Commonly,
the abortive experience of Oswald Mosley’s BUF provides historians with
seemingly hard evidence that fascism was, in Britain, a foreign political
breed, bound to come to nothing. But this is to take cognition only of
explicit, nominal fascism. For Stanley G. Payne [1],for instance, the British
Union of Fascists was ‘a contradiction in terms, a sort of political oxymoron,’
given that, at most, it might have united ‘a variety of totally insignificant
grouplets using the name fascism . . .each pettier and more irrelevant than the
others.’ Quite so; but what about groups not
‘using the name of fascist’? One more time we come up against an issue that
has been at the center of this book ever since the Introduction, namely the
difference between political rhetoric and reality, ideology and practice,
between names and substances.
The
problematic of fascism in England, I take it, cannot be reduced to the BUF and
adjacent ‘grouplets.’ And while historians overwhelmingly tend to look at
British fascism strictly through the prism of expressly fascist groups, contemporary
observers, among them some of the most incisive, approached affairs with a
political outlook more subtle as well as more profound, less concerned with
epithets and more with fundamental social and economic interests. Churchill’s
idea that Mussolini’s new political experiment had provided ‘the ultimate means
of protections’ for every ‘great nation’ was a commonplace rather than an
oddity. We may consult a figure as different from the future Prime Minister as
the novelist Evelyn Waugh who, in 1936, commended the ostensible civilizing
effects of the Italian occupation of Abyssinia. Similarly, writing in 1938, and
without bothering to refer to Mosley. He made it quite clear that fascism in
Britain is by no means an impossibility, and if it remained unlikely at the
time of writing this was decidedly not
on account of any immanent incompatibility with the English character. Quite
the contrary, the English disposition, or more specifically the disposition of
the English middle class, was
eminently suitable for embracing fascism, according to Waugh. It was only that
the middle class had not been forced to go to such lengths by strictly external
circumstances, namely because the Marxist challenge had not been strong enough:
[Fascism] is a growth of certain peculiar
soil, principally in needs two things- a frightened middle class who see
themselves in danger of extinction in a proletarian state, and some indignant
patriots who believe that their country, through internal dissention, is
becoming bullied by the rest of the world. In England we had something like a
Fascist movement in 1926, when the middle classes broke the General Strike. We
have a middle class that is uniquely apt for strenuous physical adventures,
amenable to discipline, bursting with ‘esprit de corps’, and a great fund of
patriotism . . it is quite certain that England would become
Fascist before it became communist; it is quite unlikely to become either . . .[2]
Elsewhere (146), Waugh clarifies that what holds true for the English middle class in general also applies to his own, personal case: “if I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman, I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice in imminent.” For Douglas Lane Paty statements such as these show that Waugh’s conservatism never ‘veered to Fascism’. I see them calling for another interpretation. To my mind, the rather show how Waugh, by his own admission, and by extension the English bourgeoisie, was a potential fascist; what distinguishes him as an Englishmen from the actual fascists in other countries was not any substantial ideological disagreement but a matter of expediency: in other countries, one was forced to make a choice, pressed to the corner by the proletariat of one respective country, in a way that Waugh and his middle-class compatriots were not. Or rather they had been so threatened in 1926, but were unable to subdue the forces of ‘communism,’ with a kind of provisional, rough-and-ready fascism, suitable to meet the emergency of the General Strike.
Fascism, of course, is ‘evil,’ something which is so much pleasanter and more convenient to do without. But it is clearly preferable to general strikes. It is unappealing in the sense that bitter medicine is: you don’t take it unless you have to, unless the workers start to get unruly in earnest. There is this no distinctly English, principled argument against such evil, one that pushes it beyond the pale, say the liberal commitment to the rule of law or to democracy (far from it: Waugh unswervingly admits he is ‘no more impressed by the ‘legality’ of the Valencia government than are English Communists by the legality of the Crown, lords and Commons); it is simply the fact that such evil, under the political and social circumstances presently prevailing in England, is not yet a necessary evil. One winders: how many Spaniards, Italians and Germans would have become ‘fascists’, would have rallied to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, were they not convinced that such was the only, last-ditch response to Marxism, in both its revolutionary and reformist incarnations?
