Fascism

IT IS A SUPREME IRONY that, according to American President Woodrow Wilson, World War I was fought to make “the world safe for democracy.” Yet the war, which the greatest liberal statesmen of their generation were unable to prevent, ended in the birth of fascism, with communism one of the two most anti-democratic forces of modern times. Fascism or, as it was known in Germany, Nazism, was in a real sense the response of many front-line soldiers who survived the war against the political beliefs of the “donkeys” at home who had sent them to fight.

The two most visible human personifications of European fascism were Benito Mussolini of Italy and Adolf Hitler of Germany, who had both seen military service in the war. Hitler, who would go on to lead Germany in 1933, had won the Iron Cross for bravery in the trenches on the Western Front. According to Roger Eatwell in Fascism: A History, “Mussolini joined the [Italian] Army, serving with enthusiasm if not with great distinction, until injured when a shell exploded in a mortar during firing practice.”

The militarism that was the hallmark of fascism had been evident even earlier in the writings of the Italian Filippo Marinetti, who rhapsodized in The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 of “war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for.” Indeed, the joyful way in which the nations of Europe had marched to war in August 1914 might serve to pinpoint fascism as a part of militarism, as one of the real causes—and [Page 636]not results—of the world conflict. However, it was in the aftermath of World War I that the movements historically classified as fascism made their appearance.

Two of the greatest fascists in history, Benito Mussolini (left) and Adolf Hitler smile at the height of their power in 1941. Each leader delved deep into his nation's conservative past to evoke the glory of its fascist movements.

All such movements were inherently conservative in their appeal, traditionally making an obeisance to “king and country,” even if in countries like Italy Mussolini would be the real power, not King Victor Emmanuel II, and in Spain it would be General Primo de Rivera who would hold tight the reins of power, not King Alphonso XIII. Also, the fascist movements were marked by a fanatic belief in the end justifying the means, of might justifying everything. Friedrich Nietzsche, wrote of such bemedaled elites, “we can imagine them returning from an orgy of murder, arson, rape, and torture, jubilant and at peace with themselves as though they had committed a fraternity prank,” as Christopher Simpson translates the German philosopher in The Splendid Blonde Beast.

In 1919, as the Great Powers tried to make sense of the shambles of a collapsed Europe at the Paris Peace Conference, Gabriele D'Annunzio emerged as the first recognized fascist leader in Europe. A true war hero from World War I and the role model for Mussolini, D'Annunzio made his mark in September 1919 when, like a medieval Italian condottiere, he carved out a city state in Fiume, which Italy's obliging Western Allies (Great Britain, France, and the United States) were going to give to Yugoslavia. The new state of Yugoslavia was being made with diplomatic glue out of the wreckage of the empire of Austria-Hungary and prewar Balkan countries like Serbia. Indeed, as David Frumkin wrote in A Peace to End All Peace, Italy was falling out [Page 637]quickly with its wartime comrades. Lord Curzon, the ultimate British imperialist, reproached Count Carlo Sforza, who would become Italian foreign minister in 1920, for having an “unloyal attitude” toward Allied plans for the dividing of the spoils of the conquered Ottoman Turkish Empire in the Middle East. Italy, however, was compelled to abide by the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922 that made D'Annunzio's Fiume into a “free city,” thus sending the poet-activist into exile. The Rapallo Treaty, however, became for Italy what the Versailles Treaty would be for the Nazis in Germany, a diplomatic “stab in the back.” Opposition to the treaty was strenuously voiced by Mussolini, then the sulphurous editor of the newspaper Popolo d'Italia.

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