British Fascism E-Book

John E. Richardson

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Explorations of the Far Right
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 491

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Fascism is inherently duplicitous, claiming one thing whilst being committed to something else. In examining this dishonesty, it is essential to distinguish between the surface arguments in fascist discourse and the underlying ideological commitments. Analyzing contemporary fascism is particularly difficult, since no fascist party admits to being fascist. Drawing on the critical insights of historical and linguistic research, this book offers an original and discerning approach to the critical analysis of fascism. It demonstrates that any understanding of the continuing popularity of fascist political ideology requires interdisciplinary analysis which exposes the multiple layers of meanings within fascist texts and the ways they relate to social and historic context. It is only through contextualization we can demonstrate that when fascists echo concepts and arguments from mainstream political discourse (e.g. ‘British jobs for British workers’) they are not being used in the same way.

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

For Esther

And the memory of Dr Robert Richardson

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter One Introduction: Fascism & Fascism Studies

Academic discussion of fascism

Griffin’s mythic core: fascism as palingenetic ultra-nationalism

A mythic (not political-economic) core

Fascism as revolutionary

Analysing Fascism: an approach from Critical Discourse Analysis

Chapter Two Discourse-Historical Analysis

Introduction

Discourse-Historic Analysis— text in historic context

Exploring context: intertextuality and recontextualization in fascist music

Text—discursive strategies

Application: Griffin speech at the indigenous family day

Conclusion

Chapter Three British Fascism: A Synoptic History of People and Parties

Introduction

The emergence of British fascism

British Union of Fascists

Growing radicalisation: Discipline and Action at Olympia

The State Intervenes

Post war

The Post-War Mosleyite Tradition

The National Socialist tradition, post-war

Racial Populists

Consolidation and fragmentation: the National Front, 1967–

Contemporary British fascism

Chapter Four ‘Britain’ and ‘British’: the protection of race and nation

Who is/isn’t British: the surface and depths of British fascist nationalism

Humour, and the challenge to tolerance

A Green and Pleasant Land

Women and the eugenic National project

‘Race-mixing’ and eugenics

Conclusion

Chapter Five A ‘real alternative’? Fascism and ‘Third Way’ economics

Fascist political economies

Fascists on ‘communism’

Fascists on ‘capitalism’

Capitalism and the Nation

The solution: national capitalism

Corporatism: emulating Fascist Italy

Distributism: a ‘native’ fascist economic model

Conclusion

Chapter Six Fascism and its Threat to Civil Society

Illiberalism and inequality

‘Democracy’s Masters’

Mass media, fascism and democracy

‘Vested Interests’ and the mass media

Fascism and violence

Street violence

Conclusion

Conclusion

Analysis

Understanding

Oppose

References

Primary sources

Secondary sources

Copyright

Last Page

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, thanks to Kirsty. It wouldn’t make a great deal of sense without you, love.

Second, the vast majority of this book was written in the Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, and I would like to thank my colleagues in the department for their unwavering support during what was an incredibly difficult time in our lives. It is a remarkable place to work, and I am very happy to have come back to my interdisciplinary home at Loughborough. Thanks, in particular, for granting me a study leave to finish the book, and for covering my teaching during this period.

I would like to thank Britain’s librarians and archivists for the incredible work that they do in preserving our social, political and cultural past, however revolting parts of it may be. And, for their enormous assistance during my own research for this book, I would especially like to thank the British Library, The Searchlight Archive at Northampton University, the University of Sheffield Library, the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University, and The Working Class Movement Library (Salford). The final chapters of the book were written working in the confines of the Bromley House Library; you couldn’t find a more inspiring place to work, it is a true gem in the crown of Nottingham.

I have spoken at various conferences, symposia and meetings during the gestation and writing of this book. Colleagues were (for the most part!) very encouraging, reassuring me that the approach I was taking to British fascism held some kind of promise, even though that wasn’t particularly clear in the early days. I would particularly like to thank the Culture and Media Analysis Research Group and the Cultural Communities, Cosmopolitanism and Citizenship Research Group (both at Loughborough University), the Newcastle Critical Discourse Group (Newcastle University), Lancaster’s Language, Power, Ideology (LIP) research group, Liverpool University’s Communication & Media department and the Wiener Institute. Thanks too to everyone who supported the development of my ideas and arguments, with advice and information: Michael Billig, Garry Bushell, Daniel Chernilo, Monica Colombo, Susan Condor, Nigel Copsey, Dalia Gavriely, Phil Graham, Paul Jackson, Aristotle Kallis, Darren Kelsey, Michał Krzyżanowski, Majid KhosraviNik, Andrea Mammone, Cristina Marinho, Simon McKerrell, Sabina Mihelj, Ian Roderick, Dan Stone, Chris Szejnmann, Georgina Turner, Lyndon Way and Dominic Wring.

At points, colleagues and friends were kind enough to read drafts of material that eventually found its way into the book. First and foremost, I’d like to acknowledge Ruth Wodak’s ongoing support, encouragement and comments on several draft chapters—many thanks Ruth, I really appreciate it. In addition, I would like to give sincere thanks to Matthew Feldman (whose feedback really went above and beyond), Bernhard Forchtner, Craig Fowlie, Graham Macklin, David Renton and Daniel Tilles. Thanks to Anton Shekhovtsov for commissioning the book and for providing comments on the final manuscript, and a million thanks to Gavin Brookes whose extremely generous offer to proof-read the full manuscript got me over the finish line.

Finally, during the writing of this book, I experienced two life-changing events that, for different reasons, caused me significant delay: the death of my father, and the birth of my daughter. It makes me very sad that they never met. My Dad once told me the point (of life) is to be good to each other. I strive to live up to that ideal; and so I hope that, through me, Esther still gains a sense of her Grandfather. This book is dedicated to them both, with love.

Preface

Imagine that you’re on holiday in Eastern Germany. In the rural state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, to be precise. You decide to take the car out for a day—to drive around the region you’re staying in and take in the sights. Perhaps you’ll discover a nice place and get out the car and have a wander; maybe have lunch and something to drink. In any case, it is a nice day and you and your companion are not in any rush to be anywhere, so you decide to go and explore.

You happen upon a small village of little more than 10 houses. It is a rather nondescript place, apart from a large wooden signpost at the side of the road at the entrance to the village. As you drive by, you notice that several people appear to be paying particular attention to the sign, so you decide to stop and take a look yourself. Perhaps this is what amounts to a tourist attraction in this village. If not, you can at least gain a better sense of your location.

