GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

THEORY OF FASCISM 619
Barnes, may perhaps convey more dearly than I have
succeeded in doing the distinctive and essential characteristics
of the fascist attitude to life: "Fascism is determined
to educate the new generation into one of believers in a
Divine Providence, the heralds of an age of faith, to make
of the new generation one of heroes who know no fear
because of their faith, who would exalt the spirit of
sacrifice, gladly fly in the face of any danger run in a
worthy cause and welcome martyrdom with a smile. This
is no exaggeration. This is the root of the fascist revolution.
God is to become once more the central principle of our
conscious life, with an objective, didactic moral law,
founded on reason, recognized as paramount, not accordingly
running counter to the natural quasi-normative laws
of organic life, such as the laws of conservation, integration
and growth, but transcending them; a law that sums up
and harmonizes all our loyalties, dethrones the individual
or the State from the position they would usurp from God,
yet renders the self-regarding sentiment of self-respect or
patriotic feeling capable of receiving a divine extension/'
Having read and reflected upon this quotation the
reader may be disposed to object: 'But this account has
little in common with any statement of Fascism that I
have heard and absolutely nothing in common with the
spirit of the German Nazi movement, which appears to
be anti-Christian and, as you have pointed out above, is
disposed to deny the existence of the absolute values of
truth and of morality.' The reader's objection would, I
think, be justified* To make it, is to put one's finger on the
greatest of all the difficulties that confront the would-be
expositor of Fascism, which is that in Germany and in
Italy,
the two countries in which Fascism has come to
power, the temper of the movement is different, and is apt
to issue in different statements of doctrine. How then the
bewildered expositor cannot but repeat the questionis
it possible to give a coherent and precise account of a
creed which is at once so vague and so various?