WEBVTT NOTE Thoughts on Fascism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 Incidentally, as David pointed out, the name of Hitler's party and government was not Nazi, but National Socialist. 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:15.000 Okay, Nazi was a nickname derived from the first two syllables of the term in German. 3 00:00:15.000 --> 00:00:18.000 Nationales Sozialistische Nazi. 4 00:00:18.000 --> 00:00:24.000 The Nazis never called themselves Nazis, they called themselves National Socialists. 5 00:00:24.000 --> 00:00:29.080 and they had very good reason to call themselves a variety of socialists as 6 00:00:29.080 --> 00:00:34.680 will become apparent in the conference from Professor Hoppe and others but 7 00:00:34.680 --> 00:00:37.680 referring to them as any kind of socialists made some people on the left 8 00:00:37.680 --> 00:00:42.400 very uncomfortable so they always call them Nazis or simply fascists or German 9 00:00:42.400 --> 00:00:47.600 fascists. Now, why is it misleading to call cases of police brutality especially 10 00:00:47.600 --> 00:00:53.880 brutality against political opponents of the regime fascist? To begin with using 11 00:00:53.880 --> 00:00:59.040 American violence against political enemies is a very old story with many kinds of regimes. 12 00:00:59.040 --> 00:01:05.200 And as far as European history in the 20th century goes, such massive violence on a grand 13 00:01:05.200 --> 00:01:12.880 scale did not originate in Italy or Germany, it originated in Lenin's Russia. 14 00:01:12.880 --> 00:01:19.500 First exercised by the Red Guards before the revolution, political violence, including 15 00:01:19.500 --> 00:01:24.540 and Mass Killings was institutionalized in the first incarnation of the Soviet secret 16 00:01:24.540 --> 00:01:29.900 police, the Cheka, which went through many different names, finally becoming the KGB. 17 00:01:29.900 --> 00:01:36.580 The victims were political enemies, real or imagined, but also largely class enemies, 18 00:01:36.580 --> 00:01:41.740 meaning not aristocrats who had largely fled the country, but middle-class people, anyone 19 00:01:41.740 --> 00:01:47.020 who owned property, and their families too, of course. 20 00:01:47.020 --> 00:02:13.020 As Karl Marx said, what is communism? Communism is the abolition of private property and communism will be the final perfect society once we get rid of merchants and bankers, manufacturers, traders, speculators, people who own land, landlords, just to get rid of them and we'll have utopia. 21 00:02:13.020 --> 00:02:31.020 In the Soviet Union, persons captured in the midst of acts of speculation, say townspeople who were starving, who brought some linen or crystal or whatever to some place out in the forest and traded it with some farmers for a few sacks of potato, were subject to summary execution. 22 00:02:31.020 --> 00:02:44.020 The checker was established in 1918 and the first several years of its existence is a period of the first Red Terror, Lenin's Terror, to be followed in the 1930s by Stalin's Great Terror. 23 00:02:44.020 --> 00:02:53.020 The first Great Terror claimed probably around a hundred or two hundred thousand lives, not counting those who were killed for fighting against the communists. 24 00:02:53.020 --> 00:02:57.020 Peasants, for instance, who resisted the confiscation of their crops. 25 00:02:57.020 --> 00:03:04.020 In fighting such hostile enemies, enemies of the people, the Reds committed atrocities on a grand scale. 26 00:03:04.020 --> 00:03:08.020 Of course, in the Civil War, there were atrocities on both sides, the Reds and the Whites, 27 00:03:08.020 --> 00:03:16.020 but the Reds' atrocities far out, far surpassed the atrocity of the anti-communists. 28 00:03:16.020 --> 00:03:31.020 The Reds took hostages, killed them by the thousands, and at least in one case, death camps were set up where prisoners were gassed to death, which was already in the early 1920s. 29 00:03:31.020 --> 00:03:40.020 Anybody who wanted to find out about it, find out the truth, knew about the slaughterhouse that was Lenin's Russia in those years. 