Figure 0.1: Road sign, Jamel

(Photograph: Roland Geisheimer / Attenzione / DER SPIEGEL, http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-63175.html )

Walking around the wooden sign, you see it provides the direction and distances to the major European cities of Paris, Berlin and Vienna. Three other place names on the sign are less familiar to you: Breslau, Königsberg and Braunau am Inn. You take a few pictures, but your interest in the road sign appears to have attracted the attention of a few rather threatening looking residents, so you return to your car.

What does this this all mean?

And why open a book on British fascist discourse with a fictionalised account of a holiday in Eastern Germany?

The place names might be familiar to readers from mainland Europe, particularly those from Central or Eastern Europe, but I would imagine they will be unknown to the majority of British readers. And this speaks to the first vital issue to consider when it comes to decoding fascist discourse: context. In fact, the village of Jamel has recently attracted a significant level of attention, from journalists and others, for the way that it has apparently been taken over by neo-Nazis. Sven Krüger, a high-level member of the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) and resident of the village, has refashioned it as “a 'nationally liberated zone' -- a neo-Nazi term for places foreigners and those of foreign descent must fear to tread”.1 A campaign of intimidation, vandalism and low-level violence employed by Krüger and his supporters ensured that most residents were forced to move, at which point “Krüger encouraged his right-wing friends to buy the available houses”.2 However, to the untrained eye, the indications of such a transformation remain under the surface.

What is the significance of the signpost at the entrance of the village? Why the inclusion of these particular place names? Breslau and Königsberg were both formerly German cities, now renamed Wrocław (and located in modern day Poland) and Kaliningrad (located in modern day Russia) respectively. They were the two largest cities located in the former eastern territories of Germany—that is, the territories East of the current German border—given up as part of the territorial changes to Germany following the Second World War. But their histories are more significant to modern day neo-Nazis than that. Founded in 1255 by crusading Teutonic Knights, Königsberg was for centuries the capital of Prussia and, from 1701, the regional capital of the province East Prussia. Originally created via subduing and converting (pagan) Prussians to Catholicism, the city and wider province were later populated with ‘ethnic Germans’, only to be de-Germanized after the war when its inhabitants were forcibly moved to West Germany, along with around 12 million others from across the East (Judt 2007: 25). In the words of Stalin, East Prussia—including Königsberg—had been returned “to Slavdom, where it belongs” (Ibid.). Königsberg is therefore rich in significance for German neo-Nazis. What this means is that the road sign points not only to a place, but also to a time—a time/place that was once-German. And, from the ideological perspective of German neo-Nazis, a better time/place. Drawing attention to Königsberg in this way therefore functions as a kind of condensed metonym—a part for whole replacement, in which Königsberg’s imperial history and eventual loss to the then-Soviet Union stands in for wider processes of territorial expansion, contraction and de-Nazification of the East after WWII.

Breslau/Wrocław is equally rich with historic significance. Indeed, as Thum (2011: p. xv) argues:

Wrocław is a city symptomatic of the twentieth century. In this one city, perhaps, more than any other, it is possible to witness the drama of twentieth-century Europe in full. Wrocław is a looking glass through which Europe’s self-destruction becomes manifest: nationalism and provincialization, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, the destructive rage of the Second World War, Nazi fantasies of Germanization and the murder of European Jewry, the total collapse of 1945, the shifting national borders of Central Europe, the forced resettlements, and, finally, the Cold War division of the continent.

It was home to the so-called Breslau School of Anthropology at the University of Breslau from 1931 until 1945, headed by Professor Egon von Eickstedt (1892–1965). Eickstedt’s field was ‘race psychology’, and his principle contribution to science was a ‘race formula’ that “would enable the researcher to define the degree of mixtures of racial groups in given populations. After 1939, the race experts of the Race and Settlement Main Office (RuSHA) of the SS used their own version of a ‘race formula’ to determine which parts of the population in the territories occupied by the Germans were to be resettled” (Klautke 2007: 26–27). His work in Breslau, on the presence and prevalence of the ‘Nordic race’ in the local population, therefore contributed to the ethnic cleansing of Silesia during the war—and yet he continued his work after 1945, re-establishing himself and his research team “in the Federal Republic of Germany, at the newly founded University of Mainz. Here Eickstedt became professor of anthropology in 1947” (Klautke 2007: 35). It is unclear whether these neo-Nazi sign makers were aware of Breslau’s significance in ‘race science’, and the scientific gloss this gave to Nazi policies of ethnic cleansing (‘Lebensraum’), but the example is pregnant with such possibilities.

A more conventional interpretation might involve Breslau’s involvement in warfare against the Soviet Union during WWII, given that it is remembered as the last stronghold of the Third Reich holding back the Red Army. Dubbed Fortress Breslau (‘Die Festung Breslau’) by Hitler, it was the scene of a brutal siege that cost thousands of lives—particularly those of civilians. Breslau was not directly threatened by fighting until the summer of 1944, but by February 1945, “all of Upper Silesia and most of Lower Silesia had been occupied by Soviet troops” (Thum 2011: xxii). The city was surrounded on February 15, effectively imprisoning “between 150,000 and 250,000 civilians in the city, including tens of thousands of forced laborers, prisoners of war and concentration camp inmates” (Ibid.). Vast swathes of Breslau were destroyed, by increasingly devastating Soviet raids, Nazi demolition of the city (including an ill-considered order to create a landing strip) and through arson. The city “gradually became a graveyard. There were so many corpses that it became impossible to inter all of them in the city’s cemeteries” (Thum 2011: xxvii). For 12 weeks the siege continued. General Hermann Niehoff, the commander of the fortress troops, “was not willing to surrender until Hitler had committed suicide, Berlin had fallen on May 2, and news of the Wehrmacht’s capitulation talks made it to Breslau (Thum 2011: xxix). Finally, on May 6, Niehoff signed the articles of capitulation. His fanaticism, unrelenting commitment to the ‘strategy of self-destruction’ and his lack of courage “to end a battle long after it had become senseless, cost tens of thousands of lives” (Ibid.).

The selection of these two cities—and the historic examples they invoke—is linked by a common idea, frequently present in revisionist literature: that Germans were victims of the war, and were made to suffer (disproportionately) at its end. Such revisionism is present in hard and soft forms, in mass media texts as well as in extremist propaganda. The television series Die grosse Flucht (The Great Flight) for example, produced by German documentary filmmaker Guido Knopp, “deals with the experiences of the German refugees who were driven from their homes in the eastern territories at the end of the Second World War” (Elm 2006: 160). The third episode of this series, titled ‘Die Festung Breslau’ (Fortress Breslau) appropriated “the language of the Death Marches endured by concentration camp victims by presenting the flight of German civilians from the approaching Russian army as ‘the death march from Breslau’ (der Todesmarsch von Breslau)” (Ibid.). In such a social and cultural context, where “the discourse on ‘German suffering’ […] has gained a new prominence in German public debate”, the narratives of what Breslau and Königsberg signify are hiding below the surface (Ibid.).

