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understand is that these fascist dictators are popular dictators, by
which I mean dictators who, though by no means loved by the
people, nevertheless hold their power through them. They are
demagogic dictators as distinguished from purely military dictators.
The regime includes a group of social and economic ingredients
without which the dictatorships could never have been established
and without which they could not have lasted so long.
There is a whole library of pamphlets, books, and orations produced
to prove that fascism was caused by the Treaty of Versailles
or by the greed or stupidity of Britain and France, or by the ingrown
wickedness of the German or the supine âabbiness of the
Italian, by anti-Semitism or munitions profiteers, by the conspiracies
of business magnates or the rising hatred of the free world
of the scholar. Yet fascism grew up in Italy without any push from
anti-Semitism and it flourished there before it did in Germany, which
is supposed to be the peculiar victim of Versailles. It has made its
appearance in Greece and the Slavic Balkans as well as in "Nordic"
Germany and Latin Italy and in Portugal where there were no
munitions magnates to stir the broth.
You may hear any day angry discussions of the course of events
in Washington. You will hear ardent New Dealers assert that the
government is building a great buttress around the crumbling walls
of democracy. Others tell you, with equal assurance, that the order
being fashioned there is obviously National Socialism, while still
others are quite as sure that it is communistic. Certainly it cannot
be all these things. It is, I fear, reasonably certain that most of those
who damn the present Washington regime look upon it as Red—and
take Mr. Dies's revelations of the number of Communist party
members and fellow* travelers who have penetrated the bureaus as
evidence that we are on our way to bolshevism. The fears of these
critics are very much alive, and they grow in virulence. Yet we
cannot afford to be in doubt about the real meaning and direction
of our policies.
If we have any doubt, therefore, about what fascism is we would
do well to resolve them. And the best way to do that is to examine
it in the land where it began. If we will look at it in Italy, how it
rose, what produced it, and what it in. turn created as a system of
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