In 1974, Europe's longest surviving authoritarian regime – Antonio de Salazar's Portuguese Estado Novo – the new state – fell to a revolution.
The following year, Spain's General Franco died, and Spanish authoritarianism collapsed with him.
Scholars have debated whether there was anything 'fascist' about these regimes, or whether they were classically, simply, authoritarian. And here's why that question is important today.
In both countries, the myth of the Reconquista was a powerful mobilizing force – a glorious great spiritually inspired history of defending European Christians by expelling the invading Muslim Moors from Europe.
The Reconquista became something more than just a defensive war – it became a myth, a holy war, a spiritual rebirth, from the ashes – which served to inspire further action; the reconquering of the Iberian Peninsula but then further so as to protect and grow Christian influence. It inspired Columbus to sail across the Atlantic. It inspired the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. It began the crusade of European expansion – colonialism.
Like German Fascist volkishness and the Italian Fasist Roman heritage, the Reconquista was a mobilizing mythology – nostalgia plus crisis spurred into a type of rebirth equals a powerful force.
Portugal grew her colonies – Cape Verde, Brazil, India, Africa, a slave trade – but then, slowly over the centuries, Portuese power waned. In 1910 a Republic is established. It's first decades are turbulent and full of economic crises.
Then, a protofascist – Sidonio Pais – takes over in 1917 promising a return to traditional order and values. He's assassinated. In 1926 a military coup leads to another dictatorship – General Oscar Carmona struggles to stabilise the economy and appoints a meek, mild, professor – Doctor Salazar – to help.
Salazar performs an economic miracle, is a propaganda master, and in 1932 becomes head of the government. Fascism is in the air – Mussolini has seen Italy through the worst of the depression; Hitler is the dominant force in German politics; democracies are failing everywhere in Europe. Capitalism is in crisis. War looks increasingly likely.
But Salazar is different. Most argue he was not a fascist. His movement doesn't swell up from the paramilitary street violence we saw in Italy and Germany. It is much more traditionalist, Catholic, conservative, much more elitist. But the similarities with fascism are revealing.
Salazar was seen to be above messy politics. He said 'we seek to restore the comfort of the great certainties. We do not discuss God and virtue; we do not discuss Homeland and it's History; we do not discuss authority and its prestige; we do not discuss family and its morals; we do not discuss the glory of work and its duty.'
These were absolute. There was a totalitarian logic at play. And unlikely traditional conservatives, he did want to mould the masses too, mould them into something both new and something that Portugal had lost. Instilling these things – Deus, Patria, Familia, God, Homeland, Family – into the Portuguese new man.
Robert Paxton writes that 'Dr. Salazar experimented with a "New State" (Estado Novo) fortified with devices borrowed from fascism, including corporatist labor organization, a youth movement (Portuguese Youth, or Mocidade Portuguesa), and a powerful "single party" clad in blue shirts, the Portuguese Legion'.
But here's the interesting distinction. The key difference between fascists and authoritarians is that the fascists are dynamic – they are driven by an engine of rebirth, of populist energy, of expansion or rewriting of either domestic of foreign souls – they seek to change people, boundaries, the earth. They are conservative revolutionaries, seeking a revolution underpinned by the spiritualisation of violence. I think this is what makes the Portuguese case fascinating. Salazar did also seek to expand abroad. Not just in an economic sense, but in a fascistic one too.
The Colonial Act of 1930 talked about Portugal's 'essential historic function in processing, civilising and colonising overseas territories.'
The Reconquista living on. A civilizing mission. An expanding mission.
Historian Alex Fernandes, in his book the Carnation Revolution, writes that 'The colonies are themselves the very raison d'etre of the nation, without which Portugal would lose its soul.'
This gets at something important the popular use of the word fascist today. We throw the term around a lot. But it's meaning is not just authoritarian, not just an antidemocrat. It involves a mission to dynamically reshape souls not just voluntarily, but under the threat of cudgel and jackboot.
But in Portugal something changed.
After Fascists in Italy and Germany fell, and the British Empire disintegrated, after the Civil Rights movement takes off in America, there has been less of an appetite for naked oppression and colonialism on the world stage. Rights became human rights in the popular imagine, applying to all.
In order to survive, Salazar's approach to colonialism had to change. In order to survive, Salazar argued that the Portuguese by their history, culture, and geography, were uniquely suited to a special type of colonialism – mixing, miscegenation, integration – A Greater Portuguese Empire. After the 50s, Salazar turned the colonies from colonies to provinces -a global multiethnic Portuguese community, much in the same way as the British commonwealth. Both were a desperate attempt at rebranding.
Whether this was sincere or not, it points to a major shift in international consciousness. How could we possibility go from rulers and ruled being entirely acceptable, the norm across all of history, to it being almost entirely discredited, in just twenty short years? This is a major historical question.
African and Indian Independence movements led to Portuguese withdrawals. IT was the beginning of the end. Salazar suffered a brain haemorrhage in 68, died in 1970, and the regime collapsed to revolution in 1974.
So, surviving as it did for 36 years, Salazar's regime was much more successful than Hitlers, plus had enduring elements of fascism. But we talk about Hitler all the time, while very few could tell you much about Salazar.
Hitler was in many ways a madman. He was driven totally by ideology, the Fuhrerprincip almost guarantees narcissism, he was indecisive, spontaneous, and often wildly irrational. And we'll get to why this ultimately lost him the war.
But – and this is a huge and worrying but -take the madness out of Hitler and is fascism as discredited as it is today?
Salazar represents something much more insidious; The cautious, pragmatic, rational will to dominate and shape all for the benefit of our group. I think – and I'm going to substantiate this -there is something lurking of fascism in all of us – that we all at times want to dominate to shape, control, expand our sense of self maybe at our worst moments at the expense of others. What we forget is that to dominate is a nuanced verb – it doesn't have to mean physically, but to dominate a conversation, a project, to get our point across, to master the situation. That is universal. And the universal is always with us.
