Various
Readings on Fascism and National Socialism
VI
Now to understand the distinctive essence of Fascism, nothing is more instructive than a comparison of it with the point of view of Mazzini to which I have so often referred.
Mazzini did have a political conception, but his politic was a sort of integral politic, which cannot be so sharply distinguished from morals, religion, and ideas of life as a whole, as to be considered apart from these other fundamental interests of the human spirit. If one tries to separate what is purely political from his religious beliefs, his ethical consciousness and his metaphysical concepts, it becomes impossible to understand the vast influence which his credo and his propaganda exerted. Unless we assume the unity of the whole man, we arrive not at the clarification but at the destruction of those ideas of his which proved so powerful.
In the definition of Fascism, the first point to grasp is the comprehensive, or as Fascists say, the "totalitarian" scope of its doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation.
There is a second and equally important point. Fascism is not a philosophy. Much less is it a religion. It is not even a political theory which may be stated in a series of formulae. The significance of Fascism is not to be grasped in the special theses which it from time to time assumes. When on occasion it has announced a program, a goal, a concept to be realized in action, Fascism has not hesitated to abandon them when in practice these were found to be inadequate or inconsistent with the principle of Fascism. Fascism has never been willing to compromise its future. Mussolini has boasted that he is a tempista, that his real pride is in "good timing." He makes decisions and acts on them at the precise moment when all the conditions and considerations which make them feasible and opportune are properly matured. This is a way of saying that Fascism returns to the most rigorous meaning of Mazzini's "Thought and Action," whereby the two terms are so perfectly coincident that no thought has value which is not already expressed in action. The real "views" of the Duce are those which he formulates and executes at one and the same time.
Is Fascism therefore "anti-intellectual," as has been so often charged? It is eminently anti-intellectual, eminently Mazzinian, that is, if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice. Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence. It is not that Fascism denies value to culture, to the higher intellectual pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action. Fascist anti-intellectualism holds in scorn a product peculiarly typical of the educated classes in Italy: the leterato—the man who plays with knowledge and with thought without any sense of responsibility for the practical world. It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men, but rather creates pedants and aesthetes, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent. It has no use, for instance, for the man who is "above the conflict" when his country or its important interests are at stake.
By virtue of its repugnance for "intellectualism," Fascism prefers not to waste time constructing abstract theories about itself. But when we say that it is not a system or a doctrine we must not conclude that it is a blind praxis or a purely instinctive method. If by system or philosophy we mean a living thought, a principle of universal character daily revealing its inner fertility and significance, then Fascism is a perfect system, with a solidly established foundation and with a rigorous logic in its development; and all who feel the truth and the vitality of the principle work day by day for its development, now doing, now undoing, now going forward, now retracing their steps, according as the things they do prove to be in harmony with the principle or to deviate from it.
And we come finally to a third point.
The Fascist system is not a political system, but it has its center of gravity in politics. Fascism came into being to meet serious problems of politics in post-war Italy. And it presents itself as a political method. But in confronting and solving political problems it is carried by its very nature, that is to say by its method, to consider moral, religious, and philosophical questions and to unfold and demonstrate the comprehensive totalitarian character peculiar to it. It is only after we have grasped the political character of the Fascist principle that we are able adequately to appreciate the deeper concept of life which underlies that principle and from which the principle springs. The political doctrine of Fascism is not the whole of Fascism. It is rather its more prominent aspect and in general its most interesting one.
VII
The politic of Fascism revolves wholly about the concept of the national State; and accordingly it has points of contact with nationalist doctrines, along with distinctions from the latter which it is important to bear in mind.
Both Fascism and nationalism regard the State as the foundation of all rights and the source of all values in the individuals composing it. For the one as for the other the State is not a consequence—it is a principle. But in the case of nationalism, the relation which individualistic liberalism, and for that matter socialism also, assumed between individual and State is inverted. Since the State is a principle, the individual becomes a consequence—he is something which finds an antecedent in the State: the State limits him and determines his manner of existence, restricting his freedom, binding him to a piece of ground whereon he was born, whereon he must live and will die. In the case of Fascism, State and individual are one and the same things, or rather, they are inseparable terms of a necessary synthesis.
Nationalism, in fact, founds the State on the concept of nation, the nation being an entity which transcends the will and the life of the individual because it is conceived as objectively existing apart from the consciousness of individuals, existing even if the individual does nothing to bring it into being. For the nationalist, the nation exists not by virtue of the citizen's will, but as datum, a fact, of nature.