Braunau am Inn, finally, is the birthplace of Adolf Hitler. Which rather speaks for itself.

The sign therefore achieves a great deal, but only for those who can read the codes: it points to the time/place of a past Germany, an expanded German empire and implicitly signals the breadth of lands that neo-Nazis still consider to be rightly Germanic—from Königsberg in the East to Braunau am Inn in the South West. It indexes significant moments in the story of a National Socialist—Nazi—Germany and, specifically, the sacrifice that thousands of German soldiers and civilians paid in defending the Third Reich, fighting to the last, even after hope of victory was lost. By pointing out the direction and distance to his place of birth, it signals a reverence for Adolf Hitler and so indexes the continued importance of him and his ideas to contemporary neo-Nazis. It does all this, and more, and yet on first examination it is just a road sign, whose ostensible function is to mark the direction and distance to other settlements.

The road sign is therefore an exemplary demonstration of the difference between denoted and connoted meaning—the difference between surface and depth, between what is there to be ‘read off’ and what requires additional decoding, contextualisation and analysis. Once decoded, some of the connoted meanings of this sign are relatively uncontentious. Hitler’s place of birth, for example, is a town of around only 16,000 inhabitants and so signing such a small place, located 855KM away, is rather eccentric. Consequently, few would argue against the conclusion that this town is included on this road sign as an act of veneration. However, other connoted meanings are debateable, undetermined and less fixed, or else the signs have more than one meaning—what is known as a polysemic sign. The case of Königsberg on the road sign is a case in point. (Perhaps the road sign is simply old, and the name hasn’t been updated since the city’s name was changed?) Ultimately, there is no textual or linguistic meaning outside of usage—outside of context. And so, in examples where the meanings are unclear or open to discussion, it is necessary to turn to context—to contexts of production (speaker/writer histories and motivations) and contexts of consumption (the other names on the sign; Jamel; East Germany; the ‘here and now’)—to ‘unriddle’ a sign’s possible meanings. It is the combination of the three place names—Breslau, Königsberg and Braunau am Inn—in this particular place at this particular time that indicate a neo-Nazi political act: an act of political defiance; an act which claims the public space and declares it a ‘nationally liberated zone’. And still, to some, it could just be read as ‘a road sign’.

The road sign serves as a reminder that political movements utilise coded symbols of various forms to communicate—like a dog whistle—in ways imperceptible to the untrained eye and ear. This use of coded, vague and euphemistic discourse is perhaps especially functional for fascist and neo-Nazi movements, given the post-war taboos on the open expression of extreme right-wing ideologies. The remainder of this book explores this argument in greater depth, through examining both continuity and change in British fascist discourse over the past 100 years, and their relations to social contexts.

1Popp, Maximilian (2011) “The Village Where the Neo-Nazis Rule”, Spiegel Online http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/right-wing-extremism-the-village-where-the-neo-nazis-rule-a-737471.html [consulted 16 November 2012]

2Ibid.

Chapter OneIntroduction: Fascism & Fascism Studies

Fascists and National Socialists push many traditional conservative ideas to radical and vulgar extremes, but they do not abandon them. As ‘new’ conservatives they do not want to be taken for mere defenders of the old reactionary elite, and insist endlessly that their movement is dynamic, unique and, above all, modern. Those who write the history of social movements must be careful, however, not to take ideological statements at face value. (Weiss 1967: 9)

Many academics writing about fascist ideology show a marked unwillingness to acknowledge contemporaneous fascist parties and movements. While most academics writing on the subject are united in their identification of fascist parties and movements from the past, for many, their categories and classifications are curiously deficient when analysing the ideology and practice of parties and movements breathing the same air as them. A pattern is identifiable in the academic literature, which has remained relatively stable for the past 50 years: although parties which existed 10 to 20 years ago may have been fascist (or at minimum neo-fascist), any contemporary mass movement is regarded as something different, something new. Fascism always seems to be an ideology and movement of the past. For academics who accept that fascists have continued to exist and march and campaign since 1945, around 10–20 years appears to be the standard length of time required to allow for their identification. Thus, in the 1960s, the Union Movement—Oswald Mosley’s successor party to the British Union of Fascists—was considered fascist but John Bean and Andrew Fountaine’s British National Party (BNPa) were not (Cross 1963). By the 1970s, the BNPa—which merged with other parties to form the National Front (NF) in 1967—were considered fascist, but the NF largely were not (Walker 1977).1 And yet, by the 1990s the NF were now considered fascist but the British National Party (BNPb), formed by John Tyndall in 1982 following his departure from the NF, were not. This heuristic blind spot is especially pronounced with political scientists, whose tendency to coin new political categories to describe current political parties has led to the formulation of a wide variety of double-barrelled terms, working up a seemingly endless dance of classification. Indeed, the most recent British National Party (BNPb) were at various points categorized as far right (Cantle 2012; McGowan 2012), extreme right (Eatwell 2004; Ford 2010; Goodwin 2012; Hainsworth 2008)2, radical right (Norris 2005; Sykes 2005), populist radical right (Mudde 2007), extreme right-wing populist (Rydgren 2005), neo-fascist (Ignazi 1997; Messina 2011), neo-populist (Griffin 2011), racial nationalist (Goodwin 2010), and racial populist (Solomos 2013), amongst other labels.

The reason for this diverse categorisation becomes understandable when one considers, first, the nature of the subject under analysis and, second, the methods that tend to be used to arrive at these interpretative conclusions. Even a cursory glance at primary materials produced by fascist parties reveals startling inconsistencies and deep-seated, even endemic, contradictions in what they claim to stand for. Take these examples:

We offer leadership not dictatorship and the only dictatorship under British Union Government will be the will of the people expressed through the Government they have elected. (Mosley, no date circa 1934)

Fascism, in fact, is the only scientific approach to politics and economics to-day; and dictatorship is the only scientific approach to government. (Joyce 1933: 2–3) […] Other countries have been subjected to the plague of democracy and have survived it by the establishment of dictatorships; and it is becoming increasingly evident that our own plague must end in the same way, if we are not to be exterminated. (Joyce 1933: 6)

Mosley was the leader of the British Union of Fascists and Joyce was one of the party’s leading propagandists, and yet they still offer diametrically opposed accounts of the ideology and political aims to which they apparently subscribe. The existence of such contrasting self-descriptions presents us with both analytic and political difficulties. Are fascists committed to dictatorship or not? Are they committed to popular elections or not? Are fascists revolutionary or conservative? Is fascism elitist or populist? Are they all of these things (at different times) and, hence, blow opportunistically in the wind? Or are they, in fact, liars and subscribe continuously, and covertly, to a political programme unbeknownst to the public, to the electorate and even (potentially) to portions of their own parties?

