Undergraduate Dissertation: Nature of Fascism Across Europe

The Nature of Fascism Across Europe American Themes and Issues Dr. Özlem Karagöz Gümüşçubuk Türkü Naz Altınay & İlker Görüşün TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION 3 FASCIST INCLINATIONS IN HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY 4 A. Theories on Fascism Relating to Human Psychology 4 1. Jung’s Theory 4 2. Koestler’s Self-Transcendence and Self-Assertiveness 7 3. Mass Psychology of Fascism by Reich 8 B. The Experiments 11 1. Milgram Experiment 11 2. The Third Wave 15 Fascısm and CULTUre 19 A. What is Culture 20 B. Mutual Interaction Between Culture and Fascism 21 C. Fascist Regulations on Family, Gender and Education 30 IV. Political Fascism 36 A. Genesis of Fascism 36 B. Rise of Fascism 39 C. Decline of Fascism 42 V. CONCLUSION 44 VI. WORKS CITED 46 Türkü Naz Altınay – İlker Görüşün Dr. Özlem Gümüşçubuk Karagöz American Themes & Issues II 3 June 2014 Introduction Most of us knew fascism from the heinous atrocities that they committed during their tyrannical regiments such as holocaust by Third Reich and Falangist massacres of their opponents during Spanish Civil in the beginning of twentieth century. However fascism is a phenomenon which cannot be reduced solely to these crimes against humanity for it has its own unique psychological, cultural and political soil that flourished at the turn of Modern Age. Throughout this paper from the psychological aspect; the rise of Modern Man as an epitomize of the Enlightenment Age molded with the ideas of liberalism, nihilism, reformism and conservatism, rationalism, dialectical materialism of Marx and so on: we will witness the fall of rationality contrarily and an emergence of an Irrational Age gilded under the wax of these ideas of own. The very essence of these ideas; specifically petit bourgeois liberalism and rationalism suppressing the very primordial self in the human with the decline of democracy to which devoted itself most passionately and of which confided to the hands of totalitarianism and fascism with its own hands manifested itself through the escalatory voices of fascist regimes astoundingly. The suppression of the primordial and its relation with the catharsis of fascist inclinations via fascist regimes will be analyzed from three prominent figures’ aspects; Carl Gustav Jung, Arthur Koestler and Wilhelm Reich. Later on two experiments, Milgram Experiment and Third Wave experiment will be rendered and the revealing facts and findings of the experiments revealing the fascist inclinations in human psychology will be propounded. In the second part, the cultural soil of Europe which provided the growth and sprawl consisting of political thinkers, social theorists, writers, scientific developments, scientists etc. The correlation between culture and fascism will be analyzed simultaneously; the influences of prominent figures and the formation and implementation of fascist ideas in interim period between First World War and Second World War. Also Fascist regulations on Gender, Family and Education to form a new generation embroidered with the mindset of fascist ideas and realization of fascism itself through the institutions of family and religion by the suppression sexual drives and creating the authoritarianism with patriarch structure. Ultimately in the last chapter the genesis, rise and decline of political fascism will be revealed; the emergence of political fascism in Europe, the preconditions of fascism that ensured fascist leaders and movements take control of the nations and come into offices, the reasons of their success, and the main causes of their fall and entropy within the context of war and political reasons will be discussed. II. Fascist Inclinations in Human Psychology A. Theories on Fascism Relating to Human Psychology 1. Jung’s Theory To understand the nature of fascism in human psychology in individual and masses, one needs to examine and investigate thoroughly the inclinations of sado-masochistic impulses in psyche, the urges of obedience and subordination and the roots of success of fascism and Nazism as a mass movement. It’s clear that the driving forces and dynamics in psychology of masses and individuals cannot be excluded from the socio-economic facts of the time but one can indeed deduce certain covalent elements when examining history for the psychological reasons behind such extensive massacre at the beginning of twentieth century. There are certain acknowledged arguments on the nature of fascism in human psychology; the first one is Jung’s in which he puts forth the concepts of archetype, anima/animus, and mana personality and correlates them with political sciences. He claims that despite the rationality of “modern man,” the sensibility of him to collective and individual primal myths derives from the archetypes which are transformed through language, culture and “inherited with the structure of the psyche and [. . .] therefore to be found in all times and among all peoples” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 24). According to Jung, these archetypes are the key elements in manipulation and regulation of deep emotional forces which are commonly called mana by him and these archetypes sustain their existence in a realm of Collective Subconscious. These archetypes are the driving forces behind the occults and rituals as a backbone for the rise of fascism in Europe creating a sense of belonging according to Jung such as: Fascism reached to the Shadow of the European soul that had been repressed over a century of materialism, liberalism, rationalism and cosmopolitanism. It awakened the Berserker rage, the Spartan ethos, the martial spirit of the Roman Legions. […] In German National Socialism, Carl Jung (founder of Analytical Psychology) saw the embodiment of the repressed “Shadow” of the German soul, which he named the Wotan archetype after the ancient Germanic god. Nazism and the fascist variants throughout Europe were a cathartic release from repression, a smashing of the very thin veneer of “civilization” that had held back the tribal, warrior ethos flowing through the veins of Europeans from the mists of creation, waiting to be reawakened and released (The Occult Fascist Axis). Jung focuses on the fact that with the coming of Enlightenment Age and the sprawl of ideas such as rationalism, liberalism, individualism and materialism and the decline of monotheist religions, individual becomes decentralized while becoming isolated and detached from collectivity thus become more and more alien to his subconscious instincts and attached to the ideologies: Jung saw a harmonious relationship between Consciousness, the Personal Unconscious and the Collective Unconscious as an essential precondition for human beings to enjoy a creative psychic life and to form integral parts of a healthy society. In the West the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution progressively destroyed the relative equilibrium in spiritual (or rather, mythopoeic) life assured by the Christian Church, giving rise to a “mass man”, the product of the “isolation and atomization of individuals” which accompanied “the neglect and repression of the instincts of the unconscious.” A concomitant of this has been the emergence of a “mass psyche” particularly susceptible to what Jung calls “psychic inflation” (Odajnyk, Jung and Politics: The Political and Social Ideas of C. G. Jung, 36). This mass psychology with a need and urge to devote itself to and lack of a centrum manifested itself with Fascism at the beginning of twentieth century. Complete devotion of masses to the movements and its “charismatic leaders”, the atrocities of the twentieth century aided and abeted or neglected by public or large number of people derives from the fact that the Modern Man’s suppression of primordial instincts at the turn of twentieth century and the lack of a center. As Jung states; “Our fearsome Gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with –ism” and whether German people or large numbers of Spanish citizens became the accomplices of the massacres during the Second World War with an urge of willingness and voluntariness in the name of these –isms (Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, 204). 2. Koestler’s Self-Transcendence and Self-Assertiveness The second and most recent theory on psychology of fascism belongs to a British-Hungarian author and journalist Arthur Koestler, whose most well-known book is “The Ghost in the Machine” in which he presents the idea that as human brain evolved, his tendency to create his destruction and his brain’s structure upon more primitive and primordial urges increases with a basis of neurological and scientific findings. Roger Griffin claims for him that he is “a twentieth century equivalent of the Enlightenment philosophe” (Nature of Fascism, 299). In The Ghost in the Machine (1970) he offers a comprehensive theory of the physiological substrata of human psychology which places special emphasis on the poor neurological coordination between the neocortex/mesocortex in which the higher functions of the brain are located and the phylogenetically older "animal" brain constituted by the limbic system. It is this "archicortex" which is responsible not only for the body's basic regulatory mechanisms but also for our instinctive, visceral (i.e. “gut”) emotions. The direct result of imperfect “wiring” between the three brains are the major dysfunctions which can arise in human beings' relationship with external reality and bring about what he calls “the predicament of man” (Nature of Fascism, 299). Koestler puts forth two driving forces behind the human nature; self-assertiveness and self-transcendence of which are both needs to be in a balance in psyche to build a healthy relationship with the outer world and thus coexist with it. Furthermore he asserts that not only the dreadful deeds that Fascist movements and masses committed at the beginning of twentieth century but almost all of the atrocities in the human history derives from not self-assertiveness but self-transcendence driving force and legitimizes the deeds as in the name of a “higher goal” or a “higher being/entity” (namely God) in the individual mind and so for masses. 