30 00:03:40.020 --> 00:04:00.020 and such. Massive political violence was exposed, for instance, in the conservative press, the Catholic press, but also by other non-Leninist socialists in many different countries, by anarchists like Emma Goldman, for instance, by emigres like the famous Harvard sociologist Petro Sorokin. 31 00:04:00.020 --> 00:04:09.020 So people knew about this. This didn't await the 1956 destabilization speech by Khrushchev. 32 00:04:09.020 --> 00:04:23.020 As far as violations of civil liberties go, freedom of speech, the press and so on, here too the Soviets were the pioneers and carried through the repression more systematically even than the Nazis, let alone Mussolini's fascists. 33 00:04:23.020 --> 00:04:32.020 The reason was that the communists totally abolished private property and also crushed, meanwhile, the Christian churches. 34 00:04:32.020 --> 00:04:45.020 The communists had no need of censorship in any traditional sense, since all of the newspapers, all of the meeting halls, all the publishing houses were owned by the state and staffed by communist cadres. 35 00:04:45.020 --> 00:04:54.020 In Italy, they were still privately owned so that non-fascists, even some anti-fascists, could occasionally have their writings published. 36 00:04:54.020 --> 00:04:59.020 In Russia, the communists imprisoned and massacred Christian priests wholesale. 37 00:04:59.020 --> 00:05:05.020 This the Nazis were not able to do in Germany, much as many of the Nazi leaders would have loved to. 38 00:05:05.020 --> 00:05:08.020 After all, they were only in power for 12 years. 39 00:05:08.020 --> 00:05:15.020 The outstanding example of the limitation on Nazi power is the Catholic Bishop of Münster, Clemens von Gallen. 40 00:05:15.020 --> 00:05:24.020 When Bishop Gollin heard that so-called mercy killings were taking place in hospitals and insane asylums, 41 00:05:24.020 --> 00:05:29.020 that meant that the people deemed unworthy of life were simply being killed, 42 00:05:29.020 --> 00:05:35.020 he gave a series of famous sermons, this is in the middle of the war in 1941, 43 00:05:35.020 --> 00:05:42.020 with the Germans fighting on the eastern front, in which he denounced the policy. 44 00:05:42.020 --> 00:05:48.020 And in the midst of the war, incredibly enough, Hitler was forced to modify his policy. 45 00:05:48.020 --> 00:05:54.020 So communists led by Lenin established in Russia the first and greatest terrorist state of modern history. 46 00:05:54.020 --> 00:06:02.020 Along with that came the first great Russian famine of the Soviet period, causing the deaths of another 2 or 3 million people. 47 00:06:02.020 --> 00:06:08.020 To his limited credit, Lenin permitted American relief to come in, supervised by Herbert Hoover. 48 00:06:08.020 --> 00:06:35.140 This was the Leninist system of the Communists, now proposed to spread to the whole world. 49 00:06:35.140 --> 00:06:41.980 Their instrument was the Comintern, the Communist International or the Third International. 50 00:06:41.980 --> 00:06:50.580 In conventional histories of the interwar period, one thing that you must never do is 51 00:06:50.580 --> 00:06:58.760 view the history channel, read all the books instead. 52 00:06:58.760 --> 00:07:04.320 In conventional histories of the interwar period, the Comintern is a 600 pound gorilla 53 00:07:04.320 --> 00:07:13.360 that is Missing. In 1918, in the creation of the Common Turn, its mission was to bring 54 00:07:13.360 --> 00:07:19.020 communism to every country and explicitly and openly, they didn't make any bones about 55 00:07:19.020 --> 00:07:24.880 it through illegal as well as legal means. Through any means that fit the situation, 56 00:07:24.880 --> 00:07:31.180 including violence, killings where appropriate, assassinations and so on. The first head of 57 00:07:31.180 --> 00:07:37.360 The Communist International, Gregory Zinoviev, said that if necessary, the communists would 58 00:07:37.360 --> 00:07:40.780 do away with 10 million people in Russia alone. 