British interwar fascism is therefore not to be reduced to the BUF. In fact, even Mosley’s failure dos not seamlessly or necessarily attest to the alleged inadaptability of the foreign implant of fascism to British soil. It would be interesting to draw an analogy between the weakness of official fascism in Britain to that of official liberalism in Italy and Germany, but one would have to reverse the usual terms of debate: European fascists, the reader will recall, often complained of the fact that ‘liberalism’ in their country, was taken literally, understood truly to mean the limitless rule of the masses, whereas, in countries such as England, democratic liberalism was actually a camouflaged version of elite rule. By the same token, it is possible that Mosley’s movement failed to gain ground since it understood European fascism all too literally, as truly implying some Third Road between the classes, a genuine attempt to transcend class strife.
Something like this was suggested by a major contemporary, the Fabian Socialist Beatrice Webb, who prophesized that Mosley’s ‘New Party will never be born alive; it will be a political abortion.’ But her entirely correct prediction was based not in immanent unsuitability of fascism to England as much as it highlighted the fact that Mosley’s plan failed to align itself clearly with the major social forces, either with the worker’s movement or with capitalism, thus falling ‘dead in a No Man’s Land between those who wish to keep and those wo wish to change the existing order.’ As the result of such vagueness, she added, there was nothing in Mosley’s program ‘that will grip any section of the population- the curious assortment of reforms . . . have no emotional appeal – they excite neither love nor hate’ [3].
If these comments are anything to go by, then nominal fascism went flat in England not because it was too crass and aggressive to be incorporated into the local political landscape, but because it was not full-blooded enough to make itself appealing, not socially partisan enough to be relevant to any given constituency. It appears as if, contrary to the mainstream historians, what turned fascism attractive was not its promise for social transcendence, not its bid to water down either socialism or capitalism, but rather the prospect of a clear-cut resolution, only outwardly disguising itself as ‘neutral’ and ‘unbiased’. Yet those truly neutral in a modern, class society, it seems, scarcely form a large enough constituency on which to build successful party.
Elsewhere (146), Waugh clarifies that what holds true for the English middle class in general also applies to his own, personal case: “if I were a Spaniard I should be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman, I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism. It is mischievous to suggest that such a choice in imminent.” For Douglas Lane Paty statements such as these show that Waugh’s conservatism never ‘veered to Fascism’. I see them calling for another interpretation. To my mind, the rather show how Waugh, by his own admission, and by extension the English bourgeoisie, was a potential fascist; what distinguishes him as an Englishmen from the actual fascists in other countries was not any substantial ideological disagreement but a matter of expediency: in other countries, one was forced to make a choice, pressed to the corner by the proletariat of one respective country, in a way that Waugh and his middle-class compatriots were not. Or rather they had been so threatened in 1926, but were unable to subdue the forces of ‘communism,’ with a kind of provisional, rough-and-ready fascism, suitable to meet the emergency of the General Strike.
Fascism, of course, is ‘evil,’ something which is so much pleasanter and more convenient to do without. But it is clearly preferable to general strikes. It is unappealing in the sense that bitter medicine is: you don’t take it unless you have to, unless the workers start to get unruly in earnest. There is this no distinctly English, principled argument against such evil, one that pushes it beyond the pale, say the liberal commitment to the rule of law or to democracy (far from it: Waugh unswervingly admits he is ‘no more impressed by the ‘legality’ of the Valencia government than are English Communists by the legality of the Crown, lords and Commons); it is simply the fact that such evil, under the political and social circumstances presently prevailing in England, is not yet a necessary evil. One winders: how many Spaniards, Italians and Germans would have become ‘fascists’, would have rallied to Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, were they not convinced that such was the only, last-ditch response to Marxism, in both its revolutionary and reformist incarnations?
