A History of Fascism, 1914-1945

Rating:
Summary: Excellent history.
Review: (The numerical rating above is a default setting ofAmazon's. This reviewer does not employ numericalratings.)

"Fascism" has been a term so abused by careless application as to render it meaningless.

Payne restores the term's usefulness first by carefully defining the phenomenon, then tracing its roots in the disrupted and blood-soaked soil of World War I. By delineating the distinctions between the various "authoritarian nationalisms" he is able to develop a typological description that illuminates the distinctive characteristics of fascism and shows it to be a phenomenon of a particular time and space, growing out of specific social, political, and economic preconditions.

The author examines the similarities and differences of the various national movements, with an especially valuable analysis of the rise of Nazism; discusses the rise of variants in other countries such as Spain and Romania, and assesses the minor movements in Scandanavia and elsewhere.

Considering Neofascism and the authoritarian nationalisms of today, Payne reassuringly dismisses any likelihood of resurgence in the West but is concerned by the potential of trouble from the East, especially when fueled by religious fundamentalism. Admirably readable; highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: A History Full of Memory Holes
Review: Americans find fascism confusing for one simple reason. Historians who choose to write about it are often motivated by a desire, not to elucidate, but to obscure. What they are most keen to obscure is the undeniable fact that fascism was a thoroughly socialist movement. It's amazing the lengths of self-contradiction some will go to, in order to maintain, in the teeth of a mountain of evidence, that, for example, the National Socialist German Workers' Party wasn't a socialist party. Werner Sombart, down the memory hole of history, does not appear at all in the index of this 600 page tome. Neither does Marx, Proudhon, or LasSalle. Lyndon LaRouche (?), however, does makes it into a book on the period 1914-1945. Go figure. If you want the skinny on fascism, see George Watson's "Lost Literature of Socialism." Fascism bitterly opposed the "bourgeois" ideology of capitalism: i.e., individualism, free trade, private property, free enterprise, limited government, and classical laissez-faire liberalism. Moreover, "the whole of National Socialism," as Hitler would freely admit (at least in private) was based on Marx. He explained in Mein Kampf: "As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement." As even social-democrat Sidney Hook has admitted, "Anti-Semitism was rife in almost all varieties of socialism." (Commentary, Sept. 1978) Listen to Proudhon, socialist founding father and mentor of Marx: "The Jew is the enemy of the human race. One must send this race back to Asia or exterminate it...By fire or fusion or by expulsion, the Jew must disappear... What the people of the Middle Ages hated by instinct I hate upon reflection, and irrevocably. ...The hatred of the Jew, as that of the English, must be an article of our political faith." (1847, Carnets)
Remember that the most central, fundamental, and essential tenet of socialism is that moneylenders ("capitalists") are evil economic "parasites." "Vampires," "bloodsuckers," Marx called them. The Devil of the socialist catechism is the "bourgeoisie." Indeed, Marx had another word which he used as an equivalent term for "bourgeoisie,"----"Jews." And in place of the word "capitalism," we find the early Marx using the word 'Judentum,' i.e., "Jewry." As early as 1843----a hundred years before the Holocaust----Marx published one of his first and most sensational newspaper articles, a vituperative anti-Semitic temper tantrum "On the Jewish Question," makes Hitler's own tirades look mild. Its thesis is that "mankind will never be emancipated until it is emancipated from Jews and Jewry." It concludes: "The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Jewry." Period. End of essay. Understand that this popular piece was written and published five years before the Communist Manifesto (1848) and long before Das Kapital attempted to rationalize this as an economic theory in the 1860s. Rather than that Marx's dubious economic theory of exploitation accidentally drove him to anti-Semitism, it appears things must be more the other way around: that Marx's anti-Semitism drove him to cook up the dubious economic theory. "If we are socialists, then we must definitely be anti-Semites," Hitler explained during a party speech in Munich, August 1920, "How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?" Note also that even the idea that Germany should wage a "world war" against Russia and the "barbaric" Slavs, and that the Slavs should be annihilated during this German "world storm," was an idea proposed by none other than Fredrich Engels, writing with Marx's approval in Marx's newspaper, in 1849. Both genocide, and of coercive state eugenics generally, were socialist ideas. Likewise, it was socialist Bernard Shaw who suggested, in 1933, that chemists should invent a new gas to be used to liquidate the bourgeoisie. "I have learned a great deal from Marxism, as I do not hesitate to admit." Hitler explained, "I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen-pushers have timidly begun."

Rating:
Summary: Good on Italian Fascism; weak otherwise; Gross Misprint.
Review: This book is good on Italian Fascism, weak and even defective on other fascist movements, especially National Socialism, and contains a 33 page misprint, the worst I have ever experienced. Taking these topics in inverse order, I will start with the fact that my copy had a 33 page misprint. After page 456, the Bibliography suddently starts, then ends, page 489 starts next, and then the Bibliography starts over again. Early on in the book, I detected a definite bias on the part of the author against fascism in general and National Socialism in particular. The portions dealing with National Socialism were clearly defective, omitting to mention some of the early authors of the ideology and giving misleading interpretations of other developers of the ideology of National Socialism. The author's main strength is with Italian Fascism and he should have limited the scope and title ! ! of the book to that arena. The Italian Fascist subject is covered thoroughly. If you are interested in Italian Fascism and don't mind missing 33 pages of text, I would recommend the book.