conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled The Nature of Fascism about Ambitious with the genre: Arts & Photography, Performing Arts.
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conversations.value: This is an excellent book. Ambitious in scope, though the author is commendably modest in his pretensions, it sets out to provide a new definition of fascism as a generic term.... the arguments are invariably stimulating, the insights perceptive. the author has an enviable grasp of the literature and discusses all the major issues of fascist historiography in the light of his own theory. Last but not least, he writes with admirable lucidity and lightness of touch. His book succeeds in its aim of being of use to the specialist and student/general reader alike.
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conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Nature of Fascism
  If the proliferation of abortive fascist movements in inter-war Europe necessitated a synoptic survey reminiscent of aerial reconnaissance, the sheer profusion of phenomena which in principle fall within the scope of this chapter is, to appropriate a Fascist expression, more 'oceanic' still, especially where post-war developments are concerned. For them to be included on the map at all means operating at an even higher altitude than before, so that only major topographical and geological features will stand out. Readers new to this area are thus urged to acquaint themselves in greater depth with any one of the fascisms touched on fleetingly here so as to break out of the series of abstractions and generalizations they encounter. Only in this way can they hope to acquire a feel for the unique texture and complexity which the subject exhibits at every turn when studied idiographically and which provide the sociological imagination with the raw material to work on so as to become 'real' (a point equally valid for the previous chapter). In the meantime, they are asked to take in good faith and in a heuristic spirit the schematic accounts of the non-European and postwar Europe ultra-right offered here, as well as the general inferences I have drawn about the light they throw on an important aspect of 'the nature of fascism', namely its almost Darwinian capacity for adaptation to its environment. Since these may well be novel to those who still tend to equate fascism essentially with the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler, and assume it was interred together with them in 1945, it is as well if they are summarized at the outset.
  First, a consideration of events in inter-war Latin America and Japan underpins a central thesis of the last chapter: in poorly liberalized nations even sophisticated forms of indigenous fascism stand no chance of seizing and retaining power when pitted against dynamic conservative or neo-conservative opposition and are likely to have their populist appeal (that is political space) severely restricted by rival non-fascist forms of renovationist ultra-right. This picture of fascism's impotence as a revolutionary force is not essentially modified when South African fascism is considered, even though a unique ethnic and political situation has continued since the Second World War to give it a particular virulence, despite a high degree of ambient 'modernization' that shapes the lives of the ruling caste. The rest of the chapter is devoted mainly to an account of post-war fascism in Europe and the United States which adds two new elements. First, fascism clearly no longer requires objective conditions of developmental or socio-political crisis, let alone the threat of Marxist revolution, as a precondition for its existence for it appears to have established itself, at least among a numerically insignificant but highly unsilent minority, as a permanent idiom of Western culture. Second, European fascism has undergone several significant ideological and tactical transformations which underline its protean ability to adopt new formulations and guises, one of the most significant being a process of ideological and organizational internationalization, (an ecumenicalism which paradoxically continues to go hand in hand with the marked tendency to fractionalize which is a feature of most ideological forces when they are reduced to acting as a highly marginalized extra-systemic pressure group).
  These general points, despite the lack of space to substantiate them in detail in these pages, are worth placing firmly on the agenda of the fascist debate, if only to rebut several common misapprehensions about fascism which some of the most commonly available works on the subject do little to dispel. First and foremost, fascism is not intrinsically a European phenomenon, nor did 'the fascist era' conveniently end in 1945. In fact, Payne's statement that fascism was 'an historical phenomenon primarily limited to Europe during the era of the two world wars' (1980, p. 176) holds true only if considerable weight is placed on the word 'primarily'. In addition, when a number of indigenous fascist ideologues generally neglected in surveys of the subject, whether non-European (for example Salgado in Brazil, Nakano in Japan) or post-war (for example de Benoist in France and Evola in Italy), are considered in a depth precluded here, they prove to have taken their ideology from cultural and historical sources of political mythopoeia quite remote from those drawn on by Fascism or Nazism which, as we have seen in Chapters 3 and , were themselves heterogeneous in their ideological roots as well as being worlds apart at a surface level. This merely serves to underline the fact that palingenetic ultra-nationalism as we have ideal-typically defined it can draw on any number of raw ingredients, local or imported, religious or secular. Nakano and Evola in particular also demonstrate how fallacious it would be to assume that fascism necessarily draws ideological sustenance from exclusively European wells of cultural heritage, such as Christian millenarism (for example Joachim of Flora), elitist sociology (for example Mosca and Pareto) or the late nineteenth-century 'revolt against positivism'.
