Fascism, an ideological imposter
The conservative historian Paul Johnson passed away this month and, by coincidence, I happened to read his classic Modern Times directly beforehand. If this trend continues, I’ll have to be more careful about whom I read.
Over 1,000 pages, Johnson offers history with an opinion. I won’t retell here his whole story from the 1920s until the 1980s but do want to share some of Johnson’s more striking interpretations over two emails which may be summed up as: communism bad, colonialism not so bad.
Quite properly, the villain of the 20th century is Marxism in all of its variants and heresies. The most prominent adherents, of course, were in the Soviet Union but Johnson lays out how this was less a case of Marx’s predicted historical determinism than Vladimir Lenin’s personal opportunism. There was no widespread Russian revolution of the proletariat (such a class hardly existed in Russia), just a coup d’etat by a fanatical vanguard against a burgeoning democracy followed by a civil war and decades of tyranny. For all the complaints about the czar, that regime only executed an average of 17 people a year for the preceding eight decades. Within three years, the Soviet secret police “carried out over 50,000 death sentences.” But, to Johnson,
“The most disturbing and, from the historical point of view, important characteristic of the Lenin terror was not the quantity of the victims but the principle on which they were selected. Within a few months of seizing power, Lenin had abandoned the notion of individual guilt, and with it the whole Judeo-Christian ethic of personal responsibility. He was ceasing to be interested in what a man did or had done–let alone why he had done it–and was first encouraging, then commanding, his repressive apparatus to hunt down people, and destroy them, not on the basis of crimes, real or imaginary, but on the basis of generalizations, hearsay, rumours. First came condemned categories: ‘prostitutes’, ‘work-shirkers’, ‘bagmen’, ‘speculators’, ‘hoarders’, all of whom might vaguely be described as criminal. Following quickly, however, came entire occupational groups. The watershed was Lenin’s decree of January 1918 calling on the agencies of the state to ‘purge the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects’. This was not a judicial act: it was an invitation to mass murder.”
Figure 1. And indeed millions of deaths would follow under the leadership of Joseph Stalin, who rose to power essentially as Lenin’s director of human resources. Even as Lenin attempted to disinherit him from his deathbed, by then it was too late: Stalin had rearranged everyone in the bureaucracy to his advantage. He would do much more rearranging.
Unconventionally and importantly, Johnson also presents fascism as a Marxist variant. Benito Mussolini was named after socialists and grew up in a socialist home to become a prominent socialist journalist. After being expelled from the main socialist party for his support of World War I, Mussolini popularized “fascism,” essentially socialism repackaged so as to appeal to the right. This was not a new temptation: the right-wing German monarchist Otto von Bismarck had created the first barebones of the modern welfare state in an attempt to preserve the old order. Mussolini proposed to end Italy’s raucous and chaotic politics - a “problem” that many see even in today’s democracy - with his singular rule. He offered to end frequent strikes and Communist class conflict by using his own Leninist vanguard (and eventually the state he controlled) to violently suppress dissent and then put people back to work under the unifying banner of nationalism. Seeing the problems in the Soviet Union and altering his message for political appeal, Mussolini advocated exploiting industry rather than seizing it - industrialists’ lives and social status would be spared if they redirected their efforts for the state. And at first, Mussolini’s state was relatively light - but with the arrival of the Great Depression, businesses called for bailouts and, crucially, Mussolini set terms that closely wed industry with the state, culminating the fascist regime. By 1934, Mussolini proclaimed that 3/4 of Italian businesses were “in the hands of the state.” Mussolini’s tactics and ideology directly inspired Hitler, who added his own racial overlay.
Today, fascism is considered a rightwing ideology but it is rather hard to distinguish its trajectory from the clearly leftwing communism. Indeed, as Mussolini co-opted the frightened Italian right, inspired New Dealers were traveling to Italy to learn from Il Duce. Mussolini himself once said that Keynes offered “a useful introduction to fascist economics.” As should be endlessly stressed, “Nazi” is a condensation of “National Socialist.” Fascism was an explicit critique of capitalism, calling for state direction of the economy, massive public works projects, bailouts that that amount to permanent “partnerships”, a closed economy in which everyone is told to “buy local” - you could more easily sell that unbranded program to a progressive caucus than, as the media endlessly labels it, a “far-right” Tea Party. Even fascist labor policy - the heart of its rightwing appeal - consisted of the state legally insisting on exclusively “representing” workers itself, not terribly different from what Communists wound up doing, but for the rhetoric. Would American protestors who call cops “fascists” really prefer to deal, just to give a few prominent examples among the countless, with the crews that cleared Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Tiananmen Square in 1989? Would the unfortunate people of Poland insist that fascist militarism was so different from Communist militarism? If fascism and communism horrify - and they should - then support whatever local ideology limits government.
