Revolution from the Right: Fascism - School of Arts and Humanities ...

ourgeois capitalism, and in practice has led to mass murder and terror on a vast scale in many
of its national variants, e.g. in Russia under Stalin, in China under Mao Tse-Tung, or in Cambodia
under Pol-Pot. Even the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 in Poland and Czechoslovakia destroyed a
Soviet colonial system which had brought to many ordinary citizens some measure of stability,
material security, and social peace all of which were quickly eradicated by the wild capitalism
which ensued.
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Where the fascist revolution differs significantly from liberal (bourgeois) and Marxist
ones is that in theory these, though carried out locally, aimed to establish bridge-heads in the
territorial battle against the ‘old order’ in a process which would one day bring benefits to
humanity on a global scale. One of these benefits was to be international peace. Certainly there
was talk in the inter-war period of a ‘universal’ fascism and a number of attempts at forging
international linkages with like-minded movements, linkages which post-1945 fascism has
continued to cultivate and which have become truly global in the 1990s with the advent of the
Internet. Moreover, both the Fascists and the Nazis saw themselves as saving, not just their
nation from decadence, but ‘civilization’ as a whole. Nevertheless, the main focus of fascism has
always been the ‘home’ nation, not ‘humanity’, and its revolution in that sense is a highly
sectional one. It was Italians whom Fascists wanted to revitalize by reawakening in them the
heroic qualities of the Ancient Romans, while the Nazis resorted to the most extreme measures
imaginable in order to weld all healthy ethnic Germans into a unified national community, or
Volksgemeinschaft.
Another important difference lies in the fact that, unlike the liberal or Marxist, the fascist
cannot envisage a ‘steady state’ of society which has reached a point of social equilibrium and