Volume 41, Number 12 · June 23, 1994
Radicals
By Robert O. Paxton
The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution
by Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder, and Maia Asheri, translated by David Maisel
Princeton University Press, 338 pp., $29.95
Fascism seems easy to grasp. It presents itself to us in crude primary images: the leader haranguing an electrified crowd, disciplined youths marching by, the exaltation of communal purity within and of aggressive expansion without. As soon as one attempts to define and analyze fascism as a generic concept, however, difficulties arise. Its borders are fuzzy. Do we include Stalin? Do we include charismatic third world dictators like Nkwame Nkrumah, expansionist military dictatorships like that of Imperial Japan, modernizing dictatorships like that of Argentina's Perón, or even religious purification movements like the ayatollah's in Iran? Even if we limit ourselves to Europe during fascism's heyday, Hitler's Germany, ruled absolutely (albeit messily) by an obsessed anti-Semite, matches poorly with the laxer Italy, where Mussolini had a Jewish mistress, Jewish backers, and Jewish henchmen (at least in the early days). Hannah Arendt omitted Italy from her Origins of Totalitarianism, even though Mussolini had invented the term. Today such authoritative scholars as Karl Dietrich Bracher in Germany and Renzo De Felice in Italy refuse to treat Nazism and Fascism[1] as a single phenomenon.[2] At the level of epithet, however, lumpers prevail over splitters. Practically everyone in authority has been called fascist by some mudslinger or another.
Review, 3662 words
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