British interwar fascism is therefore not to be reduced to the BUF. In fact, even Mosley’s failure dos not seamlessly or necessarily attest to the alleged inadaptability of the foreign implant of fascism to British soil. It would be interesting to draw an analogy between the weakness of official fascism in Britain to that of official liberalism in Italy and Germany, but one would have to reverse the usual terms of debate: European fascists, the reader will recall, often complained of the fact that ‘liberalism’ in their country, was taken literally, understood truly to mean the limitless rule of the masses, whereas, in countries such as England, democratic liberalism was actually a camouflaged version of elite rule. By the same token, it is possible that Mosley’s movement failed to gain ground since it understood European fascism all too literally, as truly implying some Third Road between the classes, a genuine attempt to transcend class strife.
Something like this was suggested by a major contemporary, the Fabian Socialist Beatrice Webb, who prophesized that Mosley’s ‘New Party will never be born alive; it will be a political abortion.’ But her entirely correct prediction was based not in immanent unsuitability of fascism to England as much as it highlighted the fact that Mosley’s plan failed to align itself clearly with the major social forces, either with the worker’s movement or with capitalism, thus falling ‘dead in a No Man’s Land between those who wish to keep and those wo wish to change the existing order.’ As the result of such vagueness, she added, there was nothing in Mosley’s program ‘that will grip any section of the population- the curious assortment of reforms . . . have no emotional appeal – they excite neither love nor hate’ [3].
If these comments are anything to go by, then nominal fascism went flat in England not because it was too crass and aggressive to be incorporated into the local political landscape, but because it was not full-blooded enough to make itself appealing, not socially partisan enough to be relevant to any given constituency. It appears as if, contrary to the mainstream historians, what turned fascism attractive was not its promise for social transcendence, not its bid to water down either socialism or capitalism, but rather the prospect of a clear-cut resolution, only outwardly disguising itself as ‘neutral’ and ‘unbiased’. Yet those truly neutral in a modern, class society, it seems, scarcely form a large enough constituency on which to build successful party.
Crypto-Fascism
In view of these
long suppressed historical realities, it is in truth tempting to argue that
there is a sense in which England, the hub of the liberal-democratic west,
short of becoming fascist, did succumb to fascism, only that we were never notified
of the fact.
This ties into the problematic of what Gaetano Salvmini, that astute and lucid observer with a remarkable capacity of sieving through countless details of political and social life and rescuing the important from the trivial, called ‘crypto-fascism’. As early as 1927, Salvemini classified three different forces set against democracy:
Democratic institutions are attacked not only from the left by the communists, but also from the right by crypto-fascists, who despair of destroying them and look to appropriate their most delicate organs in order to pervert them ,and by the fascists who attack them openly in thee hope of establishing a dictatorship of the capitalist class.[4]
In Prelude to World War II, Salvemeni wrote that during his study of international politics, his ‘opinion not only of the intelligence but also the moral integrity of the men who governed England in those years (as distinct from the British people) underwent a series of disastrous shocks.’ And he specified:
Under parliamentary, no less than under dictatorial governments, decisions, especially on matters of foreign policy, are taken, not by the peoples themselves, but by small groups of ‘experts’ who often deceive their peoples: see what happened in England in 1935 . . . from the end of 19245 to the autumn of 1935 all British Foreign Ministers worked more or less hand in glove with Mussolini . . .Mussolini is not the only villain in this book. The present writer . . .[does not] feel any respect, and admiration, any enthusiasm for Sir Austen Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, Stanley Baldwin or Neville Chamberlain.
In another book, Salvemini cited approvingly the views of many who in 1938 ‘;complained that England’s foreign policy was determined by a small circle of pro-German magnates,’ and referred to the ‘convincing evidence’; that the MPs of the Tory Party belong to a network of capitalist interests which have nothing to do with the masses of the British people.’[5] Clearly then, in Salvemini’s view, the British elite was vigorously practicing a brand of ‘crypto-fascism’, taking possession of ‘the most delicate organs of democratic institutions in order to pervert them.’
