Roger Griffin: there won’t be any fascist revival

At Oxford, we have an appointment with Britian’s most frequently quoted -and sometimes contested- academic political theorist on generic fascism: Roger Griffin, Professor of Modern History at Oxford Brookes University’s Department of Arts and Humanities. His best-known book is The Nature of Fascism, St.Martin’s Press, 1991/Routledge, 1993; but he has continued to be most prolific on this subject, publishing books like Fascism. Oxford Readers (Oxford University Press, 1995); International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (Edward Arnold, 1998); Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion (Routledge, 2006); Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Palgrave, 2007); A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. by Matthew Feldman; and Terrorist’s Creed. Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning (forthcoming):

In later posts, this blog will quote some of these works and/or essays (many of them accessible on the internet). They have prompted lively world-wide academic debate on comparative fascist studies, e.g. on the palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology. But Prof.Griffin agrees to express himself in much simpler terms in the following interview for our civic education porposes, when he briefly explains the essence of his thoughts on fascism, and its relevance to the 21st century, as follows:

„When you hear the word fascism you always have to ask yourself: what are they talking about, how are they using the word? The word ‚fascist‘ can be a simple way of insulting somebody, of saying that they are horrible, nasty, that they should go away. Fascist is used in a much more accurate way to talk about the Mussolini regime. The Mussolini regime was a fascist regime. Fascism is also used about regimes which have a similarity with Italian fascism, and this is were the problems begin. Because the communists see in fascism an attack on the working class, or on the working class revolution.

But I have been arguing in my books, and in my career, that we do not see in fascism a reaction against the working class, but that we see in fascism the attempt of a rebirth of the nation. Now, the Italian nation was not the same as the German nation. The problems of Jews and Communists were different in each country, but nevertheless I believe that you can understand the history of nazism and the history of fascism if you have this idea of the key driving force of fascism being in the attempt to create a new type of nation, a nation based on the historical cultural uniqueness of each country, the Italians and the Germans.

Nowadays, in the present crisis, there is no basis of the revival of fascism, because society has changed: millions of modern young people have their mp3s and they have their walkmans, and they have their computers, and they have their videogames. And so, there has been very big privatisation of your inner space. But there are problems in society, problems of religious integration. I think there are problems in the relationship between the European Christian population and the Muslem population not because Muslems are terrorists, but because there is a problem of identity.

And this problem of identity was summed up in the attempt by Breivik to start a new racial war in Europe. But look at the reaction: the Norwegian people came together and said no to Breivik, Breivik was wrong. Breivik did not start a new war against Muslems. He created more solidarity with Muslems. And this is the big difference between the present crisis and the crisis in the 1920s: In the 1920s, Hitler and Mussolini could fill the squares with thousands of people. Now, when Breivik in Oslo tries to create a mass movement against Muslems, you get thousands of people coming together to defend Muslems, and to attack Breivik, and therein lies the hope for the sort of Europe that we can build: where we all have many identities, identities as English, as European.

I am married to a Italian, in Tyrol you have ‚Italian Tiroler‘ and you have ‚German Tiroler‘, and you are all part of Italy, and Italy is part of Europe, but you can still feel close to Germany. We have multiple identities, we have many identities, and we should celebrate these multiple identities, and learn to love difference while remaining different. We should not try to get rid of differences, but we should celebrate the differences we have.“

Prof. Griffin, it’s good to hear such optimististic words from someone who is as deep into the subject of generic fascism as you are. On the other hand, looking at the current economic crisis, looking at populist tendencies all over Europe, don’t you see the probability of a strong come-back of desperate ultranationalist needs for a scapegoat (not necessarily always „the Jews“) for all our mishappenings as individuals, or as a nation?

„Breivik said that he hated nazism because nazism had made racism not respectable, no longer possible. I think that even if Europe enters a very very deep crisis, people remember what Hitler did in the name of nation and race. There are some people who have a Sehnsucht for the past, who have nostalgia, who think that Mussolini did Italy good, that we need a little bit of Hitler to sort out society. Yes, but the memories of Auschwitz, the memories of Belsen, they are deeply burned into our collective memory now – and fascism is descredited. They will be hatred, but we now have a sort of civil society, we have a different educational system, we have exhausted nationalism.

Now, there will be some sporadic violence, little cases of it, little attempts of movements, in Italy for example, now there is a terrorist movement called Casa Pound that does nasty things to people, but the vast mass of Italians…One of the great miracles of modern democracy is that even with the crisis, racist parties are not strong in Britain, they are not strong in Germany, they have not risen significantly, there is no crisis of state. Italians mugugnano, they complain, sie beschweren sich, sie beklagen sich, sie meckern…We are now a Europe of Meckerer, ja, we will complain, we will moan, and there will be one or two people who may do desperate things – but there will be no mass movement, there will be no mass movement.

We have mass television, we still move around in our cars, or if we can’t we go on buses, there is lots of access to pornography and violent video games, and there are many ways in which frustration can express itself now. There was a major book by a guy called Wilhelm Reich who said what drove nazism was sexual frustration. Well, Europe has changed sexually now, there are not so many sexually frustrated people wandering around. I think if there had been plentiful marijuana in Weimar, than maybe Hitler would not have been quite so successful either.

I think there is a danger that my generation remembers the inter-war period too readily. I did not live in the inter-war period but we tend to think: ah, here we go again, we are off again, this is the 1930s again. It is not the 1930s. We have different problems. People said, when Putin came to power: ah, here we have another fascist. Putin’s Russia is not fascist. It is corrupt, that is different. Corruption is not the same thing as fascism. We must try to fight corruption, we must try to fight racism and hatred, but we must not think that we are trying to fight the rebirth of fascism. Fascism is a phenomenon of the past.

