Fascism is more than reaction - School of Arts and Humanities ...

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apartheid South Africa, have been fascist. Just how elastic a concept it can be was graphically illustrated a few months ago when crowds in Beijing protesting against NATO’s ‘collateral damage’ to the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade held up placards bearing swastikas to symbolize the oppressor. No wonder attempts by the Russian parliament to ban fascism have so far run aground on the reef of controversy and semantics which forms when legislators try to specify precisely what is being made illegal. Second, every definition of fascism implies a causal explanation. The one offered by Dave Renton in last month’s issue of this periodical is a case in point. ‘Fascism’, he assures us, is a form of ‘reactionary mass movement’ (a simplistic and bathetic conclusion given his scathing eloquence concerning the shortcomings of ‘liberal’ theories). He explains that reactionary means ‘opposed to all forms of democratic practice’. Yet dissenters would point out that this covers a wide range of modern populist movements of the right and the left, from Islamic fundamentalism to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, while it does not take into account scores of minute extreme right- wing groupuscules (such as the English Revolutionary Faction), intellectuals (e.g. Drieu la Rochelle), think-tanks (e.g. GRECE), loners (such as those responsible for the Oklahoma bombing and the London nail-bombings), and ‘cadre’ paramilitary groups (such as the AWB), all of whom would be widely associated with the term. It is also a definition which at first sight implies that the driving force of fascism is the wantonly nihilistic one of ‘destroying democracy’. Following this logic, the Holocaust, which Renton cites as the culmination of fascist reactionary practice, can be seen as no more than a vast exercise in destruction motivated by no other goal than the Nazis’ visceral hatred of their opponents as embodiments of Communism (conveniently forgetting that they also incarnated international capitalism). The ideological origins of this hatred, the deeper rationale behind the systematic violence and systemic inhumanity it inspired, remains obscure. Or does it? Is it liberal paranoia to suggest that red lurks under Renton’s 2
ideological bed? He takes to task three liberal academics (myself among them) for giving credence to the claims of fascism’s ideologues that it had a revolutionary dimension, insisting that this makes the movement appear ‘much more positive than it actually has been’. Our approach is ‘flawed and uncritical’ and it is ‘time that it changed’. Could the hidden agenda of Renton’s vitriolic attack on ‘liberal’ theories of fascism be part of a campaign to put Marxist theories back in the driving seat of fascist studies which they occupied until the 1960s, a point surely not unrelated to the fact that his own monograph, Fascism, has just been published by Pluto Press and is advertized in this very issue of Searchlight as offering ‘the first new theory of fascism ..to come from the left for over 20 years’. Yet encrypted within the term ‘reactionary’ is the traditional Marxist assumption that fascism’s ultimate function, if not deliberate purpose, was the defence of feudal and capitalist interests at all costs from the threat posed by socialism (whether Bolshevik or Trotskyite) as the embodiment of the ‘real’ revolution. Only when Marxists finally concede that they do not have a monopoly over revolutionary movements in modern history may they finally develop an incisive ‘alternative’ account of fascism. There is nothing in what Renton says, however, to suggest that he has wandered far from the orthodox fold. Unfortunately, Renton’s polemical urge to discredit the ‘liberal’ school of fascist studies has led him to make to some aberrant judgments. The ‘academic discipline’ of fascist studies has been around not a mere fifteen years, but at least since Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism originally published in German in 1963. Though Zeev Sternhell’s work does indeed imply that fascism died in 1945, both Stanley Payne and I stress the continuities between inter-war and post-war fascism, and the bulk of my publications have concerned its 1990s variants rather than its pre-1945 ones ‘ see, for example, the epilogue to Payne’s A History of Fascism, 1914-1945, my ‘Net Gains and GUD Reactions: Patterns of Prejudice in a Neo-fascist Groupuscule (Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 33, no. 2, 1999), or section five of Fascism which is entirely devoted to contemporary fascism. Certainly, neither of us suggest that ‘the battles are over’. What 3
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