BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victim-hood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

-- Robert Paxton

An insightful, illuminating companion to Naomi Wolf's"The End of America: A Letter of Warning To A Young Patriot." BuzzFlash has sold hundreds of copies of Wolf's book that offers persuasive evidence that the U.S., under the Bush regime, is crossing the threshold into fascism.

This is a historical look at fascism's development in the first half of the last century, but the readerr cannot help but look at portents in our own society. The sense of "white victimization" and demonizing of "radicals" that one hears from FOX commentators come right out one of the essential ingredients leading to fascism: a nativist group that feels aggrieved and dispossessed of its power and self-respect.

From the Journal Foreign Affairs:

n his quest for understanding, Paxton surveys how a broad array of fascist movements has sought out followers, formed alliances, and seized and exercised power. The comparisons show great variety over time and place but also reveal characteristics that distinguish fascism from other kinds of authoritarian rule. Fascists, he concludes, were identifiable most of all by a style of political behavior that emphasized historical grievances, worshiped the cult of leadership, relied on a mass-based movement of national militants, repressed democratic liberties, and used violence as a political tool. Paxton's first book, "Vichy France," has become the standard work in the field despite its once-controversial thesis (that the Vichy regime was not merely imposed by Nazis but had domestic roots); "The Anatomy of Fascism," based on decades of research and teaching, is likely to prove just as authoritative. The in-depth bibliographical essay alone will guide scholars and graduate students for years to come.

From an online reviewer:

This book admirably summarizes a vast literature on Fascism and highlights a few key points which can be kept in mind when the threat of Fascism is imagined or raised.

1. Fascism cannot be understood only from its ideologues, it needs to be looked at in practice.
2. The practice of Fascism, as indeed the rise to power of Fascism, requires collaboration and support from the much older, stronger, and more respectable conservative and establishmentarian foundations of any society.
3. Because Fascism is designed to prevent leftist revolution it is profoundly conservative, but because its means are radical it cannot really remain conservative in practice.
4. Because Fascism is conservative it does not require much in the way of terror, intimidation, or violence to capture the acquiescence and cooperation of large segments of society, particularly of "respectable" society. It does its evil under the cover of the good and the conventional.
5. Therefore Fascism's evil can be hard to discover until it is too late.

Paxton also provides a list of the "mobilizing passions" of Fascism which can be looked for in any society. It is here that one can in contemporary America, for example, analyze the ranting and raving of talk-show hosts, the unconventional and radical goals of foreign policy experts, the manipulation of patriotic appeals, and the apocalyptic appeals of popular religiosity to discover whether Fascism has entered the national life or not. The Fascist label can be used indiscriminately and falsely, but it is possible that at the present time it ought to be used more insightfully. But it ought indeed to be used!

Library Journal:

Paxton (Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Social Sciences, Columbia Univ.; Vichy France) dissects a historical phenomenon that unleashed the deadliest epoch in world history. It is well known that fascism consumed the passions of Germany and Italy, but Paxton reminds readers that the fascist impulse found expression throughout the globe and still poses a threat to international stability. His goal is to find generic characteristics that shape the dynamics of fascism-not the product of a well-defined ideology, Paxton emphasizes, but rather a visceral response to national crises that defy conventional solutions. Paxton stresses that all fascist movements sanctify violence and view life as a Darwinian struggle; beleaguered constituencies turn toward a leader who revitalizes nationalistic sentiments by demonizing perceived internal and external enemies.

BuzzFlash note: Paxton might not necessarily agree that America is in the midst of a fascist movement, because fascism is something that is defined by him as a realized product -- and we haven't yet irrevocably crossed the Rubicon, although Naomi Wolf convincingly argues that all the current to lead us there are in place.

Robert O. Paxton taught at Columbia University. His other books include Vichy France, Vichy France and the Jews (with Michael Marrus), Europe in the Twentieth Century, and French Peasant Fascism. He lives in New York City.




BUZZFLASH REVIEWS