59 00:07:40.780 --> 00:07:44.940 In the end, it turned out to be an underestimation. 60 00:07:44.940 --> 00:07:47.740 The communists gained power briefly in Hungary and Bavaria. 61 00:07:47.740 --> 00:07:53.940 The Red Army invaded Poland, offering bounties, as we know now from the Soviet archives, offering 62 00:07:53.940 --> 00:08:01.060 bounties for the heads of Polish aristocrats, priests, and so on. 63 00:08:01.060 --> 00:08:05.700 Oddly enough, the Polish farmers and workers resisted the communist message, stood firm 64 00:08:05.700 --> 00:08:11.220 against the invasion of their country, and the Red Army was stopped at the Vistula River 65 00:08:11.220 --> 00:08:16.060 right outside Warsaw. 66 00:08:16.060 --> 00:08:21.420 Back in 1848, the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, wrote that communism was a specter 67 00:08:21.420 --> 00:08:29.060 haunting Europe, that was just a bit of propaganda, hope and aspiration. 68 00:08:29.060 --> 00:08:35.540 After the Bolshevik Revolution, Communism was really the specter haunting Europe and the world. 69 00:08:39.540 --> 00:08:43.940 What about the frequent equation of fascism with anti-Semitism and exterminationist racism? 70 00:08:44.740 --> 00:08:48.820 As far as the Italian example goes, Italian fascism, that's another myth. 71 00:08:49.780 --> 00:08:55.780 Until the late 1930s, there was no trace of anti-Semitism in Italian fascism. In the early 72 00:08:55.780 --> 00:09:00.780 In the early years of the movement and in the regime, some of the leaders were Jewish, Italian Jews. 73 00:09:00.780 --> 00:09:05.780 In fact, at least in one case, one of Mussolini's many girlfriends was Jewish. 74 00:09:05.780 --> 00:09:13.780 And the Italian fascist ideology was nationalist, not racist. 75 00:09:13.780 --> 00:09:18.780 It was only in 1938 that Mussolini promulgated some anti-Semitic laws, 76 00:09:18.780 --> 00:09:24.780 prohibiting intermarriage between Jewish and Gentile Italians, excluding Jews from university positions and so on. 77 00:09:24.780 --> 00:09:28.140 Even here, exceptions were allowed. 78 00:09:28.140 --> 00:09:30.580 Why did Mussolini take this route? 79 00:09:30.580 --> 00:09:34.340 By this late date, it was clear that Hitler was redrawing the map of Europe and the political 80 00:09:34.340 --> 00:09:37.180 momentum was on Hitler's side. 81 00:09:37.180 --> 00:09:44.740 Mussolini, in the true tradition of Italian statesmen, wanted to be in on the division 82 00:09:44.740 --> 00:09:51.100 of the spoils, some signs of anti-Semitism he thought would be welcomed by the Nazis. 83 00:09:51.100 --> 00:09:56.100 Most Italians, almost all Italians, were disgusted by the measures against the Jews. The Italians 84 00:09:56.100 --> 00:10:01.360 had no hatred towards their Jews, a very small community integrated for centuries and centuries 85 00:10:01.360 --> 00:10:08.360 into Italian society. It was Hitler that most Italians despised. When the war came and then 86 00:10:08.360 --> 00:10:14.240 the Nazi roundup of the European Jews, it was not very successful in Italy. Many books 87 00:10:14.240 --> 00:10:18.900 have been written about this. The Italians kept throwing monkey wrenches into the Nazi 88 00:10:18.900 --> 00:10:24.420 Project, and that was true of the Italian bureaucracy, of the Italian army, even of 89 00:10:24.420 --> 00:10:30.260 the fascist party. The Catholic Church hid hundreds of Jews in the monasteries and convents 90 00:10:30.260 --> 00:10:38.380 of Italy with the threat of death for the monks and the nuns. Thousands of Jews were 91 00:10:38.380 --> 00:10:39.380 saved. 92 00:10:39.380 --> 00:10:46.180 One small incident illustrates the situation. When the Germans occupied Vichy France, the 93 00:10:46.180 --> 00:11:03.580 When the Jewish synagogue in Nice was attacked by an anti-Semitic French mob, the Italian 94 00:11:03.580 --> 00:11:09.620 Carabinieri protected it and kept it from being destroyed. 