What we must do as human beings is to look for new dangers: there has always been a war between two tendencies in history, the tendency to xenophobia, exclusion, social hatred, ethnocentrism – and the tendency towards accepting and interacting with other cultures. We must be part of the tendency towards a greater humanity, towards interacting with other cultures, embracing other cultures, and we must try to react against social exclusion and hatred, but we are not refighting the Second World War.“

(Source: recorded interview with Roger Griffin on 25/05/12 at Oxford Bookes University by faschistensindimmerdieanderen; N.B. to be continued transcribing our second, longer German language interview with Prof. Griffin)

John F. Pollard: fascisms have much in common – and a future

John F Pollard: Fascisms have much in common – and a future

Trinity Hall is perhaps the prettiest of those Cambridge colleges which I have been able to visit more than once. Dr John F. POLLARD is staff fellow in history and fellow archivist there, after having taught modern European history at Anglia Ruskin, Cambridge’s „other“ university. he is also a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Author of books such as Catholicism in Modern Italy, The Vatican and Italian Fascism. A study in conflict and The Fascist Experience in Italy, John Pollard is an expert on papacy as well as on Italian fascism. He has accepted parts of our long conversation in his Trinity Hall office to be recorded. Here’s the English part of it.

What did Italian fascism and German and Austrian national socialism have in common?

They were both militaristic. They were both expansionistic, they sought to build empires. Hitler’s was to be an Empire to the East, „der Drang nach Osten„, in a new 20th century form. Mussolini wanted „living space„, „Lebensraum„, like Hitler, but he wanted it in the Mediterranean, in Africa, and in the Middle East. They were authoritarian, totalitarian regimes. They were anti-democratic, anti-liberal. They were dictatorships. They believed that they were creating „a new man„. Not just a new Germany, and a new Italy, but a new German, and a new Italian.

What is interesting is that the British historian Roger Griffin has tried to define the essence of fascist movements (not just nationalist socialist and Italian fascist movements, but a variety of movements throughout Europe (the British movement of fascists, Codreanu’s Iron Guard, the Legion of the Archangel Michael in Romania, and other groups in Belgium, in Scandinavian countries, in Spain, the Falange, and so on). And his definition is very interesting. he says: the absolute essence of fascist movements in Europe between the wars was „palingenetic populist ultranationalism„. What does that mean? It means that these movements were seeking the rebirth of their societies, of their countries, that they were populist movements, they were not elitist movements, they were trying to have a wide popular appeal, and above all, they were nationalistic.

I would slightly correct his definition and say that the fundamental difference between Italian fascism and German national socialism was that from the very beginning, from its absolute fundamental ideological origins German Nation Socialism was racialistic rather than just simply nationalistic. Hitler’s vision, the nazi’s vision of society was that of a racial society, whereas racialism entered Italian fascist ideology and policy and practice some years after fascism was born in 1919, and even after it came to power. Racialism as it can be understood in comparison with the docrines of the nazis, racialism in Italy really only arrived in the late 1930s.

Do fascists target the same type of personality? Do they satisfy similar, perhaps deep-rooted sentiment?

I think in both cases they attracted people who were affected by the First World War, very often who fought in the First World War, and people who, for different reasons in Italy as to those in Germany, felt bitter and angry about the outcome of the First World War. In the German case of course, they felt they had been cheated of their victory, that they had been „stabbed in the back“ in Germany itself by the left, by the trade unions, by the Jews, by whoever, by the civilians – that they had not really lost the war, that they had been tricked. In Italy, it was slightly different: the Italians felt that they had won their victory, but that they had been cheated by their gain by the Allies of Versailles: the so-called „mutilated victory.“ But there is the same element of bitterness, of conspiracy theory, of paranoia, a sense of having lost, in both cases. Would that go for 21st Centruy young fascists as well? I think that young fascists in Italy, Germany and elsewhere in other countries might feel a sense of loss on a different level. One is a personal one. Many a people who are attracted by such fascist or neonazi movements in different European countries may feel that somehow personally they have lost out to immigrants, to other groups in society, and that is particularly true in Britain.

What is also interesting is how in both Germany and Italy many of those people are trying to recuperate their past, their history. They are trying to re-write their history, they feel that the history of Germany in the Fifties and the Forties, of Italy in the Twenties, Thirties and Forties, have been written by „the enemy„, so they are trying to bring it back, to recover it.

Dr Pollard, we know fascism has a history. Has it a future?

It might have a future, but probably in a different form. But the essence of fascism is still palingenetic: people are still trying to reconstruct their societies, they want to re-create their societies. If you look at the language of present-day neofascist, neonazi movements, they talk about decay, about degeneration of Western European society. they talk about trying to restore the purity of the race, and that racialism is basically about the White, the „Aryan race“, the European race. They are concerned about the other, the enemy. The enemy in its broadest sense is the person from outside, which means, effectively speaking, the immigrant. The concern about immigration, foreigners, xenophobia is a powerful issue for the present day of fascists, of neonazis. It has a future in the sense that these movements will almost certainly continue to develop, and the present circumstances arguably are perfect for the development of such movements. You know, you just look at the comparison between the present-day problems with the clubs of banks, the problems of the euro, the kind of social discontent and indeed violence that this has generated, and the nineteen-thirties, the Great Depression, the collapse, unemployment, and so on.

You said it is necessary to study fascism. Why should this appear necessary to a young person? 

Well of course, as a historian I could study anything, medieval history, paintings, I could study King’s, anything. I think it is necessary to study fascism because we need to understand certain kinds of moments, periods, processes in human history.

Remember that fascism led to milions of people dying in the Second, and in addition milions of civilians including jews, slavs, gypsies, homosexuals, just because who the were, what they were. And this is I think something we must ensure that does not happen again.