An the exiled Italian was not alone in detecting an important, if not concealed, parallel between the praxis of British democracy and that of Italian fascism. Writing in 1930, G. K. Chesterton reached a remarkably similar conclusion, though from a position far less hostile to Mussolini:
Mussolini does openly what enlightened, liberal and democratic governments do secretly. This is not the same as saying Mussolini necessarily does right. Far from it; quite otherwise; heaven forbid. What enlightened, liberal, and democratic governments do is generally wrong. What Mussolini does is, in my opinion, sometimes wrong . . . But the point to grasp is that he does and defends what they do and do not defend. They conceal; they effect same thing, because they think it is convenient; but they do not defend it, because they think its indefensible. He is acting with his own principles of Fascism; they are acting against their principles of Freedom [6].
In all but designation, this, too is an account of ‘crypto fascism,’ a concept which could be usefully juxtaposed with the liberal tradition of esoteric politics, discussed in Chapter 6, from Bagehot to the Straussians of this day and age, and which aims to lead king Demos by the nose, while feigning to do his wishes. It is thus appropriate that careful secrecy and covert deals played a vital role in the politics of the British elite when dealing with the fascist regimes, a fact amply documented in the pages of such rare, truly critical historians, who dare to probe beneath the surface of probity [7].
The point is not tat negotiations were confidentially conducted which is justifiable as a part of an effort to reach diplomatic agreements. For what was kept hidden was not this or that detail, or even initiative, but rather the very substance of the deals themselves, the very goals that the politicians pursued, and for good reason, since these very often enough formed the opposite of what was openly proclaimed in order to soothe the public. Thus, exoterically, Chamberlain was reprimanding Germany, in the knowledge that the public was fed up with Hitler’s expansionism, while esoterically sending the Fuhrer assurances not to take such public utterances seriously (Leibovitz and Finkel 1998 150-1). The ultimate example of such doublespeak was the very notion of appeasement, the lofty façade of the effort to maintain the European peace, under whose cover the British politicians were briskly facilitating the next war between Germany and the USSR (and of course ultimately the war which Britain itself would be compelled to fight, though this was against their intentions. ‘War’, as famously proclaimed in 1984, ’is peace’. Yet Orwell’s critical gaze, it appears, did not have to stray far from home to discover the abuses of ‘totalitarianism.’
And there were other contemporaries who were alarmed by the patent analogies between the modus operandi of the British government and that of the European dictators. Among those dismayed by Chamberlain’s cynical strategies of spreading mass panic was the celebrated historian R.G. Collingwood, who wrote in 1938:
To me, therefore, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia was only a third case of the same policy by which the “National” government had betrayed Abyssinia and Spain; and I was less interested in the fact itself than in the methods by which it was accomplished, the carefully engendered war scare in the country at large, officially launched by simultaneous issue of gas-masks and the prime minister’s emotional broadcast, two days before his flight to Munich, and the carefully staged hysterical scene in Parliament on the following night. These things were in the established traditions of Fascist dictatorial methods: excerpt that whereas the Italian and German dictators sway the mobs by appeal to the thirst for glory and national aggrandizement, the English prime minister did it by playing on sheer stark terror ( L & F, 1998: 157).
This ties into the problematic of what Gaetano Salvmini, that astute and lucid observer with a remarkable capacity of sieving through countless details of political and social life and rescuing the important from the trivial, called ‘crypto-fascism’. As early as 1927, Salvemini classified three different forces set against democracy:
Democratic institutions are attacked not only from the left by the communists, but also from the right by crypto-fascists, who despair of destroying them and look to appropriate their most delicate organs in order to pervert them ,and by the fascists who attack them openly in thee hope of establishing a dictatorship of the capitalist class.[4]
In Prelude to World War II, Salvemeni wrote that during his study of international politics, his ‘opinion not only of the intelligence but also the moral integrity of the men who governed England in those years (as distinct from the British people) underwent a series of disastrous shocks.’ And he specified:
Under parliamentary, no less than under dictatorial governments, decisions, especially on matters of foreign policy, are taken, not by the peoples themselves, but by small groups of ‘experts’ who often deceive their peoples: see what happened in England in 1935 . . . from the end of 19245 to the autumn of 1935 all British Foreign Ministers worked more or less hand in glove with Mussolini . . .Mussolini is not the only villain in this book. The present writer . . .[does not] feel any respect, and admiration, any enthusiasm for Sir Austen Chamberlain, Sir John Simon, Sir Samuel Hoare, Stanley Baldwin or Neville Chamberlain.
