Fascism for Beginners

Stuart Hood and Litzsa Jansz

Is Fascism Over?

Many people believe that Fascism ceased to be of any real political importance after 1945. But in the 1990s, Fascist parties are emerging, are active and growing. In the late 20th century - is Fascism really a thing of the past?

"Fascist" has become an all-purpose word. We often use it to describe people and things we dislike. It is applied indiscriminately to figures in authority, to modes of behavior, to ways of thinking, to kinds of architecture.

What "Fascists" have in common is that they are the enemies of liberal or left-wing thought and attitudes. They can be seen as threatening, aggressive, repressive, narrowly conservative and blindly patriotic.

But this catch-all use of the word raises obvious questions. Are all people who could be defined in these terms really "Fascists"?

What is Fascism?

Italy was the first country to have a party that called itself Fascist. The Italian word fascio (pronounced "fasho") means a bundle of firewood, for instance. it was first used in the 1890s by workers in the notorious Sicilian sulphur mines. It meant, literally, union.

In Italy after WWI, the name was taken over by right-wing nationalistic groups who formed "fasci di combatimento" (combat squads). They came together in 1922 to form the first Fasist party.

Some people argue that, strictly speaking, "Fascist" means a member of this Italian Fascist Party or of any similar parties that sprang up in Europe between WWI and the Allied victory in 1945.

Fascist Parties included...
Austria
Belgium
Britain
France
Holland
Germany
Hungary
Ireland
Italy
Lithuania
Norway
Portugal
Romania
Spain

The examples above are incomplete. Many of these parties drew on political traditions stretching back to the 19th century.

Ultraconservatism

The intellectual traditions behind fascism are ultraconservative.

Nietzsche weighed heavily in the thoughts of the major ultraconservatives of the late 19th century. The Italian sociologists Gaetano Mosca ("the organized minority will always triumph over a disorganized majority") and Vilfredo Pareto ("our bottom-line is the free play of market forces without government intervention") were in some respects old-fashioned exponents of laissez-faire economics, but they also believed that democracy was a pipe-dream, and stressed the importance of a superior elite class in society.

Besides being anti-democratic, ultraconservative thinkers were virulently opposed to socialism which was steadily developing in the 1880s. Socialism has its roots in the 18th century intellectual movement of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Ultraconservatives reject socialism's analysis of the class nature of society.

Socialism's remedies to injustices and oppression, its opposition to war and it's internationalism, were condemned as materialist, unpatriotic and weak.

The Ultraconservatives and Racism

Ultraconservatives embraced the notions of ideologues like the Frenchman, Count Gobineau (1816-82), in his Essay on the Inequality of the Human Race (1853). "Races which retain their purity are superior to others. Best of all is the Aryan Race."

Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1885-1927), Wagner's son-in-law, an Englishman but naturalized German, was a leading theorist of German racial superiority and Jewish inferiority. He first coined the term anti-Semitism, and said Jewish assimilation must be rejected as dangerous.

In 1873, Wilhelm Marr published The Victory of Judaism over Germanism. The German composer Richard Wagner (1813-83) was a follower of Gobineau and fiercely anti-Semitic. His goal was to preserve sacred German art from a false alien power... the JEWS! Wagner's wife Cosima Liszt was disturbed by the "insolently ostentatious synagogue in the Hans-Sachs-Platz."

Ultraconservatives in France were fiercely patriotic, anti-republican and nostalgic for past glories. An example was Charles Maurras, the catholic, monarchist and anti-Semite who hated Freemasons, Protestants and foreigners resident in France. "Democracy is anarchy! It is feminine, evil, weak."

Edouard Drumont, writer of a notorious racist book La France Juive, also edited an anti-Semitic daily newspaper La Libre Parole.

Wagner and other intellectuals in Germany had made anti-Semitic nationalism fashionable and respectable, at least on one level of "high culture". But how could ultranationalism occupy the popular level and capture the imagination of the nation as a whole?

Ultraconservatives like Maurras and Drumont were also looking for an excuse to transfer anti-Semitism from the academic level to the streets and strengthen the "traditional Christian order of France.

Nostalgic monarchists, Catholics and the army with its reactionary caste-system were allied against the liberals of the Third Republic, third generation offspring of the 1789 French Revolution.

The ultraconservative allies sought to challenge and undermine the legacy of the Enlightenment and republicanism which enshrined the radical ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, and thereby re-establish traditional authority.