For Fascism, on the contrary, the State is a wholly spiritual creation. It is a national State, because, from the Fascist point of view, the nation itself is a creation of the mind and is not a material presupposition, is not a datum of nature. The nation, says the Fascist, is never really made; neither, therefore, can the State attain an absolute form, since it is merely the nation in the latter's concrete, political manifestation. For the Fascist, the State is always in fieri. It is in our hands, wholly; whence our very serious responsibility towards it.
But this State of the Fascists which is created by the consciousness and the will of the citizen, and is not a force descending on the citizen from above or from without, cannot have toward the mass of the population the relationship which was presumed by nationalism.
Nationalism identified State with Nation, and made of the nation an entity preëxisting, which needed not to be created but merely to be recognized or known. The nationalists, therefore, required a ruling class of an intellectual character, which was conscious of the nation and could understand, appreciate and exalt it. The authority of the State, furthermore, was not a product but a presupposition. It could not depend on the people—rather the people depended on the State and on the State's authority as the source of the life which they lived and apart from which they could not live. The nationalistic State was, therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses through the power conferred upon it by its origins.
The Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people's state, and, as such, the democratic State par excellence. The relationship between State and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist. Its formation therefore is the formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses. Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instruments of propaganda and education which Fascism uses to make the thought and will of the Duce the thought and will of the masses. Hence the enormous task which Fascism sets itself in trying to bring the whole mass of the people, beginning with the little children, inside the fold of the Party.
On the popular character of the Fascist State likewise depends its greatest social and constitutional reform—the foundation of the Corporations of Syndicates. In this reform Fascism took over from syndicalism the notion of the moral and educational function of the syndicate. But the Corporations of Syndicates were necessary in order to reduce the syndicates to State discipline and make them an expression of the State's organism from within. The Corporation of Syndicates are a device through which the Fascist State goes looking for the individual in order to create itself through the individual's will. But the individual it seeks is not the abstract political individual whom the old liberalism took for granted. He is the only individual who can ever be found, the individual who exists as a specialized productive force, and who, by the fact of his specialization, is brought to unite with other individuals of his same category and comes to belong with them to the one great economic unit which is none other than the nation.
This great reform is already well under way. Toward it nationalism, syndicalism, and even liberalism itself, were already tending in the past. For even liberalism was beginning to criticize the older forms of political representation, seeking some system of organic representation which would correspond to the structural reality of the State.
The Fascist conception of liberty merits passing notice. The Duce of Fascism once chose to discuss the theme of "Force or consent?"; and he concluded that the two terms are inseparable, that the one implies the other and cannot exist apart from the other; that, in other words, the authority of the State and the freedom of the citizen constitute a continuous circle wherein authority presupposes liberty and liberty authority. For freedom can exist only within the State, and the State means authority. But the State is not an entity hovering in the air over the heads of its citizens. It is one with the personality of the citizen. Fascism, indeed, envisages the contrast not as between liberty and authority, but as between a true, a concrete liberty which exists, and an abstract, illusory liberty which cannot exist.
Liberalism broke the circle above referred to, setting the individual against the State and liberty against authority. What the liberal desired was liberty as against the State, a liberty which was a limitation of the State; though the liberal had to resign himself, as the lesser of the evils, to a State which was a limitation on liberty. The absurdities inherent in the liberal concept of freedom were apparent to liberals themselves early in the Nineteenth Century. It is no merit of Fascism to have again indicated them. Fascism has its own solution of the paradox of liberty and authority. The authority of the State is absolute. It does not compromise, it does not bargain, it does not surrender any portion of its field to other moral or religious principles which may interfere with the individual conscience. But on the other hand, the State becomes a reality only in the consciousness of its individuals. And the Fascist corporative State supplies a representative system more sincere and more in touch with realities than any other previously devised and is therefore freer than the old liberal State.
NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Basic Principles, Their Application By The Nazi Party's Foreign Organization, And The Use Of Germans Abroad For Nazi Aims
Prepared in the Special Unit
Of the Division of European Affairs
by
Raymond E. Murphy
Francis B. Stevens
Howard Trivers
Joseph M. Roland
Elements Of Nazi Ideology
The line of thought which we have traced from Herder to the immediate forerunners of the Nazi movement embodies an antidemocratic tradition which National Socialism has utilized, reduced to simple but relentless terms, and exploited in what is known as the National Socialist Weltanschauung for the greater aggrandizement of Nazi Germany. The complete agreement between the Nazi ideology and the previously described political concepts of the past is revealed in the forthcoming exposition of the main tenets of Naziism.
The Volk
Ernst Rudolf Huber, in his basic work Verfassungsrecht des grossdeutschen Reiches (Constitutional Law of the Greater German Reich) (document 1, post p. 155), published in 1939, states:
The new constitution of the German Reich … is not a constitution in the formal sense such as was typical of the nineteenth century. The new Reich has no written constitutional declaration, but its constitution exists in the unwritten basic political order of the Reich. One recognizes it in the spiritual powers which fill our people, in the real authority in which our political life is grounded, and in the basic laws regarding the structure of the state which have been proclaimed so far. The advantage of such an unwritten constitution over the formal constitution is that the basic principles do not become rigid but remain in a constant, living movement. Not dead institutions but living principles determine the nature of the new constitutional order.8
In developing his thesis Huber points out that the National Socialist state rests on three basic concepts, the Volk or people, the Führer, and the movement or party. With reference to the first element, the Volk, he argues that the democracies develop their concept of the people from the wrong approach: They start with the concept of the state and its functions and consider the people as being made up of all the elements which fall within the borders or under the jurisdiction of the state. National Socialism, on the other hand, starts with the concept of the people, which forms a political unity, and builds the state upon this foundation.
There is no people without an objective unity, but there is also none without a common consciousness of unity. A people is determined by a number of different factors: by racial derivation and by the character of its land, by language and other forms of life, by religion and history, but also by the common consciousness of its solidarity and by its common will to unity. For the concrete concept of a people, as represented by the various peoples of the earth, it is of decisive significance which of these various factors they regard as determinants for the nature of the people. The new German Reich proceeds from the concept of the political people, determined by the natural characteristics and by the historical idea of a closed community. The political people is formed through the uniformity of its natural characteristics. Race is the natural basis of the people … As a political people the natural community becomes conscious of its solidarity and strives to form itself, to develop itself, to defend itself, to realize itself. "Nationalism" is essentially this striving of a people which has become conscious of itself toward self-direction and self-realization, toward a deepening and renewing of its natural qualities.
This consciousness of self, springing from the consciousness of a historical idea, awakens in a people its will to historical formation: the will to action. The political people is no passive, sluggish mass, no mere object for the efforts of the state at government or protective welfare work … The great misconception of the democracies is that they can see the active participation of the people only in the form of plebiscites according to the principle of majority. In a democracy the people does not act as a unit but as a complex of unrelated individuals who form themselves into parties … The new Reich is based on the principle that real action of a self-determining people is only possible according to the principle of leadership and following.9
According to Huber, geographical considerations play a large part in the shaping of a people:
The people stands in a double relation, to its lands; it settles and develops the land, but the land also stamps and determines the people … That a certain territory belongs to a certain people is not justified by state authority alone but it is also determined objectively by its historical, political position. Territory is not merely a field for the exercise of state control but it determines the nature of a people and thereby the historical purpose of the state's activity. England's island position, Italy's Mediterranean position, and Germany's central position between east and west are such historical conditions, which unchangeably form the character of the people. 10
But the new Germany is based upon a "unity and entirety of the people"11 which does not stop at geographical boundaries:
The German people forms a closed community which recognizes no national borders. It is evident that a people has not exhausted its possibilities simply in the formation of a national state but that it represents an independent community which reaches beyond such limits. 12
The State justifies itself only so far as is helps the people to develop itself more fully. In the words of Hitler, quoted by Huber from Mein Kampf, "It is a basic principle, therefore, that the state represents not an end but a means. It is a condition for advanced human culture, but not the cause of it … Its purpose is in the maintenance and advancement of a community of human beings with common physical and spiritual characteristics." 13
Huber continues:
In the theory of the folk-Reich [völkisches Reich], people and state are conceived as an inseparable unity. The people is the prerequisite for the entire political order; the state does not form the people but the people moulds the state out of itself as the form in which it achieves historical permanence....14
The State is a function of the people, but it is not therefore a subordinate, secondary machine which can be used or laid aside at will. It is the form in which the people attains to historical reality. It is the bearer of the historical continuity of the people, which remains the same in the center of its being in spite of all changes, revolutions, and transformations.15
A similar interpretation of the role of the Volk is expounded by Gottfried Neesse in his Die Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—Versuch einer Rechtsdeutung (The National Socialist German Workers Party—An Attempt at Legal Interpretation), published in 1935. From the National Socialist viewpoint, according to Neesse, the state is regarded not as an organism superior to the people but as an organization of the people: "In contrast to an organism, an organization has no inherent legality; it is dependent upon human will and has no definite mission of its own. It is a form in which a living mass shapes itself into unity, but it has no life of its own."16 The people is the living organism which uses the organization of the state as the form in which it can best fulfil its mission. The law which is inherent in the people must be realized through the state.
