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fascism. Because the brutalities committed by the fascist gangs, thesuppressions of writers and statesmen, the aggressions of the fascistgovernments against neighbors make up the raw materials of news,the public is familiar chiefly with the dictator element in fascismand is only very dimly aware of its other factors. Dictatorship alonedoes not make a fascist state. The dictatorship of Russia, while followingthe usual shocking techniques of tyranny—the concentrationcamp and the firing squad—is very far from being a fascist dictatorship.In any dictatorship the dictator attacks such internal enemiesand coddles such internal allies as suit his purposes, and so his suppressionsand propaganda will be directed at different groups indifferent countries. Hence while Hitler denounces and persecutes theJews, it was two Jews—Theodore Wolfï and Emil Ludwig—who acclaimedMussolini, because the latter did not find it profitable to attackthem. The central point of all this is that dictatorship is anessential instrument of fascism but that the other elements outlinedhere are equally essential to it as an institution. In different countriesit may alter its attitudes on religion or literature or races or womenor forms of education, but always it will be militaristic and imperialistdictatorship employing government debt and autarchy in itssocial structure.The commonly accepted theory that fascism originated in theconspiracy of the great industrialists to capture the state will nothold. It originated on the Left. Primarily it gets its first impulsesin the decadent or corrupt forms of socialism—from among thoseerstwhile socialists who, wearying of that struggle, have turned firstto syndicalism and then to becoming saviors of capitalism, by adaptingthe devices of socialism and syndicalism to the capitalist state.The industrialists and nationalists joined up only when the fascistsquadrons had produced that disorder and confusion in which theyfound themselves lost. Then they supposed they perceived dimly atfirst and then more clearly, in the preachments of the fascists, thegerms of an economic corporativism that they could control, or theysaw in the fascist squadrons the only effective enemy for the timebeing against communism. Fascism is a leftist product—a corruptand diseased offshoot of leftist agitation.It is equally superficial to assume that this job was the work of68