The opportunity arose in France in 1894.

The Dreyfus Affair

In 1894, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, sole Jewish member of the French general staff, was accused of spying for Germany. Evidence used against him was proven to be forged.

For 12 years, France was the scene of violent conflict between pro- and anti-Dreyfus demonstrators. It became a focus of world-wide attention. Even after Dreyfus was pardoned at his re-trial, the struggles went on until 1906 when his name was officially cleared.

In 1897, Emile Zola wrote his internationally famous J'Accuse for a reopening of the case. He was tried for libel, convicted and had to flee to England.

To the ultraconservatives, Dreyfus the Jew represented everything liberal and alien that conspired to "de-Christianize" society. The Dreyfus case split public opinion - in France but elsewhere too - along lines that determined political attitudes right up to the period of French collaboration with Hitler in WWII. It ranged liberals and socialists against the Racialist right and in defense of the Republic. Although the case ended with the defeat of an organized, official French anti-Semitism, it left deep wounds, enduring bitterness and a hate for Jews. It was a dress rehearsal for Hitlerism.

Another Forgery

Forgery was used to convict one Jewish individual of "conspiracy" - Dreyfus. Another far more dangerous forgery emerged in 1903 to convict ALL Jews of a "worldwide conspiracy". This was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion concocted by Russian agents in the Tsarist secret police working in Paris during the Dreyfus Affair. They forged the evidence of a Jewish World conspiracy planned at secret meetings of the first Zionist congress in 1897.

Despite repeated exposures of the fraud, the Protocols passed as genuine and were often republished. Henry Ford (a fervent Hitler admirer) even publicized the Protocols in his newspaper, the Dearborn Independent.

...and Pogroms

This campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda went in step with widespread pogroms during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the region with the largest Jewish population in the Tsarist empire. It was known as the Pale of Settlement where Jews were massed together in Russia. In 1905, the Union of the Russian People (a far right organization) began to speak of the need to physically exterminate the Jews.

The Stage is Set for WWI

Anti-Semitism, xenophobia and fervent nationalism were in place before WWI was declared on 1 August 1914. A strange, feverish mass hysteria gripped the "civilized world" at the outbreak of the war. By 1914, Europe already had a climate of opinion that would favor the rise of post-war fascism.

The Breeding-Ground of Fascism

Post-war economic conditions were desperately bad in Germany, Italy and elsewhere. Unemployment and inflation struck hard at the middle class professionals and pensioners on fixed incomes. Large numbers of ex-soldiers felt they had been let down by civilian politicians.

In society in general there were discontented masses - unemployed, unwanted and excluded from political life. They were ready to be recruited by parties offering an alternative - by violence if necessary, to corrupt democracy.

Fascism as a mass political phenomenon was the response of the European upper and middle classes to a series of threats: recession, mass unrest, the Russian revolution, the organized working class and its left-wing parties.

The Italian Model

Italy in the early 1920s was in economic and political crisis. Hopes were frustrated that the sacrifices of the war would be rewarded by social reforms. Industrial workers and peasants arose in wide-spread strikes and demonstrations against living conditions. 1920-22... the bienno rosso (two red years) where Gramsci and the unions occupied the factories. Unions and socialist parties were strong and militant. It seemed like a pre-revolutionary situation.

Italian ex-servicemen and officers from the middle class were angry that although the country had fought on the winning side, it had not gained its just reward in the form of territories in the Mediterranean and colonies in Africa. They were angry at the socialists for having opposed the war.

Most importantly, the Liberal government of the day and the forces of the Left were in deadlock.

In this atmosphere Benito Mussolini, an ex-socialist, journalist and ex-frontline soldier, emerged as a founder of the squads of ex-combatants and their supporters in blackshirt uniforms. "The authorities won't interfere. The landowners and industrialists will approve. Destroy the trade union centers, the newspapers of the left, the workers' and peasants' cooperatives!"

In 1922, the fascists numbered almost a quarter of a million. After a largely symbolic "March on Rome", Mussolini, who arrived by train, became the head of government at the invitation of King Victor Emmanuel III.

By 1926, parliamentary government had been abolished. Giacomo Matteotti, the leading socialist member of parliament, was murdered. Many others were executed. There was strict censorship. The secret police OVRA was given wide powers. Special courts dealt with political prisoners. Some were executed. Many more received long sentences or were sent into internal exile in remote places. The brilliant Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci spent long years in prison and died there.

