Should-Read: John Lukacs: The Duel: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler

Should-Read: The very sharp John Lukacs on what I call “fascism”—proletarian ethnoi that need to fight enemies foreign and domestic with economic cleavages within the ethnoi papered over, rather than proletarian classes that need the economic system unrigged. For some reason he calls it “nationalism”, which I think is properly something different: there may well be elective affinity between belief in the nation-state as a political and sociological community and fascism, but it is certainly not an identity: John Lukacs: The Duel: The Eighty Day Struggle Between Churchill and Hitler: “The principal force of the twentieth century is nationalism…

…It has been the fatal, or near fatal, error of Communism as well as Democracy to ignore that until it is—almost—too late. The greatest and most powerful apostle of modern nationalism was Adolf Hitler… a superlative—I am employing this word not in its commendatory sense—incarnation of a historical movement that, at least for twenty or twenty-five years, in novel forms seemed to overrun the world. From about 1920 to 1945, the quarter century that corresponds to the span of the political career of Hitler (though not of Churchill), the history of the world (and not only of Europe) was marked by a triangular struggle… Communism… Democracy… and… a new historical force, inadequately called “Fascism”…. This is why it is not only historically wrong but dangerous to see Hitler and Hitlerism as no more than a strange parenthesis in the history of the twentieth century, the transitory rise and fall of a madman.

In spite of its international pretensions and propaganda Communism did not go very far outside the Soviet Union…. Alone among the great revolutions of the world—consider only how the American and French revolutions had soon been emulated by a host of other peoples, in Latin America and in Western Europe, often without the support of American or French armies—Communism was unable to achieve power anywhere outside the Soviet Union until after the Second World War….

During the twenty years before 1940 liberal parliamentary democracy failed and was abandoned by the peoples of Italy, Turkey, Portugal, Spain, Bulgaria, Greece, Rumania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Albania, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, Germany — not to speak of Japan, China and many Central and South American countries. These changes were not the results of external pressure. They were the results of spontaneous developments…. The character of these dictatorships varied from country to country. Most of them were not “totalitarian,” in the later accepted sense of that term. Some of these national dictatorships resisted Hitler. But, by and large, Democracy was in retreat. It gave the impression of institutions and ideas that were tired and outworn. The very political map of Europe reflected this….

Within every nation, including the Western democracies, there were people who not only opposed the war—this war, against the German Third Reich—but whose opposition was inseparable from (indeed, often it was motivated by) their contempt for the democratic politics and government of their own nation, and from their consequent respect for what Hitler and his order seemed to represent…. Within France convinced Nazi sympathizers were few; but there were many men and women whose contempt for their seemingly corrupt and ineffectual governmental and social system debouched naturally into their dislike for France’s waging war in alliance with Britain. Even in the United States, where “isolationism” was widespread and politically strong, consistent isolationists were few and far between. Most isolationists, bitter opponents of Roosevelt and his administration, were not opposed to armaments and the military. What they opposed was this war, the war waged by the aged and corrupt British and French empires against Germany, and the inclinations of Roosevelt and others to side with the former…