The Specter of Fascism: The Rise of Nationalism and the Worker
William L. Shirer writes in his ground-breaking novel The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, “There was social revolt too and this often transcended the racial struggle. The disenfranchised lower classes were demanding the ballot, and the workers were demanding the right to organize trade unions and strike […] To these developments, Hitler… was bitterly opposed”. While Shirer’s novel is a first-hand account of the rise of the Nazi Party in Europe, here he is capturing the European situation that influenced a young Adolf Hitler to pursue a genocidal anti-semitic government.
As I will assert throughout this essay, much like the modern age, fascism, and ultra-nationalism, which led to the Nazi Party; are based on hatred of the expanding of rights for minorities due to economic and cultural anxieties in societies exploited by the ruling class, to counter liberal or socialist revolutionary movements that toppled the divine right of kings across Europe, especially in light of failed war.
One must understand the material conditions that led the working class to allow and work with a fascist party. Much like Marx’s assertion that a “specter is haunting Europe,” the new specter is fascism, which has walked directly into the halls of power, and threatens to see the world order overturned for American Fascism.
“In many ways, World War I is what ended the 19th century. It undermined the faith in progress that had grown, despite all of its setbacks, throughout the nineteenth century among many, perhaps most, Europeans. The major political movements of the nineteenth century seemed to have succeeded: everywhere in Europe nations replaced empires (nationalism). Europe controlled more of the world in 1920 than it ever had or ever would again (imperialism). In the aftermath of the war, almost every government in Europe, even Germany, was a republican democracy based on the rule of law (liberalism)”.
As Brooks discusses, following the collapse of the Austrian-Hungarian, German, and parts of the Russian Empire, Europeans found themselves in a new land to inherit. They were witness to new forms of governance that developed throughout the 19th century as a result of industrialization. With the aftermath of the Great War leaving Europe in rubble and a Great Depression marking the end of the Roaring 20s, economic despair and the past expansion of rights began to be utilized to stoke age-old hatred and ultra-nationalism.
Encyclopaedia Judaica describes the plight of Jewish people in the wake of various revolutions. The United States and France were the first major liberal revolutions. In the States, while Jewish existence was nominally accepted, with the First Amendment’s protection of religion, they note that with a population of 3,000 out of 4,000,000, the economic anxiety of Jewish suffrage was not a concern. In France however, the multiple panics that followed the failures of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and their subsequent economic collapses, drove a rising return of anti-semitism. Particularly, they were vilified for the fact that Jewish communities did benefit and thrive under the revolutions, being able to build an economic class for the first time. In short, before the First World War, and even during the war in Russia, anti-semitism and pogroms against Jewish communities were on the rise; fueled by the economic collapse of Germany following the war and the subsequent Great Depression.
In Germany, the rise of the Nazis followed the Reich’s defeat in the Great War. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich noted that: “A good many paragraphs of the [Nazi] party program were obviously a demagogic appeal to the mood of the lower classes at a time when they were in bad straits, and were sympathetic to radical and even socialist slogans” (Shirer, 69). This truly encapsulates the reality of rising hatred of the Jewish population. Shirer, living in Berlin, had a first-hand account as to how he witnessed a party rise to dominate the nation based upon age-old racist views, exploiting various levels of society.
The National Socialist German Workers Party began as a political party for embittered veterans of the Great War. In their view, the nation had been sold out by the liberal establishment that went on to found the Weimar Republic. In their eyes, the largest driving force to their failure was also the Jewish population. After all, Encyclopaedia Judaica teaches that throughout the industrialization of the 19th century, Jewish communities’ biggest battleground was in Germany, where they faced severe discrimination and hatred. This fed into the minds of returning soldiers, military rank and file who felt themselves cheated as they watched the economy collapse. They organized with capitalists to regain power to counter the socialist reforms of the Weimar Republic and promised the old benefactors of the Kaiser a return to state capitalism. All while manipulating millions of starving and destitute Germans to focus on race hate. (Shirer, 229)
The same economic anxieties that drove the rise of the Nazis had already influenced Mussolini to lead a fascist movement that won power in Italy. Mussolini asserted while discussing his rationale for Italism Fascism, “it does not necessarily follow that the twentieth century must also be a century of Socialism, Liberalism, and Democracy: political doctrines pass, but humanity remains, and it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority…a century of Fascism.” He promised the revitalization of the Nation-State, inspiring Hitler and the Nazi Party. He also justified targeting vulnerable minorities in the name of fascism, which would take its darkest turn with the Nazi’s policy of mass extermination, “the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose this spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy in the twentieth century”.