  As early as 1934 Soviet Marxists were describing contemporary Japan as fascist when it was still far from the apogee of its imperialism or totalitarianism, and a number of post-war Japanese historians have been happy to take over this foreign model without even attempting to improve it. But if the homogeneity of Japan's cultural history compared with that of Latin America in principle makes it easier to answer questions about whether or not it hosted an indigenous form of fascism, then the dubious applicability of Western historical analogies and social scientific concepts to such a radically different society compounds even further the problematic nature of the term as a generic concept (cf. Sims, 1982; Payne, 1984; Kasza, 1984). Certainly, a concomitant of the industrialization and 'massification' of Japan in the early twentieth century was the embryonic emergence of a pluralist party-political system, an increasingly politicized general public, and an intelligentsia polarized into ultra-left and ultra-right. But the comforting sense of familiarity that a historian of inter-war Europe might have is quickly dissipated when the period is looked at in terms of the structural forces shaping it.
  In short, the initial conditions for the emergence of a Japanese fascism of any moment were simply lacking. Despite the many points of superficial analogy between the Third Reich and post-1932 Japan when taken as case-studies in totalitarianism, none of its war leaders, even Tōjō, assumed the function of a Mussolini, let alone a Hitler, while the Imperial Rule Assistance Association, set up in 1940 when parties were dissolved, was, unlike the NSDAP, little more than a bureaucratic fiction. Even the military's ascendancy over all political, economic and social life did not mean the formal end of parliamentary processes. Indeed, when elections were held in 1942 more candidates stood than ever before (see Barrington Moore, 1969). A reference to 'the coming to power of the Japanese fascist movement' in the 1930s (Ó Maol¡in, 1987, p. 176) is thus as misleading as it is mysterious.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Thus whether we approach the question from the point of view of comparative religion, the history of ideas, sociology, political science or psychoanalysis, there is no shortage of theories which can be adduced to suggest that the convinced fascist is to be seen as someone whose flight from inner chaos has found expression in a powerful elective affinity with an intensely mythic ideology of national regeneration. This ideology, though objectively representing just one partial system of values among so many others, he (and even on occasions she) experiences affectively as an absolute vehicle of personal salvation. By promising to redeem the nation from the quagmire of 'demo-liberalism', fascism offers its converts the prospect of a renewed sense of meaning, of transcendence, of ritual time, of imminent rebirth in a world otherwise threatened with inexorable decadence, a decadence which, however real the objective factors of social dysfunction at the time, at bottom was no more than their inner world of anxiety and chaos projected on to contemporary history.
  Our ideal type of fascism allows us to be more precise about its historical preconditions than this, however, for it suggests that it is made up of three mythic components, one of which is archetypal, the other two sufficiently culture-specific to make palingenetic ultra-nationalism the product of a unique conjuncture of ideological factors. These components are (i) the rebirth myth, (ii) populist ultra-nationalism and (iii) the myth of decadence. As we argued in Chapter 2 (pp.32–36) the rebirth myth has always been available to serve as an ingredient of cosmologies and value-systems, since it seems to constitute a constant of human mythopoeic thinking: an 'arche-type', in fact. Ultra-nationalism in its populist sense is clearly of far more recent origin and is also far more culture-specific. It presupposes both the decay of feudal (in Weberian terms 'traditional') notions of power, the emergence of the nation-state, pre-Romantic and Romantic concepts of the uniqueness of national culture, a growing awareness of shared history, ethnicity, and language, the rise of mass politics as well as various other factors investigated by experts on the subject (for example Kedourie, 1966; Smith, 1979; Alter, 1989; Hobsbawm, 1990). Despite the complexity of nationalism's dynamics, the elusiveness of its definition and its many discernible sub-varieties (for it is an ideal type hardly less protean than fascism), there is a degree of consensus on the notion that populist nationalism of a tendentially illiberal or anti-liberal complexion emerged to fill the nomic vacuum left in the lives of millions of 'ordinary' citizens by the decay of traditional religion and community. Implicit in this insight is the recognition that the nation which forms the focal point of all populist nationalisms is a mythical construct, or as Anderson puts it, an 'imagined community' (Anderson, 1983, pp. 12–13; cf. also Talmon, 1980; Hobsbawm, 1990).
  It was in late nineteenth-century Europe that the two historical variables first came together which created the conditions in which ultra-nationalist permutations of palingenetic myth could appear. It was Europe that was first affected (albeit highly unevenly) by secularization and the subsequent decay of absolutist (traditional) political systems, and which experienced the concomitant rise of scientific rationalism, the nation-state, of liberal (legal/rational) politics and populist nationalism both liberal and illiberal, as well as of a wide spectrum of alternative political visions, both socialist and ultra-conservative. Clearly this was not only an ideological process, for it was accelerated by the decay of feudalism, the rise of capitalism, urbanization, industrialization, social mobility and other components of the nexus of forces often collectively referred to as 'modernization'. Elsewhere in the world traditional cultures with their non-nationalist varieties of political religions or myths still held sway. (The important exception to this generalization, of course, were many of Europe's colonies and former colonies, in which Western world-views had achieved hegemony over indigenous ones, a point to which we will turn shortly.)