A Totalitarian or Corporative State

In theory, the ruling power and ideology of fascism could not be challenged. The totalitarian state envisaged by Italian Fascists, theorists like the philosopher Gentile, was a corporative state. Employers and labor united and regulated in the interests of society as a whole. Workers and employers organized vertically in the same organizations with a common interest in productivity. Total control of the economy and the state by the Party.

In practice, industrialists and big business reigned in this urge for total control. These were the same "interests" who had approved of fascism's attacks on the parties and institutions of the Left. The old elites remained powerful, and held great sway over the fascist apparatus.

Nostalgia and Imperialism

The Fascist Party adopted as its badge the fasces - the Latin word from which fascio is derived. Fasces is a bundle of rods (for whipping people) around an axe (for capital punishment) carried in front of the rulers of Ancient Rome. Adopting the fasces meant that Italy claimed the role of the Roman Empire. They wanted to challenge British domination of the Mediterranean (Mare Nostrum of the Romans).

Fascist Italy was described in Fascist propaganda as a "proletarian nation" which had been denied its share of the colonial wealth and territory to which it could export its unemployed and impoverished peasantry. To this end, Fascist Italy developed a strategy of self-sufficiency (autarchy) and the regulation of large segments of industry with state intervention and funding.

Italy's leading industrialists (like the manufacturers of FIAT) were willing to put up with Fascism. Under fascism, heavy industry prospered. Unemployment dwindled. The Fascist party soon abandoned those elements in its programme which were critical of capitalism, or supported reforms of conditions for workers. They tried to win the support of workers by providing working men’s clubs, holiday camps and cultural events. They paid special attention to sports activities, always useful for militaristic ends.

The Italian Fascist party was not, initially, anti-Semitic. Indeed, some Jews in the army, finance and industry were at first enthusiastic supporters and party members. But with the formation of the Axis, anti-Semitism became official policy, although it never really trickled down to the Italian population.

Italian Fascism embraced the theory of leadership by an elite. Power comes from the top down. Believe! Obey! Fight! The head of State and the Party is the LEADER - Il Duce!

Italian fascism collapsed with the defeat of the German forces in Italy in 1945 and the assassination of Mussolini by Resistance fighters. From this collapse, the old elites (religious, industrial, military, law enforcement) emerged intact. The social and economic system remained unchanged.

The German Model

As in Italy, national pride in Germany had been wounded by the peace terms imposed by the WWI Allies - headed by France, the USA and Britain. This was the hated Diktat - the dictated peace settlement of Versailles, 1919.

The defeat of the German armed forces in 1918 was followed by peasant mutinies and revolutionary uprisings. The postwar Social Democrat government (with the help of the army and the Freikorps) suppressed the uprisings. The Friekorps were ruthless right-wing military formations operating independently. They murdered their political opponents, notably the communist Rosa Luxemborg and Karl Liebknecht. Bourgeois politicians of the center, like Walter Rathenau, were also assassinated. By supporting the government, the army won a place of great importance and independence within the state.

In this atmosphere of inflation, unemployment and insecurity, the National Socialist German Workers' Party - the Nazi Party - emerged. They promised many things...

1. Putting the weal of the community ahead of the weal of the individual.
2. Supporting the little man, the peasant, the artisan, the small businessman.
3. Attacking the bondage of interest, imposed by the banks and big business. (meaning the Jews)
4. Attacking the socialism of the left, by promising a national socialism of the right.
5. Creating social unity in the cause of the German people - the volk.

Das Volk was a concept based on the myths of the German race, a Teutonic legendary past, Wagner's operas and figures like the legendary Herrmann, the chief who fought off the Roman Legions.

Adolph Hitler (1889-1945) , the Nazi Party organizer, was, like Mussolini, an ex-combatant and frontline soldier. His involvement in a 1923 right-wing putsch ended in total failure. He was imprisoned for a short time. There he wrote Mein Kampf (my troubles). His party didn't become important on a national scale until the economic crisis of the 1930s. They were then able to make great advancements based on middle-class and lower-middle-class disenchantment. By gaining the support of an important number of industrialists, right-wing politicians and the army, Hitler was able to present himself as a suitable candidate for the Chancellorship and head of government.

Hitler was legally installed as Chancellor in 1933 with the support of conservatives who hoped he would crush the Left. They believed themselves able to control the Nazis.