In another book, Salvemini cited approvingly the views of many who in 1938 ‘;complained that England’s foreign policy was determined by a small circle of pro-German magnates,’ and referred to the ‘convincing evidence’; that the MPs of the Tory Party belong to a network of capitalist interests which have nothing to do with the masses of the British people.’[5] Clearly then, in Salvemini’s view, the British elite was vigorously practicing a brand of ‘crypto-fascism’, taking possession of ‘the most delicate organs of democratic institutions in order to pervert them.’
An the exiled Italian was not alone in detecting an important, if not concealed, parallel between the praxis of British democracy and that of Italian fascism. Writing in 1930, G. K. Chesterton reached a remarkably similar conclusion, though from a position far less hostile to Mussolini:
Mussolini does openly what enlightened, liberal and democratic governments do secretly. This is not the same as saying Mussolini necessarily does right. Far from it; quite otherwise; heaven forbid. What enlightened, liberal, and democratic governments do is generally wrong. What Mussolini does is, in my opinion, sometimes wrong . . . But the point to grasp is that he does and defends what they do and do not defend. They conceal; they effect same thing, because they think it is convenient; but they do not defend it, because they think its indefensible. He is acting with his own principles of Fascism; they are acting against their principles of Freedom [6].
In all but designation, this, too is an account of ‘crypto fascism,’ a concept which could be usefully juxtaposed with the liberal tradition of esoteric politics, discussed in Chapter 6, from Bagehot to the Straussians of this day and age, and which aims to lead king Demos by the nose, while feigning to do his wishes. It is thus appropriate that careful secrecy and covert deals played a vital role in the politics of the British elite when dealing with the fascist regimes, a fact amply documented in the pages of such rare, truly critical historians, who dare to probe beneath the surface of probity [7].
The point is not tat negotiations were confidentially conducted which is justifiable as a part of an effort to reach diplomatic agreements. For what was kept hidden was not this or that detail, or even initiative, but rather the very substance of the deals themselves, the very goals that the politicians pursued, and for good reason, since these very often enough formed the opposite of what was openly proclaimed in order to soothe the public. Thus, exoterically, Chamberlain was reprimanding Germany, in the knowledge that the public was fed up with Hitler’s expansionism, while esoterically sending the Fuhrer assurances not to take such public utterances seriously (Leibovitz and Finkel 1998 150-1). The ultimate example of such doublespeak was the very notion of appeasement, the lofty façade of the effort to maintain the European peace, under whose cover the British politicians were briskly facilitating the next war between Germany and the USSR (and of course ultimately the war which Britain itself would be compelled to fight, though this was against their intentions. ‘War’, as famously proclaimed in 1984, ’is peace’. Yet Orwell’s critical gaze, it appears, did not have to stray far from home to discover the abuses of ‘totalitarianism.’
And there were other contemporaries who were alarmed by the patent analogies between the modus operandi of the British government and that of the European dictators. Among those dismayed by Chamberlain’s cynical strategies of spreading mass panic was the celebrated historian R.G. Collingwood, who wrote in 1938:
To me, therefore, the betrayal of Czechoslovakia was only a third case of the same policy by which the “National” government had betrayed Abyssinia and Spain; and I was less interested in the fact itself than in the methods by which it was accomplished, the carefully engendered war scare in the country at large, officially launched by simultaneous issue of gas-masks and the prime minister’s emotional broadcast, two days before his flight to Munich, and the carefully staged hysterical scene in Parliament on the following night. These things were in the established traditions of Fascist dictatorial methods: excerpt that whereas the Italian and German dictators sway the mobs by appeal to the thirst for glory and national aggrandizement, the English prime minister did it by playing on sheer stark terror ( L & F, 1998: 157).