95 00:11:09.620 --> 00:11:14.820 The Jews of Nice were so grateful that they raised money to send to the Italian civilian 96 00:11:14.820 --> 00:11:24.740 I think this goes to show that World War II, the last good war, was a little more complex 97 00:11:24.740 --> 00:11:27.740 than many people think. 98 00:11:27.740 --> 00:11:33.000 So how were these fascists able to come to power in Italy in 1922? 99 00:11:33.000 --> 00:11:36.440 Mussolini was always an opportunist with no fixed principles. 100 00:11:36.440 --> 00:11:40.900 He began his political career as a socialist and the spokesman for the most radical wing 101 00:11:40.900 --> 00:11:50.900 The beginning of the Italian Socialist Party. It railed against the Italian state, especially against Italian imperialism in the war against Turkey over Libya. 102 00:11:50.900 --> 00:12:00.900 But by the time World War I came, Mussolini had become a nationalist, an extreme nationalist, and campaigned for Italian entry into the war. 103 00:12:00.900 --> 00:12:09.900 He kicked out of the Socialist Party, kicked out as editor of their major newspaper, started his own paper, and continued in his nationalist direction. 104 00:12:09.900 --> 00:12:17.900 The end of the war Mussolini seemed to be through. He tried to start a political movement of his own, but it got nowhere. 105 00:12:17.900 --> 00:12:27.900 It was the Italian socialists who came to his aid. Italy was in turmoil and the Socialist Party had become further radicalized. 106 00:12:27.900 --> 00:12:32.900 Lenin looked on Italy as a particularly promising area for revolution. 107 00:12:32.900 --> 00:12:42.900 The Italian Socialist Party came under the control of the Maximalists, who viewed themselves as Leninists and looked to the common term for ideological direction. 108 00:12:42.900 --> 00:12:56.900 In the program that the Socialist Party adopted in 1919, they proclaimed the start of a period of revolutionary struggle to bring about the forcible suppression of the bourgeoisie within a short time. 109 00:12:56.900 --> 00:13:06.900 and they called for the armed insurrection of the proletarian masses and proletarian soldiers to institute the dictatorship of the proletariat. 110 00:13:06.900 --> 00:13:12.900 This was after the Bolshevik Revolution and everything that the Reds were doing in Russia. 111 00:13:12.900 --> 00:13:22.900 They declared that the proletariat must have recourse to the use of violence for the conquest of power over the bourgeoisie. 112 00:13:22.900 --> 00:13:32.900 We must use new and proletarian organizations such as Workers' Soviets. We must adhere to the Third International. 113 00:13:32.900 --> 00:13:41.900 Well, general elections took place in Italy in 1919. The Socialists became the largest party in Parliament, as well as the best organized. 114 00:13:41.900 --> 00:13:46.900 Its spokesmen and agitators hail the coming socialist revolution. 115 00:13:46.900 --> 00:13:52.900 The party newspaper Avanti went so far as to state that soon all the parties will be eliminated. 116 00:13:52.900 --> 00:13:57.900 Now, socialist violence had long been a feature of public life in Italy. 117 00:13:57.900 --> 00:14:05.900 It had been, up until now, directed against employers' property and especially against non-striking workers. 118 00:14:05.900 --> 00:14:14.900 and Workers, systematically practiced by the socialist labor unions in the course of any industrial dispute. 119 00:14:14.900 --> 00:14:19.900 There was a great Italian classical liberal economist named Alfredo Pareto. 120 00:14:19.900 --> 00:14:25.900 In 1906, Pareto complained that the right to strike had been turned into what he said, 121 00:14:25.900 --> 00:14:37.900 He said, the freedom for the strikers to bash in the brains of workers who wish to continue to work and to set fire to the property of the employers with impunity. 122 00:14:37.900 --> 00:14:52.900 This was typical of the action of labor unions in Europe, in America, then as now. 123 00:14:52.900 --> 00:14:56.900 Now, union violence in Italy was not confined to the industrial centers. 