  In this cultural climate it was only natural that the preoccupation with decadence would cause some to indulge in palingenetic mythopoeia, leading to schemes to reverse decay and bring about regeneration in every sphere in which it was perceived to be at work: the occultism of Eliphas Levi (Mcintosh, 1972), the Catholic revivalism of Peguy (Griffiths, 1966), Peladan's hopes that the Slavs would rejuvenate the moribund Europeans (Swart, 1964), the aesthetics of Wagner, Picasso and Kandinsky (Hughes, 1980), the philosophy of Bergson, the social theories of Tonnies, Durkheim, Pareto and Sorel (Hughes, 1958), the criminological theories of Lombroso (Pick, 1989), the eugenics of Hackel and the racial theory of H.S. Chamberlain (Poliakov, 1974) are just individual ripples in a tide of disparate personal and collective initiatives to bring about the regeneration of a Western civilization perceived in one way or another as locked into a phase of dissolution and degeneration, but still just redeemable.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It should be added that an important factor which contributed to the destructiveness of Nazism was the autonomous executive momentum which is developed by all hierarchical structures, and hence of the programmes they adopt, once they have been properly set up. One macabre case study in this phenomenon is provided by the perversely-brilliant organization of a concentration camp system which manipulated the fanatical obedience and racial hatred of the few, and the human survival instinct of the many, to ensure the smooth, practically automatic, operation of the terror and execution machine at every level of the hierarchy right down to that of victims themselves (see Phillips, 1969, ch.4). Clearly there was a considerable degree of contingency in both the timing and scale of the escalation of the imperialist and anti-Semitic programmes, but once the crucial decisions had been made in high places, the efficiency of the Nazi state machinery was such that both the arms industry and the extermination factories created for the Final Solution maintained their lethal productive efficiency till the bitter end, even when the demands of the genocidal programme and of the war effort came into direct conflict, and long after defeat was inevitable. Similarly, the armed forces did not desert in massive numbers when the chips were down as did their Fascist counterparts. Indeed, to extirpate the Nazi high command, Berlin finally had to be taken street by street and the lives of well over one and a half million soldiers and citizens were 'sacrificed' in the process.
  Steinberg's theory about the 'Germans' may be essentially speculative and heuristically 'one-sided' perhaps to the point of caricature, (for example when he uses such phrases as 'The First World War drove Germany mad', p.236). Yet if it contained only a kernel of truth, it would indeed help account for the glaring contrast which he extensively documents between the countless acts of humanity shown to Jews by Fascists, some of whom 'privately' had anti-Semitic prejudices and the dispassionate participation in the attempted genocide of the Jews by Germans, some of whom were 'personally' neither fanatically Nazi or anti-Semitic. If such 'secondary virtues' were indeed prevalent in the German population as a whole, then it would also count as an important factor in explaining the far deeper degree of their Nazification than the Fascistization of the Italians – and the readiness of the countless bureaucratic and military henchmen of the Nazi regime to carry through its ideologically and juridically carefully legitimated programme of systematic barbarism in Europe with such 'exemplary' thoroughness.
  The pictures of thousands of frozen corpses littering Russian Steppes or of the contorted, skeletal remains of what had once been human beings frozen in their death agony in the pits of Belsen still boggle the human imagination and chill the heart. But if we take into account the clusters of factors identified in this chapter, the historical and sociological imagination can at least start to formulate partial but coherent answers to the question 'why? ' The abstract register we have used should not be confused with the dehumanizing objectivity in which leading Nazis cloaked their heinous moral crimes to their accusers at Nuremberg, and even to themselves, but as an integral part of humanistic enquiry, the urge to probe beyond 'common sense' answers, the impulse to understand the world rather than to change it.
  Once the Nazis had seized power, systematic propaganda, indoctrination and terror at every level of society reinforced the wave of genuine conversions to their cause which helped bring them to power. Even when the war started going against the Third Reich, the Hitler myth (as opposed to belief in the NSDAP and its leadership) proved remarkably tenacious, and the commitment of many hard-core Nazis to the official Utopia even survived the suicide of their leader. It should never be forgotten that many thousands of Germans courageously fought Nazism despite the atrocious deaths they faced if found out, while millions more may have understandably emigrated from Nazism 'inwardly'. But millions of others also colluded with it, while hundreds of thousands willingly carried out orders which would result directly in mass destruction and murder being committed on a vast scale. I would argue that most did so neither out of nihilism, nor out of automaton-like obedience, but because at some level of their consciousness they had persuaded themselves that this destruction had a cathartic, hygienic purpose. It was but the prelude to a new Germany, an era of vitality and creativity, a reborn nation.
  In passages such as these the 'nature of fascism' is revealed in its purest form: a sense of heroic self-sacrifice to an ideal unadulterated by the 'decadent' spirit of compassion, but inspired instead by the knowledge that, in order for the national phoenix to arise, everything and everyone that stands in its way first has to be burnt to ashes, literally if necessary.