Fascism by Roger Griffin

Author:Roger Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2017-11-10T16:00:00+00:00

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Neo-Fascism: Evolution, Adaption, Mutation

The threat to fascism posed by the Axis loss of the war

To move the focus of comparative fascist studies from interwar to postwar Europe is to enter an utterly transformed historical landscape. Between 1945 and 1955, the international political, social, economic and cultural order underwent structural changes no less profound, rapid and unexpected than those that combined in the wake of the First World War to create the original conditions for fascism to burst unannounced and unscripted onto the stage. But whereas fascism became, or at least behaved as, a contender for state power in several countries as the world crisis deepened in the 1930s, the consequences of the new wave of seismic upheavals which spread around the globe soon after the war proved lethal for fascism as a credible alternative to parliamentary democracy, conservative authoritarianism and communism.

In all but the former Axis powers, the rapid recovery of both liberalism and capitalism in Western and Northern Europe, at the same time as the emergence of the US and the USSR as rival superpowers locked in a potentially cataclysmic Cold War, severely restricted political space for revolutionary forms of nationalism as populist movements, whose rhetoric of national and racial renewal and rebirth were in any case now utterly discredited. Using a phrase from T. E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Kevin Coogan (1999) called Francis Yockey, an indefatigable campaigner and undercover agent for an international fascist empire to rise from the ashes of the war, a dangerous ‘dreamer of the day’ (Yockey 1948). Since 1945, countless thousands of obscure ‘dreamers of the day’, dispersed all over the world, have spent their lives, alone or in small groups, vainly trying to enact their updated version of a fascist utopia and refine their own strategy for being a fascist in a post-fascist age, just like more eminent unrepentant ‘survivors’ of the fascist era such as Oswald Mosley (1968; Macklin 2007), Julius Evola (1953, 1961; Furlong 2011: ch. 6), Maurice Bardèche (1961) or Léon Degrelle (1969). Such loyalty to the cause has had to be sustained in the face of the total military defeat of the Axis powers in the European and Pacific theatres, at an overall cost of over 70 million lives, and the revelation of millions of horrendous crimes against civilians as a result of repression, persecution and genocide committed in the name of a New European Order or the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere – though imperial Japan was not technically fascist, there were enough affinities for it to join the Axis powers in 1937.

Ever since the Cold War began in the late 1940s, the winds of historical change have been blowing fiercely against the far right, making it all the more difficult to keep the flame of their continued faith in ultranationalist rebirth burning (the flame is a favourite fascist symbol). However confident each fascist may remain in eventual ‘victory’, revolutionary nationalism has been caught since the death of Mussolini and Hitler in a perpetual political

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