124 00:14:56.900 --> 00:15:02.900 Systematic coercion was introduced into the countryside by the socialist agricultural unions. 125 00:15:02.900 --> 00:15:07.900 There were wildcat strikes all the time. 126 00:15:07.900 --> 00:15:12.900 The country was in constant economic turmoil. 127 00:15:12.900 --> 00:15:17.900 In the countryside, the ultimate aim of the socialist agricultural union, 128 00:15:17.900 --> 00:15:25.900 Almost a million members was to collectivize the farms, as in Russia, which would be worked by cooperatives. 129 00:15:25.900 --> 00:15:33.900 What the employers especially resented was the socialist demand to control the social, this was step-by-step towards their ultimate aim, 130 00:15:33.900 --> 00:15:37.900 to control the labor supply and employment opportunities. 131 00:15:37.900 --> 00:15:46.900 In the end, the employers were forced to recognize the employment offices run by the socialists as the exclusive source of labor power. 132 00:15:46.900 --> 00:16:01.900 In 1920, representatives of the General Confederation of Labor signed a pact in Moscow adhering to the Social Revolution and the Universal Republic of Soviets. 133 00:16:01.900 --> 00:16:10.900 In September, workers in Milan, Turin, and Genoa hoisted the red flags, seized control of the factories, proceeded to run them. 134 00:16:10.900 --> 00:16:23.900 In Turin, workers' councils were formed, which Antonio Gramsci welcomed as the Italian version of the Russian Soviets. 135 00:16:23.900 --> 00:16:35.900 Local elections in 1920 put control of most of the municipal and provincial councils in the hands of socialists, especially in central Italy and northern Italy. 136 00:16:35.900 --> 00:16:46.900 Sometimes declaring their towns revolutionary republics, the local socialists announce their intention to use the communes as a springboard for revolution. 137 00:16:46.900 --> 00:16:55.900 Socialist councils use their powers to raise taxes on wealth and property, increased spending on public services, 138 00:16:55.900 --> 00:17:02.500 Millions in this connection favored workers cooperatives and municipal contracts and subsidized 139 00:17:02.500 --> 00:17:09.240 consumer cooperatives to undercut the private retail and distribution trades. 140 00:17:09.240 --> 00:17:13.660 Millions of Italians in the middle class became convinced that Bolshevism was on the point 141 00:17:13.660 --> 00:17:16.380 of overwhelming the country. 142 00:17:16.380 --> 00:17:21.580 Nowadays, a typical historian of the period acts as if the only people who could have 143 00:17:21.580 --> 00:17:44.580 Benito Mussolini, the second from the right, I think he should be further over to that gentleman on the left. 144 00:17:44.580 --> 00:17:49.580 Nowadays people say this communist threat was all bluff verbal revolution. 145 00:17:49.580 --> 00:17:52.780 That's not how it was viewed by contemporaries. 146 00:17:52.780 --> 00:18:04.780 From their actions and their speech, there was every reason to suppose that the socialists were aiming to turn Italy into another version of the Soviet Union. 147 00:18:04.780 --> 00:18:06.780 Meanwhile, the government vacillated. 148 00:18:06.780 --> 00:18:16.780 The government officially assumed a posture of neutrality and labor disputes, which meant no protection for the rights of property or of non-striking workers. 149 00:18:16.780 --> 00:18:38.780 Now, of course, all governments are incompetent, all governments to some degree corrupt, but I have to say in my own studies of modern history, the Italian government makes FEMA look like the Sony Corporation. 150 00:18:38.780 --> 00:18:44.780 The fascists counted, now the fascists counted, started countering socialist violence with their own. 151 00:18:44.780 --> 00:19:05.780 At the time, even well-known anti-fascists like Alcida di Gasperi, the Christian Democratic Premier of Italy after the war, testified that in the beginning the fascist violence was largely defensive, the protection of the rights of non-striking workers and of farmers and of factory owners. 