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Hitler the Revolutionary Socialist (continued)
D'Souza continues his characterization of fascism with militarism and capitalism. On militarism, he cites Stanley Payne again, noting that Payne believed (wrongly, I think, but it's possibly beside the point here) militarism was not an essential feature of fascism. D'Souza says, "I mention this not to exonerate fascism and Nazism on this score, but to highlight that we should not confuse the incidental features of an ideology with its central characteristics."[1] This is an interesting point to reflect back on D'Souza, particularly with regard to the nationalism and definition of nation inherent in fascism (on which see the last post in this series).
Regarding capitalism, D'Souza begins by calling Cornel West a "dummy" for believing that capitalism generally and big business specifically play large roles in neofascism (on which, note the distinction, which D'Souza himself includes in his quotation from West, between fascism and neofascism). D'Souza's error here is in his conclusion of his section "defining" fascism: "Mussolini saw fascism as Hitler later saw Nazism: as a mechanism for rapid economic development operating through a framework that was not capitalist but rather collectivist, statist, and socialist."[2]
This is a tremendous oversimplification of a complex issue, made patently wrong by its omission of a key term: corporatism. In his defense, D'Souza will broach this term later in the book, in his chapter on Mussolini, and we can address the specifics of fascist corporatism at that point in this essay, but for now, it should suffice to say the following.
Hitler did not view socialism or capitalism as being a mechanism for rapid economic development. While it's certainly true that he viewed rapid economic development as a desirable goal, he had this view because of both the inspiration and the ultimate purpose of rapid economic development in Nazi Germany, i.e., rearmament. The extent to which socialism, capitalism, or some combination of the two would achieve this goal was a question that Hitler left often. More on this point below in addressing the 25 Points of the platform of the Nazi Party, specifically those parts of the platform ultimately abandoned by Hitler when he achieved power.
On Giovanni Gentile
D'Souza moves now to a lengthy discussion of the philosopher of Italian fascism, Giovanni Gentile. As already noted, part of D'Souza's misrepresetation/misconstrual of Gentile stems from his failure to acknowledge how Gentile as a fascist conceptualized the state as the organic representation of the people or nation defined primarily ethnically. D'Souza's initial observations about Gentle -- some correct and some not -- are less important ultimately than when he begins analyzing Gentile's relationship with socialism.
Rightly, D'Souza acknowledges that Gentile is a critic of bourgeois like Marx but that their similarity ends there, but the author then goes promptly off the rails with his pronouncement that "Gentile was, in fact, a lifelong socialist."[3] This is a statement that is not even remotely true, which D'Souza would know had he read Gentile's Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, which he quotes in the epigram to the current section. Indeed, Gentile so thoroughly situates fascism as a counterpoint to socialism in that volume that it's remarkable that D'Souza could come away with this conclusion honestly.
For instance, in the section of his essay entitled "The Fascist Doctrine of the State," Gentile notes the considerable overlap between the ideologies of fascism and nationalism, then writing, "The relationship between the individual and the State proposed by Nationalism was the direct antithesis of that advanced by individualistic liberalism and socialism."[4]
Importantly, Gentile, as indicated by D'Souza, posits the individual nature of classical liberalism as being antithetical to fascism; however, Gentile is equally clear that socialism is on the liberal side of this dispute and not the fascist side. Thus is a core assumption of D'Souza's undermined by one of his own sources. Remarkably, D'Souza's discussion of Gentile and the philosophical underpinnings of fascism ignores the topic of syndicalism, although (as with corporatism) it is one he addresses in the next chapter.
Further Abuse
Lest we think this is the sole example of D'Souza's abuse of sources, he's only gotten started. The epigraph for the next section -- "In Speech and in Deed," comes from Walter Laqueur's volume on fascism. As rendered by D'Souza, Laqueur wrote, "Fascism was not conservative at all in inspiration but was aimed at creating a new society with a new kind of human being."[5] This quote is surprising easy to find in Laqueur's book: it appears on the first page in slightly different from: "Fascism did not belong to the extreme Left, yet defining it as part of the extreme Right is not very illuminating either. In many respects, fascism was not conservative at all in inspiration but was aimed at creating a new society with a new kind of human beings."[6]
Again, note the difference between D'Souza's theory (fascism is an ideology of the far left) and what his source actually says ("Fascism did not belong to the extreme Left"). The reader gets the feeling that appeals to authority are being made for precisely the opposite effects originally intended. The remainder of this section of the chapter is dedicated to demonstrating that philosophies often different in theory and in practice, which should be obvious, before turning the Nazi Party platform. (He does take a moment to refer to the Italian way of doing things as "half-assed."[6])
Finally, we get to the Nazi program. As if the title of his book had been forgotten, D'Souza writes, "If you read the Nazi platform without knowing its source, you could easily be forgiven for thinking you were reading the 2016 platform of the Democratic Party. Or at least a Democratic platform drafted jointly by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren."[7] But is it really that close? Here's the platform:
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/25points.htm
D'Souza notes that Robert Paxton pins the leftist planks of the platform the "left wing" of the party, led by the Strasser brothers. D'Souza even claims that the platform was cowritten by the Strassers. It was not: Hitler wrote it with the party founders, Anton Drexler, Gottfried Feder, and Dietrich Eckhart. That point aside, D'Souza writes, "At no point did Hitler repudiate the principles that he and the Strassers advanced at the outset."
Is that true? Not hardly. Although the first ten platform planks were adhered to and implemented in one form or another, the 11th (no unearned income), 12th (no war profiteering), 13th (nationalization of trusts), 14th (profit sharing in big businesses), 17th (agrarian land reform), and 22nd (creation of a people's army) were not, and these are arguably the most socialist of the planks of all. Even allowing for a moment the notion that the Nazis or some wing thereof might have been left wing in an economic sense at one point in theory, in practice, the ideology was not left wing and not socialist. Should the argument be made that a public health service constitute socialism, then it should be borne in mind that this program was created in Germany under Bismarck, himself no socialist.
D'Souza concludes the chapter by saying that Hitler was socialist but only for Germans -- everyone else was excluded from the rights and protections under Nazi "socialism." Again, we can wonder how true this statement is, given that socialism was decidedly not implemented in Germany under the Nazis, but perhaps more importantly, we should note that a core assumption of traditional socialism has been the notion of a brotherhood of man -- a fraternity of all working people. One need only think of Marx's "Workingmen of all nations, unite!" The idea of providing the benefits of socialism for the minority and subjugating the rest, whether proletarians or bourgeoisie, is profoundly unsocialist.
To be continued
[1] Dinesh D'Souza, The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left (Washington: Regnery, 2017), 885.
[2] Ibid, 918.
[3] Ibid, 949.
[4] Giovanni Gentile, Origins and Doctrine of Fascism, With Selections from Other Works, translated edited, and annotated by A. James Gregor (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 2002), 25.
[5] Quoted in D'Souza, ibid, 1000.
[6] Walter Laqueur, Fascism: Past, Present, and Future (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), 13.
[7] D'Souza, ibid, 1039.
[8] Ibid, 1088.
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