “Mussolini, Sacco–Vanzetti, and the Anarchists: The Transatlantic Context,” The Review of Italian American Studies, eds. Frank M. Sorrentino and Jerome Krase (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2000), 110–11; see also Andrea Pakieser, I Belong Only to Myself: The Life and Writings of Leda Rafanelli (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014); Anatole Dolgoff, Left of the Left: My Memories of Sam Dolgoff (Oakland: AK Press, 2016), 131.

85 Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism, 152.

86 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 35 vols. (Florence, Italy: La Fenice, 1951–1963), 15:194; also see A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), 156. For an analysis of Nietzsche and Stirner, see Stephen B. Whitaker, The Anarchist-Individualist Origins of Italian Fascism (Bern: Peter Lang 2002), 86. One should resist the temptation to make too much of Fascism’s syndicalist or individualist tendencies.

87 The crucial syndicalists were Arturo Labriola, Robert Michels, and Paolo Orano, while the nationalist voice that predominated was Enrico Corradini. La Voce was founded by nationalists Giovanni Papini and raging anti-Semite Giuseppe Prezzolini; see Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 57.

88 Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 236.

89 Georges Sorel, “Materials for a Theory of the Proletariat,” 227; see also Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, 77.

90 Although anarchists like Errico Malatesta sincerely believed in the strike’s potential, the syndicalist leaders Alceste de Ambris and Filippo Corridoni seemed more interested in enhancing the strike’s “psychological value,” escalating the tensions in society in order to build long-term power by exploiting spontaneous popular revolution. See David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1979), 74.

91 Recognizing the differences between the sharecroppers, day laborers, and landowners, in his early years Mussolini organized campaigns for day laborers, promising sharecroppers that their opportunity would come during the “greatest bloodbath of all”—the revolution. Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 5:69; Renzo Felice, Mussolini, vol. 1 (Turin: Einaudi, 1965), 56–57; This experience would pay off in 1919 during the Blackshirt campaign in the Po Valley; see Robert O. Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 60–63.

92 Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 173.

93 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 8:18; also see Franklin Hugh Adler, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906–1934 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 132–33; and Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism, 76–77.

94 Paul O’Brien, Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, the Soldier, the Fascist (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005), 28.

95 Nolte, The Three Faces of Fascism, 149.

96 Alexander J. De Grand, Italian Fascism: Its Origins and Development (Lincoln, NA: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 30.

97 Benito Mussolini, quoted in Weber, Varieties of Fascism, 27.

98 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 14:398.

99 Emilio Gentile, “Fascism in Power: The Totalitarian Experiment,” in Griffin and Feldman, eds., Fascism, 4:21.

100 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 66.

101 Peter Staudenmaier, “Antisemitic Intellectuals in Fascist Italy,” in Comparative Studies for a Global Perspective, vol. 4, Intellectual Antisemitism from a Global Perspective (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2016).

102 Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (New York: Viking Books, 1996), 62–63.

103 Gentile, “Fascism in Power,” 26.

104 Pier Paulo Battistelli and Piero Crociani, Italian Blackshirt, 1935–1945 (Long Island City, NY: Osprey Publishing, 2010), 5–6.

105 See J. Degras, “Comintern Debates over the Dangers Posed by Fascism,” in Griffin and Feldman, eds., Fascism, 2:32–34.

106 Thorpe, Pan-Germanism, 213.

107 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 24:89; see also Emilio Gentile, Contro Cesare: cristianesimo e totalitarismo nell’epoca dei fascismi (Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 2010), 203.

108 John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 206.

109 Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and Fascism, 180.

110 Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2, 19.

111 Payne, A History of Fascism, 164.

112 Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1945 (Chicago: Ivan R Dee, 2009), 206–7.

113 Ernst Jünger, quoted in Theweleit, vol. 2, 38.

114 Ibid., xi, 68.

115 Elliot Neaman, “Ernst Jünger’s Millennium,” in Griffin and Feldman, eds., Fascism, 3:377.

116 Ernst Jünger, Das abenteuerliche Herz. Erste Fassung: Aufzeichnungen bei Tag und Nacht, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 9 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1979), 116-117.

117 These lines are quoted in Armin Mohler’s text on The Conservative Revolution in Deutschland, excerpted in Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 352.

118 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 104.

119 Gerhard Loose, Ernst Jünger (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1974), 40.

120 “Declaration by the Red Ruhr Army, March 20, 1920,” in All Power to the Councils: A Documentary History of the German Revolution, 1918–1920, ed. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012), 268. Emphasis in the text.

121 Walter A. McDougall, France’s Rhineland Policy, 1914–1924: The Last Bid for a Balance of Power in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 269–76.

122 See Harold J. Gordon, Hitler and the Beer Hall Putsch (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), 57–58.

123 Kurt Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika: German Nationalism Since 1945, vol. 1 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967), 109.

