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I. Class schedule

Mondays, periods III and IV, ZK101
Tuesdays, periods I and II, ZK206, 209
Fridays, periods VII and VIII, ZK101

II. The syllabus

This is what the good folk of C.I.E. want us to master:

......Theme 6: Totalitarianism between the Wars, 1919–39
• Conditions for the rise of totalitarianism: effects of World War I, the Great Depression, the failure of collective security, the failure of democratic government
• Aspects of ideology on theory and practice: leadership and the cult of personality, intolerance of diversity, economic structure, political system
• Totalitarian regimes and foreign relations: ideological influences shaping regimes’ perceptions of their roles in the world, conduct of foreign policy
• The rise of Fascism: ideology, Mussolini’s rise to power, the Fascist dictatorship
• The rise of Nazism: ideology, Hitler’s rise to power, the Nazi dictatorship
• The rise of Stalinism: Stalin’s rise to power, the Stalinist dictatorship.
(More curriculum stuff here.)

III. Some definitions

The terms totalitarian, communist, and (especially) fascist are hopelessly confused, partly through stupidity, partly through deliberate misuse of them as insults. Read how George Orwell painfully tries to extricate the term fascism from gibberish.
......Here is my own attempt:

MARXISM

is the system developed by Karl Marx, partly a philosophy of history, partly a political theory.
......He offered three big ideas:
......
......historical materialism: “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”
......
......class war: classes, not races or families or religions or nations, are the fundamental units, and war on each other
......
......the inevitable development of society: tribalism to slave society to feudalism to capitalism toto socialism (workers gain class consciousness, and via proletarian revolution depose the capitalist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, replacing it in turn with dictatorship of the proletariat) ? communism: a classless and stateless society.
......Capitalism, even in its sophisticated early C20 form (imperialism) is thus inevitably doomed.
......
Lenin turned Marxist theory into a programme of action. The Communist Party is “the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country”: it is the vanguard. It seizes absolute power through violent revolution. And then ...?

FASCISM

It’s easy to say what Fascism is against: Marxism first of all (it arises from a violent rejection of Marxism, and its practical success is a reaction); it is equally against liberalism, and the legitimate or conservate Right.
......What is it for? It is nationalist; it is authoritarian.
......Fascism venerates charismatic leadership by one figure. This figure is not normally the legitimate king (although Rumania is an exception here), nor a normal politician, but a superior individual chosen by fate to rule. The state encourages a cult of personality around him.
......But Fascism is also revolutionary.
......It means to create and maintain a revolutionised economic structure, changing social relations in a modern, self-determined culture, breaking with all tradition.
......In other words, it regards humanity as raw material, to be transformed by mere will (not intellect, not conscience) into a new, more disciplined, more efficient and happier species. Often Fascism is consciously ant-intellectual
......What goes with this is a certain aesthetic: romantic; with a stress on the masses, mobilised as one, rather than the quirky individual; joy through strength; joy through violence; a cult of masculinity, youth, with the woman essentially as breeder of new strength.
......Sometimes this reverence for violence shades off into conscious diabolism.
......Sometimes this reverence for family unity of the nation shades off into racial hatred (especially of cosmopolitan peoples without a nation: Gypsies and Jews).
......Fascism is, in aim, totalitarian: since it means to recreate humanity, everything human is properly under the authority of the state and its dictator.
......

IV. Past A-level questions

Paper 13, section B:
November 2011
• How far did Stalin continue Lenin’s policies in the USSR up to 1939?
• Which affected Europe more by 1914, Marxism or Liberalism?

June 2011
• ‘The most important reason for Hitler’s popularity in Germany from 1933 to 1939 was propaganda.’ How far do you agree with this view?
• To what extent did Russia become a Marxist country under Lenin and Stalin, up to 1939?

November 2010
• Explain the similarities and differences in the economies of Nazi Germany and the USSR in the 1930s.