Once the Nazis consolidated power, they worked quickly to enact race laws, based upon the eugenics movements of the era. In reading the SS Pamphlet, Rassenpolitik, “When National Socialism took power in Germany, most citizens did not understand the revolutionary significance of racial science and genetics. The victory of racial thinking in so short a time is astonishing. Scientific knowledge often requires decades, even centuries, to enter a people’s thinking.” (Berlin, 1943). One can point to several reasons that this population was so vulnerable and ready to accept race hate as policy. After all, this was the age of eugenics and race science, imperialism, and Henry Ford published his document of blood libel, “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” (Lecture, Week 5).
It took the Nazis over ten years to create the Third Reich, yet as Shirer asserts in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, “they knew how to create a mass movement [,] had learned the art of propaganda among the masses, and finally, they knew the value of using… ‘spiritual and physical’ terror. In short, through the construction of a racial platform, as asserted in the official platform of the Nazi Party, they had set up the mechanisms to engage in discrimination, mass deportation, slave labor, and eventually, the “Final Solution”. Upon gaining the legitimacy of the Reichstag, they were prepared to enact their vision for a racialized society built on violence.
In conclusion, the rise of Nazism, Fascism, and anti-Semitism can be traced to the economic instability and widespread anxiety that followed the revolutions across Europe and the aftermath of the Great War. The profound economic challenges and social upheaval of this period created an environment ripe for extremist ideologies to gain traction. As nations struggled with recovery, leaders like Hitler and Mussolini exploited public fear and frustration, offering authoritarian solutions that promised national strength and order. They used nostalgia and propaganda to convince people that life under the Kaisers, the Czars, and the Kings was superior, built on “social Darwinism”, including the vilification of unwanted parts of the population.
Central to these movements was the scapegoating of groups such as Jews, who were blamed for the economic turmoil.
The convergence of economic despair and political manipulation fueled the rise of these dangerous ideologies, which calls us to reflect on the current rise of ultra-nationalism sweeping the States, Western Europe, Russia, and the world at large. There are many parallels that one must examine in the language used to target the Jewish people, to the call for a new world order built on ultra-nationalism and authoritarianism.
The vilification of Jewish people did not happen overnight, nor was race hate a product of the Nazis. Hitler often justified the increasing violence and persecution of minorities, by chastising Jim Crow in the South, and the history of western colonization. In this era, prominent leaders like the famed pilot Charles Lindbergh, urged us to accept the Nazi wave, and in many ways to begin a similar purge of our society. In this day and age, a businessman capitalized off of the age-old hatred of Mexicans and Muslims, to dehumanize and urge violence against these groups. The right wing is willing to return to the days of robber barons, kings, serfs and masters; on the promise that Trump will target their chosen enemies.
Musk and Trump are following the age old playbook, championed by the dictator Benito Mussolini. As Il Duche stated, ““Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Now the world’s richest man is burning through every level of government to personally enrich his companies and purge those that practice liberal values of “diversity, equity, and inclusions”. In other, words, the corporation has joined the state, and has embraced a fascist purge.
Fascism is repeating itself once again. The only means to prevent this is to provide a real platform for a radical economic model. The tables that have been set for fascist to gorge over the planet, these tables must be overturned. Democrats failed in their failure to provide the working class with solutions and to challenge the status quo. The anarchists failed in their refusal to condone a single policy point that could encourage a convergence of the worker, the union, and a new society. A lack of organization, while important to decentralization, provides no means for the frustrated worker to have direct involvement in affairs, as a means to engage in radical politics that allow them to confront their material conditions. In order to meet the worker where they are, material conditions must be met. Plain and simple.
A specter is haunting Europe and the world at large. It is the specter of fascism, which would threaten to see our world descend into fascism. The workers reject fascism, and is our duty to organize with the workers, on a broad human front, to resist the erosion of democracy.
