Fascism
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the spirit’, aimed at creating a new type of human being (always understood in male terms). This was the ‘new man’ or ‘fascist man’, a hero, motivated by duty, honour and self-sacrifice, and prepared to dissolve his personality in that of the social whole.
Struggle The ideas that the UK biologist Charles Darwin (1809–82) developed in On the Origin of Species ([1859] 1972), popularly known as the theory of ‘ natural selection ’, had a profound effect not only on the natural sciences, but also, by the end of the nineteenth century, on social and political thought. This was most clearly demonstrated through the influence of Herbert Spencer (1820–1904), an advocate of extreme liberal individualism and the earliest exponent of social Darwinism (see Chapter 2). The notion that human existence is based on biologically impelled competition or struggle was particularly attractive in the period of intensifying international rivalry that eventually led to war in 1914. Social Darwinism also had a considerable impact on emerging fascism. In the first place, fascists regarded struggle as the natural and inevitable condition of both social and international life. Only competition and conflict guarantee human progress and ensure that the fittest and strongest will prosper. As Hitler told German officer cadets in 1944, ‘Victory is to the strong and the weak must go to the wall.’ If the testing ground of human existence is competition and struggle, then the ultimate test is war, which Hitler described as ‘an unalterable law of the whole of life’. Fascism is perhaps unique among political ideologies in regarding war as good in itself, a view reflected inMussolini’s belief that ‘War is tomen what maternity is to women’. Darwinian thought also invested fascism with a distinctive set of political values, which equate ‘goodness’ with strength, and ‘evil’ with weakness. In contrast to traditional humanist or religious values, such as caring, sympathy and compassion, fascists respect a very different set of martial values: loyalty, duty, obedience and self-sacrifice. When the victory of the strong is glorified, power and strength are worshipped for their own sake. Similarly, weakness is despised and the elimination of the weak and inadequate is positively welcomed: they must be sacrificed for the common good, just as the survival of a species is more important than the life of any single member of that species. Weakness and disability must therefore not be tolerated; they should be removed. This was illustrated most graphically by the programme of eugenics , introduced by the Nazis in Germany, whereby mentally and physically handicapped people were first forcibly sterilized and then, between 1939 and 1941, systematically murdered. The attempt by the Nazis to exterminate European Jewry from 1941 onwards was, in this sense, an example of racial eugenics.
Finally, fascism’s conception of life as an ‘unending struggle’ gave it a restless and expansionist character. National qualities can only be cultivated through conflict and demonstrated by conquest and victory. This was clearly reflected in Hitler’s foreign policy goals, as outlined in Mein Kampf ([1925] 1969): ‘ Lebensraum [living space] in the East’, and the ultimate prospect of world domination. Once in power in 1933, Hitler embarked on a programme of rearmament in preparation for expansion in the late 1930s. Austria was annexed in the Anschluss of 1938; Czechoslovakia was dismembered in the spring of 1939; and Poland invaded in September 1939, provoking war with the UK and France. In 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. Even when facing imminent defeat in 1945, Hitler did not abandon social Darwinism, but
Natural selection: The theory that species go through a process of random mutations that fits some to survive (and possibly thrive) while others become extinct. Eugenics: The theory or practice of selective breeding, achieved either by promoting procreation among ‘fit’ members of a species or by preventing procreation by the ‘unfit’.
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