The Left was divided and confused. In the last free elections (1933) the Nazis failed to win a clear majority. They received 43% of the vote, but they had already been given the power by that time.

The Instrument is Terror

The Nazis' first steps included the abolition of trade unions and leftist parties. Concentration camps were built and immediately filled with political opponents... communists, socialists, critics of Nazism. Education, culture, the church... all were brought under Nazi control. The party was all powerful and, like Italy, was a totalitarian state with a formalized leadership. Hitler was supreme leader - the Fuehrer.

Purging the Brown-shirt Stormtroopers

One element of the Nazi Party wanted to insist on a radical socialist agenda... the Brownshirts (SA or Storm Troopers). SA Commander Ernst Roehm was a homosexual (the Nazis used this as an excuse). Roehm and other SA leaders were killed in the infamous purge known as the night of the Long Knives in 1934.

Power passed to the elite corps of the SS (Schutztaffle or Blackshirts). Under Himmler, the SS became the most feared organization in Europe.

What remained of "socialism" after the SA purge was a policy of mobilization for social ends like the labour front, used on public works like the autobahns, and the Hitler Youth Movement. Welfare programs for workers were organized by the Strength through Joy movement. Holidays, cruises, sports events, model housing for workers, a cheap people's radio, a cheap people's car - the Volkswagon.

The Survival of the Fittest

Racism was central to Nazi policies based on the theory of eugenics - a dangerous and misleading idea of Darwinian "natural selection" applied to a social context.

Eugenics was invented by Francis Galton, a brittish scientist. It involves the belief that selective breeding of society's best would end up bettering the race. In a 1910 departmental paper, then-Home Secretary Winston Churchill advocated the sterilization and imprisonment of 100,000 of England's mental defectives in order to halt what he called the abasement of the English people. Dr. Marie Stopes, birth control pioneer, held similar, if less extreme views. She claimed the wisest course was to encourage the breeding of the fittest and finest. George Bernard Shaw also supported this movement.

The Logic of the Holocaust

In 1926, the American Eugenics Society advocated the sterilization of the insane, the retarded, and epileptics. The Nazis began by applying these principles to the mentally disabled, gassing 200,000 German adults and children between 1939-41. Homosexuals were classed as unacceptably deviant, and Gypsies and Slavs were classed as racially inferior. Homosexuals, Gypsies and Slavs died in large numbers in labour and extermination camps during WWII.

Ethnic Cleansing

This same bogus genetic theory maintained that the Jews were a threat to the "pure Aryan stock" of the German race. "Jews are an alien body that creates ill-feeling, disease, ever-festering sores, death. These aliens are the cause of putrefaction and should be destroyed as quickly and thoroughly as possible." So sayeth Biblical Scholar Paul de la Garde.

Germany had to be made Judenrein - free of Jews. Apart from the genetic threat, Jews were labeled as doubly threatening... both as powerful capitalists and subversive Bolsheviks. Getting rid of them would end threats from both sides. This absurd reasoning ultimately led to the logic of the Holocaust.

A War of Economy

The Nazis swiftly began a campaign of territorial expansion. This, of course, led to war. From the beginning, German industry was complicit in the war effort. When the extermination camps were set up in Poland in the 1940s, German industrial concerns such as Siemans and I.G. Farben set up factories alongside them. BMW, the Bavarian car-manufacturing company, used slave labour from Dachau. Degesch, a pesticide manufacturer, supplied Zyklon B for the gas chambers. Topf and Son designed the cremation ovens and took out a patent on its system in 1953. The camps were a source of cheap expendable labor. So too were the conquered territories from the east from which slave labor was imported to work in industry and on the land.

The End of Hitler's 1000-Year Reich

Nazism collapsed with the total defeat of the German military machine. Germany was divided, and the Berlin wall became a symbol of this political reality. In West Germany, the British, American and French restored a capitalist economy which was swiftly rebuilt. The old elites were still intact, and remain so to this day. In the East, Stalinist command economy and totalitarian state system were implemented. But what was waiting beneath the surface of this ostensibly socialist system? More on that later.

The Spanish Model

Spain was the third European country to have a fascist regime in place as official government. It came to power as the result of the military rebellion and civil war which lasted between 1936-39.

1931 had seen the democratic election of a government devoted to social reform. Their platform?

