In the exercising of power, stage four, fascists did not attempt to replace the state wholesale with the party apparatus as the Bolsheviks did. Instead, fascist leaders allowed their parties to build parallel structures, which then operated in permanent tension with the pre-existing state structures in a ‘bizarre mixture of legalism and arbitrary violence’. The German and Italian regimes may have seemed to outsiders like well-oiled machines, but they were riven with discord, uncertain lines of authority, and competing chieftains.
Which is precisely the situation that allowed fascism’s fifth stage — extreme radicalisation — to become what it did. Fascism was a dynamic force, promising the world to its followers and then never stopping for breath. ‘Fascist regimes had to produce an impression of driving momentum … They could not survive without that headlong, inebriating rush forward.’ This was hard to pull off: Mussolini invaded Ethiopia as a way of re-energising his frustrated cadres after a decade of rule, but his regime, afflicted by military defeats in the second world war, ultimately ran out of steam.
Hitler, alas, succeeded. The newly conquered lands of the east, where the authority of the German state did not reach, became a zone of unlimited arbitrary power. As ambitious territorial administrators, party leaders, and SS commanders engaged in ‘a Darwinian competition for attention and reward’ from their Führer, the atrocities mounted ever higher, ultimately being subsumed into the co- ordinated policy of the Final Solution. In its last days, having already spun far beyond any rational calculation of interest, Hitler’s regime chose self-immolation and national destruction.
Paxton concludes with a thoughtful chapter on the prospects for fascism in today’s world, finding its functional echoes — if not its formal existence — in the ethnic cleansing and demagoguery of Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbia and Franjo Tudjman’s Croatia. But he warns that no country is immune to fascism, recapping the embarrassing history of fascist and extremist movements in both Great Britain and the United States — though it would probably require ‘catastrophic setbacks and polarisation’ to allow such fringe movements to enter the mainstream. Still, Paxton leaves us with an unsettling thought: ‘We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular ‘“march” on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies” is enough.’
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