But the central and basic concept of National Socialist political theory is the concept of the people:
In contrast to the state, the people form a true organism—a being which leads its own life and follows its own laws, which possesses powers peculiar to itself, and which develops its own nature independent of all state forms.... This living unity of the people has its cells in its individual members, and just as in every body there are certain cells to perform certain tasks, this is likewise the case in the body of the people. The individual is bound to his people not only physically but mentally and spiritually and he is influenced by these ties in all his manifestations.17
The elements which go to make up a people are beyond human comprehension, but the most important of them is a uniformity of blood, resulting in "a similarity of nature which manifests itself in a common language and a feeling of community and is further moulded by land and by history."18 "The unity of the people is increased by its common destiny and its consciousness of a common mission."19
Liberalism gave rise to the concept of a "society-people" (Gesellschaftsvolk) which consisted of a sum of individuals, each of whom was supposed to have an inherent significance and to play his own independent part in the political life of the nation. National Socialism, on the other hand, has developed, the concept of the "community-people" (Gemeinschaftsvolk) which functions as a uniform whole.20
The people, however, is never politically active as a whole, but only through those who embody its will. The true will of a people can never be determined by a majority vote. It can only display itself in men and in movements, and history will decide whether these men or movements could rightly claim to be the representatives of the people's will.21
Every identification of the state with the people is false from a legal and untenable from a political standpoint … The state is the law-forming organization and the law serves the inner order of the community; the people is the politically active organism and politics serve the outward maintenance of the community … But law receives its character from the people and politics must reckon with the state as the first and most important factor.22
The "nation" is the product of this interplay and balance between the state and the people. The original and vital force of the people, through the organization of the state, realizes itself fully in the unified communal life of the nation:
The nation is the complete agreement between organism and organization, the perfect formation of a naturally grown being. … Nationalism is nothing more than the outwardly directed striving to maintain this inner unity of people and state, and socialism is the inwardly directed striving for the same end.23
Dr. Herbert Scurla, Government Councilor and Reich's Minister for Science, Education, and Folk Culture, in a pamphlet entitled Die Grundgedanken des Nationalsozialismus und das Ausland (Basic Principles of National Socialism With Special Reference to Foreign Countries), also emphasizes the importance of the Volk in the National Socialist state. Dr. Scurla points out that National Socialism does not view the nation in the domocratic sense of a community to which the individual may voluntarily adhere.
