Nazism and Fascism- The Ultimate Ideologies

Introduction

The two ideologies, Fascism and Nazism originated from Italy and Germany respectively. It can be stated that these two ideologies are very same yet very different at the same time. Basically Nazism is a specific type of Fascism because Nazism supports the ideologies of Fascism.

 The word Nazism is an abbreviated form of ‘National Socialism’ where race is considered supreme- master race. According to Nazism, in a country the race which represents majority of its population is the master race. The other minority should either serve the master race or be eliminated. Nazism serves the sole purpose of the advancement of the ‘master race’. Adolf Hitler- brilliant orator and a former leader of Germany was the initiator of Nazism.

Fascism, originated under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini is an ideology where state is considered supreme. The central theme is the state. The state is supreme and everything revolves around the state. Even though Fascism too practices nationalism they accept he minorities provided that these minority groups adopt their culture, language and religion.

 Simply, Nazism wants to eliminate race while Fascism believes in eliminating the culture. However it is my opinion that none of these ideologies were able to solve peoples’ tribulations and both the initiative dictators of these ideologies only lead their countries to extreme war situations and utter chaos.

National Socialism (Nazism)

The word Nazism is derived from the word National Socialism; basically Nazism is the shortened form of National Socialism. It is a unique variety of Fascism which incorporates biological racism and anti-Semitism. The ideology was first developed by Anton Drexler and then by Adolf Hitler, but the forefather of modern Nazism is considered as Adolf Hitler. Initially Nazi political views portrayed leftist ideas (anti-big business, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist but later those aspects were downplayed in the 1930s to obtain the support of industrial owners to the Nazi Party and significance was given to anti-Marxist and anti-Semitist theories.

Nazism advocated the supremacy of the supposed ‘Master Race’ (in the case of Germany which was the Aryan race) over the other races. Nazis believed that the greatest threat to the Aryan race was the Jews whom they called Parasites. To maintain the purity of the Aryan race  the Nazis sought to exterminate or impose exclusionary segregation upon "degenerate" and "asocial" groups that included: Jews, homosexuals, Romani, Blacks, the physically and mentally disabled, Jehovah's Witnesses and political opponents.

The methods adopted by Nazis to achieve their political, diplomatic and economical goals were often based on violence and war. The Nazi theory promoted war and militarism and in fact it envisaged politics as being a battle. They often carried out violent attacks on their opponents, particularly Jews. The party’s brain child Sturmabteilung- a paramilitary organization affiliated to the Nazi party carried out these attacks.

The economic system proposed by Nazis enclosed numerous advantages to Aryans while it deliberately excluded all the other minority races. the Nazis supported völkisch equality that officially ascribed collective racial equality of opportunity, equality before the law, and full legal rights to those able people of German blood or related Aryan blood but deliberately excluded people outside of this definition who were regarded as inferior and rejected the conception of universal equality of individuals. The Nazis advocated a welfare state in Germany for German citizens (able Germans of Aryan racial descent) as a means to provide social justice and eliminate social barriers between the German people. It promoted the creation of a community of common interest between managers and employees in industry where a factory leader would be selected to act in coordination with a council of factory members, though these members would have to obey the Führerprinzip of the factory leader. The economy was to be subordinate to the goals of the political leadership of the state.

The official presentation of Nazism is such that it is a neither left wing nor a right wing political ideology but a politically syncretic ideology. However a majority of scholars identify Nazism in practice as being a far right form of politics.

The Hitler File

Adolf Hitler- The Man Who Hated Jews (Forefather of Nazism)

·        Name- Adolf Hitler

·        Date of Birth- 20^th April 1889

·        Date of Demise- 30^th April 1945

·        Special Skills- Brilliant orator and a bright student at school. He also had a passion for art and said to be extremely good at sketching buildings and landmarks.