How should we identify fascism, given that virtually no contemporary political party attempting to build a mass movement, or secure power through the ballot box, will self-identify as fascist? The political situation is widely assumed to have shifted following the Second World War. Understandably, the Nazi industrialization of murder has meant that fascism, as a political creed, is forever discredited in the eyes of the majority of people. However, as Billig (1978: 125) points out, analysis of fascist discourse from the inter-war period reveals that fascist movements “encountered a qualitatively similar problem”, encouraging concealment of the true intentions of the party. In the period between 1930 and Hindenburg appointing Hitler Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) tried to appear more moderate; they wanted to be perceived as a political party aimed at achieving power by constitutional means rather than violent direct action. This political goal was reflected, sometimes in subtle and implicit ways, in their propaganda. For example, one line of the song Die Fahne Hoch (“The Flag on High”)—widely known as The Horst Wessel Song—was changed in order to underplay their by now well-established paramilitarism. The line which used to be sung:

Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über Barrikaden

[Soon Hitler's flags will flutter above the barricades]

was now sung as:

Bald flattern Hitlerfahnen über alle Straßen

[Soon Hitler's flags will flutter above all streets]

The genocidal intent of Hitler was similarly absent from mass propaganda until 1939 (Herf 2006) and, until the outbreak of war, was not “publicly proclaimed as the ultimate goal of the Nazi programme” (Billig 1978: 125). Cohn (1967: 183) argues that a book published in 1924 by Hitler’s mentor Eckart—entitled Bolshevism from Moses to Lenin: a dialogue between Adolf Hitler and myself—was downplayed by the ideologues and propagandists of the NSDAP “precisely because it was too revealing”. Similarly, contrasting the ideas and arguments in Goebbels’ public speeches, private diaries and an interview, Eckhardt (1968) suggested that “one explanation for the difference between the values of the Goebbels’ diaries and his other fascist sources might be that the diaries were not intended for public consumption” (from Billig 1978: 70).

Contradictions remain in both contemporary fascist ideology and between the pronouncements and actions of political extremists—that is, between what they say they stand for, and what they do. As early as 1923, Klara Zetkin argued “If you compare the programme of Italian fascism with its performance, one thing is already apparent today: the complete ideological bankruptcy of the movement. There is the most blatant contradiction between what fascism has promised and what it actually delivers to the masses” (p.108). Some of these contradictions are the product of attempting to appeal to different audiences, and are therefore similar in kind (but, perhaps, not degree) to the forms of chicanery observable in modern political communications from across the political spectrum. So, for example

Hitler made no mention whatsoever of the Jews in his notorious speech delivered before the Hamburg National Club in February 1926. The sole aim of the Nazi movement, he underscored then, was the ‘total and complete’ annihilation of Marxism. This contrasts with remarks made when speaking before his ‘own’ audience in the Munich beer halls, where almost every speech was replete with brutal attacks on Jews as the ‘masterminds behind financial capital’, ‘polluters of the people’ and adherents of the ‘subversive doctrine of Marxism’. (Kershaw 2008: 54)

Other inconsistencies, ambiguities and contradictions are specific to fascism. The above quote contains an obvious one: that Jews are, apparently, both the ‘masterminds behind financial capital’ and the ‘subversive doctrine of Marxism’. This seeming contradiction is resolved through recourse to a higher order explanation. That is, fascists’ frequent criticism of capitalism using a pseudo-leftist vocabulary, and frequent criticism of Communism using a conservative vocabulary, are reconciled in fascist ideology through an explanation that sees both capitalism and communism as two sides of a single ‘internationalist’ conspiracy.

Other contradictions in fascist discourse are the direct reflection of the deceptions that fascists need to perform, in order to appeal to a mass audience. Fascism is inherently and inescapably inegalitarian. This inegalitarianism is marked in two major ways: first, fascism seeks to deny and, in its regime form, reverse the small progressive victories that have helped ameliorate the structural violence that capitalism heaps onto workers. These include the destruction of working class organisations and removing legal constraints on unbridled economic exploitation. These basic facts of fascist economics (which I discuss in more detail below) mean that fascist discourse must conceal the ways it encodes the economic interests of the minority, in order to entrench the exploitation of the majority. Even the liberal historian Roger Griffin acknowledges that Marxist approaches to the analysis of fascism have demonstrated “empirically how any apparent victory of […] fascism can only be won at the cost of systematically deceiving the popular masses about the true nature of its rule” (1998: 5). This leads on to the second way that fascism enshrines and enacts inegalitarian politics: “fascist movements use ideology deliberately to manipulate and divert the frustrations and anxieties of the mass following away from their objective source […whether through] an emphasis on essentially irrational concepts such as authority, obedience, honour, duty, the fatherland or race […or] emphasis on the hidden enemies who have sinister designs on society and who threaten the longed-for sense of community” (Kitchen 1976: 86). As well as embracing, inter alia, xenophobia, racism and conspiracy theories, this fundamentally deceitful and manipulative mode of political communications indexes the hierarchical and elitist distinctions between groups of people inherent in fascist political structuration. Specifically: the leader(s) is/are wise and knowledgeable; the party and movement exist to service the vision of the leader(s); and the general population is to be managed—ideally kept ignorant and misled regarding their true interests and opponents, but terrorised, imprisoned and even killed should obedience not be achieved.

Academic discussion of fascism

Milza and Bernstein (1992: 7) argue that “No universally accepted definition of the fascist phenomenon exists, no consensus, however slight, as to its range, its ideological origins, or the modalities of action which characterise it”. Indeed, since it emerged, there has always been variability and disagreement about how to classify or define fascism. These disagreements have themselves shifted, so the arguments of the 1930s were different to those of the 1960s, different again to the debates now, and shaped in part by the histories, debates and current political realities in different national contexts. Nevertheless, a sense remains that there must be an ideological core—or collection of essential (fascist) political or ideological traits—that allows us to recognise and identify fascism as fascism. Or, at minimum, there must be a group of “definitional characteristics of the genus fascism, of which each variety is a different manifestation” (Griffin 1998: 2). Accordingly, since the 1970s there have been repeated academic attempts to codify the plurality of what fascism ‘really’ was—and perhaps is—and what the aims and characteristics of a fascist political movement are.