- Unionization of the peasantry.
- 8-hour agricultural work-days.
- Regulation of wages and working conditions.
- Strengthening the industrial trade unions.

The ruling class thought these ideas were dangerously left-wing, and funded right-wing and fascist parties and para-military groups to counter them. One of these groups was the Falange, founded in 1933 by Primo Di Rivera, who was assassinated. They wore blue shirts, had fascist rituals, salutes and chants. They were trained in streetfighting, hated the bourgeoisie and hated the Jews. They found allies in the Monarchist party, the Ceda (authoritarian Catholics) and the Carlists (deeply conservative Catholic party from the north of Spain).

Spanish fascism was nostalgic for the "Catholic majesties" of the 18th century, Ferdinand and Isabella (Discovery of the New World, driving out the Moors). The Falangist badge featured the emblem of the Catholic Kings - a bundle of arrows - and borrowed the red and black colors of the radical left.

In the ideological field, fascism maintained that Spain had been corrupted by the ideas of the enlightenment and the French Revolution. They believed liberal ideas were evil, and found common enemies in unions, communists and democratically elected republicanism.

El Moviemento

The election in 1936 of a government composed of socialists, communists and radicals triggered a military rebellion led by Generalisimo Francisco Franco. He forced the fascists and Monarchists into a single "Moviemento". With the aid of German and Italian forces, the civil war ended after 3 years, with Franco's victory. Irish Fascists, White Russians and French Monarchists also aided Franco.

The International Brigades

Pro-republican volunteers from all across Europe, with the Lincoln Brigade from the USA (Hemmingway). Stalin also sent help, but his help included sending Comintern agents to purge his enemies - Trotskyites, anarchists and radicals - thereby causing a civil war within a civil war on the Left, and weakening the republican effort. George Orwell witnessed and wrote about the assassination of leftists in Barcellona, but wasn't believed.

The victory of Fascism in the civil war was followed by a dictatorial regime with concentration camps, forced labor for opponents of the regime, and special courts which handed out summary death sentences in appalling numbers. Over 30,000 people were executed, by conservative estimates.

With the destruction of the left, the peasants and workers were left defenseless in the face of attacks on wages and living standards. The trade unions were handed over to the Falange which also inherited the printing presses and other property of the left.

40 Years of Fascist Dictatorship

When military victory had been won, Franco distanced himself from the Falange, whose prestige was undermined by the collapse of Italian Fascism in 1943 to which the Falange was linked.

The Falange controlled a mass youth movement. It also penetrated the civil service and dispensed patronage in many areas of Spanish life.

Power remained with the military, right wing Catholics and technocrats from the Opus Dei - a powerful secret organization that still has important connections in politics, industry and finance outside of Spain.

The fascist dictatorship was gradually eroded by Spain's growing economic prosperity, and by the pressure of the US which wanted air-bases in Spain. Spanish industrialists also could see that the regime's traditionalist views and control of the economy were hindering the country's development.

On Franco's death in 1975, the monarchy was restored. Once again, the old elites were still in place.

Other Brands of European Fascism

Fascism in the interwar years had many national varieties. It was chameleon-like, drawing on different local right-wing and radical traditions.

In France, there were anti-Semitic organizations like the Monarchist Action Francaise and the Fascist Leagues like the Croix de Feu composed of veterans decorated for bravery in WWI.

In Belgium, the Fascists were Rexists - followers of Christus Rex (Christ the King), Catholic and nationalist. In Romania, the Iron Guard was fanatically religious and nationalistic.

In Hungary, the Arrow Cross was Christian, nationalist and anti-Semitic.

Then there were varieties of fascism best defined as clerical Fascism. Examples were the long, puritanically religious dictatorship of Antonio Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, and Austria in the 30's, before Hitler took over, experienced the brief regime of Chancellor Englebert Dolfuss, a Catholic anti-socialist and anti-Semite.

The British Case

The insecurity and mass unemployment caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s help to explain the rise of Fascism in some European countries. Britain shared the same problems, but Fascism had only a very moderate success.

Oswald Mosley, a soldier in WWI, emerged as leader of a British Fascist party. He started out as a Tory, went on to Labor, left and founded the New Party, which was not a success. Then he formed the British Union of Fascists, drawing on a tradition of nationalist racism that stemmed from the 1904 British Brothers League, created to reduce or stop immigration from Eastern Europe. Their symbol was the fasces, again, because they claimed the Roman empire of the 20th century was England.

