Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
- 16,829
- 2,492
- 245
While not all conservatives are authoritarians; all highly authoritarian personalities are political conservatives.
Robert Altmeyer - The Authoritarians
In the February 29, 1929 edition of the Völkischer Beobachter (official newspaper of the Nazi Party), Adolf Hitler published an article on the new Lateran Treaty between Mussolini's fascist government and the Vatican. According to Hitler, this treaty should demonstrate to the world that not only are fascism and Christianity not polar opposites, but that they are in fact close kin which should be working together:
"The fact that the Curia is now making its peace with Fascism shows that the Vatican trusts the new political realities far more than did the former liberal democracy with which it could not come to terms.
...The fact that the Catholic Church has come to an agreement with Fascist Italy ...proves beyond doubt that the Fascist world of ideas is closer to Christianity than those of Jewish liberalism or even atheistic Marxism, to which the so-called Catholic Center Party sees itself so closely bound, to the detriment of Christianity today and our German people."
Note Hitler's use of the phrase "Jewish liberalism." An important aspect of modern political anti-Semitism was the ability to associate Jews with everything conservative Christians disliked about modernity: emancipation (of women, Jews, gays, and other minorities), the loss of Christian privileges, legalized contraception and abortion, easier divorces, sexual liberty, socialist economic policies, expanding capitalism, etc. Conservative Christianity has never come entirely to terms with the Enlightenment and modern political liberalism.
I guess you also feel Hitler was a misunderstood pacifist, since it's easy to find many quotes in which he pleads for peace.
No, I don't 'feel' Hitler was a misunderstood pacifist. Not when you understand the history of Europe leading up to fascism.
Traditional conservatives have persistently criticized modern liberalism for its alleged softness. After the First World War right-wing German and Italian critics abused the governments of Weimar Germany and pre-Mussolini Italy for their commitment to social welfare, which their critics linked to an unwillingness to use force in international relations. To use Robert Kagans expression, the Weimar Republic could only do the dishes, not prepare the feast.
German and Italian critics of liberalismwriters such as Ernst Jünger and Giovanni Gentilelonged for the military spirit that allegedly typified the front-fighter generation that had lived through the horrors of trench warfare during World War I. The experience of war, they said, could redeem the anti-national Weimar Republic and the spineless decadence of Italian liberalism by reintroducing them to the necessity of using forcewhich would mean a much more ready resort to military power and a reorientation of government to promote its use. Both men and nations could thereby reestablish their virility.
Extreme right-wing theoreticiansfor example, German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmittbelieved that the European states in general had to choose between defending the interests of their national communitiesat the end of the day by forceand sustaining a debilitating commitment to popular welfare, which more and more absorbed the energies of a weak-kneed liberalism that precariously clung to power in many European states. Schmitt believed that the state existed exclusively to oppose the enemies of the national community and ensure domestic order. Politics, he famously said, is founded on the friend-enemy polarity. Liberals had embarked on a fruitless crusade to escape inevitable political conflict within their societies by expanding the welfare function of the modern state to appease the demands of the masses, and thereby weakening its executive function.
The proximate causes of this revulsion against liberalism in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere are not far to seek. And the underlying anti-liberal logic was more cultural than political-economic. After defeat in World War I neither Germany nor Italy was able to advance its interests effectively in Europe. The Italians were widely regarded as pathetic soldiers. The Italians, Bismarck said, have such large appetites and such poor teeth. Giovanni Gentile, subsequently a Fascist minister for Mussolini, lamented the dolce far niente (sweet do nothing) that he found characterized the Italians as a nation. As for the Germans, they had of course lost the war, but they were encouraged to believe that their armies and fighting men had not been defeated on the battlefield but had been betrayed by an unpatriotic cabal of Jews, Francophiles, liberals, and socialists.
So for these men and like-minded others, there was a necessary connection between reviving militarism and imperialism and curtailing the states commitment to popular welfare. Only a new political elitebattle-hardened, ruthless, and devoted to authoritarian governmentcould achieve the reforms needed to restore these states to the ranks of the European powerful. The new governments would not be parliamentary: talk shops never get anything done. In Italy the Fascist elite developed an imperial ideology focusing on Rome; in Germany, too, there was an imperial elementthe Thousand Year Empirealthough we correctly understand the racism of the National Socialists to have been their most memorable contribution to the horrors of the 20th century.
The Hard Road to Fascism