Modernity’s progenitor of horror was World War I, where millions died in the exchange of trenches and many millions more would die under its successor regimes. The conflict was bungled both into and out of, and Johnson especially highlights the latter. In the wake of their coup, the Soviets were eager for peace so they could consolidate their domestic power and figured that they could freely make territorial concessions because the workers of the world would soon rebel anyway. In a separate peace treaty, the Germans swallowed much of the east and freed up troops for the western front which had never gone especially well but, important to national self-conception, no allied soldier had ever set foot on German territory. Knowing full well the disaster of the war (and campaigning on keeping America out of it), Woodrow Wilson nevertheless entered the conflict and eventually offered terms that the Germans thought might allow them to keep some of their gains. But Wilson had not consulted his allies who had borne the brunt of the fighting and dying. The subsequent harsh peace surprised the Germans who nurtured a grievance that their civilian leadership had stabbed their victorious armies in the back -- but Johnson compellingly asks: how could anyone stab the German military in the back when they so thoroughly ran the country?
Meanwhile, Johnson is delightfully revisionist about the United States in the 1920s, lionizing Warren G. Harding (usually ranked near last among presidents by historians) for responding to the post WW1 recession by cutting government so much that it spent 40% less than before the war. Charles Dawes, the first budget director, called the result “velvet for the taxpayer” and America’s economy quickly recovered. Harding’s successor, Calvin Coolidge, gets the epitaph from Will Rogers that “He didn’t do anything but that’s what the people wanted done.” Coolidge himself reported that 90% of his visitors at the White House “want something they ought not to have.” But this embrace of laissez-faire came to an end not with FDR but Herbert Hoover. When Hoover first entered the Commerce Department, his predecessor marveled that it was a wonderful job that only required 2 hours of work a day. Instead, Hoover became the only Cabinet secretary who increased staff and cost. Coolidge had little enthusiasm for his inherited minister and eventual successor: “That man has offered me unsolicited advice for six years, all of it bad.” While history has vilified Hoover as inactive in the face of a Great Depression, Johnson argues that “in all essentials, Hoover’s actions embodied what would later be called a ‘Keynesian’ policy’” and that “more major public works were started in Hoover’s four years than in the previous thirty.” Indeed, on the campaign trail, FDR would criticize Hoover for running an unbalanced budget! Alas, FDR would simultaneously condemn Hooverism and continue it, with some inspiration from Il Duce, such that by 1939, two terms into fighting the Great Depression, unemployment remained a catastrophic 17%.
Figure 2. Still, Johnson goes too far by going out of his way to argue that the “pathetically shy” Harding was slandered by claims of extramarital affairs (in fact, the charges were proven true by a DNA test and letters released after the book’s publication). This, however, is the only glaring factual error that I noticed in the book.
Johnson’s treatment of World War II is fairly conventional, but let’s briefly touch on some of his unusual takes: Johnson argues that if the United Kingdom had simply allowed Italy to swallow monarchist Ethiopia rather than sanction it, Italy, already paranoid about German union with neighboring Austria, might have proven an ally in the subsequent war as it had in the last (unmentioned by Johnson, but note that Germany even supplied arms to the Ethiopians during the conflict). In the lead up to actual fighting, Johnson suggests that Hitler was seen domestically as a brilliant Bismarkian figure advancing the German state with expert diplomacy and minimal conflict. Though popularity is hard to gauge in a totalitarian state, Johnson argues that the actual invasion of Poland was ill-greeted by Germans. Further, Johnson argues, with what I interpreted to be British glee, that the Nazi-appeasing ruler of Vichy France, Philippe “Pétain quickly became the most popular French ruler since Napoleon. He incarnated anti-romanticism, the anxiety to relinquish historical and global duties, the longing for a quiet and safe life which now swept over France.” Certainly not the conventional narrative of the war in France, where everyone claims their grandparents were in the resistance.
Figure 3. “On 10 January 1946 the Tory MP and diarist ‘Chips’ Channon attended a society wedding in London and remarked to another guest, Lady (‘Emerald’) Cunard, ‘how quickly normal life had been resumed. “After all”, I said, pointing to the crowded room, “this is what we have been fighting for.” “What,” said Emerald, “are they all Poles?””
