Terry Eagleton on Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism



Exactly what fascism consists of, however, is far less clear. In some leftist circles, the word is lobbed loosely around to vilify anyone in the cramped space to the right of Conrad Black. Yet fascists are radicals, unlike right-wing conservatives. Conservatives believe in God, tradition, the monarchy, civilisation and the individual, whereas fascists are pagan, primitivist, collectivist state-worshippers who prefer jackboots to crowns. Fascists admire productive workers (including productive capitalists) and denounce effete aristocrats and the idle rich; conservatives tend to champion both groups, among whose ranks they themselves can frequently be found. Ezra Pound was a fascist, but T S Eliot was a conservative. Fascists strut, while conservatives lounge. From a right-wing viewpoint, there is not much to distinguish fascists from Marxists, except that fascists are marginally more tolerable.



Conservatives disdain the popular masses, while fascists mobilise and manipulate them. Some conservatives believe in ideas, but fascists have a marked preference for myths. If they think at all, they think through their blood, not their brain. Fascists regard themselves as a youthful, revolutionary avant-garde out to erase the botched past and create an unimaginably new future. This includes ditching conventional distinctions between political left and right, a point that ought to worry partisans of the Third Way rather more than it seems to.



Fascism is an anti-political kind of politics, which elevates national unity over class distinctions, gut prejudice over ideological debate, and race over reason

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If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class grouses, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact. The disgruntled petite bourgeoisie were taken for the longest ride in their unenviable history. With breathtaking insolence, the fascists used aspects of their ideology to prop up the very state that they found so oppressive.



The book could have said more about the curious time-warping involved in fascism - the way in which it is archaic and avant-garde, mythological and technological, at the same time. In this, it resembles the cultural modernism with which it had intimate (if ambiguous) relations. The Holocaust was both barbarism and the triumph of a "scientific", full-bloodedly modern rationality. If it was a revolt against Enlightenment reason for some thinkers, it was the consummation of it for others. Old-fashioned pogroms, Paxton points out, would have taken 200 years to complete what the Nazis' more advanced technology achieved in three years.