Central to these discussions were a number of debates which have yet to be resolved: is fascism an ideology or a system of rule? Was fascism limited to a period between 1919 and 1945—a mini-epoch? Or is it a praxis, or an ideology, that has survived the end of the Second World War? Is fascism modernising or conservative? Is fascism reactionary, revolutionary or counter-revolutionary? To what extent was fascism a generic phenomenon, with various permutations within one unified ideological family; or were different regimes the product of different socio-political conditions and historical traditions? Should we regard fascism as an aberration? A psycho-social pathology? As a product of crisis and disease in society (Gregor 1974: 28), of “blackest, unfathomable despair” (Drucker 1939: 271), or a reflection of the prejudiced authoritarian personality of fascist leaders and their supporters (Adorno et al 1950)? Within work advancing historical and socio-economic frames of reference, fascism has been given a bewildering variety of contradictory classifications, and placed at almost all points on the ideological spectrum: as a counter-revolutionary movement of the extreme right (Renton 1999), as the extremism of the centre (Lipset 1960), as a synthesis of both left and right offering a combination of “organic nationalism and anti-Marxist socialism” (Sternhell 1986: 9), or as a particular form of totalitarian government, which shares key features with the Communist left (Friedrich, summarised in Kitchen 1976: 27).

There is, in short, an almost insuperable volume of quite contradictory work on fascist ideology and fascist movements. De Felice (1991), for example, lists 12,208 books and articles in a bibliography devoted to Italian Fascism, generic fascism and the history of the Second World War; Rees’ (1979) annotated bibliography on fascism in Britain lists 608 publications on British fascism by that date alone, and a further 270 written by fascists themselves. Given this outpouring, and the ways that such theorisation has, in part at least, reflected broad trends in Western geopolitics (particularly post-WWII), it should come as little surprise that one’s definition of fascism (or indeed Fascism3) is as much a reflection of the political commitments of the writer—and specifically, their perception of the function of scholarship on fascism—as it is a reflection of the material or historical ‘facts on the ground’. On the one side of the argument we find the challenging polemics of Renton (1999: 18), demanding “how can a historian, in all conscience, approach the study of fascism with neutrality? […] One cannot be balanced when writing about fascism, there is nothing positive to be said of it.” On the other, there is Griffin (1998), who argues that historians should “treat fascism like any other ideology” (p.15); in other words, it should be approached and defined “as an ideology inferable from the claims made by its own protagonists” (p.238).

Since the end of the 1960s, a body of work has developed whose primary focus is on fascist ideology, and aims to extract the ideological core of “generic fascism that may account for significant and unique similarities between the various permutations of fascism whilst convincingly accommodating deviations as either nationally or historically specific phenomena” (Kallis 2009: 41). This work on generic fascism has sometimes formulated lists of such “significant and unique similarities”, aiming to distil the “various permutations of fascism” down to a minimum number of necessary and sufficient characteristics: the so-called ‘fascist minimum’. Ernst Nolte (1968) developed the first of these, wherein he argued that fascism was characterised by three antagonistic ideological elements—anti-communism; anti-liberalism; anti-conservatism—and three political arrangements: the Führerprinzip; a party army; and the aim of totalitarian control. Nolte’s objective (though not his theoretical approach) was then developed in novel and fruitful ways by others—amongst them Juan Linz, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell and Walter Laqueur. Such work reaches its apotheosis in the work of Roger Griffin, whose one-sentence definition of fascism—“Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (Griffin 1993: 26), or “formulated in three words: ‘palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism’” (1998: 13)—is, truly, a minimal fascist minimum. Indeed, the extreme brevity of his definition drew withering comment from Paxton (2005: 221), who suggests Griffin’s “zeal to reduce fascism to one pithy sentence seems to me more likely to inhibit than to stimulate analysis of how and with whom it worked.”

There is no doubting, however, the significant influence that Griffin’s approach has had, particularly on American and British scholars. Some praise his scholarship and the heuristic value of his definition, and include themselves within his claimed ‘new consensus’ on fascism studies; others are far more circumspect about its politics and the degree of convergence that Griffin claims between his work and that of others. For example, Woodley (2010: 1) has argued that the ‘new consensus’ in fascism studies developed by “revisionist historians” such as Griffin, “is founded less on scholarly agreement than a conscious rejection of historical materialism as a valid methodological framework.” Baker (2006b: 286) goes as far as to accuse Griffin of “methodological colonialism” in his attempts to argue that (seemingly all!) writers share his definition of a fascist minimum, and the notion of palingenesis in particular. It is towards Griffin’s definition that this chapter now turns.

Griffin’s mythic core: fascism as palingenetic ultra-nationalism

Roger Griffin argues that fascism should be defined as “a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (1991: 26). Fascism, he argues, aims to rejuvenate, revitalise and reconstruct the nation following a period of perceived decadence, crisis and/or decline. Griffin uses the Victorian term ‘palingenesis’, meaning ‘rebirth from the ashes’, to characterise this central motivating spirit (Geist) of fascism, though it is only when combined with the other elements in the noun phrase, that his fascist minimum is given a sense of ideological form. Thus, in response to criticisms that ‘national rebirth’ is not a uniquely fascist ideological commitment, Griffin argues: “I agree entirely […] It is only when the two terms are combined (‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’) that they form a compound definitional component” (Griffin 2006b: 263–4). Detailing his noun phrase a little more, he uses

‘populist’ not to refer to a particular historical experience […] but as a generic term for political forces which, even if led by small elite cadres or self-appointed ‘vanguards’, in practice or in principle (and not merely for show) depend on ‘people power’ as the basis of their legitimacy. I am using ‘ultra-nationalism’ […] to refer to forms of nationalism which ‘go beyond’, and hence reject, anything compatible with liberal institutions or with the tradition of Enlightenment humanism which underpins them” (Griffin, 1991: 36–7).

Since 1998 Griffin (c.f. 2006a, 2006b, 2007: 179–183) has argued that a ‘new consensus’ has developed in Anglophone fascist studies around the utility and application of his definition. Like him, this ‘new consensus’ “rejects Marxist, essentialist or metapolitical notions of the ‘fascist minimum’ [and] identifies this minimum in a core ideology of national rebirth (palingenesis) that embraces a vast range of highly diverse concrete historical permutations” (Griffin 2006a: 29). His own heuristic definition has shifted, slightly, since its first iteration (for an interview discussing this, see Griffin 2008). In Modernism and Fascism, for example, he wrote:

FASCISM is a revolutionary species of political modernism originating in the early twentieth century whose mission is to combat the allegedly degenerative forces of contemporary history (decadence) by bringing about an alternative modernity and temporality (a ‘new order’ and a ‘new era’) based on the rebirth, or palingenesis, of the nation. Fascists conceive the nation as an organism shaped by historic, cultural, and in some cases, ethnic and hereditary factors, a mythic construct incompatible with liberal, conservative, and communist theories of society. (Griffin 2007: 181)

For theorists who work within this approach, fascist ideas are revolutionary, not reactionary; modern, not conservative; and ‘positive’, in the sense that they envision and are directed towards utopian ideals, rather than a range of fascist negations (such as the anti-communism, anti-liberalism and anti-conservatism of Nolte’s (1968) minimum). That said, Griffin has also argued: although “the rampant eclecticism of fascism makes generalizations about its specific ideological contents hazardous, the general tenor of all [fascist] permutations places it in the tradition of the late nineteenth-century revolt against liberalism” (Griffin 1993, reprinted in Griffin 1998: 37). Thus, despite his stated reservations regarding Nolte’s definition, he regards anti-liberalism, or (with a nod to fascism’s “futural dynamic”) “post-liberalism”, to be a necessary feature of a fascist ideological programme.

