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Fascists and National Socialists push many traditional conservative ideas to radical and vulgar extremes, but they do not abandon them. As ‘new’ conservatives they do not want to be taken for mere defenders of the old reactionary elite, and insist endlessly that their movement is dynamic, unique and, above all, modern. Those who write the history of social movements must be careful, however, not to take ideological statements at face value. (Weiss 1967: 9)

Many academics writing about fascist ideology show a marked unwillingness to acknowledge contemporaneous fascist parties and movements. While most academics writing on the subject are united in their identification of fascist parties and movements from the past, for many, their categories and classifications are curiously deficient when analysing the ideology and practice of parties and movements breathing the same air as them. A pattern is identifiable in the academic literature, which has remained relatively stable for the past 50 years: although parties which existed 10 to 20 years ago may have been fascist (or at minimum neo-fascist), any contemporary mass movement is regarded as something different, something new. Fascism always seems to be an ideology and movement of the past. For academics who accept that fascists have continued to exist and march and campaign since 1945, around 10–20 years appears to be the standard length of time required to allow for their identification. Thus, in the 1960s, the Union Movement—Oswald Mosley’s successor party to the British Union of Fascists—was considered fascist but John Bean and Andrew Fountaine’s British National Party (BNPa) were not (Cross 1963). By the 1970s, the BNPa—which merged with other parties to form the National Front (NF) in 1967—were considered fascist, but the NF largely were not (Walker 1977).1 And yet, by the 1990s the NF were now considered fascist but the British National Party (BNPb), formed by John Tyndall in 1982 following his departure from the NF, were not. This heuristic blind spot is especially pronounced with political scientists, whose tendency to coin new political categories to describe current political parties has led to the formulation of a wide variety of double-barrelled terms, working up a seemingly endless dance of classification. Indeed, the most recent British National Party (BNPb) were at various points categorized as far right (Cantle 2012; McGowan 2012), extreme right (Eatwell 2004; Ford 2010; Goodwin 2012; Hainsworth 2008)2, radical right (Norris 2005; Sykes 2005), populist radical right (Mudde 2007), extreme right-wing populist (Rydgren 2005), neo-fascist (Ignazi 1997; Messina 2011), neo-populist (Griffin 2011), racial nationalist (Goodwin 2010), and racial populist (Solomos 2013), amongst other labels.

The reason for this diverse categorisation becomes understandable when one considers, first, the nature of the subject under analysis and, second, the methods that tend to be used to arrive at these interpretative conclusions. Even a cursory glance at primary materials produced by fascist parties reveals startling inconsistencies and deep-seated, even endemic, contradictions in what they claim to stand for. Take these examples:

We offer leadership not dictatorship and the only dictatorship under British Union Government will be the will of the people expressed through the Government they have elected. (Mosley, no date circa 1934)

Fascism, in fact, is the only scientific approach to politics and economics to-day; and dictatorship is the only scientific approach to government. (Joyce 1933: 2–3) […] Other countries have been subjected to the plague of democracy and have survived it by the establishment of dictatorships; and it is becoming increasingly evident that our own plague must end in the same way, if we are not to be exterminated. (Joyce 1933: 6)

Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists and Joyce was one of the party’s leading propagandists, and yet they still offer diametrically opposed accounts of the ideology and political aims to which they apparently subscribe. The existence of such contrasting self-descriptions presents us with both analytic and political difficulties. Are fascists committed to dictatorship or not? Are they committed to popular elections or not? Are fascists revolutionary or conservative? Is fascism elitist or populist? Are they all of these things (at different times) and, hence, blow opportunistically in the wind? Or are they, in fact, liars and subscribe continuously, and covertly, to a political programme unbeknownst to the public, to the electorate and even (potentially) to portions of their own parties?

How should we identify fascism, given that virtually no contemporary political party attempting to build a mass movement, or secure power through the ballot box, will self-identify as fascist? The political situation is widely assumed to have shifted following the Second World War. Understandably, the Nazi industrialization of murder has meant that fascism, as a political creed, is forever discredited in the eyes of the majority of people. However, as Billig (1978: 125) points out, analysis of fascist discourse from the inter-war period reveals that fascist movements “encountered a qualitatively similar problem”, encouraging concealment of the true intentions of the party. In the period between 1930 and Hindenburg appointing Hitler Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) tried to appear more moderate; they wanted to be perceived as a political party aimed at achieving power by constitutional means rather than violent direct action. This political goal was reflected, sometimes in subtle and implicit ways, in their propaganda. For example, one line of the song Die Fahne Hoch (“The Flag on High”)—widely known as The Horst Wessel Song—was changed in order to underplay their by now well-established paramilitarism. The line which used to be sung:

Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über Barrikaden

[Soon Hitler's flags will flutter above the barricades]

was now sung as:

Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über alle Straßen

[Soon Hitler's flags will flutter above all streets]

The genocidal intent of Hitler was similarly absent from mass propaganda until 1939 (Herf 2006) and, until the outbreak of war, was not “publicly proclaimed as the ultimate goal of the Nazi programme” (Billig 1978: 125). Cohn (1967: 183) argues that a book published in 1924 by Hitler’s mentor Eckart—entitled Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: a dialogue between Adolf Hitler and myself—was downplayed by the ideologues and propagandists of the NSDAP “precisely because it was too revealing”. Similarly, contrasting the ideas and arguments in Goebbels’ public speeches, private diaries and an interview, Eckhardt (1968) suggested that “one explanation for the difference between the values of the Goebbels’ diaries and his other fascist sources might be that the diaries were not intended for public consumption” (from Billig 1978: 70).

Contradictions remain in both contemporary fascist ideology and between the pronouncements and actions of political extremists—that is, between what they say they stand for, and what they do. As early as 1923, Klara Zetkin argued “If you compare the programme of Italian fascism with its performance, one thing is already apparent today: the complete ideological bankruptcy of the movement. There is the most blatant contradiction between what fascism has promised and what it actually delivers to the masses” (p.108). Some of these contradictions are the product of attempting to appeal to different audiences, and are therefore similar in kind (but, perhaps, not degree) to the forms of chicanery observable in modern political communications from across the political spectrum. So, for example

Hitler made no mention whatsoever of the Jews in his notorious speech delivered before the Hamburg National Club in February 1926. The sole aim of the Nazi movement, he underscored then, was the ‘total and complete’ annihilation of Marxism. This contrasts with remarks made when speaking before his ‘own’ audience in the Munich beer halls, where almost every speech was replete with brutal attacks on Jews as the ‘masterminds behind financial capital’, ‘polluters of the people’ and adherents of the ‘subversive doctrine of Marxism’. (Kershaw 2008: 54)

Other inconsistencies, ambiguities and contradictions are specific to fascism. The above quote contains an obvious one: that Jews are, apparently, both the ‘masterminds behind financial capital’ and the ‘subversive doctrine of Marxism’. This seeming contradiction is resolved through recourse to a higher order explanation. That is, fascists’ frequent criticism of capitalism using a pseudo-leftist vocabulary, and frequent criticism of Communism using a conservative vocabulary, are reconciled in fascist ideology through an explanation that sees both capitalism and communism as two sides of a single ‘internationalist’ conspiracy.

Other contradictions in fascist discourse are the direct reflection of the deceptions that fascists need to perform, in order to appeal to a mass audience. Fascism is inherently and inescapably inegalitarian. This inegalitarianism is marked in two major ways: first, fascism seeks to deny and, in its regime form, reverse the small progressive victories that have helped ameliorate the structural violence that capitalism heaps onto workers. These include the destruction of working class organisations and removing legal constraints on unbridled economic exploitation. These basic facts of fascist economics (which I discuss in more detail below) mean that fascist discourse must conceal the ways it encodes the economic interests of the minority, in order to entrench the exploitation of the majority. Even the liberal historian Roger Griffin acknowledges that Marxist approaches to the analysis of fascism have demonstrated “empirically how any apparent victory of […] fascism can only be won at the cost of systematically deceiving the popular masses about the true nature of its rule” (1998: 5). This leads on to the second way that fascism enshrines and enacts inegalitarian politics: “fascist movements use ideology deliberately to manipulate and divert the frustrations and anxieties of the mass following away from their objective source […whether through] an emphasis on essentially irrational concepts such as authority, obedience, honour, duty, the fatherland or race […or] emphasis on the hidden enemies who have sinister designs on society and who threaten the longed-for sense of community” (Kitchen 1976: 86). As well as embracing, inter alia, xenophobia, racism and conspiracy theories, this fundamentally deceitful and manipulative mode of political communications indexes the hierarchical and elitist distinctions between groups of people inherent in fascist political structuration. Specifically: the leader(s) is/are wise and knowledgeable; the party and movement exist to service the vision of the leader(s); and the general population is to be managed—ideally kept ignorant and misled regarding their true interests and opponents, but terrorised, imprisoned and even killed should obedience not be achieved.