The easy assumption is that fascism died in that bunker in Berlin. But not only did it survive, but it did so as a continuous thread. The Italian MSI – a neofascist party – was organised immediately after WWII in 1946. A paramilitary group – the Ordine Nuovo (ON) – of tens of thousands was active in Italy in the decades following the war, leading most notably to a bombing in Milan in 1969 that killed 17 and injured 90.
In the UK, the National Front was the fourth biggest party in the seventies, inspired by Oswold Mosley and specifically neo-fascist.
In the US, the Aryan Nation was caught celebrating Hitler's birthday each year at Lake Idaho, just as at its peak in the 2000s, thousands of skinheads marched in Wunsiedel, Germany in celebration of Hitler's birthday each year.
These sorts of groups are only the most visible spearheads – those who are rare in not minding the social ostracism. But what I'm interested in – is the intellectual threads, the conceptual ghosts, the more subtle and nuanced heritage – those that don't say boo – but say maybe certain parts of fascism weren't as bad as we've been taught.
We are clearly all still haunted by this fascist potential. Fascism, as we looked at last time, is culturally everywhere. We are fascinated by it, by war, by glory and nation.
When history haunts us there is a reason. When history lingers there are causes. Does it mean that fascism's return is a real possibility? Or do the ghosts of fascism simply haunt us to remind us how ghastly they are. The eternal warning of the worst humans can do.
Last time we looked at the narrative of fascism emerging. Today we'll look at fascism in practice, fascism at war, and the memory of fascism asking how all of this still informs – a haunting word – us in the present.
Ghosts of Fascism
The philosophers Jacques Derrida and Mark Fischer talked a lot about hauntology, a concept that sounds strange, unmodern, and difficult to take seriously. However, I've come to be convinced by Tom Whyman's claim that hauntology is 'perhaps the most important, political-philosophical concept we have right now.'
Ghosts of the past, lingering ideas, people, claims, philosophies can still exist in our heads, ghosts that haven't – for some reason - been laid to rest. Why do ghosts hang around?
Hauntology has often been approached from a left-wing position – the idea of lost futures, nostalgias, paths not taken. But It's often forgotten that we are haunted by dreams of the right as much as by spectres of Marx.
Merlin Coverley writes that hauntology highlights 'the political failings of the present by returning to those moments when a different path might have been taken, turning points whose promise remains unfulfilled and which continue to offer us hope for the future.'
We too often forget that the far-right had hopes for the future too, hopes that are still alive.
The right sees the political failings of the present – of democracy and liberalism - and looks back to fascism, monarchy, authoritarianism. It may seem like liberalism beat fascism is every way – whether physically on the battlefield, philosophically in ideas, or culturally in Hollywood. IT may seem like the battle's over, won, dusted. But some cracks in that victory are starting to appear. There are those that want to revise the history of fascism. To say it might still hold promise. That it was distorted. To emphasise the successes and write-off the failures.
I think it's important to remember this – that there are reasons why fascists are in our heads. If you hold a concept of something, if it reoccurs, if it keeps coming up, there are reasons.
Maybe we still don't fully understand that period. Maybe we're still too close to it. History exists on two planes – what happened in the past and what we think about what happened in the past now. Those two planes have a connection that's hard to untangle. The present always effects our view of history. And at least the first draft of history is written by the victors. So as liberalism as a victor begins to falter, the stories it's told us become questionable too – stories on the left and the right.
And I think one of the big takeaways from our deep history of fascism was, not how abnormal the ideology around it was, but how normal it would have all seemed. Fascism can be normalised. And that's what ghosts do too – they try to reintegrate themselves into our lives.
There's a book on the philosopher Rene Girard that has a title that always stays with me – Can We Survive Our Origins?
For Girard, there is a deep-seated logic in human history that has driven us to do things that seem - from our comfy modern armchairs - irrational. That as a species we have continuously scapegoated each other, committed seemingly irrational violence, been driven by spirals of jealously and rivalry.
And I think there are things we too often neglect from our scientific, materialist, logical western frameworks – the power of charisma, order, domination, self-destruction in pursuit of glory. Are these things rational?
We think we have good ideas about democracy, rights, abstract science, technology. But have we neglected to understand more primordial ideas that are latent in us?
The historian Goerge Mosse pointed to what he called idées-forces. That some ideas are not of the intellectual sort – they come from something somatic, bodily, a feeling. Hunger can be an idea. But it's not an intellectual idea. The thrill of violence can be an idea, it can create a mythology. The purpose and clarity of order – an idea too. Jealousy an idea. Nostalgia. Glory.
Is there an authoritarian or a fascist personality, rooted in some corner of our DNA, that threatens to switch-on at any moment? Given the right conditions?
The point I'm trying to get at is this – is fascism eternal? Or at least, a historical expression of an eternal part of human nature? Is it universal? In all of us? Or is it so historicisable so as to be no longer a threat, of its moment, gone forever. Could fascism return today? This is something historians have endlessly debated.
Most historians say it was of its moment – a product of World War One, of the ancien regime, of a reaction to the Enlightenment – all the stuff we looked at in part one.
But the reason I point to hauntology is this. Ghosts haunt us when the causes of them remain. Ghosts are laid to rest when the times change. And so there is a pretty scientific way of analysing this question – what's different and what's the same? Only then can we think more clearly about the future of authoritarianism and fascism.
With fascism, similarities spell risk, differences mark change. If you give good enough reasons why things are difference, the threat is diminished. Ghosts can be laid to rest. We can search for new ghouls that might appear. We all work like this psychologically, predictively, we look for signs that precede events – the bark that precedes the bite, the glint that warns of the icy road, the pain that could be an illness. We look for similarities and differences – we compare what's happening with what we know about what has happened.