3. Mass Psychology of Fascism by Reich Lastly and the third argument belongs to Wilhelm Reich who was an Austrian psychoanalyst born in the late 19th century and focusing on the issue of Fascism by mainly characterizing the psychological traits behind the driving forces of massive inclinations to and support for Nazis in Third Reich Era asking the question of “What was it in the masses that caused them to follow a party the aims of which were, objectively and subjectively, strictly at variance with their own interest?” (Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism, 29) The main argument of Reich is based upon the idea that “with regard to its social basis, National Socialism was originally a middle class movement” (Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism, 29). The promise of Hitler to fight against the capitalistic power and protection of middle class, NSPD gained its momentum in the ballots and elections from the lower middle class and middle class strata of the society. Apart from the sociological strata, Reich associates the fascist inclinations in human psyche with the subversion of the biological core by a secondary, intermediate layer which is consisted of superficial layer of social cooperation and complete separation and non-communication between them. To be more precise: If one penetrates through this second, perverse and antisocial layer, one arrives regularly at a third, the deepest layer, which we call the biological core. In this deepest layer, man, under favorable social conditions, is an honest, industrious, cooperative animal capable of love and also of rational hatred. In character-analytic work, one cannot penetrate to this deep, promising layer without first eliminating the false, sham-social surface. What makes it appearance when this cultivated mask falls away, however, is not natural sociality, but the perverse antisocial layer of the character (Reich, Mass Psychology of Fascism, 6). Thus the suppression of biological core by social mask; the secondary layer causes the implicit inclinations of fascism in human nature; the biological core needs a way of expression in human life; whether in arts or sports if cannot it turns into destructive powers. On the other hand, the contribution of ethics of liberalism to this suppression of biological core is indisputable. As a sum of his ideas on fascism, Reich concludes that fascism is not born out of a political movement but it’s innate and dormant in every individual character by the suppression of biological core of which he clearly states in his book “Mass Psychology of Fascism”; “In this characterological sense, “fascism” is the basic emotional attitude of man in authoritarian society, with its machine civilization and its mechanistic-mystical view of life. It is the mechanistic-mystical character of man in our times which creates fascist parties, and not vice versa” (6). The mechanistic-mystical man of modern age is the man stuck between the mechanists and mystic thinking according to Reich. That is to broach the subject with the own words of Reich from his book “Ether, God and Devil/Cosmic Superimposition”: The [character-] armored, mechanistically rigid person thinks mechanistically, produces mechanistic tools, and forms a mechanistic conception of nature. The armored person who feels his orgonotic body excitations in spite of his biological rigidity, but does not understand them, is mystic man. He is interested not in “material” but in “spiritual” things. He forms a mystical, supernatural idea about nature (10). In the light of all these arguments on the nature of fascism in human psychology, it can be concluded that fascist inclinations are the very existing primordial urges in human psyche and emerge from the conflict between the primordial self and a secondary dynamic of which sometimes is the external force such as societal role or a more sophisticated inner force -in Jungian discourse, the dissonance between Collective Unconscious, Personal unconscious and Conscious, to Wilhelm Reich the suppression of biological core by the social mask and detachment with it and for Koestler the imbalance between the Self-assertiveness and Self-transcendence forces. While psychological dynamics of inclinations of fascism can vary according to different arguments, there are certain elements that most of the theorists provide within their theories. Before jumping to a sudden conclusion, we’d like to analyze first three prominent sociological and psychological experiments which can be regarded as the microcosmic examples of fascist inclinations within small, controlled groups which are conducted after World War II with an intention of comprehending the nature of the psychology of masses during the World War II and within the course of the rise and conduct of Fascist movements. Apart from sociological turmoil, these experiments were conducted to both understand and show the group behaviors, mass psychology, and the degrees of human cruelty when emancipated from responsibility, the effects of hierarchy on the behaviors and so on. B. The Experiments 1. Milgram Experiment The first experiment that will be mentioned below is Milgram Experiment conducted starting from 1961 by Stanley Milgram who was a social psychologist at Yale University with an intention of answering the question of “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?” three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem (Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey, 106). The experiment contained three types of subject; the scientist conducting the experiment, the subject of the experiment namely the teacher within the context and another volunteer who compacted with the experimenters before. To be more clear, a stage was arranged before as though an experiment of learning would be conducted without the knowledge of the participant and the other volunteer (actually an actor) who pretends that he draw the “learner” paper from the lot and mentions in the room that he has a heart condition when they’re left alone. The subjects were 40 males between the age of 20 and 50, drawn from New Haven and the surrounding communities. Subjects were obtained by a newspaper advertisement and direct mail solicitation. Those who responded to the appeal believed they were to participate in a study of memory and learning at Yale University [...]. Typical subjects were postal clerks, high school teachers, salesmen, engineers, and laborers. Subjects ranged uneducated level from one who had not finished elementary school, to those who had doctorate and other professional degrees. They were paid $4.50 for their participation in the experiment. (Milgram, Behavioral Study of Obedience, 272). Seemingly goal of the experiment was to teach the words to the volunteer (actor), by giving electroshocks ranging from small amounts to high levels. The participant (teacher) is given a word peers list and commanded to read the word; each time the learner answer incorrectly, the teacher administers electroshocks. Before the experiment the teacher is sat down to the chair of the learner and given small amount of electroshock to comprehend the experiment. The levels of electroshock range from 15 volts to 450 volts; from Slight Shock to Danger: Severe Shock. During the administration of the shocks; “the teacher” witnesses the pain through the voices of “the learner” which are actually tape records. What is interesting those 26 out of 40 male subjects pursues until to the end which means the Severe Shock. After a number of voltage-level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease (Milgram, Behavioral Study of Obedience, 114). The responses of the subjects are varying but the majority pursues the experiment with hesitations and the urge of confirmation and sometimes the attempt to quit. The experiment ends if the subject continues to pursue his desire to quit after four verbal prods in such order: 1. Please continue. 2. The experiment requires that you continue. 3. It is absolutely essential that you continue. 