Fascists Among Us Read online

  The fascists of the 1930s differed from traditional conservatives in several important respects. Throughout the nineteenth century, the numerically tiny social elite relied on either state power or mercenaries to quell popular unrest. Fascism, by contrast, built its own organisations to destroy mass social-democratic and communist parties. That meant recruiting from the middle of society rather than merely from the top. Fascists could and did attract the wealthy; they could also appeal to industrial workers, particularly in periods of high unemployment. But in most countries, core fascist support came from the so-called small men: artisans, professionals, shopkeepers, policemen, and individual proprietors of relatively humble means, aghast at being dominated by a working class they saw as beneath them.

  In the context of intractable crisis, fascism weaponised middle-class fear, transforming dentists, clerks, and grocers into a formidable paramilitary force. Yet, despite their hostility to unions and socialists, the key recruits to fascism didn’t entirely share the agenda of the social elite. The ‘small men’ felt themselves menaced by big business just as much as by labour unrest. A lawyer or a baker in Weimar Germany might well have feared communist agitation. But he was just as likely to loathe the bankers and businessmen who were prospering during a crisis that threatened his very survival.

  That contradiction gave fascism its distinctive duality.

  In Italy and in Germany, Mussolini and Hitler eventually formed governments with the support of industrialists who, after considerable hesitation, embraced the fascists as a necessary evil and the only force capable of destroying an insurgent labour movement. Elsewhere, even when fascism wasn’t able to take power, its leaders usually recognised the need to forge an eventual alliance with the big end of town.

  Yet, even as fascist movements negotiated with elites, they promised their own cadres something entirely different: a new order in which the little man of the city, stunted by the banality of commerce, would be reborn into an authentic, heroic life.

  Griffin’s one-line gloss emphasises fascism’s rhetoric of national regeneration, which typically combined an invocation of a mythical past with an embrace of high technology, modernity, and innovation. In another influential definition, Robert O Paxton explains fascism as:

  a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.6

  Before the Second World War, fascists adopted a variety of methods to square the circle of their commitment to reaction and radicalism. Their organisations depended on authoritarianism to hold together people more accustomed to small-business competition than labour collaboration. A cult around a Man of Destiny allowed fascists to make different promises to different constituencies, with the great leader presenting organisational tacks and turns as manifestations of his mysterious but infallible wisdom.

  Fascist racism also facilitated a faux militancy entirely compatible with reaction. Hitlerite anti-Semitism, for instance, buttressed the ‘socialist’ side of National Socialism, as agitators depicted Jews as financiers, bankers, and speculators oppressing ordinary Germans. Brutality directed at impoverished Jewish men, women, and children could then be described as revolutionary action taken against the secret masters of the world.

  But a key element in the fascist project was always violence.

  ‘Fascism,’ writes Daniel Woodley, ‘is distinguished from liberalism by the aestheticization of struggle and the glorification of paramilitary violence as primary features of political action … For fascists “creative violence” is contrasted with the insipid cowardice of liberal intellectualism: violence is not just a means to an end, but an intrinsic value in itself.’7

  In Mein Kampf, Hitler admired left-wing demonstrations because, he said, they ‘burned into the small, wretched individual the proud conviction that, paltry worm as he was, he was nevertheless a part of a great dragon’.8 But, as I have noted above, the middle-class recruits to fascism lacked the collective traditions of the left. So, instead of the solidarity of the factory, fascists looked to war as a model of excitement, purpose, and fraternity.

  Both Mussolini and Hitler recruited heavily — especially at first — from demobilised Great War soldiers, building what Mussolini called ‘a trenchocracy of ex-combatants: a new elite that had emerged from a baptism of fire’.9 Italian fascism emphasised the spirit of combattentismo exemplified by veterans, while National Socialism stressed the camaraderie of the Freikorps, military units that transitioned from fighting the Allies in the trenches to battling communists in the streets of Berlin.

  ‘People told us that the War was over,’ said the Freikorps leader Friedrich Wilhelm Heinz. ‘That made us laugh. We ourselves are the War. Its flame burns strongly in us. It envelopes our whole being, and fascinates us with the enticing urge to destroy’.10

  The historian George Mosse describes how, across Europe, fascists saw the society that had emerged from the war ‘as an enemy which as shock troops they must destroy’.11

  Crucially, fascist violence didn’t simply provide a means through which the promised national rebirth would be achieved. It was, in a sense, itself that rebirth, with combat against the internal foe (the communist, the Jew, the intellectual) the crucible from which a new superman would arise. The reconstitution of society and the reconstitution of the individual were a single project — the consequence of the war the fascist waged against his enemies.

  In his manifesto, Person X presents precisely this sentiment: ‘Radical, explosive action is the only desired, and required, response to an attempted genocide … [Young men and women] decry weakness, mock fecklessness and worship strength, and in this worship of strength they radicalize and find the solution.’12

  In another place, he explains, ‘the struggle is a beauty in itself, and the victory will be all the sweeter because of it’.13

  This is the rhetoric of classical fascism.