·        Hitler was the fourth child of Alois Hitler and Klara Hitler. He is said to have been a very intelligent and a deeply religious child in his boyhood. It was unfortunate that he didn’t use his learning skills at secondary school and his answer for the tough competition was to stop trying. By the age of eighteen he moved to Vienna and joined the German army with the outbreak of the First World War. Due to commitments in war he was awarded five medals including the prestigious Iron Cross and also served the German army as a spy. In September 1919 he joined the German Workers Party and that marked the beginning of his political career. He was able to attract more members to the party with the use of orating skills in his speeches. Hitler created National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in February 1920 which came to power under Hitler’s leadership. While in power Hitler practiced anti-Semitism and anti-communism where mass culled Jews. In January 1945 Hitler’s government was overthrown with the entrance of soviet troops into Nazi Germany. He spent his last years in an underground bunker and committed suicide with his wife Eva Braun on 30^th April 1945.

Fascism

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascism advocates the supremacy of the state which is ruled by the supreme leader by way of a dictatorship. Fascists believe that a nation’s well being is based on the qualitative values and fascist conception states that a nation must be led by qualitatively-able leaders while rejecting democracies for being based on quantitative evaluation of individuals and their opinions rather than qualities. To achieve its goals, fascists purge forces, ideas, people, and systems deemed to be the cause of decadence and degeneration.

Political violence is given vitality in Fascism and war is considered as an action which creates national regeneration, spirit and vitality. Fascism applauds militarism as providing positive transformation in society and providing spiritual renovation, education, instilling of a will to dominate in people's character and creating national comradeship through military service. Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations for violent attacks on opponents or to overthrow a political system.

Fascism supports a socially united, collective national society and opposes socially divided class-based societies (including liberal bourgeois society and Marxian proletarian society) and socially-divided individualist-based society. Fascists claim it is a trans-class movement, advocating resolution to domestic class conflicts within a nation to secure national solidarity. While fascism opposes domestic class conflict, it favours a proletarian national culture and claims its goal of nationalizing society levels and social classes and emancipates the nation's proletariat. While viewing domestic class conflict within a nation as unnecessary and resolvable, fascism believes that bourgeois-proletarian conflict primarily exists in national conflicts between proletarian nations versus bourgeois nations; fascism declares support for the victory of proletarian nations. It is opposed to many ideologies, including conservatism, liberalism, and two major forms of socialism: communism and social democracy. It opposes a variety of economic, political and social systems, it is opposed to democracy, parliamentary systems, in most cases has an inherently anti-clerical background with some exceptions, and holds a distinctive opposition to capitalism. It rejects egalitarianism, materialism, and rationalism in favour of action, discipline, hierarchy, spirit and will. 

Fascists advocate: a state-directed, regulated economy that is dedicated to the nation; the use and primacy of regulated private property and private enterprise contingent upon service to the nation or state; the use of state enterprise where private enterprise is failing or is inefficient; and autarky. They are hostile to finance capitalism, plutocracy, and internationalist economics.

Fascism was founded during World War I by Italian national syndicalists who combined left-wing and right-wing political views, but Italian Fascism gravitated to the right in the early 1920s. Mussolini in 1919 described fascism as a syncretism movement that would strike "against the backwardness of the right and the destructiveness of the left". Italian Fascists described fascism as a right-wing ideology in the political program The Doctrine of Fascism: "We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the 'right,' a fascist century." However they also officially declared that although they were "sitting on the right" they were generally indifferent to their position on the left-right spectrum, as being a conclusion of their combination of views rather than an objective, and considering it insignificant to their basis of their views that they claimed could just as easily be associated with "the mountain of the center" as with the right. There is a running dispute among scholars about where along the left/right spectrum that fascism resides.

 The Mussolini File

Benito Mussolini- The Man Who Believed in State and not in People (Forefather of Fascism)

·     Name- Benito Mussolini

·     Date of Birth- 29^th July 1883 in Predappio, Italy 

·     Date of Demise- 29^th of April 1945

·     Special Skills- Intelligent student at school and he also had good writing and oratory skills.