The central field of force of the National Socialist consciousness is rather the folk, and this folk is in no case mere individual aggregation, i.e., collectivity as sum of the individuals, but as a unity with a peculiar two-sidedness, at the same time "essential totality" (M.H. Boehm). The folk is both a living creature and a spiritual configuration, in which the individuals are included through common racial conditioning, in blood and spirit. It is that force which works on the individual directly "from within or from the side like a common degree of temperature" (Kjellén) and which collects into the folk whatever according to blood and spirit belongs to it. This folk, point of departure and goal at the same time, is, in the National Socialist world-view, not only the field of force for political order, but as well the central factor of the entire world-picture. Neither individuals, as the epoch of enlightenment envisaged, nor states, as in the system of the dynastic and national state absolutism, nor classes, as conceived by Marxism, are the ultimate realities of the political order, but the peoples, who stand over against one another with the unqualifiable right to a separate existence as natural entities, each with its own essential nature and form. 24
Dr. Scurla claims that National Socialism and Fascism are the strivings of the German and Italian people for final national unification along essentially different national lines natural to each of them. "What took place in Germany," he asserts, "was a political revolution of a total nature."25 "Under revolution," he states, "we understand rather the penetration of the collective folk-mind [gesamtvölkischen Bewusstseins] into all regions of German life."26 And, he concludes:
National Socialism is no invented system of rules for the political game, but the world-view of the German people, which experiences itself as a national and social community, and concedes neither to the state nor the class nor the individual any privileges which endanger the security of the community's right to live. 27
Some of the most striking expressions of the race concept are found in Die Erziehung im dritten Reich (Education in the Third Reich), by Friedrich Alfred Beck, which was published in 1936. It is worthy of note that the tendency which may be observed in Huber (document I, post p. 155) and Neesse to associate the ideas of Volk and race is very marked with Beck. "All life, whether natural or spiritual, all historical progress, all state forms, and all cultivation by education are in the last analysis based upon the racial make-up of the people in question."28 Race finds its expression in human life through the phenomenon of the people:
Race and people belong together. National Socialism has restored the concept of the people from its modern shallowness and sees in the people something different from and appreciably greater than a chance social community of men, a grouping of men who have the same external interests. By people we understand an entire living body which is racially uniform and which is held together by common history, common fate, a common mission, and common tasks. Through such an interpretation the people takes on a significance which is only attributed to it in times of great historical importance and which makes it the center, the content, and the goal of all human work. Only that race still possesses vital energy which can still bring its unity to expression in the totality of the people. The people is the space in which race can develop its strength. Race is the vital law of arrangement which gives the people its distinctive form. In the course of time the people undergoes historical transformations, but race prevents the loss of the people's own nature in the course of these transformations. Without the people the race has no life; without race the people has no permanence … Education, from the standpoint of race and people, is the creation of a form of life in which the racial unity will be preserved through the totality of the people. 29
Beck describes the politically spiritual National Socialist personality which National Socialist education seeks to develop, in the following terms:
Socialism is the direction of personal life through dependence on the community, consciousness of the community, feeling for the community, and action in the community; nationalism is the elevation of individual life to a unique (microcosmic) expression of the community in the unity of the personality.30
National Socialist education must stress the heroic life and teach German youth the importance of fulfilling their duty to the Volk.
Heroism is that force and that conviction which consecrates its whole life to the service of an idea, a faith, a task, or a duty even when it knows that the destruction of its own life is certain … German life, according to the laws of its ideology, is heroic life … All German life, every person belonging to the community of Germans must bear heroic character within himself. Heroic life fulfils itself in the daily work of the miner, the farmer, the clerk, the statesman, and the serving self-sacrifice of the mother. Wherever a life is devoted with an all-embracing faith and with its full powers to the service of some value, there is true heroism … Education to the heroic life is education to the fulfilment of duty … One must have experienced it repeatedly that the inner fruition of a work in one's own life has nothing to do with material or economic considerations, that man keeps all of his faculties alive through his obligation to his work and his devotion to his duty, and that he uses them in the service of an idea without any regard for practical considerations, before one recognizes the difference between this world of heroic self-sacrifice and the liberalistic world of barter. Because the younger generation has been brought up in this heroic spirit it is no longer understood by the representatives of the former era who judge the values of life according to material advantage … German life is heroic life. Germany is not a mere community of existence and of interests whose only function is to insure the material and cultural needs of its members, but it also represents an elemental obligation on the part of the members. The eternal Germany cannot be drawn in on the map; it does not consist of the constitution or the laws of the state. This Germany is the community of those who are solemnly bound together and who experience and realize these eternal national values. This Germany is our eternal mission, our most sacred law … The developing personality must be submerged in the living reality of the people and the nation from earliest youth on, must take an active and a suffering part in it. Furthermore the heroic life demands a recognition and experiencing of the highest value of life which man must serve with all his powers. This value can perhaps be recognized and presented theoretically in the schools but it can only be directly comprehended and personally experienced in the community of the people. Therefore all education must preserve this direct connection with the community of the people and school education must derive from it the form and substance of its instruction.31
This nationalism, which is based upon the laws of life, has nothing in common with the weak and presumptuous patriotism of the liberalistic world; it is not a gift or a favor, not a possession or a privilege, but it is the form of national life which we have won in hard battle and which suits our Nordic-German racial and spiritual heritage. In the nationalistic personality the powers and values which have been established in the socialistic personality will be purposefully exerted for the perfection of the temporal and eternal idea of life.32