  Yet an obvious gulf exists between mass movements of the 1920s and 1930s and the small coterie of fascist thugs in most developed countries today — or, indeed, an individual murderer like Person X.

  The Allied victory in 1945 marked a turning point for the English-speaking world, transforming fascism from a mass phenomenon into (for the most part) a fringe preoccupation.

  In what sense, then, can we talk of fascism as persisting after the war? What continuity exists between the past and the present?

  Person X nominates Sir Oswald Mosley as ‘the person from history closest to my own beliefs’ — and because Mosley’s career straddled the pre-war and post-war era, he provides an ideal illustration of the evolution of twentieth-century fascism.

  Oswald Mosley was born in 1896 into an aristocratic Staffordshire family that blamed its reduced influence on a nefarious modernity. He served, and was injured, in the Royal Flying Corps during the Great War, an experience that bolstered his subsequent association with danger, speed, and technology. Like Mussolini, Hitler, and other fascists from the classic period, Mosley treasured the camaraderie of his service, particularly in contrast with the factional divisions of civilian life.

  He first won a parliamentary seat in 1918 as a Conservative, establishing himself as an orator representing the younger war generation in opposition to the ‘old gang’ of conventional politicians. He became an independent in 1920, and then, in 1924, joined the Labour Party. With unemployment climbing to 16 per cent by 1930, Mosley outlined his own semi-Keynesian, semi-corporatist program for economic repair — and, upon its rejection by the Labour leadership, resigned his membership.

  In 1931, he launched his own New Party, which brought him,
for the first time, into conflict with the trade unions. ‘That is the crowd that has prevented anyone from doing anything in England since the war,’ he complained after being jostled by Labour supporters.14 Thereafter, the New Party trained young men, often with military experience, as ‘Mosley’s Biff Boys’, eventually creating something like a paramilitary force.

  In 1932, the New Party gave way to the British Union of Fascists, an organisation explicitly putting forward an Anglicised interpretation of ideas borrowed from Mussolini and (later) Hitler.

  Mosley advocated a radical economic program of national protectionism, implemented by what he called a ‘Modern Dictatorship’: a version of Mussolini’s corporatist state, made feasible by the revitalising will of fascist ‘super-men’.

  For a period, the BUF seemed poised for a breakthrough. At its peak, it had a membership of about 50,000 people, with its activists often coming from various professional occupations. It briefly enjoyed the support of establishment figures such as the press baron Lord Rothermere, who backed fascism in Britain (as he had in Italy) as a counter to the communism he loathed. Rothermere’s Daily Mail infamously ran an editorial entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’; his Evening Standard ran a competition for readers to sum up ‘Why I like the Blackshirts’ on a postcard.15

  By 1936, the group styled itself the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists (or simply the British Union). The group founded its own Black House (in imitation of Hitler’s Brown House), where its members studied martial arts and performed paramilitary drills. Mosley’s supporters wore a blackshirted uniform adorned with a lightning bolt in a circle. They addressed him as ‘the Leader’, and greeted him with ‘Hail Mosley’ and the stiff-armed salute.16

  A poem ‘We Follow’ from the BU press encapsulated the group’s distinctively fascist outlook, celebrating Mosley with almost religious fervour:

  We ask no easy path –

  Show us a way

  That’s harder, grander,

  Nobler than of old.

  Teach us to strive, and

  Glory in the strife,

  Nor falter when the flame

  Of life grows cold;

  But meet Death with a Laugh,

  not tear or sigh.

  We ask thee, Leader,

  teach Us how to die!17

  Over time, the BUF became overtly anti-Semitic, with Mosley denouncing the ‘big Jews’ in business and the ‘little Jews’ who threatened British identity via immigration.18

  It also grew increasingly violent. At a notorious meeting at Olympia, Mosley used searchlights to highlight hecklers to be systematically beaten up by his troops. One of the journalists present mused as to why Mosley paused his speech during interjections, even though his powerful loudspeakers could easily have drowned them out. ‘Slowly we all understood,’ he wrote, ‘that it was done to allow his Blackshirts to make a thorough mess of the interrupter …’19

  The consistent resistance to Mosley from Jewish and socialist groups ultimately led Rothermere and other potential backers to abandon him, judging the BUF as likely to provoke (rather than quell) industrial unrest.

  As the conflict in Europe drew closer, Mosley argued for appeasement, declaring ‘a million Britons shall never die in your Jews’ quarrel’.20 The BUF campaigned for peace during the so-called Phoney War of 1939 and early 1940, before being banned in the middle of the year. Mosley himself was arrested, and spent the rest of the war in prison.

  On its own, the précis of Mosley’s career does little to explain the reverence in which Person X evidently holds him. Mosley didn’t come to power; the BUF presented, at best, a second-rate imitation of successful continental fascism. A yawning cultural and social gulf separates Person X, the internet shitposter from a ‘low-income family’ in regional Australia, and Sir Oswald Mosley, the playboy Sixth Baronet of Ancoats.

  Yet, unlike Hitler and Mussolini, Mosley survived the Second World War. After his release from prison, he set about reconstructing an English-speaking fascism for the post-war era, in terms that still resonate today.