And spoiler alert – history moves. Nothing stays exactly the same. It rhymes rather than repeats. Even if you believe in some kind of stable human nature, some things inevitably change over time – technology, culture, philosophy, science.
The key is to sort it all out into a framework – an analytic view of history today. What could still rhyme?
We looked at volkism or ultranationalism, Darwinism or struggle, the heightening of glorification of violence, the paramilitarisation of society through veteran groups, corporate or syndicalist reactions to liberalism. We also looked at idealism, mythology, anti-rationalism and charisma. And material factors like crises in capitalism and anti-Bolshevism.
Fascists in Power
I always think about the root of authoritarian being author. Fascism – and authoritarianism more broadly – draws its legitimacy from the leader having some kind of special qualities. Remember how fascism had its roots in a reaction to the rationalism and materialism of the Enlightenment. We might think today of our reliance on statistics, data, studies, GDP, technocracy – and many of the criticisms of those things. The antidote to them is some kind of human leadership. That might involve willpower, charisma, foresight, intelligence much greater than the ordinary – all of which was represented by the Fuhrerprincip – the idea that Hitler's word wasn't just law, but was above the law.
Paxton writes 'The Führer and the Duce could claim legitimacy neither by election nor conquest. It rested on charisma, a mysterious direct communication with the Volk or razza that needs no mediation by priests or party chieftains. Their charisma resembled media-era celebrity "stardom," raised to a higher power by its say over war and death.'
Hitler designed standards, helped design the sets for great rallies, worked closely with film makers. He knew the power of symmetry and symbols and understood them well through his study of art. This kind of appeal to aestheticism – both in art and uniform and in personality - accounts for so much of the power of anti-rationalism and its heritage. Hitler wasn't just a leader, but a visionary.
To think through the ghosts of fascism then, we have to think about whether this principle was successful anyway. Is it true that one leader can become so correct, so intelligent, so right for a country, that should be the sole author of the direction of a nation, above the law, supreme.
As we're thinking about fascism in general we'll start with Mussolini.
There is little agreement amongst historians on Mussolini – how he ruled, what his real intentions were, how much power he really had, the effect of that power. One historian wrote that 'We do not agree on how bad it was. Nor do we agree on how evil Mussolini was.'
The obvious claim is that a strongman can get things done. But this is a bit of a myth in how fascism worked. It was, remember, a compromise that left the economy in private – and usually very politically powerful – hands.
At first, for example, Mussolini had strong views on government interference. In 1922 he said 'Enough of the railroad state, the postal state, the state as insurance agent. Enough of the state operating at the expense of Italian taxpayers and exhausting the finances of the Italian state.'
Mussolini also had to compromise with the local fascist Ras leaders, plus the Catholic Church. He famously left the King in place. His biographer, Bosworth went as far as describing him as a weak dictator.
The obvious question here then is what are the dictatorial powers that are meant to be effective? The economic thrust of fascism was the idea of a 'third way' to appeal to both the middle-classes and business. That capitalism was ok if it was benefiting the 'national' community.
Both Hitler and Mussolini were to varying degrees at varying times, quite anti-capitalist if capitalists were decadent, greedy, siphoning profits from the good of the German or Italian national community. In Germany in particular this was coded as Jewish Capitalists.
So the purpose of the third way had to be to find a way to direct business without the state taking over business.
The philosophy was corporatism.
Towards the end of the twenties and especially after the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the following depression, Mussolini took a greater hand in the economy.
In 1934, for example, Mussolini passed a law through which 22 different corporations of different sectors were formed – each had councils of employers and workers, as well as government officials. Ultimately though these were top down – regulations, officials, decisions were decided by Mussolini.
However, in practice not much changed. The workers had no real power. The councils had no real role. Big industries were consolidated and rationalised, and the Italian government invested in firms at a rate higher than any country other than the Soviet Union. But it did so in a way that was skewed towards war aims – prioritising rubber, steel, chemicals - we'll return to this.
Corporatism never really happened, despite attempts.
Similarly, in agriculture, Mussolini desired autarky – self-sufficiency - an Italy free from 'the slavery of foreign bread'. This led to tariffs on foreign grain imports, an increase in domestic grain production, but a skewed agricultural economy. Farmers invested in grain but not in crops and animals that Italy was actually better suited for.
In his book Duce: Contradictions of Power, Peter Williamson writes 'The increased tariffs also led to notable increases in the price of grain for Italian consumers, which had a significant impact upon average consumption.'
Mussolini also favoured heavy industry over agriculture. As again everything was geared towards war. Williamson says that 'The policy of autarky had minimal impact on the economy except to starve Italy of raw materials.'
Paxton sums it up like this: 'Radicalizing impulses were not absent from Mussolini's Italy. Torn between periodic urges to reinvigorate the aging Blackshirts and the normalizing drag of conservative fellow travellers, the Fascist regime followed an irregular trajectory. Mussolini had popularized the term "totalitarianism," and he continued to lace his orations with bombastic appeals to action and promises of revolution. In practice, however, he shifted back and forth, unleashing party radicals on occasion when his power position would benefit, but more often reining them in when his rule needed stable conditions and an unchallenged state.'
In the end, the Italian economy grew by 1.5-2.2% over the period, which was the lowest of the major nations, including Japan, Britain, France, the US, the Netherlands, and others. Plus inequality grew, labour in particular struggled, and malnutrition rose.
Williamson summarises damningly like this: 'the pursuit of his political instincts produced generally poorer outcomes compared to other economies in relation to unemployment, productivity growth, income equality, poverty and regional equalities. This was not bad luck, but a consequence of policy choices.'
Ok so Mussolini made bad economic choices. But what about Germany?
