A People's History of Modern Europe by William A. Pelz

Author:William A. Pelz [Pelz, William A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780745332451
Google: wi0AswEACAAJ
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2016-01-15T22:26:10+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Against Fascist Terror: War and Genocide, 1933–45

The Weimar Republic’s brutal destruction in 1933 gave hope and strength to the ultra-right throughout Europe, while it awoke the left to very real danger of fascism. A year after flames had leapt from the Reichstag, signaling the death of freedom in Germany, a movement from across the Rhine arose with the same ideas. On February 6, 1934, war veterans and right-wing extremists descended on central Paris nominally to complain about government corruption. It seems likely that many came to do fundamental damage to parliamentary government. The demonstration quickly turned into a riot as police fought back wave after wave of assaults on the French Parliament. Over a dozen were killed and hundreds wounded. The next day, the center-left government resigned. Although there was no clear blueprint for a coup d’état, this served as the start, not the end, of a fascist march to power. The ultra-right forced one leftist government to resign, and their repeated extra-parliamentary tactics destabilized every subsequent Parliament elected until the German occupation in 1940.1

In the United Kingdom, Sir Oswald Mosley formed the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932. Supported early on by the Daily Mail2 and claiming 50 thousand members,3 the BUF never really gathered much electoral support and is mainly noted for well-crafted rallies and street fighting with left-wingers and Jews. When war came, the government easily interned their leaders and core supporters. In the other major Anglo-Saxon power, across the Atlantic, pro-Nazi groups had thousands of supporters, and help from industrialist Henry Ford and aviation legend Charles Lindbergh. At one point, they filled New York City’s Madison Square Garden for a Nazi-style rally.4 Of course, this does not even consider the vast and powerful, native fascist Ku Klux Klan that held sway in so much of the southern US. It would seem that fascism was on the march worldwide.

These developments did not go on unnoticed. In spring 1934, following the fascist attack on Parliament, the French Communist Party (PCF) proposed a Popular Front against Fascism. The left had previously discussed and, on occasion, entered into “United Fronts” between left, working-class parties. The Popular Front was different in that it included not just leftists but liberals and even, at times, conservatives, as long as the parties were committed to fighting fascism. It was a cross-class, multiple ideological grouping, rather than a clear program based on parties of the working people. The Popular Front policy was supported, many say initiated, by the Communist International and the Soviet Union. Another clear source of support for this new coalition was the pressure from below, as average Europeans, and most of all workers, wanted unity in face of the rising fascist threat. Of course, many have argued that the average people wanted labor unity, not an alliance with capitalist interests who would tie their hands in the fight against fascism. Trotsky, for one, believed that a united front without bourgeois allies was the only road to victory over the extreme right.

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