152 00:19:05.780 --> 00:19:15.780 The great increase in fascist membership and influence came initially in the rural areas where the fascist squads or blackshirts were formed. 153 00:19:15.780 --> 00:19:31.780 And these were largely middle class young men, the sons of some of these small property owners, many of them veterans of the war. 154 00:19:31.780 --> 00:19:45.780 and they were hailed by all non-communist, non-socialist, communist, really indistinguishable in Italy, elements in the country. 155 00:19:45.780 --> 00:19:52.780 The socialist program had alienated even many sharecroppers and tenant farmers, especially in the Po Valley. 156 00:19:52.780 --> 00:19:59.780 So these were the people who started equipping and financing these blackshirts. 157 00:19:59.780 --> 00:20:10.780 And it was called by later historians, some later historians, basically a movement of middle-class self-help. 158 00:20:10.780 --> 00:20:25.780 One thing I sort of like, it was the non-union workers, the scabs, right, together with the fascist blackshirts who broke the labor monopoly on the Genoa docks. 159 00:20:25.780 --> 00:20:38.780 And when in the area of Carrara, the local socialist government threatened to nationalize the marble quarries while they were forcefully stopped. 160 00:20:38.780 --> 00:20:49.780 Of course, the fascist violence was not merely defensive. It went far beyond that. They tended to root out the socialist infrastructure. 161 00:20:49.780 --> 00:21:04.780 They applied physical violence that their opponents could not match, you know, union goons though they were, and destroyed socialist-run town halls, union headquarters, newspapers, and tax-subsidized cultural centers. 162 00:21:04.780 --> 00:21:16.780 Now, anti-communists in Italy and overseas applauded the fascist victory over the socialists, that is, when Mussolini came to power in 1922. 163 00:21:16.780 --> 00:21:36.780 In 1927, Winston Churchill visited Italy and met with Mussolini, and Churchill publicly praised fascismo's triumphal struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism, claiming it had proved the necessary antidote to what he called the communist poison. 164 00:21:36.780 --> 00:21:44.480 Poison. When the fascists were on the point of assuming power, Mussolini reversed his 165 00:21:44.480 --> 00:21:49.580 earlier anti-monarchical and anti-Catholic views, and he even quoted the support of Italian 166 00:21:49.580 --> 00:21:54.060 free-market economists, of which there was a small but very prestigious group that had 167 00:21:54.060 --> 00:22:02.260 access to major newspapers. There's a parallel in French history with Napoleon and the ideologues, 168 00:22:02.260 --> 00:22:20.260 That's another subject, and because of my limited time, I'm not able to go into it, but if we, you know, certainly have, could do it in an hour and a half, I suppose. 169 00:22:20.260 --> 00:22:30.260 And so Mussolini did this with the Italian free market economists, as I say, a small but prestigious group. 170 00:22:30.260 --> 00:22:35.260 Mussolini even used the term Manchesterism in one of his talks. 171 00:22:35.260 --> 00:22:42.260 Now you have to understand, for decades already, any hint of Manchesterism, which is laissez-faire, was anathema. 172 00:22:42.260 --> 00:22:48.260 It's the worst thing that you could say in most of Europe. 173 00:22:48.260 --> 00:22:59.260 That and the real danger, as they saw it, of a Leninist takeover, led all of the Italian free-market economists to endorse Mussolini's commitment to power in 1922. 174 00:22:59.260 --> 00:23:07.260 His supporters included Luigi Ainaudi, a famous economist admired by Mises and Hayek. 