Michael
Oakeshott, the ingenious English conservative- in fact pre-neo- liberal,
inasmuch as he opposed the welfare state and espoused small government, individual
initiative and unrestrained market forces- provides a good case in point. For example,
writing in 1955, he disagreed with Walter Lippmann’s pessimistic analysis of the crisis in liberal
democracy, which the then famous American journalist understood in terms of the
irrational, ‘Jacobine’ tendency of the modern masses to exaggerate democratic
demands at he expense of mandatory liberal limitations, notably the right of
property. This, in Lippmann’s view, was the key factor that has led to the
collapse of liberal-democratic regimes and to the rise of authoritarian ones. Oakeshott,
however, sensed here a ‘misplaced gloom.’ His confidence in the prospect of
liberal-democracy was much greater; yet he completely partook in Lippmann’s
unflattering diagnosis of the masses. It was as only that he feared them much less than his American counterpart.
Implicitly falling back on the English political
tradition, which he on many other occasions explicitly extolled, Oakeshott was
confident that elites in liberal countries will continue to be intelligent and responsible
enough not to incite the mases. For, quite like a la Mosca and Pareto, he
dismissed the notion that political initiatives ever come from below; not really, that is. What the masses clamor
for in the final account is nothing other tan what their leaders have
instructed them to want:
It is safe to say that we, ‘the people,’ never ask for what we have not been prompted to desire; we corrupt policy, not by our own shortsighted demands, but by our responsiveness to what is suggested and promised to us. Our voice is loud, but our utterance is the repetition of simple lessons well learned. [8]
It is safe to say that we, ‘the people,’ never ask for what we have not been prompted to desire; we corrupt policy, not by our own shortsighted demands, but by our responsiveness to what is suggested and promised to us. Our voice is loud, but our utterance is the repetition of simple lessons well learned. [8]
Given that the
masses as an independent actor, indeed the people, are completely ruled out, both literally and metaphorically,
construed as mere clay in the hands of the potter, it is only a question of
what the leaders will do, for good or
bad. Oakeshott thus supported the rule of the people under the assumption that
such a rule is an impossibility; that what we actually have under political liberalism
is not democracy, but – to use the neologism suggested by Robert Dahl – a polyarchy, an interplay of ruling elites.[9]
A keen appreciation of the advantages of such a polyarchic, stolid, ’English’
model, it would seem, underlines Michael Mann’s position. He therefore expresses
wonderment at the failure of fascists to notice, and subsequently copy and
employ, the same tested, liberal and ‘democratic’ methods of the northwest:
But a question still arises. Why should
upper and middle classes increase the level of repression, abolish parliaments
and civil liberties, and mobilize mass arties –still less call in dangerous fascists
– if tried and tested milder forms were available at lower cost and risk? In
fact the best solution to class struggle was visible in the northwest,. Its unions,
socialist parties, and strikes were large than in most of the center, east and
south but were implicated in class compromise, posing little threat to
capitalist property relations . . . the center, east and south’s neglect of all
this experience appears puzzling [10].
Mann provides the sanguine definition of the liberal model, underlining the ‘class compromise’ it entails; but one can grasp the same phenomena in a less positive light; precisely as a sophisticated way to defuse democratic potential, to dilute the people’s sovereignty and, in extremis, to avail oneself of crypto-fascism, with all the dangerous pitfalls on this path. Nor is it altogether just to reproach the center, east and south for ‘neglecting’ to consider the pluses of this model. AS we have seen, many fascists in both Germany and Italy envied the western-liberal ability to create a democracy ‘in appearance’, as Mosca put it, a democracy where the proverbial, terrifying, many-headed hydra of the people is gratifyingly transformed, to paraphrase Oakeshott, into a well-trained, if gargantuan, parrot.