Griffin’s heuristic definition approaches fascism primarily as a set of ideological myths expounded by its leaders. As he has argued: “The premise of this approach [the ‘new consensus’…] is to take fascist ideology at its face value, and to recognize the central role played in it by the myth of national rebirth to be brought about by a finding a ‘Third Way’ between liberalism/capitalism and communism/socialism” (Griffin 1998: 238). That is, Griffin and similarly idealist historians form their conclusions regarding the ideological content of fascism on the basis of discourse produced by fascists themselves. Griffin (1993, reprinted in Griffin 1998: 38) maintains that fascists have “produced relatively elaborate theories on such themes as the organic concept of the state, the leader principle, economics, corporatism, aesthetics, law, education, technology, race, history, morality and the role of the church.” These theories, he argues, should be the main foci of analysis, preceding analysis of specific movements and contexts.

My approach taken in this book overlaps, to a degree, with that proposed by Griffin; the exact manner of this overlap I will detail later on in this chapter. However, it also differs in several significant ways, which position my analysis squarely outside of the ‘new consensus’. For example, take Griffin’s definition of populism, quoted above: “a generic term for political forces which […] depend on ‘people power’ as the basis of their legitimacy” (Griffin 1991: 36–7). This may be a necessary aspect of any definition of populism, but it is insufficient to account for the particular form of populism orchestrated within fascist movements. At a bare minimum, we need to make a distinction between right wing populism and left wing populism (see Wodak et al 2013). De Grand (2006: 218) offers this useful distinction between the two:

Left-wing populism has traditionally blamed economic elites for many of its grievances and has supported labour unions, the right to strike and egalitarian values, whereas right-wing populism has traditionally railed against the evil influence of Marxists, liberals, Jews, Blacks or immigrants, and, rather than attacking upper class material interests, has [de facto or de jure] defended them by opposing labour unions and labour strikes and by channelling social anger towards racial or ethnic ‘inferiors’.

Looking at De Grand’s two broad-brush descriptions, it is immediately apparent that fascism—as ideology, political programme and regime—fits squarely with the second: fascism is not simply populist, but right-wing populist. Fascism’s populist agenda does not depend simply on ‘people power’, but on channelling anger towards ‘parasitic’ and/or ‘contaminating’ Outgroups. Within left-wing populism, the working class are (rhetorically) united against political-economic elites; within right-wing populism the working class are divided, and an unpatriotic and/or internationalist political-economic elite is blamed for the existence of the portion of the population deemed ‘undesirable’. Left-wing populism orientates towards egalitarian principles; right-wing populism orientates towards chauvinism—inclusion for Us, exclusion (at best) for Them. The distinction is stark, and needs to be made patently clear in any heuristic account.

I will now outline three further key points of divergence before introducing my discourse analytic approach in more detail. The following sections draw heavily on the debates published in Griffin et al (2006).

A mythic (not political-economic) core

The key problem which I, and others (inter alia De Grand 2006; Mann 2004; Woodley 2010, 2013), have with Griffin’s definition of fascism stems from his philosophical idealism and the constitutive power imputed to political myth. Griffin’s ontology has its origins in the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century, and specifically in the way it lays “emphasis on the way in which we invest the world with our own meanings” (McLellan 1986: 7). From such an Idealist ontological foundation, there is believed to be a movement from ideas to material reality; in other words, social consciousness is taken to determine social being. Opposing such an approach is a Materialist view of social practice. Those who adopt a materialist perspective suggest that this determining relationship is predominantly the other way around, from material reality to ideas. Critiquing the Idealistic philosophical position, Marx argues it is “a mistake to start from human consciousness and to proceed from this to an investigation of material reality. The correct approach [is] the other way around. The origin of the problem was not mistaken ideas, but the misshapen nature of social reality which generated mistaken ideas” (McLellan 1986: 12). I point this out not to push for a narrowly deterministic explanation of the relationship between social practice and (fascist) ideology, nor to argue that fascist ideology is simply symptomatic of class conflict and so a reflection of ruling class interests—such interpretations were always a caricature of Marxist dialectical analysis. Rather, it should be acknowledged that political ideas are never divorced from social practice—they are both constituted and constituting; shaped by situations, institutions and social structures, but also shaping them (Fairclough & Wodak 1997: 55). As De Grand (2006: 96) puts it, by “cutting the analysis off from the economic and social realities, we lose a sense of how the regimes affected real people. Abstract projects become more important than realizations”. Or, in more stark terms:

Griffin’s idealism is nothing to be proud of. It is a major defect. How can a ‘myth’ generate ‘internal cohesion’ or ‘driving force’? A myth cannot be an agent driving or integrating anything, since ideas are not free-floating. Without power organizations, ideas cannot actually do anything. (Mann 2004: 12)

The three concepts Griffin identifies (palingenetic; populist; ultra-nationalism) may well be necessary but, even combined, they are insufficient to properly define fascism since they are detached from material practices. Griffin, however, mocks analysts who approach fascism from a Marxist dialectical perspective:

The sense of living in a post-fascist world is not shared by Marxists, of course, who ever since the first appearance of Mussolini’s virulently anti-communist squadrismo have instinctively assumed fascism to be endemic to capitalism. No matter how much it may appear to be an autonomous force, it is for them inextricably bound up with the defensive reaction of bourgeois elites or big business to the attempts by revolutionary socialists to bring about the fundamental changes needed to assure social justice through a radical redistribution of wealth and power. (Griffin 2006a: 37)

There are three points to make regarding this extract. First, he claims that Marxists “have instinctively assumed fascism to be endemic to capitalism” [my emphasis]. Marxists would argue that their conclusions are based not on instinct or assumption, but on an understanding of how labour is organised under capitalism and basic empirical observation. Capitalism rests on workers not being paid the full value of their labour. An employer will pay workers, but they will not compensate them for the full value of their labour—the remainder, this ‘surplus value’, is the accumulated product of the unpaid labour time of workers. In layman’s terms, this is what is called profit. Every fascist regime was founded on such a capitalist mode of production; every fascist ideology is founded on (qualified) support for a capitalist mode of production; no fascist regime threatened the property and economic privileges of the upper classes (Mann 2004: 62–63; see also Chapter 5). Benjamins (1973: 243) summarises this as follows: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate.” As I discuss below, fascist opposition to certain capitalists, or companies or (especially) international capital does not remove the basic fact that, under fascism, labour continued to be organised in such a way that it generated surplus value—profit—for companies and their owners. Indeed, Griffin (2006a: 44) acknowledges this, stating that Nazism ‘renewed’ the economic sphere of inter-war Germany “by adapting capitalism rather than abolishing it”. Obviously there are many different forms of capitalism; clearly these can be more or less repressive, more or less exploitative, more or less illiberal. But all fascisms are capitalist—that is, they assume and advocate a political economy structured with the means of production in private hands, and labour power purchased in order to produce surplus value (profit).