124 Mosse, The Fascist Revolution, 8–9.

125 Shenfield, Russian Fascism, 35.

126 Eatwell, Fascism: A History, 125.

127 Nikolai Bukharin, quoted in Payne, A History of Fascism, 126.

128 Comintern, quoted in Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, 56.

129 The KPD’s leading theorist until his expulsion from the party, August Thalheimer, went further to identify fascism as a form of right-wing populism based on the “autonomization of the executive power”—a popular dictatorship akin to Bonapartism that should be opposed in its own right. August Thalheimer, “On Fascism,” in Marxists in Face of Fascism, ed. David Beetham (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1983), 189.

130 Peter Stachura, Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism (New York: Routledge, 2015), 35.

131 Ibid., 47–48.

132 Ibid., 76.

133 Otis C. Mitchell, Hitler’s Stormtroopers and the Attack on the German Republic, 1919–1933 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2008), 123–24.

134 Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, 763.

135 Peter G. J. Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2003), 320.

136 Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, 131.

137 Militaer-Wochenblatt, January 22, 1937. Quoted in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 230.

138 Stachura, Gregor Strasser and the Rise of Nazism, 10 & 95; Kershaw, Hitler, 397.

139 The suspicious nature of the case and the trial is brought out by Benjamin Carter Hett in Burning the Reichstag: An Investigation into the Third Reich’s Enduring Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 144–46. However, Hett’s account is not without contestation among historians. For instance, see Richard J. Evans, “The Conspiracists,” London Review of Books 36, no. 9 (May 8, 2014): 3–9.

140 On this subject, see Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (New York: Verso, 2008).

141 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 193.

142 Emilio Gentile, “The Sacralization of Politics,” in Griffin and Feldman, eds., Fascism, 3:40.

143 Kiran Klaus Patel, Soldiers of Labor: Labor Service in Nazi Germany and New Deal America, 1933–1945, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 224.

144 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, 106.

145 M. Rainer Lepsius, “The Model of Charismatic Leadership,” in Charisma and Fascism, ed. António Costa Pinto, Roger Eatwell, and Stein Ugelvik Larsen (New York: Routledge, 2007), 50.

146 Kershaw, Hitler, 551.

147 Falange Española leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera went as far as to insist that “Hitlerism is not Fascism, it is anti-Fascism, the counterfigure of Fascism. Hitlerism is the consequence of democracy, and a turbulent expression of German Romanticism. Conversely, Mussolini is classicism, with his hierarchies, his following, and, above all, reason.” Quoted in Stanley G. Payne, Fascism in Spain: 1923–1977 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999), 160.

148 Paul Preston, The Politics of Revenge: Fascism and the Military in 20th Century Spain (New York: Routledge, 2005), 24.

149 Payne, Fascism in Spain, 136–39.

150 Janek Wasserman, Black Vienna: The Radical Right in the Red City, 1918–1938 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 105.

151 Robert Soucy, French Fascism: The Second Wave, 1933–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 244.

152 Andreas Umland, “Classification, Julius Evola and the Nature of Dugin’s Ideology,” in Griffin, Loh, and Umland, eds., Fascism Past and Present, West and East, 486.

153 This term was originally conceived by scholar John Breuilly and articulated in Thorpe, Pan-Germanism, 22.

154 According to leftist scholar Daniel Guérin, heavy industry and big banks investing in fixed capital, machines, and raw materials played a large role in sustaining fascism, rather than see their factories turned over to workers; Daniel Guérin, Marxism and Big Business (New York: Pathfinder, 1974); Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, 81.

155 See Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, 86.

156 Edwin Dakin, “Henry Ford, Man or Superman?” Nation, March 26, 1921, 336–41.

157 Reynold M. Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 4.

158 Ford and General Motors built “nearly 90 percent of the armored ‘mule’ 3-ton half-trucks and more than 70 percent of the Reich’s medium and heavy-duty trucks…‘the backbone of the German Army transportation system.’” US Congress, The Industrial Reorganization Act: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, First Session, on S 1167, Part 9 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1974), A-22.

159 Ibid., A-17, A-142.

160 When the committee published its report, it redacted crucial aspects of the testimony, including insinuations that Du Pont would help provide weapons to the coup through its connections with the American Liberty League. Unfortunately, the two histories of this case do not call Butler’s testimony into question and end up sounding like conspiracy theories. See Jules Archer, The Plot to Seize the White House (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2015) and Glen Yeadon, The Nazi Hydra in America (San Diego: Progressive Press, 2008).

161 Quote by William Randolph Hearst, quoted in Clifford Sharp, “How Strong Is Hitler?,” Readers’ Digest 23, no. 137 (1933): 44.

162 Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons, Right-Wing Populism in America (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), 141–46

163 Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 33.

164 William Vance Trollinger, God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 77.

165 Joseph F. Dinneen, “An American Führer Organizes an Army,” American 74, no. 2. (1937): 14–15.

166 Ibid., 157.

167 Mogens Pelt, “The ‘Fourth of August’ Regime in Greece,” in Costa Pinto and Kallis, eds., Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe, 200–214.

168 This estimated number includes China and Japan.