By JOHN WILSON
“The more someone uses the word ‘fascist' in everyday conversation, the less likely it is that he knows what he's talking about." So writes Jonah Goldberg on the cottage industry of Bush-inspired dystopian paranoia that's sprung up on the left in recent years and warns of the dangerous “fascist" aspirations of the neo-cons, big corporations, the Religious Right or some unholy combination of the three.
| When someone starts expounding on the impending advent of fascism, it's always good to ask them their opinions on Gabriele D'Annunzio. Most "experts" on fascism have never heard of him. Along with Alceste de Ambris, D'Annunzio wrote the Charter of Carnaro when he occupied Fiume after the First World War, refusing to allow it to be taken over by the new state of Croatia, holding it for a year. The Charter established the first corporate state, with nine corporations to represent the different sectors of the economy (workers, employers, professionals, etc.), and a tenth (d'Annunzio's invention) to represent the "superior" human beings (heroes, poets, prophets, supermen). D'Annunzio either invented or perfected the economics of the corporate state, blackshirts, the Roman salute -- that later became the Hitlergrüss, the incorporation of war veterans (the Arditi) as roving bands of fascisti which made possible the use of strongarm tactics to repress any inconvenient dissent. The "expert" in fascism should know all that, and ideally should have read (in the original or in translation) at least some of D'Annunzio's poetry, one or two of his novels, and seen one or two of his plays. He actually was a very good writer, and he was, as are today's liberals, quite the idealist. |
But Goldberg, a conservative columnist and National Review contributor, doesn't waste much time with the fringe left; “Liberal Fascism" is instead a bold and witty attempt to introduce into American political discourse an adult understanding of a movement that's for too long served as little more than a leftist boogeyman. In the process, he makes a persuasive case (if, at times, an uneven one) that fascism was from the beginning a movement of the left - and one that's surprisingly tied up with the history of 20th century American liberalism. | Fascism tries to implement a non-Marxist socialism. For one thing, there's not a lot of money in proletarians. For another thing, actual working men and women have the distressing habit of having opinions different from those of the vanguard of the proletariat, which is why communists tend to reclassify large numbers of them as bourgeoisie on taking power so they can be comfortably massacred. |
| “Fascism," Goldberg explains, “is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people." |
| One of the techniques Mussolini lifted from D'Annunzio in Fiume was the practice of forcibly dosing opponents with castor oil to humiliate and/or degrade them. This became a favorite of the blackshirts. Today's libs are fond of similar techniques, only leaving out the castor oil. |
| That fixation on secularism is actually a separate thread, tied to Italy's strain of reactionary anticlericalism. Prying the Papal States away from the Pope wasn't done without a bit of propagandizing. Other fascist states reached different accomodations with the churches. Fascist ideology sees the Church (singular) as one of the corporations making up the state. |
| The symbol of fascism is the Roman fasces, a bundle of reeds, each reed in itself weak, but bound together in a bundle unbendably strong. That was actually the same symbolism the Romans put on them, and it was a particularly attractive idea to the young Italian nation that had within living memory (Garibaldi died in 1882) been a conglomeration of weak states, each of them a pawn played by larger, more cohesive Europowers. The Fearless Leader is the prime characteristic, along with the fasces, of fascism. Fearless Leader is a Nietzschean Superman™, the Man on Horseback™ who has All the Answers™. If somebody has All the Answers™ you can relax and let him do the thinking. All you have to do is show up for parades in a clean shirt of whichever color and know the words to the Inno dei Fascisti or the Horst Wessel Lied, depending. Without the corporate state, by the way, the Man on Horseback™ is a mere garden variety dictator, such as are found in South America still, but also were fairly common in Europe up until the end of the Second World War. My favorite Man on Horseback™ is the original, General Georges Boulanger. His followers were ready to overthrow the Republic -- I think it was the Second, but it may already have been the Third -- as soon as he appeared on the scene, on horseback, of course. He changed his mind at the last minute, leaving the supporters in the lurch, and ended up blowing his brains out at the grave of his mistress in Brussels. |
| It's repulsive to the modern mind only when it's explicitly, perhaps even forcibly, associated with Bergen Belsen. D'Annunzio's birthplace is still a museum, and his house is now the Vittoriale degli Italiani (The shrine of Italian victories), where are housed the plane he flew in WWI and the boat he used in taking over Fiume. His blackshirts were just as thuggish as Mussolini's, but the presentation of his ideas was couched in idealistic terms. |