To many, Hitler was seen as the great artist, the innovator, the spiritual total guide. After all, he seemed to be riding on a wave of success after success; economic – as German recovered from hyperinflation and the depression – or political in his rejection of the reparation terms of The Versailles Treaty, or later military successes – The Anschluss with Austria, Czechoslovakia, Blitzkrieg swiftly defeating France. He even helped design banners, uniforms, buildings, and the route of the autobahn.– in short, Hitler was seen as inimitable genius.
But how much truth is there in the appraisal of Hitler as genius? Lets look at these successes in turn.
To take an often cited symbolic success to start – the autobahn. Hitler was obsessed with cars. The Nazis put hundreds of thousands to work building motorways. And this type of Keynesian intervention was successful in putting Germans to work and boosting the economy.
But Hitler's role has been overemphasised. These were already existing schemes. The government before the Nazis – Schleicher's – was spending 500m Reichsmarks on a roadbuilding project that was set up by the previous govnermnet. The Nazis can only take credit for increasing the funding to 600m and securing a propaganda victory for the success.
Car ownership in Germany was far behind US and Britain, France, and even Denmark– and the Nazis did improve that, doubling car ownership in a few years.
But as Evans points out 'By 1938, to be sure, Germany's vehicle production was growing faster than that of any other European country, but there was still only one motor vehicle there per forty four inhabitants, compared with one for every nineteen in Britain and France'
And many of the Nazi schemes for rerouting the autobahn along volkish principles or Hitler's suggestion that motorways should have roofs to protect tanks from air raids were economically inefficient.
In fact, this pattern – increasing investment in ideas already in place, having success yes, but then taking more credit than is deserved for that success plus an ignoring of some of their more detrimental spins on the existing policies – is a pattern that repeats.
For example, when the Nazis took power in 1933 the economy recovered, but it was already recovering in 1932 before they took power.
In his book The Third Reich in Power, Richard Evans writes 'The impression that the Nazis were extremely lucky in coming to power when the economy was already starting to recover is strengthened when it is realized that some of their much-trumpeted measures did little more than restore the status quo of the pre-Depression years. In housing, for instance, the numbers of newly built or converted dwellings looked impressive at 310,490 in 1936; but this was still below the figure of 317,682 which had been achieved by the despised Weimar Republic in 1929.'
So in the period between 1933 when they took power and 1939 when they started WWII, there were successes – unemployment came right down and industrial production improved – but it was really only a return to the position they were in before. Plus some of the successes redirected attention away from what was a major failure – the average 'consumer' continued to struggle. Everything in the Nazi economy, as we'll get to, was geared towards war.
Take Hitler's policy of achieving autarky – self-sufficiency – like Italy. After the experience of WWII, being cut off on all sides, food shortages and a Turnip Winter – autarky was seen as absolutely crucial to Germany's success. In fact, it was a major influence in securing Lebensraum in the East, as we looked at last time.
Tariffs were introduced to discourage importing food and to encourage domestic production. But this led to higher costs for consumers and shortages. They were many goods rations even before the war – flour, butter, fruit, and coffee were all restricted.
Evans writes 'On 28 March 1939, the meat counter at the Hertie department store on the Dönhoffplatz in Berlin was opened only to sell registered customers their weekly ration of fat; there was no fresh or frozen meat available at all. Shortages inevitably led to a flourishing black market in scarce foodstuffs.'
'The people', reported a Social Democratic agent in May 1939, 'are suffering a great deal from the shortage of all kinds of foodstuffs and respectable, solid clothing. Still,' he added, 'this has not led to any kind of unrest, apart from queueing in front of shops, which has become a daily occurrence.'
Much of this was because Hitler prioritised preparing for war above all else – as much as possible was directed towards heavy industry. Because of this, huge sacrifices were demanded of the German people. All sorts of saving schemes, government bonds, and loans were used to raise money to finance the coming war. Many went without in return for a promise that the future would be better. And one group, of course, suffered this redirection of funds more than any other – the Jews.
Evans write 'The economic history of the Third Reich is indeed inseparable from the history of the regime's expropriation of the Jews.'
Jewish businesses were plundered. Jewish managers were forced out of their jobs, businesses forced to sell up, expatriates fled at the cost of heavy exit taxes. In 1933, this Jewish exit tax raised a million marks, by 1939 it was bringing in 342 million Reichsmarks.
This points to something important: The Nazi economy was not your average economy – its hard to compare – it was a violence-based economy, a theft-economy, and a corrupt one.
One businessman wrote in 1938: 'As an experienced, honest, and upstanding businessman, I can no longer stand idly by and countenance the way many Aryan businessmen, entrepreneurs and the like are shamelessly attempting to grab up Jewish shops and factories etc. as cheaply as possible and for a ludicrous price. These people are like vultures, swarming down with bleary eyes, their tongues hanging out with greed, to feed upon the Jewish carcass'
Jews were forced to sell their property for rock-bottom prices, Nazi connected party members were granted cheap loans, so the banks benefited too, and money was funnelled into big armament companies who reaped the profits. Jews were of course offered little legal or financial or political help in any of this. The average German did better than the 20s, but still suffered – all of it pursuit of the gamble of a stronger economy built in the east.
That's before we get to corruption.
One estate agent said 'To do business under the Nazis, you had to have a friend in every government office, but it was too dangerous to bribe openly. You had to work it indirectly.'
There was no financial oversight into the dealings of the one-party state. Jobs, contracts, and favours were handed out to loyalists. Communists struggled to find work. And Brownshirts enriched themselves through petty theft of Jewish and Communist homes.
All the senior Nazi figures – Hitler, Goebbels, Goring – became multimillionaires, usually buying up property. Goring's home was renovated at the cost of 15 million marks. A commander like Karl Koch confiscated 200,000 reichsmarks worth of goods and cash from Jews. Even he Nazi youth were at it.