4. You have no other choice, you must go on. After the end of experiment, the realization of the pain of the “learner” by the subjects was demonstrated clearly with the post-experimental interviews by Milgram: Subjects accept situation. With few exceptions subjects were convinced of the reality of the experimental situation, that they were administering shocks to another person. And the most potent shocks were extremely painful. In the post-experimental interview subjects were asked: “How painful to the learner were the last few shocks that you administered to him?” Subjects were instructed to indicate their answers on a printed 14-point scale ranging from “Not at all painful” to “Extremely painful.” The modal response was 14 (Extremely painful) with the mean at 13.42 (Behavioral Study of Obedience, 375). So what was the main reason or that is to say cause these people to implement such a dreadful deed on another human being with the knowledge of the pain he’s suffering and neglecting it? The question asked by Milgram after the Second World War, the holocaust and tortures conducted by Nazi officers, scientists and supporters could only be explained with a political thought, enforcement or by fear from authority and sadistic nature of fascists? Milgram concludes that the true essence of conducting such sadistic deeds of “ordinary” people ranging from professions of white collars, industrial class to academic staff and students with a percentage of %60 at least and sometimes with %85 percentage of pursuing until the end and implementing 450 voltage to the learner portrays not the sadistic inclinations in people but the urge to satisfy the authority and the justification of the deed as a part of necessity of the experiment in the name of science. It is also a conclusion of the controlled experiments conducted with different subjects and under varying circumstances in different nations and countries such as Princeton, Munich, Rome, South Africa Australia that the obedience is the key element for the subjects to carry the experiment even though they don’t want to and are aware that the learner can be harmed lethally or die and try to resist but are unable to break through their ties with the authority. The rupture with the authority is called “disobedience” if the teacher still perseveres to quit or terminate the experiment after four verbal prods the experimenter claims that enforces the teacher to continue. According to Milgram as a result of this experiments’ findings, the answer to the nature of dreadful and nonhuman atrocities committed at the beginning of twentieth century were conducted with a mindset of the perception of a cog of a bigger, higher machinery of the self by most officers, bureaucrats and masses: The essence of obedience is that a person comes to view himself as the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and he therefore no longer regards himself as responsible for his actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred, all of the essential features of obedience follow. The most far-reaching consequence is that the person feels responsible to the authority directing him but feels no responsibility for the content of the actions that the authority prescribes. Morality does not disappear -- it acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority (Perils of Obedience, 9). One of the best example of obedience of the self to a higher machinery, structure and leader even to the degree of sacrifice of self and his family embodies with Goebbels; the Propaganda Minister of Adolf Hitler in the decline of Third Reich. When the Russian Army invaded Berlin Goebbels stays with Hitler until the end and before they were captured, he and his wife Magda poisoned their six children; five girls and one son and then they committed suicide. Gradually the dreadful jobs done by masses or individuals are mainly committed in the name of higher purposes; sometimes science or religion or politics and it can be concluded that apart from the leaders with an irrational hatred for marginalized ones; Jewish, homosexual, gypsy, sick and old people; most of the other people that supported, helped and consolidated the holocaust legitimized the atrocities in their minds as what they were doing was just a job that had to be done detaching the context of the job from their consciences and moralities. 2. The Third Wave The second and last experiment named The Third Wave was conducted in a high school with sophomore students by a history teacher Ron Jones as a part of study of Nazi Germany for the comprehension of students in 1967. The experiment bears significance for its implementation of a cult-like organization made up by Ron Jones to demonstrate the students of the appeal and pestiferous nature of fascism. On the other hand it reveals even the democratic societies are fragile to the appeal of fascism. The seed of the experiment idea was first implemented in the mind of Jones with a question of one of his students: How can the German populace claim ignorance of the slaughter of the Jewish people? How can the townspeople, railroad conductors, teachers, doctors, claim they knew nothing about concentration camps and human carnage? How can people who were neighbors and maybe even friends of the Jewish citizen say they weren't there when it happened? (Jones, The Third Wave: An Account) Jones pursued experiment six days and introduced a new concept each day to the students and implemented them by drilling. The first day; discipline, the second day; community, the third day; action, the fourth day; pride and the fifth day; understanding. Considering the fascist regimes such as Third Reich or Falangist Spain, the concepts bear significance resemblance and continuity with the real fascist concepts. To begin with, The Discipline is the first concept introduced in the classroom and implemented by some actions like straight sitting; cleaning the desks, looking forward with a stiff chin and so on which is at the same time one of the founding element of fascist movements which constitutes the ground for an authoritarian establishment and the unity of the masses which leads us to the concept of fasces which means a bunch or a bound bundle of wooden rods in Italian and constitutes the word stem of fascism alluding to holding together like a bunch and highlighting the unity and Community which Jones emphasizes in his experiment and reduce the importance of individual to a zero point. The third concept that Jones introduces in classroom is Action; it’s the implementation of the rules and disciplines of the organization; Jones explains some actions he leaded to be taken in the classroom such as: I decided to push the tolerance of the class for regimented action. In the final twenty-five minutes of the class I introduced some new rules. Students must be sitting in class at the attention position before the late bell; all students must carry pencils and paper for note taking; when asking or answering questions a student must stand at the side of their desk; the first word given in answering or asking a question is “Mr. Jones.” We practiced short "silent reading" sessions. Students who responded in a sluggish manner were reprimanded and in every case made to repeat their behavior until it was a model of punctuality and respect (The Third Wave: An Account). Jones hands out membership cards only to the students who are part of this organization and so on and a curious fact; each day the number of the students gets almost doubled and the unity ensured between students astoundingly improves the success of the class too. The fourth concept declared on the board by Jones is Pride that gives the feeling of authenticity and uniqueness to the students just same as the Master Race theory and Aryan Race of Nazism and superiority of a nation of other generic fascisms. As the experiment continues without the knowledge of students, the more students take it serious and the experiment’s impact gets bigger. The special salute that Jones taught in the classroom and commanded to use outside the classroom to the students becomes a viral: The school was alive with conjecture and curiosity. It affected everyone. The school cook asked what a Third Wave cookie looked like. I said chocolate chip of course. Our principal came into an afternoon faculty meeting and gave me the Third Wave salute. I saluted back. The Librarian thanked me for the 30' banner on learning which she placed above the library entrance. By the end of the day over two hundred students were admitted into the order. I felt very alone and a little scared (The Third Wave: An Account). The fifth and last concept was the understanding which constituted the epilogue of the experiment; the closure that would bring the students to an understanding of that it was only an experiment, not a real organization or event. Before the last day, Jones paved to the closure with a sensibility of not crushing the reality of his students because it was taken more seriously than he anticipated. On Thursday he made a declaration of the “real” purpose of this movement: The Third Wave isn't just an experiment or classroom activity. It's far more important than that. The Third Wave is a nationwide program to find students who are willing to fight for political change in this country. That's right. This activity we have been doing has been practice for the real thing. Across the country teachers like myself have been recruiting and training a youth brigade capable of showing the nation a better society through discipline, community, pride, and action (The Third Wave, 1967: An Account). He gambled and announced that a nationwide rally would happen by the declaration of a national candidate president’s support for this cause and 1000 youth groups would stand up and show their support on TV alive and commanded students to be in the auditorium tomorrow noon. The next day the auditorium was filled with 200 students all cramped Jones turned the TV and with an excitement and anticipation all students waited for a national president candidate to show up on the screen but confronted with a snowy noise on the screen. The minutes pass with an expectation of Jones for the understanding and digestion of the reality for his students. The confrontation with the reality of a nonexistence of any leader nationwide and the fall of the feeling of