·     Mussolini came from a very poor family where the father was a blacksmith and they lived in a small and crowded two bed roomed house. Though Mussolini was a bright student he was violent and had a large ego. When in boarding school Mussolini was expelled for stabbing another student and after obtaining his diploma in 1901 he briefly taught at secondary school. In 1904 he joined the military and engaged in full time politics thereafter.   Mussolini became a member of the Socialist Party in 1900 but he deserted the party in 1914 to cross over to the enemy camp, the Italian middle class. He also founded a news paper called Popolo d'Italia in the same year. Mussolini came to power in October 1922 and once in power he took steps to remain in power. The climax of his political career was the 1930s where he received a wider support. However during this period the Italian working class had to undergo a tremendous amount of suffering while only the ruling class benefited from Mussolini’s rule. In 1940–41 Mussolini's armies, badly supplied and poorly led, suffered defeats from Europe across the Mediterranean to the African continent. Italy lost its war in 1942; Mussolini's power collapsed six months later. Restored as Hitler's puppet in northern Italy in 1943, he drove Italy deeper into invasion, occupation, and civil war during 1944 and 1945. He was finally executed by a firing squad on April 28, 1945, at Dongo in Como province.

                                                                                       

How did Fascism Differ from Nazism?

The two ideologies Fascism and Nazism are very different and very similar at the same time.

Not all fascists are Nazi's, but it would be all but required to support fascist ideology in order to be a true Nazi. Fascists are not necessarily racist, which is contrary to the anti-Semitic doctrines which are at the core of Nazi ideology. This is proved when paid attention to the given statement,

‘Not all Fascists are Nazis, but all Nazis are Fascists’

The question is where do you draw the line between Fascism and Nazism?

First let us take the similarities of these two ideologies into consideration in order to differentiate between the two.

·        Both Fascists and Nazis use political violence to achieve their political, diplomatic or economical aims.

·        Both the ideologies believed in practicing militarism and paramilitary organizations under the patronage of the government were established during their rule.

·        War was promoted by both ideologies.

·        Both were right wing political ideologies although initially Nazism showed more of a leftist aspect. However some scholars also claim that these two ideologies were neither left wing nor right wing political ideologies.

·        Both were influenced by the rise of nationalism, fear from communism, crisis of the capitalist economic system and dissatisfaction with the outcome of World War I.

Now, let us consider the differences of Fascism and Nazism.

·        The most significant disparity between Fascism and Nazism is that theory of supremacy. Nazism believes that the ‘master race’ in a country is supreme while Fascism believes that the highest point of supremacy is the state.

·        Another major difference between Fascism and Nazism was their rise to power. The National Fascist Party came to power in Italy as early as 1922, while Hitler’s putsch in Munich inspired by Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome turned out to be a failure. The Nazi Party, officially called the National Socialist German Workers Party achieved virtually no success until the early 1930’s, while its leader Adolf Hitler was laughed at.

·        Nazism had a rule where only the master race (Aryans) were benefited and given the citizenship rights, where as the Fascist rule was state oriented.

·        Nazism practiced genocide and Anti-Semitism while Fascism rejected it and provided the opportunity for the minority to follow them provided the minority should eliminate their own culture and embrace the culture of the master race.

·        Nazism believes in eliminating people while Fascism believes in eliminating culture.  

·        Mussolini focused on territorial expansion rather than creation of ethnically “clean” Italian state.

·        The Nazis rejected corporatism although they supported state intervention in the economy and cultural production. They viewed modernism as a sign of cultural degeneration and promoted “healthy” art that emphasized the ideas of the Nazi doctrine. The Fascists in Italy, on the other hand, did not restrict artistic expression and encouraged creativity rather than promoting the Fascist style. They did, however, censored all works that openly attacked the state or the Fascist regime. Both the Fascist and Nazi architecture had a tendency towards monumentalizing but again, they differentiated themselves in the view of modernism.

·          The state under Nazism serves the sole purpose of the advancement of the "master race." Nationalism is one aspect of Fascism. However, nationalism is often used to stress the superiority of the national culture as opposed to other minority cultures. Fascism accepts other groups, provided that the minority groups reject their culture, language, and religion for the superior nationalism. For example, the fascist Christian Socialists advocate the conversion of Jews to Christianity, not the extermination of the Jewish race, as the Nazi German Nationalists would have it. Fascism wants to exterminate the culture, not the people.