In the second sentence, Griffin presents an “extreme case formulation” of what Marxists (plural, and presumably all of us) apparently argue, in order to convince readers to buy into his own academic project. This formulation appears to be based on Dimitrov’s (1935) speech to the Seventh Comintern, wherein fascism is defined as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” But Dimitrov’s polemic was not the only, and certainly not the most sophisticated Marxist analysis, even in 1935. Marxists do not (all) argue that fascism is restricted to “defensive reaction” of “bourgeois elites or big business”, as repeat empirical analysis of middle class, petty bourgeois and lumpenproletariat membership and activism demonstrates (cf. Mason 1995). Nor is this “defensive reaction” directed in response to the actions of only “revolutionary socialists”, but against all organised labour and indeed any group perceived as being in opposition to the aims and objectives of the Party (as metonym for the Nation). Nor is it only groups and individuals committed to “a radical redistribution of wealth and power” that fascism violently opposes, but any campaigning based on egalitarianism; fascism “dispenses with all the trappings of parliamentary discourse. No opposition whatsoever is allowed, either within or without the fascist movement” (Kitchen 1976: 86). In his eagerness to reject what he calls ‘Marxist’ understandings of fascism, Griffin reproduces some of the characterisations that fascists offer of their mythical opponents—a characterisation which emphasises Marxist revolutionary excess in order to justify fascist excess—and, in so doing, throws the baby out with the bathwater.

To summarise: I do not doubt or deny that the myth of imminent ‘national rebirth’ can be documented in a copious number of Fascist/fascist primary sources; it is clearly the case that Fascists/fascists did, and do, invoke ‘national rebirth’ in their discourse. But how much does that tell us? Analysis is insufficient if it begins and ends with identifying the surface of fascist ideological discourse. The more important points are: what fascist ‘national rebirth’ is taken to actually mean given that: (1) myths of rebirth are “shared with many other political ideologies” as well as cultural and religious movements (Baker 2006a: 73); and (2) for most fascist movements, ‘rebirth’ appears to translate to ethnic and political cleansing (Mann 2004). Is ‘national rebirth’ in fact a fascist euphemism? Examining in greater detail what ‘rebirth’ is taken to mean is the first step towards a critical examination of the role(s) that such myths play in fascist political projects and the relationships between such myths and what Fascists/fascists actually did (and did not do).

Fascism as revolutionary

Griffin (2006b: 261) maintains that fascism is a revolutionary ideology. To substantiate such a claim, he offers an ad populum argument: he is not the only person convinced that this is the case, pointing again to the ‘new consensus’ in fascist studies: “a growing area of agreement concerning the value of seeing fascism as an extreme form of (not necessarily eugenically racist or antisemitic) ultra-nationalism bent on a cultural and anthropological revolution.” As Durham (2006: 301) observes, Griffin clearly rejects the assumption “that a revolution must entail a far-reaching challenge to capitalist property relations”, instead arguing that it is “enough to argue that fascism’s call for the creation of a new man, a new woman and a new order envisaged a revolutionary transformation of the cultures in which it has arisen.” However, Durham continues, if we consider fascist views on sex and gender, then the picture becomes more complex—revealing that fascism has both culturally revolutionary and culturally reactionary features. “For many fascists, the new woman would be above all a wife and mother […] But, as distinct from other forms of rightism, she would also be mobilised in mass and often uniformed women’s movements” (Durham 2006: 301). On this point, Soucy (2006: 214) would also agree:

Even if one bases one’s definition of fascism on ‘the primacy of culture’ rather than on the primacy of economics, the cultural appeals which Fascism and Nazism made to their major constituencies in Italy and Germany were often far more conservative than revolutionary. […] In a meeting with church officials in 1933 Hitler justified his policies by citing Catholic traditions. Conservative too was Nazi propaganda on behalf of certain ‘traditional’ values, including some associated in the 1920s and 30s with bourgeois respectability (hard work, plain living, sexual repression, traditional gender roles, etc).

Kershaw (2008: 57) is even more categorical: “Hitler did view himself as a revolutionary, but his revolution was strictly and exclusively racial, a revolution of annihilation.”

On weighing up this balance of revolutionary and reactionary elements in fascism, Griffin (2006b: 264) writes: “I have no doubt that in the interwar period many were drawn to fascism for non-revolutionary, genuinely reactionary motives such as fear of communism or economic chaos […] I would argue, however, that they remained at heart fellow travellers rather than ‘true’ fascists. By contrast the fascist policies that affected the working classes, the Church, women, and (in Germany) art all had a revolutionary rationale in their own terms, no matter how ‘reactionary’ they were in terms of conflicting ideologies”. This passage is key, for how it deals with Griffin’s hermeneutics of fascist ideology: Fascists claim that they are revolutionary, or at least that their policies “had a revolutionary rationale”. Other analysts disagree, arguing that these same features—the features that fascists claim to be revolutionary—are in fact reactionary. But, “no matter how ‘reactionary’” the opponents of fascism argued that these policies were, Griffin concludes that their readings of fascist policy should not be given primacy, because fascist policies are revolutionary “in their own terms”. In other words, fascist policies are revolutionary because the fascists say they are revolutionary.