superiority and cult-like form of students for five days they had devoted themselves to embodied within the words of Jones: Listen closely, I have something important to tell you. Sit down. There is no leader! There is no such thing as a national youth movement called the Third Wave. You have been used. Manipulated. Shoved by your own desires into the place you now find yourself. You are no better or worse than the German Nazis we have been studying. You thought that you were the elect. That you were better than those outside this room. You bargained your freedom for the comfort of discipline and superiority. You chose to accept that group's will and the big lie over your own conviction. Oh, you think to yourself that you were just going along for the fun. That you could extricate yourself at any moment. But where were you heading? How far would you have gone? Let me show you your future (The Third Wave, 1967: An Account). The fascist inclinations of people even in democratic societies revealed through this experiment and confronted them with this reality. From the sociological and psychological aspect it can be concluded that the main elements of fascism; unity, discipline and feeling of superiority and authenticity as a nation or a part of group tantalize even the educated citizens of democracy. The amenity of the deposition of one’s control and responsibility onto other becomes the main point of the subject. In 1930s under the regiment of Nazis, the German people lived high on the hog with the prosperity plundered from Jewish elite and business class while neglecting or dismissing the death camps and declaring their lack of knowledge of the death of millions of people who were their neighbors, colleagues, friends, teachers or doctors in the public area. Fascism & Culture In previous chapters, key points of fascism’s nature were examined from a micro scale, step by step to a larger, macro one. Primarily, the psychological aspects in human nature and its mechanisms were presented; secondarily the political aspects in fascist regimes were explained. In this third and last chapter the cultural aspects of fascism is going to be discussed and the connection between how culture and fascism affected each other in societies will be examined and exemplified. What is Culture? Before moving further into the subject, it is important to ask what culture is in order to understand what is meant by the term culture in a scholarly way. “Culture” is often described as a way of life of a society with their behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols they accept -without questioning or thinking about them- which are passed from one generation to the next by communication and imitation. It also refers to accumulated knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, values, myths, hierarchies and religion. In “Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism” Andrew Arato explains: The concept of culture is significantly ambiguous in normal usage. More often than not, "culture" is represented as the sum total of activities that possess the aura of intellectuality or spirituality, that is, the arts and the sciences. But there is also an important usage especially, but not only, in the social sciences that defines culture as the ensemble of those intersubjective traditions, meanings, values, institutions, rituals, customs and typical activities characteristic in space and time of a given social formation (The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, 185). Also, according to Edward Tylor, culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” (Primitive Culture: Researches in the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, 1) Since fascist ideals were concentrated around all these values that are just described above, it wouldn't be wrong to establish a connection/correlation, between a certain society's culture and the probability of that society to have a tendency to support fascist inclinations at any point of their known/recorded history. Additionally, it would be absolutely absurd to assume that the guilt of atrocities committed during a fascist rule –which will be discussed partly in this chapter and some more in the next and the final one- solely rested upon the rulers of those certain fascist regimes such as; Hitler “Führer” of Third Reich; Mussolini “Il Duce” of Fascist Italy; and Franco “El Caudillo” of Francoist Spain. Of course, it is necessary to clarify; the aim of pointing out this bilateral relation between these two parties –society and their leader– is to acquit neither of them, but moreover, to emphasize the objective approach that’s been adopted from the beginning till the end of this research. The leaders in each of these cases have relied on the needed support of their followers and their followers have relied on their guidance. As, in his famous essay “Fascinating Fascism”, Jeffrey T. Schnapp suggests, “[…] analysis of the cultural domain is of decisive importance in coming to grips with a phenomenon as adaptable and omnivorous as fascism” (237). Thus, in order to understand how cultural conditions paved the way for fascist regimes to raise up to power, prior conditions should be examined carefully. The dominant liberal faith in values of late nineteenth century like individual liberty, reason, natural human harmony, and progress had created their oppositions eventually. Deeper preconditions of fascism were laid in the revolts targeted against these values by anti-liberalism, aggressive nationalism, racism, and a new aesthetic of instinct and violence; which in the end created a cultural soil for fascism to flourish. Mutual Interaction Between Culture and Fascism To manipulate the masses one should first attune oneself to the mindset of the era, the intellectual and cultural developments in the artistic and literary areas had impacts on the mindsets of the leaders of fascist regimes. They were philosophers, social theorists, sociologists, artists, poets, and scientists like Nietzsche, Gustav Le Bon, George Sorel, Émile Durkeim, Vilfredo Pareto, Charles Darwin, George von Schönerer, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Mayor Lueger, Ferdinand Tönnies, Oswald Spengler, D Gaetano Mosca, Giovanni Prezzoloni, Ezra Pound, Joseph de Maistre, Roberto Michels, Flippo Tommaso Marinetti, Wyndham Lewis and Ernst Niekisch. The words of fascist technocrat Camillo Pellizzi describe fascism: Above all else fascism is and must ever increasingly become a “way of life”. To cast it as dogma, however the word is understood, means to bind it with a chain that, if it is not immediately sundered in the process of acting, can only end up shackling and perhaps killing off all future development .... Our leaders and the Duce, first and foremost, have been spurred on and inspired from above. From that 'above' that resides in every man and from which gushes forth the will's creative surge. Dogma is unnecessary; discipline is enough. This is fascism's sole dogma. (Schnapp, 238) This quite clear explanation shows that fascism cannot simply be reduced to an unchangeable set of doctrines. It should rather become a “way of life” so that it might firm its roots in the culture of the nation and ensure its existence. While some of these intellectuals had no intention to influence these leaders, some of them, on the other hand, had more direct influences. Some examples can be given about these influencing processes. It would be appropriate as well as necessary to take a look at these leaders’ intellectual nourishments which gave possibility and needed inspiration for their “revolutionary” movements. As a social organizer and school teacher, Mussolini was also a serious reader. He was influenced by the ideas of Nietzsche, Gustav Le Bon and George Sorel. Hitler was absorbed by the pan-German nationalism, anti-Semitism of George von Shönerer. These ideas were elevated into an ecstatic state of mind by the music of Wagner in Vienna’s streets. “Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) has so often been accused of being fascism’s progenitor that his case requires particular care” says Robert O. Paxton in his book “The Anatomy of Fascism” and he continues his argument: […] he invested all his brilliance and rage in attacking complacent and conformist bourgeois piety, softness, and moralism in the name of a hard, pure independence of spirit. In a world where God was dead, Christianity weak, and Science false, only a spiritually free “superman” could fight free of convention and live according to his own authentic values. […] his writing contained plenty of raw material for people who wanted to brood on the decline of modern society, the heroic effort of will needed to reverse it, and the nefarious influence of Jews. Nietzsche himself was scornful of patriotism and the actual anti-Semites he saw around him, and imagined his superman a “free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the non-worshipper, the dweller in forests.” His white-hot prose exerted a powerful intellectual and aesthetic influence across the political spectrum, from activist nationalists like Mussolini and Maurice Barrès to nonconformists like Stefan George and André Gide, to both Nazis and anti-Nazis, and to several later generations of French iconoclasts from Sartre to Foucault. “Nietzsche’s texts themselves provide a positive goldmine of varied possibilities.” Another example can be taken from Mussolini’s life. A retired French engineer and amateur social theorist, Georges Sorel exerted a more direct and practical influence