But “there was scarcely a crime the Nazis or the knights of bushido had committed, or even imagined, which the Soviet regime had not also perpetrated, usually on an even larger scale.” And so conservatives have been complaining for decades that FDR gave up Eastern Europe to Communism at Yalta in 1945. A reasonable counterpoint has always been, short of a George Patton-esque war on the Soviet Union, what exactly were we supposed to do? Johnson actually offers some pointers. First, he criticizes Churchill, otherwise fairly attuned to the Soviet threat, for immediately offering unconditional aid to the Soviets upon the German invasion. British specialists argued rather reasonably that the Empire should be ‘trading supplies against detailed information about Russian production and resources.’ The Allies instead gave quite a lot of material aid “directly to Stalin’s personal autocracy,” including, immediately, planes that had been destined for the defense of Singapore. Second, Johnson argues that while certainly not all of Eastern Europe could have been saved, the United States Army, sensing Nazi Germany on the ropes, made a mistake by slowing the pace of their advance to conserve soldiers, with Ike insisting “I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political purposes.” Thereafter, the United States essentially conceded the totalitarian takeover of the east, including a Communist coup d’etat in Czechoslovakia against a mixed government when there were only 500 Soviet troops in the whole country.
In two of the most prominent civil wars of the 20th century, each featuring the prospect of a Communist takeover, Johnson attributes success to the use and abuse of monetary policy. In the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, Johnson argues that while the leftists “started with one of the largest gold reserves in the world,” they just handed it over to the Soviet Union. Despite substantial initial advantages, their currency lost over 80% of its value within a year and did worse as the war went on. Meanwhile, the right-wing Nationalists’ “greatest achievement was to maintain a respectable paper currency without the benefit of the nation's gold reserves and central banking system,” actually enjoying a fairly stable exchange rate with the British pound, encouraging commerce, and attracting loans that they repaid in full once they won the war. Meanwhile, the anti-Communists of China horribly mismanaged their currency to the point of hyperinflation. While Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army seized what they needed to eat, Chaing Kai Shek’s troops were paid in worthless paper - and so they wound up selling their equipment and otherwise engaging in corruption. Interestingly, in response to the classic conservative question “Who lost China?”, Milton Friedman argued FDR for destabilizing the silver market upon which the Chinese currency was originally based.
Johnson also reveals that Stalin proposed splitting China in half a la Korea and Germany but that Chiang rejected the offer. The immediate result was Mao taking over the mainland and beginning his reign by “urg[ing] peasants to kill ‘not one or two but a goodly number’” of “local bullies and evil gentry,” such that “at least 2 million people perished, half of them the tyrannical owners of less than thirty years.” Within a decade, tens of millions more would die in the Great Leap Forward.
Figure 4. When the reformer Deng Xiaoping eventually took over China, "The Peking People’s Daily apologized to readers for ‘all the lies and distortions’ it had carried and, more remarkably, warned them against ‘the false, boastful and untrue reports’ which it ‘still often prints’." Some of our current publications could use such an editorial.
I plan to read Johnson’s history of the United States at some point but, aside from the twenties and one item I’ll mention in a moment, I didn’t find his chapters on our republic quite as insightful as those on the international scene, especially the little covered Third World (more on that in the next email). His American takes are generally the standard conservative ones - that yes indeed Alger Hiss was a spy and that “presidential skullduggery” stretched behind Watergate at least back to FDR. Johnson’s most notable American argument postwar is that Khrushchev, not Kennedy, came out ahead of the Cuban missile crisis, with a guarantee that a totalitarian Communist regime would survive 90 miles offshore the US.
Otherwise, Johnson properly lionizes West Germany’s Konrad Adenaeur for aligning his half to the western market and condemns Argentina’s Juan Peron for a far-reaching socialist agenda that continues to bankrupt a once rich country. Johnson explains that Salvador Allende led Chile to default on its debts and experience economic chaos amidst the highest inflation in the world until Augusto Pinochet took over and turned the economy around. Unusually for a conservative historian, Johnson condemns the Shah of Iran but for a conservative reason: the Shah was too much of a central planner and his disruptions of rural life meant a monarchist constituency was missing when he was challenged by the mullahs. That, and plenty more hot takes, can be found in the book!
Tune in next time for Johnson’s defense of colonialism.
Figure 5. Click here to buy Modern Times by Paul Johnson (8/10), a British conservative’s view of the 20th century.