We have seen how it was not uncommon for continental, ‘open’ fascists and their fellow travelers- such as Moeller, Jung, or Rocco – to expressly ground their politics on the inability to develop a democratic model of the English or French type. In Italy, it was notably the resonant failure of this ‘best solution,’ according to Mann, embodied in Giolitti. Fascists in general had to face a democracy declining in nominal status and threatening to become real and substantial. And indeed, what happens if the masses are not so sensible (or insensible(as to ‘compromise’ their interests? What if –pace Oakeshott-they refuse to repeat their simple lessons? And what if –pace Mann – they are determined to use democracy not to underpin but to question ‘capitalist property relations’? Is fascism, then, an understandable, viable and legitimate option? Reading Mann, it is at times difficult to avoid the impression that this , indeed, is his opinion. As when he states that ‘If we place ourselves in the shoes of the Spanish latifundistas, threatened by anarcho-syndicalist and socialist land occupations, bombings, and ostensibly ‘revolutionary’ uprisings, we might also reach for the gun.’
Mann provides the sanguine definition of the liberal model, underlining the ‘class compromise’ it entails; but one can grasp the same phenomena in a less positive light; precisely as a sophisticated way to defuse democratic potential, to dilute the people’s sovereignty and, in extremis, to avail oneself of crypto-fascism, with all the dangerous pitfalls on this path. Nor is it altogether just to reproach the center, east and south for ‘neglecting’ to consider the pluses of this model. AS we have seen, many fascists in both Germany and Italy envied the western-liberal ability to create a democracy ‘in appearance’, as Mosca put it, a democracy where the proverbial, terrifying, many-headed hydra of the people is gratifyingly transformed, to paraphrase Oakeshott, into a well-trained, if gargantuan, parrot.
We have seen how it was not uncommon for continental, ‘open’ fascists and their fellow travelers- such as Moeller, Jung, or Rocco – to expressly ground their politics on the inability to develop a democratic model of the English or French type. In Italy, it was notably the resonant failure of this ‘best solution,’ according to Mann, embodied in Giolitti. Fascists in general had to face a democracy declining in nominal status and threatening to become real and substantial. And indeed, what happens if the masses are not so sensible (or insensible(as to ‘compromise’ their interests? What if –pace Oakeshott-they refuse to repeat their simple lessons? And what if –pace Mann – they are determined to use democracy not to underpin but to question ‘capitalist property relations’? Is fascism, then, an understandable, viable and legitimate option? Reading Mann, it is at times difficult to avoid the impression that this , indeed, is his opinion. As when he states that ‘If we place ourselves in the shoes of the Spanish latifundistas, threatened by anarcho-syndicalist and socialist land occupations, bombings, and ostensibly ‘revolutionary’ uprisings, we might also reach for the gun.’
For all Mann’s
negation of the class analysis of fascism, we irreducibly back at the liberal
cul-de-sac, which sees the bourgeoisie confronted with the masses, the economic
domain against the political, capital vs democracy. We are back at the doorstep
of the Lockes, the Burkes, the Donosos, the Mills, the Paretos, and the
Spenglers, defending the sanctity of private property against the encroachment
of ‘the mob’.
[1] 1996 A History of
Fascism, 1914-45; 304
[2] quoted
in Patey 2001, The Life of Evelyn Waugh,
147
[3] Cole, Margaret, ed. 1956. Beatrice Webb’s Diaries. 1924-1932
[4]
Salvemini, Gaetano and George Bernard Shaw. 1997 Polemica sul fascismo, Rome: Ideazione Editrice
[5]
Salvemini, 1973 The Origins of Fascism in
Italy 57
[6] 1990 “The
Resurrection of Rome”, in G. K. Chesterton Collected
Works Vol XXI 429
[7]
Leibovitz and Finkel (1998) In Our Time.
The Chamberlain-Hitler Collusion. Monthly Review Press. Quigley, Carrol
(1981) The Anglo-American Establishment.
From Rhodes to Cliveden; GSGH &
Associates. Schuman, Frederick (1942)
Europe on the Eve: The Crisis of Diplomacy 1933-1939; Knopf.
[8]
Oakeshott, Michael. 1993 Religion, Politics
and the Moral Life, Yale University Press.
[9] Dahl,
Robert A. 2003. How Democratic is the
American Constitution? Yale University Press
[10] Mann, Michael.
2004 Fascists Cambridge Univ. Press
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