Mosley was also typical in that he was funded by a big industrialist, Sir William Morris, the car manufacturer, and encouraged by Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, which supported the Blackshirts. The BUF was never more than 40,000 strong at its peak in the 30s. Its members came overwhelmingly from the lower middle class - small shopkeeps, students, unemployed. It did have a measure of working class support, however. In East London, where there was a large Jewish population, they had up to 20% of the vote.

Reasons for the Failure of Fascism in Pre-war England

One reason the BUF failed was the fact that its anti-Semitism and elitist positions easily fit into the official right-wing group, the Torries! The politically important rightist elements of England in the 30s thought that the pursuit of an appeasement approach with Hitler might be the best course of action.

Britain was also fortunate that the bulk of its armed forces were stationed abroad in the empire, and thus removed from the political arena. We should remember what happened in Curagh in 1914, where the officer corps mutinied in protest against handing home-rule to Ireland!

Mosley's blackshirts held mass rallies at which interrupters were severely man-handled, with the police apparently unwilling to intervene. In 1936, the Public Order act forbade the wearing of uniforms and gave the police greater power to control public displays and marches, powers used against the left as well as the right.

The Battle of Cable Street

The rest up to after Japan, is at home on another file...

Nostalgia and Maladjustment

Nostalgia for a strong state involves the psychological dimensions of a nationalist 'siege mentality".

1. A feeling of loss of identity or national prestige (for instance, Britain’s loss of Empire) compensated by jingoism and hooligan behavior.

2. Difficulty of adjusting to a society in which large numbers of citizens are unemployed and likely to never find work - thanks to the government's economic reliance on "the market" which deepens the gap between the rich and the poor and results in the creation of a "sub-class", the euphemism for people the market has junked.

3. Inability to admit and come to terms with the realities today of multi-ethnic societies and cultures.

4. Blindness to a world facing an immense movement of populations as the poor and deprived leave countries where deserts are expanding, famine is endemic and life is intolerable. The 19th century poor of Europe emigrated to America and the British Empire. The new wave of emigration will be from the misery of Africa and Asia. European governments are responding to this by tightening immigration regulations and denying asylum to political refugees.

The Respectable Right

It is dangerously misleading to think of the Far Right simply in terms of neo-Nazi skinhead hooligans. More important and more powerful supporters of new-fascism can be found in respectable society... in the judiciary, police, the military, finance and industry. Respectability is also the aim of the academic and intellectual "new right".

An important expression of this New Right is GRECE, the acronym in French for the Group of Research and Study for European Civilization. Significantly, Grece, in French, also means Greece, traditionally the cradle of Western civilization. GRECE’s publications hark back to the myth of a European race, paganism, cult figures like the Vikings. GRECE is radically anti-egalitarian and anti-humanist. It celebrates thinkers like Pareto whose theory of elites underpins much fascist thinking.

The intellectual new right is active not only in France, but in Italy, Germany, Britain and elsewhere...

This anti-egalitarian movement has adopted social biology, genetics, and ethnology to apply concepts of animal behavior such as "the pack" and "the dominant male" to human society.

New Right apologists peddle "scientific" theories about the inheritance of intelligence and its links with race.

An article in the medical journal the Lancet in 1972 suggested that the "increased prevalence of mental retardation" called for urgent action. Such views are linked to the concept of "mental hygiene" and eugenic medicine.

In Britain, a leading proponent of this line of thought was Sir Cyril Burke. His work on the IQ of twins, aimed at discounting the importance of culture and economy in the development of intelligence, is today discredited. he was a member of the Eugenics society and a founder of MENSA, the high IQ group which believes in eugenic principles.


Finally...

How do we recognize whether a group, party or government qualifies as Fascist or not? One way of attempting a definition might be to tick off the headings of the following list...

Prime targets:

Trade unions
the Left
Parliamentary Democracy
Are they supported by the middle-class (doctors, professionals, small businessmen)?
...by disillusioned workers?
Do they appeal to youth?
Do they rely on support of the military and police?
are they racist?
are they jingoistically nationalist?
are they corporative?
are they funded by industry and land-owners?
do they attempt to limit the role of women?
are they hostile to homosexuality?
do they oppose abortion?
do they rely on a mass party?
do they appeal to a mythical history?
do they use terrorism against their opponents?
do they enjoy the complicity of the authorities?
do they exalt the Leader?