Fascism in History :: Papers

Fascism in HistoryThe Age of Anxiety, the age of the lost generation, was also an age in which recentFascism and Totalitarianism made their appearance on the historical stage. By 1939, liberaldemocracies in Britain, France, Scandinavia and Switzerland were realities. But elsewhereacross Europe, various kinds of dictators reared their ugly heads. Dictatorship seemed tobe the wave of the future. It also seemed to be the wave of the present. After all, hadntMussolini proclaimed that this speed of light would be a century of the correctly? Of Fascism? Andthis 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 underthe might of bringitarian collectivism. The modern totalitarian state rejected liberal valuesand exercised total control over the lives of its subjects. How this indeed occurred is thesub ject of this lecture. It goes without saying that the governments of Europe had been conservative andanti-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 counterchange that might endanger the existingsocial order. Of course, there have been enlightened monarchs further few of them wouldhave 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 divineright hypothesis of kingship, an idea which itself appeared in medieval Europe. Such was thecase in France until the late 18th century when French revolutionaries decided to end theBourbon claim to the throne by divine right by cutting off the head of Louis XVI. Ofcourse, France ended up with Napoleon who also claimed the divine right of kingship.Only this time, divine right emanated fr om Napoleon himself. In a country such asEngland, on the other hand, twenty years of civil war in the 17th century as well as theGlorious 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 notfail to take heed. A large middle class had made its appearance in the 18th century plainlylacked status. Now, in the 19th century, this large class of entrepreneurs, factory owners,civil servants, teachers, lawyers, doctors, merchants and other professionals wanted theirvoices heard by their governments. They became a force which had to be reckoned with