on Mussolini. Paxton explains this: Sorel was fascinated by what kinds of causes were capable of awakening “in the depths of the soul a sentiment of the sublime proportionate to the conditions of a gigantic struggle” so that “the European nations, stupefied by humanitarianism, can recover their former energy.” He found the best examples at first in the revolutionary syndicalism we have already encountered as Mussolini’s first spiritual home. The syndicalist dream of “one big union,” whose all-out general strike would sweep away capitalist society in “one big night” and leave the unions in charge, was what Sorel called a “myth”—a galvanizing ideal capable of rousing people to perform beyond their everyday capacities. (The Anatomy of Fascism, 33) Another important aspect which had direct influences on culture and the mass –mass being here a society- was the major intellectual developments those stood on the summit of the intellectual knowledge: the discovery of the reality and power of the subconscious in human thought and the irrational human action, at the end of the nineteenth century. “While Bergson and Freud had absolutely nothing to do with fascism, and indeed suffered personally from it, their work helped undermine the liberal conviction that politics means free people choosing the best policies by the simple exercise of their reason.” (Paxton, 34) Like Paxton suggested, Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud might not have influenced those leaders directly, but it is clear the ideas of controlling the masses have had an intellectual and scientific background. In order to exercise power they –or their accomplices like Goebbels, Reich Minister of Propaganda in the case of Third Reich, who helped Hitler by applying his expertise into perfecting the propaganda techniques- needed to shape the society into mindless masses which would help them carry their causes. While Goebbels was mentioned it would be convenient to give an example on how his ideas on Jews and Jewish intellectualism had an influential effect on Hitler. “Enemies were central to the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination.” Paxton continues “Fascists saw enemies within the nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies, though their danger seemed to intensify with the advance of Bolshevism and with the exacerbated border conflicts and unfulfilled national claims that followed World War I.” So creating an enemy, an outside threat to the welfare and prosperity of a certain nation was crucial. The culture of this particular nation had to be defended against those internal others. During a book-burning ceremony in Berlin, Goebbels declared that “the age of extreme Jewish intellectualism has now ended, and the success of the German revolution has again given the right of way to the German spirit.” (Paxton, 36) Even though Mussolini and his friends were not so worried about cultural modernism, Mussolini’s fascist squads made bonfires from socialist books. The important point here to be noted is the interaction between fascism and culture; that is to say, a mutual one. Starting out from this one simple example of book-burning ceremony it can be assumed that nature of fascism requires, moreover, obliges the deformation/destruction of the ideals which poses threat to its existence. Through the late nineteenth century, some popular writers reworked the already existing terms like race, nation, will and action into more aggressive and harsher forms as the notorious social Darwinism. A rather neutral term, race, which was used for any animal or human group, was given a more biological and hereditary form. Francis Galon, Darwin’s cousin, invented the term “eugenics” in an effort to prove that science gave mankind the power to improve race by urging the best to reproduce. Paxton argued that; The nation—once, for progressive nationalists like Mazzini, a framework for progress and fraternity among peoples—was made more exclusive and ranked in a hierarchy that gave “master races” (such as the “Aryans,” a figment of nineteenth-century anthropological imagination) the right to dominate “inferior” peoples. Will and action became virtues in themselves, independently of any particular goal, linked to the struggle among the “races” for supremacy. (Paxton, 34) Related to this exaltation of the race, some disturbing views were quick to be formed. “If the nation or Volk was mankind’s highest attainment, violence in its cause was ennobling. Beyond that, a few aesthetes of violence found beauty in the very extremity of masculine will and endurance demanded by trench warfare.” (Paxton, 35) Some different ideas were formed on the other hand, concerning to find a solution to the social disintegration. Thomas Carlyle, a Victorian polemicist, was worried about disciplining “the masses, full of beer and nonsense” as more and more of them received the right to vote. His solution was simple: militarized welfare dictatorship, led by the selfless captains of industry and heroes of the order of Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great. Later, Nazis would claim that Carlyle was their forerunner. These concerns about the collapse of communities under the corrosive influences of free individualism by the impact of urban sprawl, industrial conflicts and immigrations, were intensified in Europe toward the end of nineteenth century. In the creation of a new sociological discipline, diagnosing the flaws and ills of the community became a central project. According to Émile Durkheim, society was afflicted with “anomie” which meant “the purposeless drift of people without social ties”, and he suggested that organic solidarity -ties formed within natural communities like villages, families, and churches- should be changed with mechanical solidarity –the ties formed by modern propaganda and media- which would be adopted and perfected by fascists later. One can deduce another concern of the late-nineteenth century from the previous examples which helped fascist regimes to gain power and popularity, or even support from the mass; the decadence. Paxton defines decadence as “the dread that great historic nations were doomed by their own comfort and complacency to declining birth rates and diminished vitality” (35). Oswald Spengler however, had predicted this decline in his “Decline of the West, 1918”. Spengler’s argument was that cultures have life cycles like organisms, passing from a heroic and creative which he called “Age of Culture” to a corrupt one called “Age of Civilization”. This “Age of Civilization” bore a pessimistic meaning “when rootless masses, huddled in the cities, lose contact with the soil, think only of money, and become incapable of great actions.” He feared that the modernization process was sweeping away rooted traditions; moreover, Bolshevism would be even more destructive. Some seemingly unrelated developments in science were also effective in creating fascist ideals. The French biologist Louis Pasteur and Gregor Mendel’s findings were also open to distortion of fascist imaginations. Pasteur’s findings on the role of bacteria in contagion and Mendel’s findings on mechanisms of heredity made it possible create new categories of internal enemies: disease carriers, hereditary ill, insane, and criminals. In Protestant northern Europe the urge to purify the community became stronger than Catholic southern Europe. In more liberal states like The United States and Sweden forcible sterilizations were conducted for habitual offenders, but in Nazi Germany it took the form of a more inhuman act: the most massive program of medical euthanasia ever known. Under the light of these developments one should classify the different tendencies of fascist movement in Europe. Fascist Italy had also promoted the growth of la razza –the race- but not in a biological way; it was understood rather in a cultural/historical term. Thus, the fascism in Italy was more religious and political. In Spain it was the same. In order to mobilize their followers, fascists needed an enemy, a demonized party. It didn’t have to be Jewish necessarily like in the example of Nazi Germany. Gypsies and Slavs were also targeted. In case of America for instance, blacks and Catholics as well as Jews, were demonized. Later, in accordance with the ideals of the superiority of one nation to another, and the stronger one’s domination on the inferior and weaker one, Italian fascists added Ethiopians and Libyans to their list, and tried to conquer them in Africa. To sum up, at the beginning of this chapter, it was discussed that there is/was a mutual relationship between culture and fascism, and the leaders of the fascist regimes were influenced by the cultural backgrounds and developments during their eras. They also influenced the masses as well as writers and poets, like Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, who were sympathetic to Italian Fascism in 1920s. These regimes also shaped the culture as long as they were in power. According to Zeev Sternhell, an Israeli historian, political scientist and writer, fascism is a coherent ideology that formed “an integral part of the history of European culture” (Paxton, 38). On the other hand, according to Hannah Arendt, a German-American political theorist, Nazism: owed nothing to any part of the Western tradition, be it German or not, Catholic or Protestant, Christian, Greek or Roman. . . . On the contrary Nazism is actually the breakdown of all German and European traditions, the good as well as the bad . . . basing itself on