Fascism in History :: Papers

Fascism in History The Age of Anxiety, the age of the lost generation, was also an age in which modern Fascism and Totalitarianism made their appearance on the historical stage. By 1939, liberal democracies in Britain, France, Scandinavia and Switzerland were realities. But elsewhere across Europe, various kinds of dictators reared their ugly heads. Dictatorship seemed to be the wave of the future. It also seemed to be the wave of the present. After all, hadn't Mussolini proclaimed that this century would be a century of the right? Of Fascism? And this is what bothered such writers as Arthur Koestler (1905-1983), Yevgeny Zamayatin (1884-1937), Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), Karel Capek (1890-1938) and George Orwell (1903-1950). It was a nightmare world in which human individuality was subsumed under the might of totalitarian collectivism. The modern totalitarian state rejected liberal values and exercised total control over the lives of its subjects. How this indeed occurred is the subject of this lecture. It goes without saying that the governments of Europe had been conservative and anti-democratic throughout their long histories. The leaders of such governments -- whether monarch or autocrat -- WERE the government, and by their very nature, prevented any incidence of social or political change that might endanger the existing social order. Of course, there have been enlightened monarchs but few of them would have been so enlightened to have removed themselves from the sinews of power. Before the 19th century these monarchs legitimized their rule by recourse to the divine right theory of kingship, an idea which itself appeared in medieval Europe. Such was the case in France until the late 18th century when French revolutionaries decided to end the Bourbon claim to the throne by divine right by cutting off the head of Louis XVI. Of course, France ended up with Napoleon who also claimed the divine right of kingship. Only this time, divine right emanated from Napoleon himself. In a country such as England, on the other hand, twenty years of civil war in the 17th century as well as the Glorious Revolution of 1688, produced a constitutional monarchy. In the 19th century, it was the dual revolution -- the Industrial and French Revolutions -- which created the forces of social change which monarchs, enlightened or not, could not fail to take heed. A large middle class had made its appearance in the 18th century but lacked status. Now, in the 19th century, this large class of entrepreneurs, factory owners, civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, merchants and other professionals wanted their voices heard by their governments. They became a force which had to be reckoned with