All of this was tilted away from the working class – who yes had more jobs but worked longer hours and whose wages generally suffered – and towards industrial and political leaders. In this sense, fascist economics is the economics of a particular group with a strong ideology led by a leader who is meant to embody the will of the unified nation. However, the nation is imagined in a particular way – cohesive, without anything to make it impure, in a boundless struggle, asked to make sacrifices, anti-communist. It imposes an ideological vision on a nation that is actually much more diverse, fractured, decentralised, and in disagreement than is assumed. And that struggle and sacrifice is made real in the leader's commitment to a war economy.
Fascism as War
I'm a firm believer that ideology structures almost everything. Even those who think they are immune, rational, unbiased are conditioned by the deep history of ideologies. There is no view from nowhere. We all think through the lens of the culture we live in.
For Hitler and Mussolini, that ideology was war. While Mussolini inherited an Empire, were immediately more aggressive.
Some of this in Italy was inspired by protecting and recapturing the so-called lost lands (terre irredente) – ethnic Italians outside of Italy's border.
But Mussolini and the PNF also quickly pacified resistance to Italian rule in Libya in the 20s before launching into a second full scale brutal invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, using chemical weapons, executions and concentration camps.
But Italy was still weak – still called the 'least of the great powers' – and Mussolini had to acquiesce to the demands of Britain and France.
In his book on Mussolini, Peter Williamson puts it like this: 'While the militarisation of the economy generated expansion, which was disproportionately accrued by profits, the Italian economy was never in a sound state of economic preparedness for war, despite it being Mussolini's overriding policy by then. Intervention had been self-defeating: fundamental problems, including the growing public deficit, persisted.'
Mussolini then needed to exercise some patience. But for Hitler, everything was struggle and war.
That means that the German economy was almost immediately a war economy. Hitler wrote "The sword must stand before the plow, and an army before the economy"
In 1933, as he took over Germany, Hitler declared 'The next 5 years in Germany must be devoted to the rearmament of the German people. Every publicly supported job creation scheme must be judged by the criterion of whether it is necessary from the point of view of the rearmament of the German people. This principle must always and everywhere stand in the foreground. Germany's position in the world will be decisively conditioned by the position of Germany's armed forces. Upon this, the position of Germany's economy in the world also depends.'
Of course, much of this had to be hidden in some way. Germany heavy industry was redirected into producing 'agricultural tractors' that could be quickly turned into tanks. 17,000 passenger planes were actually air force bombers.
But Germany was bankrupt. How was it going to afford this remilitarisation? They did so by demanding extraordinary sacrifices from the German people while raising money from secret war bonds that Hitler promised would be replayed and mitigated by the territorial expansion in the East.
All was gambled on a victory in the upcoming war. The lessons of the first world war – Germany being surrounded and starved from all sides – also had to be learned.
Autarky – self-sufficiency – had to be achieved quickly. It was through autarky that the ideology of struggle combined with the idea of volkism.
Like in Italy, the corporatist model was meant to unify the nation into rationally organised bodies. 'Reich Groups' were set up in different sections – industry, banking, agriculture – and were led by ministers directed from the top. German industrialists were left to direct their own affairs if they agreed to align with Nazi policies. Of course, in most cases it seemed like those interests aligned anyway. Orders for vehicles, chemicals, weapons from the state were just more orders after all.
And many German economists had long advocated for a more streamlined 'rationalised' economy.
Richard Evans puts it like this: 'The idea, long advocated by farming lobbyists, was to unite producers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers in a single chain that would eliminate the exploitation of one by another and ensure a fair deal for all. Thus in the fishing industry, for example, fishermen, fish processors, fish wholesalers, fish distributors and fishmongers were organized into a single association run from Berlin, and the same was done for other branches of agriculture, from fruit farmers to grain producers.'
All of this had the appearance of being entirely rational – all hanging together with ideological and scientific trends of the day.
Biological Germans in a volkish corporate body with a strong leader sacrificing and coming together 'socialistically' – would inevitably win the coming struggle. The communists had been routed, the Jews stripped of their influence, the squabbling of parliament destroyed. Holism was the bundle of sticks that came together stronger.
Hitler said that 'The aim of German foreign policy was to make secure and to preserve the racial stock (Volksmasse) and to enlarge it. It was therefore a question of space.'
The sacrifice though is often underappreciated. As we've seen, rations were common in the interwar period. The German people were encouraged to invest and save, with that money being redirected to rearmament. But this ideology extended all the way to scrap metal.
In 1938, it was ordered that ALL metal garden fences were to be taken and down and handed over to the Nazis. Signposts were replaced with wooden ones which contributed to the shortage in paper too. The Hitler Youth was mobilised to search cellars and attics for anything metal – even old keys. Local communities came together to search for scrap.
Evans writes 'It became people's patriotic duty to surrender any old or unused metal objects to the authorities.'
Not everyone agreed with this. In fact, many tried to sound the alarm. But any economist or politician who criticised the policies were quickly replaced with Nazi sycophants.
In 1939, the president of the central Reichsbank wrote a letter to Hitler which was signed by every bank director warning of inflation. He wrote 'The limitless expansion of state expenditure is destroying every attempt to put the budget in order.'
Hitler sacked him.
Which gets us to the crux of the fascist economy. It may leave much of the economy to the industrialists, but in the last degree it is not liberal, it is not technocratic, it is not socialistic, it is an authoritarian war economy. An economy led by ideologically rigid autocrats who will inevitably try to shape it to their ends. This becomes a high stakes gamble at best and disastrous at worst.
Evans puts it bluntly – 'the Nazis' headlong rush to war contained the seeds of the Third Reich's eventual destruction.'
The End of Authority
Fascism haunts us because it has something to say. The dominant narrative – that it was a disaster that led to the Holocaust – is robust, but even that has been challenged by high profile figures like David Irving. The problem with the complexity of history is that it's easy to minimise parts and to point to other parts. If I say to you – yes Hitler was terrible but he built the autobahn, saved Germany from economic disaster by putting Germans to work, and learned how to save an economy from collapse from Mussolini – would you have the facts at hand to reply?