June 2010
• How accurately can Hitler’s government of Germany from 1933 to 1939 be described as‘totalitarian’?
• Who did more to establish communism in Russia during the period from 1917 to 1939: Lenin or Stalin?

V. Some maps

Fascist regimes in Europe: green means fascistic or semi-fascistic dictatorships before 1939.
The Russian Civil War
The Soviet-Polish War

VI. Some readings

1. Fascism is a religion, said Mussolini. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism. In Italy, 1922 became year 1, new national “holy days” were instituted. Nationalistic Italians would go on pilgrimages to sites such as the Duce’s birthplace in Predappio, much like pilgrimages Muslims make to Mecca or Christians to Bethlehem. Mussolini was made Italy’s new God and anything negative or acknowledging his humanity, such as aging or health problems, were censored or withheld from the Italian population. Mussolini also made it a point that no one could be allowed to appear as a successor to him. He believed that the Fascist state would not outlive him.

2. In 1914 Europe was a patchwork of constitutional monarchies, with a few parliamentary republics. The Great War was advertised by Woodrow Wilson as a war to make the world “safe for democracy” – a notorious phrase. What that meant was the destruction of the great empires, and the establishment of new, much smaller republics, based on ethnicity, each duly equipped with democratic institutions.
.......These were unlikely to last, and didn't last. By 1939 Europe was a patchwork of dictatorships, in which the dictator enjoyed far more absolute sway than any monarch before 1914.
.......Out east there was the Bolshevik tyranny of Stalin, successor of Lenin, more terrible than any Tsar.
.......But all over Europe most states obeyed a ‘strongman’ or ‘great man’, variously titled, each revered in a cult of personality. There was the only original Mussolini, Duce of Italy; there was Metaxas, Archigos of Greece, Pilsudski, Naczelnik Panstwa of Poland, Franco, Caudillo of Spain, Salazar, dictatorial Prime Minister of Portugal, and of course Hitler, Führer of Germany.

.......These regimes were all, in a sense, right-wing, and to some extent authoritarian. It has seemed convenient to label them all fascist, after the Italian fascisti, and to regard this pan-European fascism as the counterpart of Soviet communism: the rival variety of ‘totalitarianism’.
.......But were these ‘fascist’ regimes very alike? ‘Fascism’ in Italy meant authoritarian socialism; in Spain, mere reaction, a cruder replacement of the ruined monarchy; in Poland and Hungary, simple conservative nationalism; in Greece, nationalism with a vague utopian rhetoric; in Portugal, old-fashioned Catholic paternalism. In Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Rumania it meant reviving unlimited monarchy.
.......Degrees of tyranny varied enormously. The press remained more-or-less free under some of these governments, including Mussolini’s. And there was no fascist ‘front’: Poland and Greece fought Hitler, and Italy nearly went to war with Germany in 1936, while Hitler was happy to ally with Stalin.
.......All these regimes looked ‘fascist’, of course. That is to say: in the ’Thirties, when jackboots, stiff-arm salutes and personality cults were in fashion, they tended to embrace such trappings. (The wee fellows on the right are members of the Hellenic youth organisation.) But it was often a tepid embrace. In Greece, for instance – note how shy Metaxas looks! Also in Portugal – this is what every classroom had to display under Salazar, who was content to be called Prime Minister. In Spain the Falangist regime of Franco adopted the fascists paraphenalia in the early ’Forties, then promptly shed it at the fall of Hitler, without changing its nature.
.......It thus seems clear that ‘fascist’ Germany was a unique case. The Nazis (and, from 1940, their quisling satellites) were consciously sinister and consciously extreme. They really did want to rival Bolshevism’s massacres and perpetual reign of terror. They alone were open enemies of the Church, aristocracy, and the cultural traditions of Europe. If we ‘fascist’
.......The embarassing truth is that ‘fascist’ Europe between the wars was simply post-parliamentary Europe, in diverse forms. Parliamentary goverment really was played out in Continental Europe by 1939. True, it was restored by Anglo-American arms in 1945 – but not as an organic phenomenon. It was simply imposed on Western Europe, just as Communist tyranny was imposed on Central Europe. It has not taken root. Note how eagerly France threw off parliamentarianism and revived the Bonapartist state in 1958. Note how carelessly each European state dissolves its popular sovereignty into the unelected super-state in Brussels. Note how in the Iberian peninsula, the only region not occupied by Soviets or Anglo-Americans, the authoritarian regimes survived, almost without effort. The Estado Novo in Portugal lasted until 1975, when a Communist coup wrecked it; Falangist Spain was never overthrown, but bequeathed itself to the restored monarchy.
.......Hence it seems that the ‘fascist’ regimes between the wars were not, as they are usually represented, a dead-end. The dead-end was nationalist republicanism, disastrously foisted on Europe in 1918 by Woodrow Wilson. Since 1922 non-Communist Europe has been trying to escape the Wilsonian utopia. European Federalism (the Holy Roman Empire done in gray) is only the latest experiment. It will not be the last.......... RJCM

