More Glaring Similarities Between Fascism/Nazism and the Rest of the Left

Chapter 3.3: Governance, belligerence, and other traits hiding in plain sight

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3)
PART 2
Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6
PART 3
Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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3.3
Fascism/Nazism vs. Orthodox Leftism

• Government

  • Anti-parliamentarianism

  • Political centralism

  • Bureaucracy

  • One-party state

• Martial Virtues and Belligerence

  • Revision 3

Government

If liberalism spells individualism, Fascism spells government.
—Benito Mussolini

In terms of the size, scope, and structure of government, fascism and Nazism were little different from the fullest manifestations of leftism. Indeed, if we were to establish a continuum that measures size/scope of government, they would all be side by side. Down at the other end would be the various manifestations of classical liberalism.

Anti-parliamentarianism

Like their socialist cousins, the fascists and Nazis were not big fans of representative legislative bodies. Like absolute monarchs, they saw them as an obstacle to power. They weren’t above using them, temporarily, however, as a path to that power:

We are an anti-parliamentarian party….We enter the Reichstag to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy. If democracy is foolish enough to give us free railway passes and salaries, that is its problem….Any way of bringing about the revolution is fine by us. If we succeed in getting sixty or seventy of our party’s agitators and organizers elected to the various parliaments, the state itself will pay for our fighting organization. That is amusing and entertaining enough to be worth trying. Will we be corrupted by joining parliament? Not likely. Do you think us such miserable revolutionaries that you fear that the thick red carpets and the well-upholstered sleeping halls will make us forget our historical mission?¹

Lenin and his Bolsheviks felt the same, seeing them as a temporary annoyance on the pathway to revolutionary victory:

Parliamentarianism has become “historically obsolete.” That is true in the propaganda sense. However, everybody knows that this is still a far cry from overcoming it in practice. Capitalism could have been declared—and with full justice—to be “historically obsolete” many decades ago, but that does not at all remove the need for a very long and very persistent struggle on the basis of capitalism. Parliamentarianism is “historically obsolete” from the standpoint of world history, i.e., the era of bourgeois parliamentarianism is over, and the era of the proletarian dictatorship has begun.²

Parliaments are notoriously inefficient, characterized more by their squabbling than by their accomplishments. This is by design. Contrary to the claims of collectivists everywhere, human beings actually have differing views on things, and representing those views in a legislative body will naturally create contention and division. In the Federalist Papers, Publius makes it clear that inefficiency is a feature, not a flaw: they sought to create a system that would slow things down—one branch checking the other, balancing faction against faction. Recognizing people’s diverse natures, opinions, and interests, they wanted to ensure that individuals and minorities did not get bulldozed by majorities.

Those who seek absolute power and control could not care less about any of that. Fascists and Nazis execrated parliaments as sclerotic relics of a liberal past, standing in the way of the nation’s path to greatness. Socialists dispensed with them once their revolutions were successful. Absolute monarchs saw them as impinging upon their “divine right” to rule with impunity…

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