Fascism

[Keith McMullen]

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk- 
ascherson18apr18,2,2628651.story?coll=cl-bookreview

Excerpt:

The Anatomy of Fascism
     by Robert O. Paxton

  Reviewed by Neal Ascherson

  We have had to wait a long time for this book. As its author notes,  
"Fascism was the major political innovation of the twentieth  
century,"other political ideologies, such as Marxist socialism, having  
roots in the 19th or earlier. Yet until now there has been no  
satisfying account of fascism that includes a convincing diagnostic kit  
for identifying its symptoms. Researched with scholarly attention to an  
enormous array of sources and written with a cool lucidity and sense of  
order, Robert O. Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism" reviews the  
literature of theory about fascism and sets its horrible manifestations  
into a matrix of interpretation.

  Why has this approach taken so long to emerge? In part because a  
sensible account of fascism has been befogged by faulty theorizing —  
some popular, some academic. Two such versions have been particularly  
misleading. The first is the popular notion (still held on the English  
left) that fascism is one stage in a sequence of almost chemical  
reactions: Nationalism leads to fascism, which leads to racism, which  
leads to war. The sequence is derived from vulgarized Marxism and  
condemns all nationalism as a bourgeois counter-strategy against the  
class struggle; this assumption can exist only in societies ignorant of  
nationalism's complex nature. The second is the theory of  
totalitarianism as propounded in the Cold War by Zbigniew Brzezinski  
and others to suggest a moral and political equivalence between  
fascism, especially in its Nazi variety, and Stalinist communism.