Tuesday, June 25, 2013
C3.23 (Oudemanhuispoort)
This paper addresses the origins of Italian Fascist anti-socialism and anti-communism in reaction to the post World War I socialist mobilization and the Bolshevik Revolution. Anti-socialism and anti-communism held a central tactical and philosophical place in Fascist ideology and politics from its 1919 founding, giving it a clear enemy to purge and a worldview to define itself against. Fascism as a movement was born in a crucible of anti-socialist violence, with the Fascist squads’ attacks on the leaders and institutions of Italian socialism and the political “cleansing” it brought about later to hold a proud and central place in Fascist identity and politics. The paper focuses on the ways in which the early Fascists represented socialism and communism as the violent dissolution of the Nation that they existed to defend and on the crusade early Fascist leaders declared against socialists and communists -- the subversive and foreign elements bent on national, economic and social destruction and responsible for the post First World War crisis. I analyze, in particular, enemy images of this first phase of Fascist anti-socialism in which Fascists represented socialists and communists as “anti-nation,”“shirkers,” and “cowards” who defiled the nation in its time of need. In this initial set of enemy images from Fascism’s movement phase (1919-1922), the Red enemy was disembodied, that is, represented by a symbols, most commonly a trampled red flag or a smashed hammer and sickle. This analysis of early Fascist anti-socialism and anti-communism and enemy representation offers critical insights into the character of the Fascist movement, the key mobilization function that the Left held for Fascism, and to the reaction of the early Fascists to the threats to capitalism and the state represent by the Left. I locate this critical look at the role played by "the enemy" in Fascist self-defintition within the larger issue of the centrality of enemies to modern political culture and the modern nation-state.
