NOTES
INTRODUCTION: EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT FASCISM IS WRONG
1. Real Time with Bill Maher, HBO, Sept. 9, 2005.
2. Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (New York: St. Martin's, 1991), p. 26; Roger Eatwell, 'On Defining the 'Fascist Minimum': The Centrality of Ideology,' Journal of Political Ideologies 1, no. 3 (1996), p. 313; Gentile is quoted in Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), p. 5 n. 6.
3. Griffin, Nature of Fascism, p. 1, quoting R. A. H. Robinson, Fascism in Europe (London: Historical Association, 1981), p. 1; the dictionary definition is quoted in Richard Griffiths, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Fascism (London: Duckworth, 2000), p. 4; Payne, History of Fascism, p. 3; Gilbert Allardyce, 'What Fascism Is Not: Thoughts on the Deflation of a Concept,' American Historical Review 84, no. 2 (April 1979), p. 367.
4. George Orwell, 'Politics and the English Language,' Horizon, April 1946, in Essays (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 959.
5. Michele Parente, 'Rangel Ties GOP Agenda to Hitler,' Newsday, Feb. 19, 1995, p. A38; Bill Clinton, Remarks to the Association of State Democratic Chairs in Los Angeles, June 24, 2000, Public Papers of the Presidents, 36 Weekly Comp. Pres. Doc. 1491; for a typical Times article, see Alexander Stille, 'The Latest Obscenity Has Seven Letters,' New York Times, Sept. 13, 2003.
6. Rick Perlstein, 'Christian Empire,' New York Times, Jan. 7, 2007, sec. 7, p. 15; Jesse Jackson, interview, 'Expediency Was Winner Over Right,' Chicago Sun-Times, Dec. 3, 1994, p. 18.
7. In America 'social Darwinism' means 'survival of the fittest' in an anarchic free-for-all of capitalist predation. This is the tradition of Herbert Spencer, a radical freethinker and individualist. By that definition, Nazism is the opposite of social Darwinism. As we shall see, the Nazis were Darwinists, but they were reform Darwinists, believing that the state should actively pick winners and losers and lavish the winners with social benefits, welfare, and other forms of government largesse — exactly the opposite position of those we call social Darwinists.
8. John Patrick Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 215.
9. One correspondent for the New York Times was an enthusiastic supporter of Italian Fascism for many years, writing that fascism was both good for Italy and good for the Abyssinians Mussolini tried to conquer. That reporter, Herbert Matthews, later recanted his support for fascism when it came into conflict with his support for the communists in the Spanish civil war. But years later he found another revolutionary 'man of action' he could support with gusto: Fidel Castro.
10. DuBois eventually condemned Nazi anti-Semitism, but often through clenched teeth as he was more than a little resentful of the special attention the plight of Jews was receiving in America. In September 1933 he editorialized in Crisis: 'Nothing has filled us with such unholy glee as Hitler and the Nordics. When the only 'inferior' peoples were 'niggers,' it was hard to get the attention of the New York Times for little matters of race, lynchings and mobs. But now that the damned include the owner of the Times, moral indignation is perking up.' Harold David Brackman, ''Calamity Almost Beyond Comprehension': Nazi Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in the Thought of W. E. B. DuBois,' American Jewish History 88, no. 1 (March 2000), citing W. E. B. DuBois, 'As the Crow Flies,' Crisis 40 (Sept. 1933), p. 97.
11. See John Garraty, James Q. Wilson, David Schoenbaum, Alonzo Hamby, Niall Ferguson, and, most powerfully, the German historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch.
12. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), pp. 32, 29.
13. Ironically, the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter made a similar, if dramatically more understated, argument about the progressives and populists in The Age of Reform and elsewhere. But he intimated that progressives and populists were essentially right-wing forces, an argument I don't believe can be sustained.
14. The national leaders would be 'pure and sensitive souls,' according to Robespierre, imbued with the ability to do what destiny demanded in 'the people's name' and blessed with the 'enlightenment' to determine which 'enemies within' required execution. See J. M. Thompson, Robespierre (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), p. 247. As Robespierre put it, 'The people is sublime, but individuals are weak' or expendable. Gertrude Himmelfarb, 'The Idea of Compassion: The British vs. the French Enlightenment,' Public Interest, no. 145 (Fall 2001), p. 20. See also Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 836; John Kekes, 'Why Robespierre Chose Terror,' City Journal (Spring 2006). Robespierre explained the need for terror: 'If the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue; it is not so much a special principle as it is a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs.'
15. Thomas R. DeGregori, 'Muck and Magic or Change and Progress: Vitalism Versus Hamiltonian Matter-of- Fact Knowledge,' Journal of Economic Issues 37, no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 17-33.
16. Seymour Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, The Politics of Unreason: Right Wing Extremism in America, 1790-1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), p. 95, citing New York Sun, July 23, 1896, p. 2, as reported in Edward Flower, 'Anti-Semitism in the Free Silver and Populist Movements and the Election of 1896' (master's thesis, Columbia University, 1952), pp. 27-28.
17. As Robert Proctor writes, 'Public health initiatives were pursued not just in spite of fascism, but also in consequence of fascism.' The National Socialist 'campaign against tobacco and the 'whole-grain bread operation' are, in some sense, as fascist as the yellow stars and the death camps.' Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 124, 249, 278.
18. Here is a list of the things the New York City Council tried to ban — not all successfully — in 2006 alone: pit bulls; trans fats; aluminum baseball bats; the purchase of tobacco by eighteen-to twenty-year-olds; foie gras; pedicabs in parks; new fast-food restaurants (but only in poor neighborhoods); lobbyists from the floor of council chambers; lobbying city agencies after working at the same agency; vehicles in Central and Prospect parks; cell phones in upscale restaurants; the sale of pork products made in a processing plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, because of a unionization dispute; mail-order pharmaceutical plans; candy-flavored cigarettes; gas-station operators adjusting prices more than once daily; Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus; Wal-Mart. 'Whatever It Is, They're Against It,' New York Post, Dec. 29, 2006, p. 36.
19. Greenpeace International, 'Getting It On for the Good of the Planet: The Greenpeace Guide to Environmentally-Friendly Sex,' Sept. 10, 2002, www.greenpeace.org/international/news/eco-sex-guide (accessed March 15, 2007).
20. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Knopf, 1994), vol. 2, p. 320.
21. Philip Coupland, 'H. G. Wells's 'Liberal Fascism,'' Journal of Contemporary History 35, no. 4 (Oct. 2000), p. 549.
22. Wells's theology was, to put it mildly, heretical. He argued that God was not all-powerful but rather an