the intoxication of destruction as an actual experience, dreaming the stupid dream of producing the void. (Paxton, 38) Considering these views, it can be said that they are both right in their claims. It wasn’t solely the culture that gave birth to fascism, but culture itself was also shaped by it. What fascists did was breaking down the moral, aesthetic and traditional codes of that particular society in order to awake a series of “mobilizing the passions”. These mobilizing passions are, according to Paxton: • a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions; • the primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it; • the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external; • dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences; • the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary; • the need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny; • the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason; • the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success; • the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle. (Paxton, 41) It is of utmost importance to tread carefully around topics such as fascism. Several names were discussed through this part of the chapter; philosophers, social theorists, sociologists, artists, poets, and scientists, considering how their ideas, findings, discoveries, theories, and innovations might have directly or indirectly influenced the fascist rulers. It would be unethical and unscientific, rather subjective in other words, to blame a group of intellectuals who had nothing in their minds related to fascist delusions. To emphasize this point again, Paxton argues, “Intellectual and cultural preparation may have made it possible to imagine fascism, but they did not thereby bring fascism about. Even for Sternhell, the ideology of fascism, fully formed, he believes, by 1912, did not shape fascist regimes all by itself. Fascist regimes had to be woven into societies by choices and actions” (Paxton, 39). On the other hand, the intention here is not to vindicate them either; since this paper’s aim was not to make a critique of these intellectuals. To achieve and carry out an academic stance however, it was preferred to stand outside the periphery of subjective bias. Fascist Regulations on Family, Gender and Education In the first section of this chapter, definition of culture was given and a correlation between culture and fascism were attempted to be established by examining the intellectual developments in the mid and late nineteenth century. In this section the fascism’s interests and regulations on society will be examined. To start with, family, a very important institution, has been in fact the focus of the fascist leaders. The motive of this focus on family, according to Wilhelm Reich in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism”, is to manipulate the society. To be clearer, if the fascist leaders could control the family, they would control the nation in the end. Reich explains “the close interweaving of family and economy is the reason why the agricultural population is "bound to the soil," why it is "traditional" and thus so accessible to the influence of political reaction” (32). The interest in family becomes quite clear by this explanation. Control the core of the society, control the masses. However the dynamics of family has strange mechanisms. Since the fascist regimes’ power relied on an authoritarian discourse, it should create authoritarian families which would procreate a youth submissive to the authority. But how could it be achieved? Through a psychoanalytical approach, Reich argues that it can be achieved by the sexual repression. He claims that: […] the sexual interests of all begin to serve the profit interests of a minority. This process has assumed a solid organizational form in the institutions of patriarchal marriage and patriarchal family. With the suppression of sexuality the emotions undergo a change: a sex-negating religion begins to develop which gradually builds up its own sex-political organization, the church in all its forms, which has no other goal than that of eradicating sexual pleasure. With this patriarchal family comes the implementation of an authoritarian structure, to explain it further Reich continues: Character-analytic investigation of people of any age, nationality or social stratum, shows that the interlacing of the socio-economic with the sexual structure, as well as the structural reproduction of society, takes place in the first four or five years of life, and in the authoritarian family. […] In this way the authoritarian state develops its enormous interest in the authoritarian family: the family is the factory of its structure and ideology. And finally, step by step, the results of these plans are collected as an obedient youth which would help carry out the fascist ideals of the state: Suppression of the natural sexuality in the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, "good" and "adjusted" in the authoritarian sense; […] In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation (25). Like it is stated before, in order to achieve this the steps should be applied in order as Reich concludes, “At first, the child has to adjust to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety” (Reich, 25). After re-structuralizing the family into an authoritarian one, regime is still not quite done. It needs to shape the nation’s youth into its loyal followers. After all, this very youth is the guarantor of the “racially pure and superior” nation. The next step is the education of this youth by forcefully implemented ways. Each fascist regime had its own ways of doing it. Fascist regimes set out to make the “new” men and women who were simultaneously fighters and obedient subjects. Educational systems in liberal states were already committed to shaping citizens. Fascist states were able to use existing educational personnel and structures with only a shift of emphasis toward sports and physical and military training. Some of the schools’ traditional functions were absorbed, to be sure, by party parallel organizations like the obligatory youth movements. All children in fascist states were supposed to be enrolled automatically in party organizations that structured their lives from childhood through university. In Spain for instance: By the 1940s, the Church continued to be influential in the educational system, as attested by popular Catholic pedagogical journals such as Atenas, El Magisterio Español, and Escuela Española. These provided precise methodological guidelines for teachers about how to apply principles of “Spanish pedagogy” to various disciplines. Simultaneously, Franquist educators did not replicate the teaching of the sixteenth century, as they had intimated that they would, but instead adapted teaching to coincide with the current political environment (Domke, 99) The education in Germany was explained in Paxton’s “The Anatomy of Fascism”: Hitler was even more determined to take young Germans away from their traditional socializers—parents, schoolteachers, churches—and their traditional spontaneous amusements. “These boys,” he told the Reichstag on December 4, 1938, “join our organization at the age of ten and get a breath of fresh air for the first time; then, four years later, they move from the Jungvolk to the Hitler Youth and there we keep them for another four years. And then we are even less prepared to give them back into the hands of those who create our class and status barriers, rather we take them immediately into the Party, into the Labor Front, into the SA or the SS . . . and so on (Paxton, 143-144). Another area was also under the scope of fascist regimes. As it was discussed in the previous sections, the fascist ideals were mostly racist, like in the Third Reich’s case; they were in favor of the nation’s –to be more precise “the superior races’”- continuity and dominance. This was only possible buy the elimination of the “unwanted” citizens: mentally insane, hereditary ill, criminals and disease carriers. Now in this final part, a few examples will be given upon this matter. During the fascist era these minorities suffered heavy consequences of fascism. Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and mentally ill people were demonized, tortured and killed. In “The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Postwar East and West Germany: An Introduction” Robert G. Moeller discusses the problems of homosexuals during the Nazi Germany, he states that, “The proliferation of magazines aimed at male homosexual audiences created a forum for those forcefully advocating an end to the criminalization of sexual acts between men and challenging stereotypical visions of homosexual men as effeminate, at worst scorned and despised, at best pitied, but certainly not accepted or tolerated” (522). He continues with explaining Hitler’s attitude: In June 1934, Hitler's aggressive, deadly move against Ernst Röhm, one of his earliest and most zealous supporters and the head of the paramilitary storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA), eliminated a perceived threat to the leadership of the German army; but it also appealed to the "healthy sensibilities of the people," who were relieved to see that the Führer was ready to eliminate homosexuality within the ranks of his most loyal followers. Röhm had made little secret of the fact that his vision of a "second revolution," a true Nazi revolution that would tremendously enhance the power of the SA, would also include an all-out war on the "apostles of [a] morality" that was narrowly conceived. Before 1933, it had been Social Democrats, not Hitler, who pushed sensationalist press reports about Röhm, strongly suggesting that inclinations toward National Socialism and homosexuality went hand in hand. Hitler's decision to move decisively against Röhm after the Nazi takeover suggests that the Führer was playing to his public, appealing directly not only to those who opposed Röhm's aspirations to achieve military command but also to those who feared that he might well be ordering young men not only into battle but also into his bed (523-524). As a result of the homophobic propagandas made by Nazis, Germans were turning in other Germans voluntarily, thus a third of criminal prosecutions were initiated by third part denunciations. However, for lesbians the prosecution was not as harsh as it was for gays. Legal experts were debating whether lesbianism should be criminalized, and they concluded that the women in general were less likely to seduce other women. As Stefan Micheler explains in “Homophobic Propaganda and the Denunciation of Same-Sex Desiring Men under National Socialism”, “if a woman is seduced she will not for that reason lastingly withdraw from normal sexual relations, but will be useful as before in terms of population policy” (The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Postwar East and West Germany: An Introduction, 524). The Nazi’s reproduction regime and their attitude toward homosexuality were strict, for both homosexuality and abortion was a threat for the future of the “master race”. Thus, as a result, fifteen thousands of people were convicted of crimes against morality were ended up in concentration camps. Despised by the guards and many of the other prisoners, they were easily identified by the pink triangle they were forced to wear on their uniforms and were treated brutally; including beatings, torture, experiments, rape and the exchange of homosexual sex for food. And, in the end, almost fifty percent of these “criminals” were dead. Political Fascism After examining the cultural soil and foliation of fascism in Europe and its mutual interactions with culture and reshaping it; it’s proper to focus on the political and abstract context of fascism and its genesis initially. A. Genesis of Fascism Fascism word as we mentioned at the beginning of the essay derives from the Italian word fasce and as it’s known by historians it was first used by the peasants uprising against the landlords in Sicily in 1893-94 called themselves Fasci Siciliani. It can be seem curious that a root term of fascism was first used by proletariat within the context of a rebellion and a group against the feudalism. As seen by most, fascism is not a political thought that can be examined or considered apart from leftist movements in the late nineteenth and beginning of nineteenth century. The political influence of George Sorel a pro-violence revolutionary syndicalist philosopher and theorist and the formation of left-wing nationalists were the political foundation of fascism in Italy. After the fall of monarchies like Prussia and Piemonte which were later united as nations, Italy and Germany sustained their national unity posteriorly. The delayed national unity and the capitalistic expansion caused by Industrial Revolution created the necessity of the nations’ contribution to the economic market for their benefit. Regarding Italy and Germany, the economic depression that both country faced became the foundation reasons of the genesis and rise of fascism in such terms; Italy came out of World War I with 1.100.000 casualty and soon even the pro-war leftist and interventisti (interventionists; pro-war Italians holding the political thought that Italy should join the first World War) realized that the war was not a revolutionary ground for the realization of hopeful utopias or land reformation but it was an imperialist war. The imbalance between feudal south and industrial development of north made the economic and internal state of Italy more fragile. The decline of middle class and business and the capitalistic growth of big businesses created the inflation, cutback in wages, hunger and social anomie. Mussolini; writing in socialist journals and even publishing one periodically held nationalist, aggressive and pro-war interventionist thoughts while he was a member of Italian Socialist Party. Later he was expulsed from the Italian Socialist Party due to his support for the war and harsh criticism of the pacifism of socialists. The political and social background was ready for the genesis of fascism after the World War I; a disillusioned nation came out of war with great casualties and little gain, increasing within left and right without any solutions for the real problems of the nation such as land reforms, minimum wages and working hours, voting rights, the disintegration of political unity and the social turmoil. To draw a picture of the post-world war I Italy; the inflation rate was so high that the purchasing power of money declined to 64 rates if the value accepted 100. The wages reduced %25-45 in the oil, cotton and textile industry working lines. Within these social and political atmosphere; Mussolini a recent war veteran came out of war influenced from the ideas of Alceste De Ambris who was an Italian nationalist syndicalist and organized agrarian strike actions of 1908 and founded Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria Interventista (Revolutionary League for Interventionist Action) which outcast socialist Mussolini himself was a part of. It reflected both the rising and concrete action in political arena of an idea that had the roots long before the World War I within newly emerged nation of Italy; the unity of the nation and the solidarity with a background of capitalistic urges for Italy to has her share from the big cake of wealth accumulated in limited and certain hands after the war. When compared with her casualties Italy came out of the war defeated. Robert Paxton defines the birth of fascism in Italy with such words: Officially, Fascism was born in Milan on Sunday, March 23, 1919b That morning somewhat more than a hundred persons, including war veterans, syndicalists who supported the war and Futurist intellectuals, plus some reporters and the merely curious, gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, overlooking the Piazza San Sepolcro, to “declare war against socialism… because it has opposed nationalism.” Now Mussolini called his movement the Fasci di Combattimento, which means, very approximately, “fraternities of combat” (Anatomy of Fascism, 5). Their national agenda was the fulfillment of: “Italian expansionist aims in the Balkans and around the Mediterranean that had just been frustrated a few months before at the Paris Peace Conference. On the radical side, it proposed women’s suffrage and the vote at eighteen, abolition of upper house, convocation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for Italy (presumably without the monarchy), the eight-hour workday, worker participation in ‘the technical management of industry’, the ‘partial expropriation of all kinds of wealth’ by a heavy and progressive tax on capital, the seizure of certain Church properties, and the confiscation of 85 percent of war profits ” (Anatomy of Fascism, 5). B. Rise of Fascism For other countries considering their unique sociological structure and events, backgrounds and societies according to most historians and prominently Roger Griffin, the term can be applied only as “generic fascism” since fascism born out of Italy’s authentic contexture. For example in Nazism the biological superiority becomes the foundation of the political agenda and concentration camps causing millions of people’s death whereas “racism” for Italian fascism is merely a cultural/social phenomenon. The rise and success of fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany and Falangism in Spain contains different variations however there were the atmosphere in Europe approximately similar within those countries and the offerings they provided to the establishment share similarities. They offered a mass enabling conservatives to form parliamentary majorities retrieving them from the obligation of dependence onto Leftist partners. As Paxton claims; “Mussolini’s thirty-five deputies were not a major weight in the balance, but Hitler’s potential contribution was decisive. He could offer the largest party in Germany to conservatives who had never acquired a knack for the mass politics suddenly introduced into their country by the constitution of 1919” (Anatomy of Fascism, 102). They also brought young blood to the politics which was in decadence for years with elders. “Both nations longed for new leaders, and the fascists offered conservatives a fountain of youth. The fascists also offered also offered another way of belonging-deeper commitment and discipline in an era when conservatives feared dissolution of the social bond” (Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 103). The third component of succession was the reason that besides Marxism and conservatism there wasn’t any other strong movement that could drift the masses and the argument of Marxism that “the working class had no home-land, conservatives had been unable to find any way to refute him. None of their nineteenth-century nostrums- deference, religion, schooling- had worked. […] when World War I began foretold that in the twentieth century