3. Handout on the Bolshevik régime.

4. Norman Davies, Europe: A History, pp. 946-951.

5. R.R. Palmer and Joel Colton, A History of the Modern World, third ed. (1965), pp. 800-815.

6. David Thomson, Europe since Napoleon (1948), pp. 582-587.

7. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s (1992), pp. 261-277.

8. Visit the A-level modern world history site; it's excellent on the Nazis, especially on the organisation of the dictatorship and the workings of the police state.

VII. Films

Russia:
1. A very decent documentary on the Russian Revolution: I, II, III, IV;
2. while here we have a documentary on the October Revolution which is straightforward Communist propaganda.
3. An excerpt from the drama Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), sympathetic to both the Tsar and to Kerensky.
4. Some strident Stalinism.
5. It is hard to credit how credulous the Left in the West was about Stalin. Have a look at this astonishingly wicked (and badly made) film, Mission to Moscow (1943), based on the book by the American ambassador to Russia, Davies. Davies was a bribed agent of the Soviets; Hollywood was riddled with secret Communists; and this is the result.

Germany:
1. The greatest piece of all fascist propaganda: Leni Riefenstahl's 1934 film The Triumph of the Will, about the Nuremberg Rally - 700,000 people, 30 cameras, 105 minutes, one dictator.
2. A newsreel of a Nazi rally;
3. another, around 1928.
4. verge of power, 1932.
5. Life under Hitler for the young;
6. Was there an opposition? Of sorts. There were the young people of the White Rose, who canvassed against Hitler and were beheaded;
7. and even a few adults.

Spain:
1. A subtle discussion of the Nationalists;
2. unsubtle enthusiasm for Franco.
Spanish Civil War drama:
3. Raza (1942), Race, a 1942 Spanish semi-autobiographical war film directed by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, based on a novel by Franco himself (O yes!) under the pseudonym of Jaime de Andrade.
4. Naive enthusiasm for the Republic in Behold a Pale Horse (1964), directed by Fred Zinnemann, and starring Gregory Peck, Omar Sharif and Anthony Quinn, and
5. For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), directed by Sam Wood, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway.
6. Less naive enthusiasm: Land and Freedom (1995), directed by Ken Loach, hagiography of a British Communist prole who goes to Spain to fight for the so-called republicans.

Italy:
1. An excellent Discovery Channel documentary, usuing colour film, Fascism In Color: Mussolini In Power ( I, II, III, IV, V).
2. Fascist architecture.
3.Speeches by Mussolini; even one in
4.English!

VIII. Posters

The age of totalitarianism happened to coincide with the golden age of poster art.
.......Here's propaganda from the Soviet Union, Mussolini's fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Norway and Spain.
.......Now look at these posters: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
.......Do they represent extremes of Right or Left? How can you tell?