Both Hitler and Mussolini made disastrous decisions that might have been avoided. It's this that is the ultimate failure of fascism. It is at its core – as the title of Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler suggests – hubristic.
In many ways, fascism was an attempt at a great synthesis of all of the themes and trends of the age and of the past through the iron will of one person. Mussolini wrote that "We permit ourselves the luxury of being aristocratic and democratic, conservative and progressive, reactionary and revolutionary, accepting the law and going beyond it, according to the circumstances of the time, place and environment"
I mention this book quite a lot at the moment. Jonathan Rauch's The Constitution of Knowledge.
Rauch lays out a theory of how knowledge is produced in an open society. Theories are suggested, decisions are debated, errors are checked, experts are consulted. Knowledge – whether scientific or political – is anti hubristic in that it is – and I'll quote Rauch now - 'Only when others look at his scribbles, evaluating and testing them, is science taking place. Knowledge can be made only when it can be validated by others.'
Rauch writes that 'If we care about knowledge, freedom, and peace, then we need to stake a strong claim: anyone can believe anything, but liberal science— open-ended, depersonalized checking by an error-seeking social network— is the only legitimate validator of knowledge, at least in the reality-based community'.
This is what the historian Andrew Roberts argues lost the war for the fascists. Hitler, despite his initial successes, made egotistical blunder after blunder, while the Allies built plans through negotiation, deliberation, debate, and consensus. That was the win for a decentralised liberalism that listened to experts.
Authoritarianism in general becomes sycophantic quite literally, in that there is only one appeal to authority you can go to. You have to go to the Nazis to get business done, you have to go to the Nazis to get your paper published, you have pay the SS favours, and mind what you say about Mussolini. Of course this is going to be a less efficient system. Party sycophants are chosen over the qualified.
Take Evans' quote about Goring:
'Goring, for all his undoubted energy, ambition and intuitive grasp of how power worked, possessed no such overview of the economy. He had very little understanding of economics or finance. He did not set clear priorities, nor could he, since Hitler kept changing his mind as to which arm of the services- air force, navy, army - should come top of the allocation list.'
Despite this Goring led the Hermann Goring Ironworks.
Even if you are an economic mastermind, we've moved further and further away from a world where one person can know so much. Napoleon could know pretty much everything he needed to know about France and warfare. Today, military affairs are too complicated. Hitler was a Napoleonic figure in that he took an interest in everything – he took over the military from the generals, he helped design the Volkswagon, he sketched grand buildings. But he was also incredibly hubristic in all of this. Early victories during the war couldn't make up for his many faults later on. He didn't listen to anyone – including military experts or scientists working on weapons – he ultimately had the last word.
Fascism, of course, promises order. But chaos, decentralised information, the division of interests and groups in society, cannot be papered over. It is, in some ways, a fact of the world. Which is why neither Mussolini or Hitler were as all powerful as is assumed. They both had limits to their power. Mussolini the Ras, the Pope, businessmen, local politicians and leaders. Hitler left a lot to others, so much that they had to 'work towards the Fuhrer' – they had to interpret and second guess and try to align their own decisions with the leader.
Historians refer to it as 'polyocracy.' Paxton writes 'This reality has produced an influential interpretation of fascist governance as "polyocracy," or rule by multiple relatively autonomous power centres, in unending rivalry and tension with each other. In polyocracy the famous "leadership principle" cascades down through the social and political pyramid, creating a host of petty Führers and Duces in a state of Hobbesian war of all against all.'
They are all second guessing the Fuhrer's will rather than emphasising and accepting the reality of debate and disagreement about the future of the nation. Corporatism also reflected this failure. It was vague and flawed and ultimately toothless and ineffectual. It promised a society ordered into rational bodies – an order that doesn't really exist.
More liberal and anarchist ideologies acknowledge this – that the world is decentralised. I think there is something like an early response to an emerging postmodernity in fascism. Competing ideologies, a world in flux, migration, new technologies like the radio, crises of capitalism, a fear of chaos. The promise was order, the result was more chaos.
The modern world in this sense is not suited to dictatorship. Yet the cult of personality remains. An example, I think, of us not being able to escape our evolutionary origins – a reason I cited Girard at the beginning.
I'd describe this as the failures of personalism – of everything revolving around the will and personality of a great leader - which leads to the promoting of loyalty rather than expertise. It was one of the reasons a professional civil service was developed in most European countries in the late nineteenth century.
As the historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes in Strongmen, 'Personalist rulers can be the most destructive kinds of authoritarians because they do not distinguish between their individual agendas and needs and those of the nation. Their private obsessions set the tone for public discourse, skew institutional priorities, and force large-scale resource reallocations, as happened most famously in Hitler's war against the Jews. Authoritarian history is full of projects and causes championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect. Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia to give Italy an empire bankrupted the Italian state. Mobutu's massive projects for the Congo River—two Inga Falls dams and an Inga-Shaba power line—caused a debt crisis in Zaire.'
Hitler dismissed military leader after military leader, and despite negotiating with the army in order to take power in 1933, he quickly took over. Consider this quite scary thought – that if Hitler listened, or assassination attempts against him were successful, if other Nazis took over, or if the army did, Germany might have sued for peace, or not invaded the Soviet Union, she might have kept her European Empire dominating Austria, Poland, Czeckosolvakia, Mussolini might have remained, and the history of Fascism could have looked very different.
But fascism – and here's the key difference with authoritarianism – is defined by its dynamism, its energy, its promise of spiritual inner or geographic renewal. Without which it becomes simple authoritarianism. It had to sustain a certain revolutionary dynamic or else collapse.
Fascism is apocalyptic – it is us vs them – an existential threat. When it turns out its not an existential threat, or that the threat diminishes, what then? The dictator needs new promises to survive.
