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СКАЧАТЬ relationship of Europe with Africa and Asia. The politics of Hitler and Mussolini is often reduced to their capacity to treat racial outsiders as non-human, but the fascists were not the first people to treat their opponents in this way. On his return from revolutionary Spain, the British journalist and (briefly) enthusiast for a Marxism poised between Socialism and Communism, George Orwell, grasped this, writing in 1939:

      What we always forget is that the overwhelming bulk of the British proletariat does not live in Britain, but in Africa and Asia. It is not in Hitler’s power, for instance, to make a penny an hour a normal industrial wage; it is perfectly normal in India, and we are at great pains to keep it so. One gets some idea of the real relationship of England and India when one reflects that the per capita income in England is something over £80, and in India about £7. It is quite common for an Indian coolie’s leg to be thinner than the average Englishman’s arm.³²

      As fascism became an idea to be emulated, prospective military dictators all over the world chose to declare that they too were fascists. But when this happened the aspirant fascists of the developing world found to their humiliation that neither Mussolini nor Hitler were interested in them. When given a choice between loyalty to fellow right-wing ideologues and loyalty to existing colonial structures, the fascist leaders repeatedly chose the latter.³³

      Fascism extended existing practices of colonial rule. Italian generals ordered the use of mustard gas against Libyan rebels in 1930. In 1923, the nomadic population of Djabal al Akhdar was forced into concentration camps in the desert and neglected so thoroughly that half of the prisoners died.³⁴ In Ethiopia following the 1935 invasion, the Italian Empire operated minutely worked-out polices of racial zoning, segregation in shops, cinemas and restaurants, the banning of mixed unions, and the use of criminal laws to prevent the parents of mixed-race children from providing for them. Its policies of racial segregation were more extensive than any other European power in Africa at that time.³⁵

      The historian Jürgen Zimmerer writes that Hitler and the leaders of the NSDAP learned from previous instances of colonial killing, and events such as the massacre of the Hereros in German-ruled Namibia in 1904,³⁶ grasping that similar techniques might be employed in Europe. One key moment in the massacre of the Hereros was an order given by General Lothar von Trotha. He commanded his troops to fire directly on any Herero men they saw, but to shoot into the air above Herero women and children. This was not an act of kindness; the idea was to force the survivors into the desert where they would die of thirst. Trotha’s acts were well known in Germany. Hermann Göring’s father served as a colonial administrator in South West Africa; Franz Ritter von Epp participated in the genocide and was later a member of the NSDAP in the 1920s. Hitler and Himmler drew on Trotha’s commands in justifying their own killings in winter 1941.³⁷

      Meanwhile in occupied eastern Europe after 1939, the Nazis intended, in the words of one historian of international politics, Alexander Anievas, ‘to telescope over the course of a few decades the territorial imperialisms other European countries had pursued over the previous three centuries’.³⁸ The Nazis treated the Slavs as an inferior race, entitling them to destroy existing settlements and tear up forms of land use as if the east was a land without people, and finally commenced in the Holocaust a system of industrialised mass killing which went further even than the history of colonial massacres on which it drew.

       Revolution and Counter-Revolution

      In 1917–19, the soldiers’ and sailors’ mutinies that brought an end to the First World War pushed European society to the left. There were revolutions in Russia, Hungary and Germany, and across Europe there were mass strikes. In Italy, 1919 and 1920 were known as the Biennio Rosso, the two Red Years. In Turin, armed workers set up factory councils. In September 1920, when engineering employers called a lock-out, half a million workers took control of their factories.³⁹ Without appreciating the extent of the revolutionary fervour of 1919–20, it is impossible to understand how it was that fascism could grow afterwards.⁴⁰

      In Germany, as in Italy, the end of the war was followed by a period of revolution. Throughout 1918, there were repeated mutinies in the German armed forces. In November 1918, a revolt in the naval barracks at Kiel sparked the formation of sailors’, soldiers’ and workers’ councils, which spread through the northern ports and inland to Berlin. On 9 November, this mass movement forced the Kaiser to abdicate. In January 1919, there was a failed revolt in Berlin, the ‘Spartacist Days’. In April, Bavarian leftists formed a Soviet Republic, although it was crushed the following month. In 1920, a general strike in Berlin stopped an attempted coup led by Wolfgang Kapp, a civil servant and right-wing journalist. In summer 1923, as the mark collapsed, miners, steel workers, Berlin metal workers and printers all took part in huge political strikes against the government. Workers formed proletarian hundreds, armed guards, as the first step towards a left-wing insurrection. The Communist Party vacillated and then shelved its plans; thus, as it had been in Italy, the opportunity was lost.⁴¹

      The question of the relationship between fascism and counterrevolution has repeatedly divided historians. It was posed starkly during the German ‘historians’ controversy’ (Historikerstreit) of 1986–7, in which a key part was played by Ernst Nolte, a historian of ideas, who had worked for many years on questions of politics and philosophy before becoming a historian. Nolte’s previous 1963 book, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (published in English as Three Faces of Fascism) had been a considerable publishing success and is of lasting value. It sought to interpret fascism through the works of the left-liberal novelist Thomas Mann, and through Mann’s insight that the 1930s had been an ‘age of fascism’ in which powerful historical forces had converted the authoritarian right into fascism. Twenty years later, as Nolte had become older and more partisan, he was looking for a rhetorical device which could liberate Germans, and especially German conservatives, from their association with Hitler’s atrocities. Nolte’s solution was to argue that Nazism had been a response to the revolutionary excesses of the political left. Had it not been for the threat of a German revolution, there would have been no counter-revolution. It followed that the people who deserved the blame for the Holocaust were not the Nazis, nor the conservative politicians who invited them into power, but the Russian revolutionaries who had diverted interwar Europe from its likely path of peace and social calm.⁴²

      Nolte himself was widely criticised during the Historikerstreit and there have been very few writers who have followed him since. But one premise of his approach which has been attractive to a wider group of historians is the idea that fascism was a politics of counter-revolution, the revenge in other words of those who had been defeated during the 1917–18 revolutions in Russia and Germany.

      The Marxist writers of the interwar years come close to this insight. The speed with which Italy went over from revolution to fascism makes this approach, or something like it, almost inevitable. But, even in Germany, the dynamics were different. The spirit of revolution had been at its height in 1919 or 1923, it had been waning for years by the time of Hitler’s victory.

      For the interwar Marxists, the most obvious forms of counterrevolution could be seen in those postwar countries where a revolution had been defeated but otherwise society continued along previous lines. Fascism, Zetkin explained, had a different programme. It mobilised different people to more ambitious ends. Zetkin cautioned against comparing the fascists to such forces as the Horthy regime in Hungary. That had been a military response to that country’s Soviet Republic. It was anti-liberal, and had an uneasy alliance with right-wing paramilitaries. Elections were held, albeit Communists were banned and trade unions subject to police supervision.⁴³ Horthy’s government ‘was established’, Zetkin wrote, ‘after the short-lived revolution of the proletariat had been supressed and was the expression of vengeance of the bourgeoisie’. Fascism, by contrast, ‘is not the revenge of the bourgeoisie … The fascist leaders are not a small and exclusive caste; they extend deeply into wider elements СКАЧАТЬ