Quotes from Robert O. Paxton

Looking for fears, indeed, may be a more fruitful research strategy than a literal-minded quest for thinkers who "created" fascism.

Fascism is "true" insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle,

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

We are not required to believe that fascist movements can only come to power in an exact replay of the scenario of Mussolini and Hitler. All that is required to fit our model is polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites.

while a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in

They expected that inevitable war would allow the master races, united and self-confident, to prevail, while the divided, "mongrelized," and irresolute peoples would become their handmaidens. Fascism had become conceivable, as we will soon

Battle of Cable Street

Fascists quickly profited from the inability of centrists and conservatives to keep control of a mass electorate. Whereas the notable dinosaurs disdained mass politics, fascists showed how to use it for nationalism and against the Left. They promised access to the crowd through exciting political spectacle and clever publicity techniques; ways to discipline that crowd through paramilitary organization and charismatic leadership; and the replacement of chancy elections by yes-no plebiscites.

is a phenomenon of failed democracies, and its novelty was that, instead of simply clamping silence upon citizens as classical tyranny had done since earliest times, it found a technique to channel their passions into the construction of an obligatory domestic unity around projects of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Religion may be as powerful an engine of identity as the nation;

Marxists, fascism's first victims, were accustomed to thinking of history as the grand unfolding of deep processes through the clash of economic systems. Even before Mussolini had fully consolidated his power, they were ready with a definition of fascism as "the instrument of the big bourgeoisie for fighting the proletariat when the legal means available to the state proved insufficient to subdue them.

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is.

In fascist propaganda, and in most people's image of fascist regimes, leader and party are fused into a single expression of the national will. In reality, there is permanent tension between them, too. The fascist leader inevitably neglects some early campaign promises in his quest for the alliances necessary for power, and thus disappoints some of his radical followers.

War is to men as maternity is to women.

Junior partnerships within authoritarian regimes proved disastrous for fascist movements. Playing second fiddle fit badly with fascists' extravagant claims to transform their peoples and redirect history. For their part, the authoritarian senior partners took a dim view of the fascists' impatient violence and disdain for established interests, for these cases often involved fascist movements that retained much of the social radicalism of the early movement stage.

it is not the particular themes of Nazism or Italian Fascism that define the nature of the fascist phenomenon, but their function. Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle.

In May 1941, when the German army overran and split up Yugoslavia, the pre-war terrorist-nationalist Ustaša and its longtime leader Ante Paveli? were permitted to take power in the newly independent state of Croatia. Even Nazi onlookers were appalled by the disorderly slaughters in which the Ustaša massacred a soberly estimated 500,000 Serbs, 200,000 Croats, 90,000 Bosnian Muslims, 60,000 Jews, 50,000 Montenegrins, and 30,000 Slovenes.

Every strategy for understanding fascism must come to terms with the wide diversity of its national cases. The major question here is whether fascisms are more disparate than the other "isms." This book takes the position that they are, because they reject any universal value other than the success of chosen peoples in a Darwinian struggle for primacy.

The nation took precedence over any universal value, proclaimed the anti-Dreyfusard Charles Maurras, whose Action Française movement is sometimes considered the first authentic fascism.72 When a document used to incriminate Dreyfus turned out to have been faked, Maurras was undaunted. It was, he said, a "patriotic forgery," a faux patriotique.

Authoritarians would rather leave the population demobilized and passive, while fascists want to engage and excite the public.65 Authoritarians want a strong but limited state. They hesitate to intervene in the economy, as fascism does readily, or to embark on programs of social welfare. They cling to the status quo rather than proclaim a new way.

Before fascism could become a serious contender, one chief would have to emerge as the "gatherer"—the one able to shove his rivals aside and assemble in one tent all the (nonsocialist) discontented.

Extreme radicalization remains latent in all fascisms, but the circumstances of war, and particularly of victorious wars of conquest, gave it the fullest means of expression.

Fascist success depended as much on allies and accomplices as on the tactics or special qualities of the movements themselves...it took the decisions of powerful individuals to open the gates to fascism. That was the final essential precondition of successful fascism: decision-makers ready to share power with fascist challengers.

We must see fascist rule as a never-ending struggle for preeminence within a coalition, exacerbated by the collapse of constitutional restraints and the rule of law, and by a prevailing climate of social Darwinism.