175 00:23:07.260 --> 00:23:14.260 Afterwards, Ainaudi became the first president of the Italian Republic and one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society, 176 00:23:14.260 --> 00:23:21.740 Society, probably the most famous classical liberal in Europe at that time. But in 1922, 177 00:23:21.740 --> 00:23:26.220 since they felt they had a choice between Lenin and Mussolini, that's what Ainaudi 178 00:23:26.220 --> 00:23:30.860 and the others did. At first, it appeared that Mussolini would actually realize the 179 00:23:30.860 --> 00:23:36.420 wishes of the free market economist. He appointed as his finance minister, professor of economics, 180 00:23:36.420 --> 00:23:41.820 Alberto de Stephanie, who proceeded to enact a liberal economic policy, including lowering 181 00:23:41.820 --> 00:23:48.900 Taxes, abolishing numerous anti-growth regulations and promoting free trade. But his policies 182 00:23:48.900 --> 00:23:55.540 alienated the leaders of the armaments, metal and chemical industries, constituencies, powerful 183 00:23:55.540 --> 00:24:02.380 constituencies in the North. These are what the public choice economists would call rent-seeking 184 00:24:02.380 --> 00:24:09.080 groups. They were deeply offended by de Stephanie's free trade ideas and his refusal of state 185 00:24:09.080 --> 00:24:14.760 Subsidies to their Private Businesses. In 1925, he was forced to resign. 186 00:24:14.760 --> 00:24:19.880 And there's another parallel with the French history in Turgot. Now, with the departure 187 00:24:19.880 --> 00:24:26.480 of de Stephanie, the fascist regime became basically more interventionist and steadily 188 00:24:26.480 --> 00:24:31.520 interventionist. There was, first of all, the growth of the state bureaucracy, the bane 189 00:24:31.520 --> 00:24:36.820 of modern states, but most particularly of Italy. After all, jobs had to be found for 190 00:24:36.820 --> 00:24:47.340 of Good Fascist Cadres, phony baloney jobs, so that they could take a siesta, maybe four 191 00:24:47.340 --> 00:24:54.320 hours work to begin with, interventionism of the fascist regime, which will doubtlessly 192 00:24:54.320 --> 00:25:01.020 be detailed during our conference, reached its heights in the 1930s with the creation 193 00:25:01.020 --> 00:25:08.380 of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, the IRI, an enormous state-holding company 194 00:25:08.380 --> 00:25:15.140 that controlled numerous firms in many different fields. By 1939, the IRI, the state-holding 195 00:25:15.140 --> 00:25:22.420 company, held 18 percent of the total capital of Italy. As one historian has noted, Mussolini's 196 00:25:22.420 --> 00:25:28.900 government controlled a proportionately larger section of the national economy than any other 197 00:25:28.900 --> 00:25:33.220 government in Europe except the Soviet Union. 198 00:25:33.220 --> 00:25:37.620 It appears that the Italian fascists coined the term totalitarian and used it in a positive 199 00:25:37.620 --> 00:25:44.380 sense, everything was to be done for the state, against the state and so on. 200 00:25:44.380 --> 00:25:47.860 But this was a real bombast and bluster. 201 00:25:47.860 --> 00:25:56.480 There was a fascist secret police called the OVRA and typically, seriously, the initials 202 00:25:56.480 --> 00:26:02.600 stood for nothing at all. 203 00:26:02.600 --> 00:26:09.160 To compare the overwrought to the Gestapo or the Soviet secret police is ridiculous. 204 00:26:09.160 --> 00:26:13.680 Stanley Payne is an excellent historian of fascism at the University of Wisconsin, as 205 00:26:13.680 --> 00:26:14.680 he says. 206 00:26:14.680 --> 00:26:20.360 During the entire history of the fascist regime, about 5,000 persons were given prison sentences 207 00:26:20.360 --> 00:26:45.360 for Political Reasons, with about 10,000 sent into internal exile. It's 1922 to 1943. Up until 1940, the war, political executions amounted to nine altogether, mostly of Slovenian terrorists, so-called. During the war years, 1943, another 17 political executions took place. What was that? 208 00:26:45.360 --> 00:26:59.360 A half an hour at Treblinka or a half an hour at Vorkuta or Kolyma in the way of deaths in the Blue Log. 209 00:26:59.360 --> 00:27:29.360 Now, one thing that might be mentioned, although again, I don't know what I did to upset Jim so much, or maybe, I don't know, the powers that be, limiting me to the Nobel laureate, not exactly, sorry, a Schlaubam laureate, to the same amount of time as the, you know, I don't want to say undistinguished, but at least not 210 00:27:29.360 --> 00:27:47.520 There are in fact many significant connections between fascism, Italian fascism even, and 211 00:27:47.520 --> 00:27:55.000 the Jacobins during the French Revolution, and those could be detailed. 