Paxton summarises it like this: 'Fascism is, in the last analysis, destabilizing.' He continues that 'Fascist regimes could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power.' And that 'The charismatic leader had made dramatic promises: to unify, purify, and energize his community.'
Finally, there's the inherent ambiguity about succession. Almost half (47%) of authoritarian regimes end in collapse when the leader dies or needs replacing. In other words, succession is really hard. Also, personalised dictatorships struggle on until the bitter end, dragging their country down with them.
Again, order is promised, chaos is the reality.
Killing the Ghosts
Just eight years after the end of WWII, in 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA. Since then, we've learned so much about genetics, ethnicity, heredity, evolution, and everything in between – with one huge crucial consequence for this story. Nazi Ideology has been totally discredited.
The idea that there is or was a pure German race, that some races are fitter, or are more destined by biology to be ruled over, and the idea – popularised by racialists like Houston Stewert Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau – that there are pure races have all been thoroughly debunked.
Remember, the Nazis believed in a pure Aryan racial archetype that existed in the deep past which was being – like the French and Americans – contaminated and made impure by degenerates – whether Jewish, gay, disabled, black – really anything that wasn't German.
Modern genetics has shown variation within 'races' is greater than variation between, that we all come from the same ancestral eve, that all humans share 99.9% of their DNA, that environmental factors are as important as genetic ones in determining our lives – all of this has done much to discredit the eugenic and racial thinking of the late nineteenth century and has done much for the idea of universal human rights.
The Nazi idea that Slavs are biologically incapable of ruling themselves or the idea or that the Portuguese or British are biologically suited to colonising and 'teaching' large parts of the globe holds little water today. That's not to say similar kinds of things don't persevere, only that something very significant that served to legitimised fascist ideology has changed because of scientific advances.
Take this quote on eugenics from historian Richard Evans on the Nazis:
German racialists believed that first 'heredity played a significant role in determining human character and behaviour. The second, which followed on from this, was that society, led by the state, should manage the population in order to increase national efficiency. The 'fit' had to be persuaded, or forced, to breed more, the 'unfit' to breed less. Thirdly, however these terms were understood, the racial hygiene movement introduced an ominously rational and scientific categorization of people into those who were 'valuable' to the nation and those who were not. 'Low quality' - the German term was minderwertig, literally, 'worth-less'—became a stock term used by social workers and medical men for many kinds of social deviant before the First World War.'
The idea that the state should have any role in persuading the 'fit' to breed and the 'unfit' to breed less has become, lets say, unfashionable. Of course, 'race science' still persists in the minds of many. But even they have to argue in a completely different scientific field than the nineteenth century racialist one – where this sort of view was entirely normal.
More than this, it delegitimizes the idea of 'volkism' entirely. Volkish thinkers, again, throught there was something transcendental about races. Ie pure, Platonic forms, existing outside of space and time – archetypes of Germanness say, that united people, language, forest, spirit. And that outside peoples could only pollute.
Obviously, no-one serious today argues that say Englishness or Americanness are biological. These kinds of arguments have move much more from the biological into the cultural realm.
That's not to say that nationalism obviously isn't still a dominant force in modern life – maybe still the dominant force. But there is an interesting irony here. On the one hand, nationalism is maybe more powerful than ever. It has good claim on being the most enduring ideology other than religion that has ever existed. But that also means that nation states with fixed borders and identifiable languages and cultures are much more entrenched. In 1920s Europe, borders were more porous, national stasis was new. Empires were the norm. Again, rulers and ruled, weak and strong.
It's much more different to make a legitimate claim to the right to rule over a particular area because nationalism is so strong. The old reasons given – to protect or steward, to enslave, to educate or civilize – carry much, much less weight, for the same reasons racialism has declined. It has become much more difficult to essentialise a people and to justify doing something to them, because we're much more aware of the flexibility, the migratory history, the evolutionary facts about human.
Figures like Putin might try and make these kinds of arguments, but they don't land in anywhere near the same way as they would in the 1920s. Instead, they strike us as ridiculous. Putin's interviews are ridiculed. Whereas, In the 30s, many in the US and Britain looked at some of Hitler or Mussolini's early territorial ambitions in the Sudetenland or in Libya as perfectly legitimate.
The ultranationalism of that period in fact came from a kind of weakness of nationalism. Nationalism was still developing, it hadn't evened out, most nations weren't countries, empires were the norm.
Take the Italian case. It's easy to remember Mussolini as an ultranationalist. We forget that this happened because of how un-nationalised Italy was – in other words, how little nationalist consciousness Italians had. Itlay had just unified, was very weak, had little sense of national identity – only 2.5% spoke Italian, the peasants didn't care about WWI, Bolsheviks were internationalists.
Mid-century ultranationalism was also a response to the universal claims Bolshevism and jealously of universalist Empire. In other words – and Five Roads to Modernity by Liah Greenfeld is a great book on this – ultranationalism is a reaction to something from the outside – either defence against another nationalist incursion into your own culture or territory or a response to an incursion by universalist aims.
You can see this in the nationalist response to globalisation or the European Union. Big universalist claims provoke strong nationalist responses.
So in short, race science has been challenged but ironically 'cultural' or 'social' nationalism has been so successful that it's much harder to justify the kind of dynamic domination of others that is crucial to fascism.
The idea of scientific struggle also underpinned – along with the First World War - fascist emphasis on violence as both inevitable and sometimes a good. We can see this in philosophies like futurism too. War, conquest, empire, expansion, good vs evil – these are physical and the way to achieve greatness. Violent populist struggle is the heart of fascism. In some sense, it's a feature and consequence of modernity itself. Social Darwinism was popular in Meiji Japan, and Japanese expansionism was mimicking the Western model.
There was a sense in the period that the world was zero-sum. It was about who had the largest territory, the strongest people, the most resources – that was all that mattered and anything was justified in securing it. We looked at how Ernst Junger thought that violence could be 'spiritualised'. Richard Evans writes that 'The cult of violence, derived not least from the Free Corps, was at the heart of the movement.'