  Mosley had always been influenced by continental fascism (not least because he’d been funded by both the Italians and the Germans). After the war, he shifted his emphasis from a narrow English nationalism to a broader Europeanism, encapsulated in his phrase ‘Europe-a-nation’. Amidst the wreckage left by conflict, he spoke of overcoming economic malaise with a ‘third force’, fighting both ‘Mob’ (communism) and ‘Money’ (the rising American empire).

  Though it dismayed some of his older followers, the new orientation positioned Mosley within an intellectual context that would influence the far right for decades. In many countries, fascism had enjoyed mass support — and now its intellectuals were struggling to come to terms with shattering defeat. After 1945, Mosley became part of a milieu of fascist thinkers recasting their doctrine for a new period.

  His European focus allowed Mosley to relate to the anxieties arising around post-war immigration from the developing world. Where previously his supporters had addressed ‘Britons’, now they spoke to ‘Europeans’ opposed to a supposed influx of non-whites. As Richard C. Thurlow notes, Mosley’s Union Movement became, in 1951, the first significant political party to campaign against the ‘coloured invasion’, filling its newspaper with stories of dope peddling, black crime, and the molestation of white women, and demanding a ‘white Brixton’. Later, Mosley cheered on the Notting Hill race riots of 1958, and made overtures to the ‘Teddy boy’ gangs implicated in anti-immigrant violence.21

  The significance of Mosley to Person X thus becomes clearer. The BUF’s agitation against Jews in Britain bears no direct relevance for an Australian fascist living in New Zealand. But Mosley’s later doctrine presented ‘Europeanism’ as an expansive category, a political ideal as much as a geographical identification. In a similar fashion, Person X could write about defending ‘our lands’ against ‘invaders’, even as he stood on the soil that Maori called Aotearoa.

  Mosley represents a link between the ‘glamour’ of the classical era and the strategies of tiny far-right grouplets today — organisations that present comparable ideas, albeit to a much-reduced constituency. Sir Oswald was the handsome playboy who married Diana Mitford in Goebbels’ drawing room (at a ceremony attended by Adolf Hitler); he was also the post-war leader of a fringe sect campaigning against immigrants while trying to recruit teenage thugs. He embodies fascist continuity — linking, however tenuously, the age of Hitlerism to the misfits attracted to neo-Nazi groups today.

  But whether Person X recognised it or not, Mosley’s post-war career also illustrates the distinctive problems facing fascists in the second half of the twentieth century — and indirectly highlights the opportunities presented to them in the very different circumstances prevailing today.

  Mosley had pinned his hopes of a political comeback on the expectation of economic downturn, a return of the conditions in which the BUF had grown. In the immediate devastation of the post-war era, Britain did, indeed, experience a revived anti-Semitism, with Mosley addressing a meeting of 3,000 people in 1947 after anti-Jewish riots in Glasgow, Liverpool, and Manchester.

  Yet, despite a short recession that year, both Britain and the world economy recovered, entering capitalism’s longest-ever period of consistent growth. The resulting political and economic stability was not conducive to the middle-class hysteria upon which fascism depended. Not surprisingly, Mosley’s various projects failed to gain traction.

  He also struggled against the intense post-war hostility to fascism in general and Nazism in particular. After his release, he was widely seen as a traitor, an apologist for fascist genocide. The public meetings and rallies he sought to hold in the late 1940s were regularly attacked (particularly by Jewish ex-servicemen), so much so that by 1949 Mosley abandoned them and fled overseas.22

  In that period, and for the rest of his life, he tried and failed to disassociate fa
scism from the horrors of Nazi Germany. He oscillated between disowning anti-Semitism and embracing it; he rejected any responsibility for the Holocaust, and then grew into, as one historian puts it, ‘a central figure in a veritable cottage industry of [Holocaust] revisionism and denial’.23

  In the 1930s, fascism had not necessarily been beyond the pale in respectable circles, with many establishment politicians expressing an interest in what they saw as the innovative social experiments conducted by Mussolini and Hitler. After 1945, the term became taboo — and only attracted more odium as knowledge of Nazi atrocities circulated more generally.

  Increasingly, the Holocaust, the most egregious moral catastrophe of the modern era, functioned as an obstacle hindering not merely those who preached overt fascism, but for anyone advocating the kind of biological racism that reached its denouement in Auschwitz.

  For the rest of the twentieth century, fascists in Britain and around the world grappled with the same seemingly intractable problem. The memory of the Six Million rendered overt fascism anathema to most people. The racism they had traditionally used was increasingly unacceptable, in part because of its association with Nazi race science.

  But then came the twenty-first century — and new opportunities for the fascist right.

  2

  ‘SWEEP IT ALL UP!’

  THE WORLD AFTER 9/11

  On 11 September 2001, hijacked planes slammed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. With the wreckage still smouldering, secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld mused to a note-taking aide about the strategic opportunities the tragedy offered for America, particularly in relation to his long-held desire for regime change in Iraq.