Nation was going to be stronger than Class” (Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 103). The utopia that fascist regimes offered to masses writhing in anomie with the weltschmerz of economic depression and post-World War atmosphere was also invincible. They offered an egalitarian, united, national socialist industrial machine wonderland to the masses which later to reveal itself as a mechanic capitalistic and national Leviathan devouring the working class for its purposes to elevate the elite class on the shoulders of the masses forgetting all of its promises which initially enabled it to came into power. Another precondition to the rise of fascism was its acclaimed solution to the disorder within nations. “Having unleashed their militants in order to make democracy unworkable and discredit the constitutional state, the Nazi and Fascist leaders then posed as the only non-socialist force that could restore the order” (Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 104). The malfunction of democracy and liberal constitution brought about the rise of fascism. “The Collapse of Liberal state” with the words of Roberto Vivarelli, “occurred independently of fascism” (Kolloquien des Instituts für Zeitgeschichte, Der italienische Faschismus, 49). The decline in the execution of liberal constitution and suffocation of impractical democracy within the atmosphere of post-World War I era was tempting for the masses because the detachment between the politicians and the social needs of the public was wide; within this context fascism emerged out of the crisis as a reactionary and revolutionary opposition corresponding to the needs of the masses. The fascists paved their way through the offices by the help of conservatives who saw the fact that these leaders could drag along quantitative masses and control them: The conservatives brought Hitler and Mussolini into office quasiconstitutionally, within coalition governments that the fascist leaders did not totally control. Having achieved office quasilegally, Mussolini and Hitler had been entrusted only with the powers granted a head of government under the constitution. In more practical terms, their power was limited during their first days in office by having to govern in coalition with their conservative allies. Although the fascist parties held some vital posts in these governments, they had a small minority of the cabinet positions (Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 106). On the other hand Franco’s succession conditions were different for his rise up into power occurred not solely with the cooperation with conservative elite class but also by the crush of left-wing with Spanish Civil War. As Paxton suggests; “General Francisco Franco crushed the Spanish Left and the republic by armed insurrection and civil war, and left little room after taking power for the small Spanish Fascist party, the Falange” (Anatomy of Fascism, 56), Franco and Falange Party realized itself more bloodily unlike quasidemocratic ways of Nazis in Germany and Fascist Italy but the course of events in regard to violence reversed after the succession for Hitler comparing with Mussolini. Such as: The Italian Fascist pattern of violence was the opposite of the Nazi one. Mussolini spilled more blood coming to power than Hitler did, but his dictatorship was relatively mild after that. The main form of punishment for political dissidents was forced residence in remote southern hill villages. About ten thousand serious opponents of the regime were imprisoned in camps or on offshore islands. The regime sentenced to death a mere nine opponents between 1926 and 1940 (The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan, Brooker). C. Decline of Fascism From the beginning; fascism took its momentum from its violent revolutionary core and motion promising the expansion, industrialism, purification of the race, revolution of the lands and constant change. As Paxton clearly explains with his words: Fascist regimes could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power. The charismatic leader had made dramatic promises: to unify, purify, and energize his community; to save it from the flabbiness of bourgeois materialism, the confusion and corruption of democratic politics, and the contamination of alien people and cultures; to head off the threatened revolution of property with a revolution of values; to rescue the community from decadence and decline. He had offered sweeping solutions to these menaces: violence against enemies, both inside and out; the individual’s total immersion in the community; the purification of blood and culture; the galvanizing enterprises of rearmament and expansionist war. He had assured his people a “privileged relation with history.” (Anatomy of Fascism, 126). The disintegration of fascist regimes came with the expansionist policies by their nature. The annexation of new territories and the purification of the race within national boundaries demanded new politics and preparations of which most Fascist regimes didn’t have. For instance: At the other extreme, Nazi Germany alone experienced full radicalization. A victorious war of extermination in the east offered almost limitless freedom of action to the “prerogative state” and its “parallel institutions,” released from the remaining constraints of the “normative state,” such as they were. (Paxton, 149-150). On the part of Germany in Second World War; the expansion through vast territories from Poland to Belorussian borders and annexation half of the eastern and western Europe brought about the issue of uncontrollable lands and military supply shortage. When the war machine Third Reich’s armies pressed in upon Stalingrad, it was obvious that they were in no shape to provide armament or supply for the last years was a constant battle and though Germany was a newly emerged industrial machine; it was not capable of handling such a great war. Although it may seem that Axis powers were in solidarity during the war; it was not the real picture. After Hitler declared war on Poland and Britain, Franco intended to keep Spain out of the war and interviewed with Hitler bargaining for his price to join the war as his ally. “A few days after meeting Franco at Hendaye, on French-Spanish border, on October 23, 1943, Hitler told Mussolini that he would rather have three or four teeth pulled than spend another nine hours bargaining with that ‘Jesuit swine’.” (Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism, 149). Though Italy was a part of axis during the war; Mussolini had its own capitalistic expansionist plans even they conflicted with the benefits of his allies. Mussolini wanted to conquer Savoy, Nice, Corsica and the African colonies of Tunisia and Algeria from France and preparing to declare a war on France before Germany had. The shortage of armaments stopped Mussolini of doing so but the main point is regarding the entropy of fascist regimes after the World War I can ultimately be epitomized in their irrational, insatiable capitalist appetites with bad strategies in foreign expansionist policies. The constant urge to react and transform; the conflict between uncontrollable revolutionist and nationalist nature with capitalist and relentless expansionist attacks which enabled them to success at the beginning seems to become the very reason of their decline and entropy. Conclusion As a conclusion the wide range of the fascism penetration/emanation from human’s very deep core itself and sprawl through the political arena and public implementation and regulation is the explicit manifestation that fascism born out of human repressed and oppressed feelings and resonates itself through again psychological mediums and so on in a cyclical sense. The cultural mediums that finds itself rooms varies widely too; the emergence and realization itself through reformation of the culture its own with its momentum hinging upon the previous thinkers, scientists and writers, feeding upon the traditions and interpreting them arbitrarily ; fascism reveals itself as a mass control movement emerging from the masses and for the masses shaping itself accordingly. And lastly fascism as a reaction/anti-revolution to dysfunctional liberalism and parliamentary system and democracy at the beginning of the century taking its own momentum from aggressiveness, expansionism and attunement with capitalism is the revealment its own entropy. Gradually one can conclude that fascism is within us, resides in us and around us. It exists even in the most “democratic societies” and it’s such a thing that needs to be constantly examined, investigated, watched out and tamed for a better understanding of the world in human itself, for politics and reading the culture. During these authoritarian days our intention of choosing such a subject may seem ironical but it was necessary for the same reason. With the Second World War and atrocities committed, and still being committed during these days, hours and minutes we witness, observe and know that if it’s not watched out animalistic forces can be the medium of mass manipulation and lead us to total destructions.  Works Cited Arato, Andrew. "Esthetic Theory and Cultural Criticism." The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1985. N. pag. Print. Domke, Joan. Education, Fascism, and the Catholic Church in Franco's Spain: 1936-1975. N.p.: n.p., 2011. PDF. Griffin, Roger. The Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge, 1993. Print. Jones, Ron. 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