Now, obviously some of this remains. Struggle as motor of history is retained in the idea of class struggle – but this is usually much more economic than violent.
But many things have changed that have challenged the social Darwinist idea of physical struggle.
First, the Nuclear Bomb has changed the stakes of violence. So did WWII and the Holocaust more broadly. The view of violence before these was much more limited – soldiers choosing and being paid to fight small wars with less powerful weapons. This meant a much more chivalrous attitude to violence was possible. And again, national areas are much more strongly identified.
There's also a renewed sense that long periods of peace can be achieved – even if this is being challenged somewhat.
But I think most of all there's a much more prevailing attitude in economics that outcomes are not zero-sum. Even exchanges between competitors can be in the benefit of both. It is not longer the case – as with Mercantilism or Autarky – that we think either the Brits can win or the French can with. That one Germany companies win is necessarily an Italian companies loss. Although obviously that can be the case. Positive-sum outcomes are taken much more seriously – cooperation instead of naked competition can lead to more prosperity for all.
And at the very least, national expansionism has been transferred to multicorporate economics. Americanism can reach around the globe without invading the countries it wants to do more business in – for good and for bad.
So I think It would take a lot for our attitude towards violence to return to the same as the paramilitary violence in Italy after WWI. That takes real desperation, horror, and real crises – Nothing since has come close.
Eternal Fascism
So what of the ghosts of fascism? Are they real? Are we jumpy? Do we imagine them too easily? In 1963 the German philosopher Ernst Nolte argued that although fascism persisted in the postwar period, it had been 'stripped of significance.' Many agreed – the classical fascism period ended in 1945. It was a product of its time – WWI, the emergence of the masses as a political force, a response to Bolshevik Revolution.
Paxton summarises it like this: 'Important scholars have argued that the fascist period ended in 1945.'
Nolte was writing in 63, Paxton in 2004. Have things changed since then? There were those that suggested that fascism was much more universal even before the war broke out.
On March 1 1939, exactly 6 months before the outbreak of WWII, the German novelist Thomas Mann published this now little remembered essay in Esquire Magazine – That Man is My Brother
Half-way through Mann admits that he feels like Hitler is 'A brother—a rather unpleasant and mortifying brother. He makes me nervous, the relationship is painful to a degree. But I will not disclaim it.'
Mann continues 'The fellow is a catastrophe. But that is no reason why we should not find him interesting, as a character and as an event. Consider the circumstances. Here is a man possessed of a bottomless resentment and a festering desire for revenge; a man ten times a failure, extremely lazy, incapable of steady work; a man who has spent long periods in institutions; a disappointed bohemian artist; a total good-for-nothing. And here is a people obsessed with powerful though far less justifiable feelings of defeat and inferiority, and unable to think of anything save how to retrieve its lost "honor."'
Mann is emphasising something terrifying – there is a Hitler in all of us.
Mann continues 'He rouses the populace with images of his own insulted grandeur, deafens it with promises, makes out of the people's sufferings a vehicle for his own greatness, his ascent to fantastic heights, to unlimited power, to incredible compensations and over-compensations.'
Those words - Resentment, revenge, honor, greatness, unlimited power – timeless qualities. And maybe even worse than there being something of Hitler in all us, there is something of an artist in him.
Mann points to 'the difficulty, the laziness, the pathetic formlessness in youth, the round peg in the square hole, the "whatever do you want?" The lazy, vegetating existence in the depths of a moral and mental Bohemia; the fundamental arrogance which thinks itself too good for any sensible and honorable activity, on the ground of its vague intuition that it is reserved for something else… the bad conscience, the sense of guilt, the anger at everything, the revolutionary instinct, the unconscious storing-up of mines of compensatory wishes; the obstinate need of self-justification, self-proof, the urge to dominate and subdue, the dream of seeing the whole world abased in fear and love, admiration and remorse, at the feet of the once-despised!'
Why has fascism become such a buzzword – so overused. Because we recognise sparks of it everywhere – maybe even in us too. The eternal desire to impose order but to go further, to shape, to expand upon, to dominate the soul of those around you and of others further afield too.
If we ask whether ghosts of fascism persist – does this sound eternal to you? Fascism was just the latest technological instance of a long history of using violence power, naked power, power unchecked, without check or balance – power heading, even if it can never quite reach it, to totalitarianism.
When we think of fascism we think of Hitler and Mussolini, but there have been hints of fascism all over the world ever since. That's why I started with Salazar and the theologically inspired civilizing mission. There have been the KKK, skinheads, Neo-Nazis, there have been populists corrupted, there's been Father Coughlin spouting antisemitism on the radio in the US. There's been Mussolini's granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini who was elected to Italian parliament in 1992 as the deputy of the MSI, a party whose very roots were fascist.
My point though is not to point to particular fascists – but a fascist urge, a fascist lineage, a fascist potential – that given the right conditions, is burning in all of us, or at the very least, in someone close to us, someone we love.
Many, like historian George Mosse, have after searching for all those causes and factors, concluded that fascism is a kind of mood more than a ordered intellectual ideology. He's used the phrase 'mobilizing passions,' – pre-rational. A passion for one's heartland, for stories of good vs evil, of corruption, of action, of emotion over reason, of order over chaos, of charisma, of spiritual violence. How can you rationalise the pre-rational? How can you say those things will ever not be with us? It takes a continual conscious effort to warn against them, to really know the failures – of what happened when they were put into practice.
The reason historians have disagreed on a definition of fascism is its malleability. It has some key ingredients, but they can change. But some of these ingredients are things that aren't going away – that might be a core of a kind of eternal fascism – which will not return as it has but could quite feasibility as something new. To understand that requires a genealogy through neofascism up to today. That is something I'll get to soon.