166 Chapter 7
TENSIONS WITHIN . . . FASCISM Fascism v. Nazism state worship state as vessel
chauvinist nationalism
extreme racism
voluntarism
essentialism
national greatness
biological superiority
organic unity
racial purity/eugenics
pragmatic anti-Semitism
genocidal anti-Semitism
futurism/modernism
peasant ideology
corporatism
war economy
colonial expansion
world domination
This policy was based on a deep contradiction, however. War and military expansion, even when justified by reference to a peasant ideology, cannot but be pursued through the techniques and processes of a modern industrial society. The central ideological goals of the Nazi regime were conquest and empire, and these dictated the expansion of the industrial base and the development of the technology of warfare. Far from returning the German people to the land, the Hitler period witnessed rapid industrialization and the growth of the large towns and cities so despised by the Nazis. Peasant ideology thus proved to be little more than rhetoric. Militarism also brought about significant cultural shifts. While Nazi art remained fixated with simplistic images of small-town and rural life, propaganda constantly bombarded the German people with images of modern technology, from the Stuka dive-bomber and Panzer tank to the V1 and V2 rockets. THE FUTURE OF FASCISM One view of fascism is that it was the product of a unique, and dramatically combustible, combination of circumstances that surfaced during the interwar period (Nolte, 1965). These circumstances included the following. First, democratic government had only recently been established in many parts of Europe, and democratic political values had not replaced older, autocratic ones. Second, European society had been disrupted by the experience of industrialization, which had particularly threatened a lower middle class of shopkeepers, small businessmen, farmers and craftsmen, who were squeezed between the growing might of big business, on the one hand, and the rising power of organized labour, on the other. Third, the period after World War I was deeply affected by the 1917 Russian Revolution and the fear among the propertied classes that social revolution was about to spread throughout Europe. Fourth, World War I
Powered by FlippingBook