Aside from an overwhelming sense of ‘painting the roses red’, this privileging of fascist justificatory and self-descriptive schemas reveals a slippage in Griffin’s work between two analytic positions: “(a) that palingenetic ultra-nationalism is the core of the definition of fascism and (b) that it is the core of actual fascist movements” (Passmore 2006: 352). If we are to opt for (b), and rely on the self-descriptions of fascists to determine what may or may not be regarded as ‘fascist’, then why do we need a heuristic model at all? If we are to opt for a heuristic definition—and, for sake of argument, let’s say it is the definition in (a)—then we cannot take the statements of (potential) fascist movements as the sine qua non for establishing fascist credentials. As Passmore (2006: 353) continues “Griffin is well aware that only the first usage is appropriate if the concept is to be used heuristically”, otherwise he risks essentialising fascism:

For Griffin, conservatives in fascist movements “remained at heart fellow travellers rather than ‘true’ fascists.” The quote marks around ‘true’ reveal unease, but there is no clearer example of essentialization than in the expression “at heart”. To defend his theory Griffin asserts privileged insight into the true motives of fascists. Again, Marxists are just as able to argue that revolutionaries in fascism were “ultimately” fellow travellers or dreamers who were sooner or later eliminated from movements and regimes. (Passmore, 2006: 354)

There is, however, a more problematic corollary to emphasising the “cultural and anthropological revolution” professed in fascist ideological myth: backgrounding the politically illiberal facts on the ground, the alliances between conservative forces and silence on fascism’s “distinctively brutal violence and paramilitarism” (Mann 2004: 12). On this point, De Grand (2006: 96) reminds us that any ‘cultural revolution’ achieved by the Fascist or Nazi regimes “was derived from the violent suppression of alternatives more than from positive policies. […] Griffin blurs all of this in an ideological fog”. For example, Griffin describes “Mussolini’s fascio di combattimento and the squads as ‘a remarkable alliance between the avant-garde artistic and cultural milieu with revolutionary syndicalists and national socialists.’ [Griffin 2002: 33] The participation of the landowners and the Nationalist right, castor oil and savage beatings of socialist union organizers conveniently disappear from view” (De Grand 2006: 96). In the next paragraph of this same article Griffin (2002: 33) argues:

The transformation of the NSDAP from a marginalised party gaining 2.6 per cent of the vote in 1928, to a mass movement which won over 37.4 per cent (13,745,800 votes) in July 1932, was no simple matter of mass manipulation. It involved a complex process by which Nazism, thanks to the propaganda machine and sophisticated theatrical politics of a party which identified itself explicitly with the prospect of a revolutionary new order and the comprehensive palingenesis of Germany symbolised in the Swastika, finally became the core of a genuine mass charismatic community.

Griffin’s idealistic account of the rise of the NSDAP, above, is lacking at least three crucial points. First, Griffin limits political process to the ideational level: the “propaganda machine and sophisticated theatrical politics”. In so doing, he skips over the profound “economic crisis of 1929–33, and the breakdown of the democratic system under its centrifugal political pressures, which created the opportunity for Hitler to successfully project his message of national revival under his leadership that proved so attractive no longer to just völkisch activists but to a desperate people” (Noakes 2004: 30). As Renton (1999: 36) points out, “Between 1928 and 1932 industrial production in Germany fell by 42 per cent, while unemployment rose from an average of 1.3 million in 1928 to 5.6 million in 1932.” Griffin’s philosophical idealism is such that he privileges autonomous ideas and ‘political theatre’ over the complex dialectical relationships between Nazi discourse and an increasingly receptive German audience—receptive because of their dire material circumstances, and the resulting crises of political hegemony and of the working classes. Second, citing the number and percentage of votes from the July 1932 election ignores the fact that, in this election, Hitler’s popular support had peaked. Indeed, later that same year, the NSDAP had lost 2 million votes—in the elections of November 1932, the mutually antagonistic Socialist Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD) combined garnered 13,000,000 votes, against 11,700,000 for the Nazis (Renton 1999: 36). “Hitler’s failure to secure power after the July 1932 election produced a serious crisis in the party during the autumn and winter of 1932” (Ibid). It was not “the prospect of a revolutionary new order” (Griffin 2002: 33) that resulted in Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor. Nor was it the “palingenesis of Germany symbolised in the Swastika” that brought Nazism to power. In fact, Hitler “was saved by the intervention of members of the traditional German elites, who were determined to avoid a return to democratic politics” (Noakes 2004: 30).

Third, lost in this picture of “propaganda” and “sophisticated theatrical politics” is any sense “of how much fascism rested on violence and compulsion” (De Grand 2006: 96). Of course, by the time Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933 there had been more than a decade of political violence, of varying systematicity, meted out by, amongst others, the SA (Sturmabteilung), the paramilitary wing of the NSDAP. Though “definitely not the level of 1919 and 1920, which saw the scattered eruption of civil war”, the years up to the end of 1932—the same period that Griffin referred to above—saw a marked increase in the scale and intensity of political violence (Schumann 2009: 252). As Rosenhaft (1983: 4) puts it: “During the years of economic depression and political crisis that preceded Hitler’s ‘bloodless’ takeover, scores [-actually hundreds: JER] of lives were lost in a conflict that was now continuous, growing in intensity, and increasingly the preserve of the most extreme parties of right and left”. Between 1929 and the end of July 1931, 155 people were killed and 426 injured in street violence—predominantly in Zusammenstöße (‘clashes’) between the SA, the KPD and other paramilitary organizations; two thirds of these fatalities (108 dead) were Communists (Schumann 2009: 252). October and November of 1931 saw an additional 21 people reported killed and 1138 injured across Germany (Rosenhaft 1983: 7); between January and September 1932, the Prussian territories alone reported 155 dead, 105 of whom were killed during the period leading up to the Reichstag elections in July, in “an unprecedented wave of shootings and bombings, for which the SA was largely responsible” (Rosenhaft 1983: 8).

These deaths didn’t only reflect and induce terror in the population, they also brought wider political consequence. During the last months before Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the mortality figures, the degree to which they demonstrated that the state had lost its monopoly of violence, the growing crisis of political hegemony and imagined proximity to civil war were considerations “repeatedly brought into play when Papen, Schleicher and Hindenburg discussed how the energies of the Nazi movement could be harnessed towards the creation of a new kind of constitutional order” (Rosenhaft 1983: 9).

Thus, the study and analysis of fascism are contested territories. One justification for using the generic term ‘fascism’ is that it enables appreciation and comparison of tendencies common to more than one country and more than one period in time—and also that it helps draw out the interconnections between these different periods in time. But, I would argue, any appropriate theory of fascism can only begin with the idea that fascism must be interpreted critically. A critical approach does not entail recourse to polemic. Instead it means that we need to take a step beyond the immediate, and take into account detailed analysis of the social, political and cultural factors as well as the significance of ideas and arguments (Iordachi 2010); to look at what fascists do as well as what they say; and to closely examine the dialectical relations between context and the text/talk of (assumedly/potentially fascist) political protagonists.

To state things plainly: in this book, I intend to take from these varying perspectives what is analytically productive. From Griffin and the ‘new consensus’ scholarship, I take a commitment to take fascist ideology seriously, and to take fascist discourse as the primary point to access, summarise and evaluate the aims of the British variant(s) in this ideological family. Indeed, if we are interested in examining what fascists communicate, or understanding how they mobilise, attract and retain support, it seems to me the height of folly to not