Shadow of Montreux: A brief history of the Fascist International by Pablo Portillo

Author:Pablo Portillo
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Sea Lion Press
Published: 2018-11-30T23:00:00+00:00

The Great Fascist Labyrinth

When and if fascism comes to America it will not be labeled "made in Germany"; it will not be marked with a swastika; it will not even be called fascism; it will be called, of course, "Americanism."

Halford E. Luccock

The Fascist International entered its thirty-fifth year of existence in the midst of a grave crisis of identity. The Italian Fascist movement of old was no more, subordinated to the royal dictatorship of King Umberto at home and reduced to a shadow of its former self at Montreux, where the Presidency of the International had to be ceded to Spain, and a good number of seats in both the Executive Committee and the Council sacrificed to appease the dozens of squabbling factions and petty tyrants vying for attention. Where they had previously enjoyed unquestionable supremacy, the Italians could barely get a seat at the table. The problem was further worsened by the irruption of the French Solidariste movement and its own brand of what later analysts would categorize as “neo-fascism” or “second-generation fascism”, as well as the marginalization suffered within the International by the maneuvers of the Falangists and the old-guard parties.

France’s seemingly unstoppable ascendancy within the International was especially problematic considering how the old-guard parties were faring. The Italians were on the retreat and now forced into a replica of the Spanish model, which itself was starting to show signs of decay as General Yagüe and King Juan’s balancing act between the Falange, the monarchists, conservatives and the military was proving harder to maintain; in Eastern and Central Europe many Fascist movements had been swept away and forced into opposition roles, if not outright oblivion, and in the East only Manchuria’s Concordia Association remained after decades of conflict between China and Japan. Only in Latin America did the movements remain strong, chiefly as a consequence of developments in Brazil, Argentina, Peru and Paraguay; but the bloc’s unity at Montreux was sporadic at best and the lack of cooperation on a long term basis was often exploited by the older parties at Montreux to deny either the Brazilians or the French any sort of hegemony.

An unforeseen side effect of this crisis was the beginnings of fascism’s ideological disintegration, as the thirty years of canon and doctrine forged by Mussolini and his veritable army of ghost-writers, intellectuals, poets, economists, adventurers and philosophers in the many volumes of the “Doctrine of Fascism” and other similar works began to lose ground to the Manifestos and speeches coming from the barricades at Paris and later the Solidariste Manifesto, the infamous “Little Black Books”, not to mention many other more regional variants that began to arise in the Americas and Asia, in many cases inspired by the Octobristes.

Different little ideological and programmatic schisms and rifts of this type became common during the 1960s, as local national movements shed the doctrine crafted at Rome, Milan and Montreux in favor of programs, demands and ideals of their own, better suited for their own peoples and circumstances.

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