Fascism

Adolf Hitler, in 1939, age 50,
with Benito Mussolini.

Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, was the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. Similar political movements, including Nazism, spread across Europe between World War I and World War II.

The most restrictive definitions of fascism include only one government, that of Mussolini in Italy. However, the term is frequently applied to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and is used to refer to similar regimes and movements across Europe in the same time period, such as Hungary's Arrow Cross Party, Romania's Iron Guard, Spain's Falange, and the French political movements led by Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot.

More broadly, it is sometimes (by both supporters and opponents) applied to other authoritarian regimes of the period such as those of Imperial Japan under Hideki Tojo, Austria under Engelbert Dollfuss and Greece under Ioannis Metaxas. Its use for similar but longer-lived regimes such as Spain under Francisco Franco and the Estado Novo of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal is widespread among opponents of those regimes but is often disputed by their supporters. This trend toward the term being used only by opponents is amplified in the case of more recent authoritarian regimes such as Indonesia under Suharto, and Chile under Augusto Pinochet.

Although the broadest definitions of fascism may include every authoritarian state that has ever existed, most theorists see important distinctions to be made. Fascism in Italy arose in the 1920s as a mixture of syndicalist notions with an anti-materialist theory of the state; the latter had already been linked to an extreme nationalism. Fascism in many ways seems to have been clearly developed as a reaction against Communism and Marxism, both in a philosophic and political sense, although it opposed democratic capitalist economics along with Socialism, Marxism, and liberal democracy. It viewed the state as an organic entity in a positive light rather than as an institution designed to protect collective and individual rights, or as one that should be held in check. It tended to reject the Marxist notion of social classes (and universally dismissed the concept of class conflict), replacing it instead with two more nebulous struggles: conflict between races and the struggle of the youth versus their elders. This meant embracing nationalism and mysticism, and advancing ideas of strength and power as means of legitimacy, a might makes right that glorified war as an end it itself and determinant of truth and worthiness. An affinity to these ideas can be found in Social Darwinism. These ideas are in direct opposition to the ideas reason or rationalism characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment, from which liberalism and, later, Marxism would emerge.

Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic. The fascist state regulates and controls the means of production. Fascism exalts the nation, state, or race as superior to the individuals, institutions, or groups composing it. Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, often to the point of a cult of personality.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 4, 1906 – April 9, 1945) was a German Lutheran pastor and theologian. He was also a participant in the German Resistance movement against Nazism, a founding member of the Confessing Church. His involvement in plans by members of the Abwehr (the German Military Intelligence Office) to assassinate Adolf Hitler resulted in his arrest in April 1943 and his subsequent execution by hanging in April 1945, shortly before the war's end. His view of Christianity's role in the secular world has become very influential.

Academic Training

Bonhoeffer attended Tübingen University for a year and visited Rome, where he became conscious of the universality of the church, before he matriculated at the University of Berlin in 1924, then a centre of liberal theology under theologians such as Adolf von Harnack. Around this time, he discovered the writings of Karl Barth, an eminent Swiss theologian whose pioneering work in neo-orthodoxy was a reaction against liberal theology. Barth believed that "liberal theology" (understood as emphasizing personal experience and societal development) minimized scripture, reducing it to a mere textbook of metaphysics while sanctioning the deification of human culture. Harnack cautioned Bonhoeffer against dangers posed by Barth's "contempt for scientific theology", but young Bonhoeffer, becoming increasingly critical of liberal theology as too constraining and responsible for the lack of relevance in the church, was won over to Barth's dialectical theology. Bonhoeffer was nevertheless not beyond criticizing Barth, and the confluence of Barth's Christocentrism and Harnack's concern to show the relevance of Christianity to the modern world had indelible effect on Bonhoeffer's approach to theology.

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Adolf Hitler, Rise To Power

Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany began in September 1919 when Hitler joined the political party that was known as the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (abbreviated as DAP, and later commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). This political party was formed and developed during the post-World War I era. It was anti-Marxist and was opposed to the democratic post-war government of the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles; and it advocated extreme nationalism and Pan-Germanism as well as virulent anti-Semitism. Hitler's "rise" can be considered to have ended in March 1933, after the Reichstag adopted the Enabling Act of 1933 in that month; President Paul von Hindenburg had already appointed Hitler as Chancellor on 30 January 1933 after a series of parliamentary elections and associated backstairs intrigues. The Enabling Act—when used ruthlessly and with authority—virtually assured that Hitler could thereafter constitutionally exercise dictatorial power without legal objection.

Hitler rose to a place of prominence in the early years of the party (1919 - 1923) largely as a result of his considerable skills in oratory, organization and promotion. He was aided in part by his willingness to use violence in advancing his political objectives and to recruit party members who were willing to do the same. The Beer Hall putsch in 1923 and the later release of his book Mein Kampf (usually translated as My Struggle) introduced Hitler to a wider audience. In the mid-1920s, the party engaged in electoral battles in which Hitler participated as a speaker and organizer, as well as in street battles and violence between the Rotfrontkämpferbund and the Nazi's Sturmabteilung (SA). Through the late 1920s and early 1930s, the Nazis gathered enough electoral support to become the largest political party in the Reichstag, and Hitler's blend of political acuity, deceptiveness and cunning converted the party's non-majority but plurality status into effective governing power in the ailing Weimar Republic of 1933.

Once in power, the Nazis created a mythology surrounding the rise to power, and they described the period that roughly corresponds to the scope of this article as either the Kampfzeit (the time of struggle) or the Kampfjahre (years of struggle).

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Fascism

Fascism (in Italian, fascismo), capitalized, was the authoritarian political movement which ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 under the leadership of Benito Mussolini. Similar political movements, including Nazism, spread across Europe between World War I and World War II.

The most restrictive definitions of fascism include only one government, that of Mussolini in Italy. However, the term is frequently applied to Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and is used to refer to similar regimes and movements across Europe in the same time period, such as Hungary's Arrow Cross Party, Romania's Iron Guard, Spain's Falange, and the French political movements led by Marcel Déat and Jacques Doriot.

More broadly, it is sometimes (by both supporters and opponents) applied to other authoritarian regimes of the period such as those of Imperial Japan under Hideki Tojo, Austria under Engelbert Dollfuss and Greece under Ioannis Metaxas. Its use for similar but longer-lived regimes such as Spain under Francisco Franco and the Estado Novo of António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal is widespread among opponents of those regimes but is often disputed by their supporters. This trend toward the term being used only by opponents is amplified in the case of more recent authoritarian regimes such as Indonesia under Suharto, and Chile under Augusto Pinochet.

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