212 00:27:55.000 --> 00:28:02.000 There was one writer on fascism who was himself a fascist and survived the war I find particularly interesting. 213 00:28:02.000 --> 00:28:12.000 His name is Maurice Bardet and he was a group of Parisian fascists, not Vichy people, hated Vichy or despised Vichy, 214 00:28:12.000 --> 00:28:17.000 but actual fascists who lived in Paris during the German occupation. 215 00:28:17.000 --> 00:28:22.880 a book called What is Fascism? And he declares that the ultimate goal of fascism was the 216 00:28:22.880 --> 00:28:28.800 production of a new man. Just as, almost in the same words that Ropespear and the Jacobins 217 00:28:28.800 --> 00:28:38.600 used in the French Revolution, he would be Spartan man. And the essential goal of fascism 218 00:28:38.600 --> 00:28:46.920 was the creation of the Order of Sparta. That is total self-abnegation, total living for 219 00:28:46.920 --> 00:28:56.760 So, finally, what can we say were the characteristic traits of fascism, including German national 220 00:28:56.760 --> 00:28:57.760 socialism? 221 00:28:57.760 --> 00:29:03.480 There was, first of all, the militarization of society, the spread of military values 222 00:29:03.480 --> 00:29:05.800 and institutions. 223 00:29:05.800 --> 00:29:11.740 These reached a very high degree of achievement in Germany, but it was rather feebly attempted 224 00:29:11.740 --> 00:29:14.240 in Italy as well. 225 00:29:14.240 --> 00:29:31.420 Let's keep in mind that in the 1920s and 1930s, this was still an age of world imperialism. 226 00:29:31.420 --> 00:29:36.180 Mussolini somewhat vaguely aimed to break through the chains of British and French imperialism. 227 00:29:36.180 --> 00:29:38.240 Hitler aimed at something beyond that. 228 00:29:38.240 --> 00:29:42.160 Now, this is, I think, suggestive. 229 00:29:42.160 --> 00:29:51.160 As for militarism, Andrew Bacevich of Boston University has written a disturbing study quite 230 00:29:51.160 --> 00:29:58.800 recently entitled The New American Militarism, How Americans are Seduced by War and unconsciously 231 00:29:58.800 --> 00:30:08.640 how military values and putting the military above everything else, if they had it their 232 00:30:08.640 --> 00:30:36.640 The Second Defining Characteristic of Fascism in the Broader Sense was the Third Way. The middle ground between what people thought was English and American laissez-faire capitalism, dreadful as that was, that was on the one hand. 233 00:30:36.640 --> 00:30:42.880 On the other hand, there was Soviet Communism. Fascism would be the middle ground, not total 234 00:30:42.880 --> 00:30:48.440 nationalization of the means of production. No one wanted the chaos and misery of Soviet 235 00:30:48.440 --> 00:30:56.440 Russia. Maybe Russians could put up with that, but not Italians, certainly not Germans. Fascism 236 00:30:56.440 --> 00:31:05.040 would end the dog-eat-dog competitive system of the West. As this French fascist wrote 237 00:31:05.040 --> 00:31:11.520 after the War. Fascism maintained private property in name, but it imposed its will 238 00:31:11.520 --> 00:31:21.960 on the egoism of liberal capitalism. This third way of fascism was praised by many conservatives 239 00:31:21.960 --> 00:31:27.120 and progressives around the world, by businessmen and labor unions, and it would finally do 240 00:31:27.120 --> 00:31:34.860 away with the awful world of laissez-faire, where the market rules, and it would bring 241 00:31:34.860 --> 00:31:39.460 about a true community of all the classes in society. 242 00:31:39.460 --> 00:31:47.460 And I think that how that evolved in fascist regimes is going to be outlined in detail 243 00:31:47.460 --> 00:31:48.460 in further talks.