HIST 102 #34 - Totalitarianism in the Fascist States

Thank you. Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. On our last lecture, you learned about World War One and the peace that resulted from World War One with the Treaty of Versailles, which obviously encompassed quite a lot of changes in the world after the end of World War One. And of course, we also, I wanted to mention, had a Great Depression. I've mentioned this before, just want to mention it again, that there was a Great Depression that will not only affect the United States with the stock market crash in 1929, but it will also affect Europe as well. In fact, Germany will be devastated. High inflation, people are burning money. It's better to burn money for kindling than to actually spend it because the money was worthless. Wasn't even worth printing, probably. It was that bad. And not just Germany was affected, but you're Europe as well. This was a worldwide depression.

And we're going to see that in times of, of economic strain and times of trouble, when people aren't, um, you know, they don't feel secure, maybe they're not getting enough food, you have soup kitchens and you have bread lines all over Europe, also in the United States as well. That the situation is ripe for what is called totalitarianism to take hold. And when I say totalitarianism, I want to give you a kind of a what that means. And because you'll learn, of course, more about it in our lecture coming up, but you know, the best examples of totalitarianism would be in, at least for the fascist states, would be in Italy and Germany. Now, there was totalitarianism in the Soviet Union as well, which will be another lecture, but they were communist. The Soviet Union was not fascist. It was a different kind of totality, but all of them are totalitarianism. But Italy and Germany are fascist. The Soviet Union is communist in nature. In fact, Adolf Hitler hated the Soviet Union, hated, um, hated Stalin. Stalin hated Adolf Hitler, okay? Although they will, as you'll find out, make a non-aggression pact, but it wasn't because they loved each other and they weren't best friends. So communism and fascism does not, they do not go hand in hand. Different. And you'll learn, of course, what that means as we go through the lectures.

But as far as the general broad term of totalitarianism, you know, it's where the government takes over the economic, the political, the personal freedoms of its people, um, using modern mass propaganda techniques to, to conquer the minds and to influence the minds of the people. In fact, you know, the United States will use propaganda methods with Hollywood and the movie industry with, uh, World War One, well, with World War II, when we show, of course, the Germans, we never show the Germans in a very positive light. That is, of course, influencing the listeners and the, the people that are watching these movies. So we see that it's not just a, it's it's mass, it's it's big. These propaganda techniques, they're not targeting a few people, they're targeting a lot of people in the country, led by one leader, a single leader. In Italy, we have Benito Mussolini, and Germany, of course, will have Adolf Hitler. And then, of course, when we get into communist Russia, we will have Joseph Stalin. And we have a single party, the fascist party, the Communist Party. We have, in, in Germany, the Nazi party, okay? So a single party.

Now, your individual freedoms in a totalitarian state are subordinate, under inferior, to the will of the, the masses, the people, and of course, the leader. And that one party will determine what the will is, but you do not have individual freedom, okay? Definitely not a democracy. Police control to enforce that will. Now, not, like I said, remember this, not all totalitarian states are the same. For this lecture, we'll focus on the fascist states. And of course, communist state of Soviet Union will come in a later lecture. So you'll learn about the growth of totalitarian, totalitarianism in Italy, and you'll also learn about the, the rise to power of this Nazi party in Germany. And how, in between World War One and World War II, we're seeing both Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, who will make an alliance, by the way. It's called the Rome-Berlin Axis. They will fight together, although Mussolini will be the weaker partner. I think at first he felt he would be the stronger partner, but Italy is the weaker partner in this Rome-Berlin Axis. But we'll see that in between World War One and World War II, we have this rise to power from Mussolini, and we have Adolf Hitler. And and his Adolf Hitler actually rises to power through legitimate constitutional means. He tried to do a little takeover there, and he was imprisoned. If you want to call it imprisonment, it wasn't like he was tortured or anything, but that's where he wrote his book, his autobiography called Mein Kampf, which means my struggle. So you'll learn about that too, of course.

And, you know, Germany with the Great Depression, with the war guilt clause and the reparations they had to pay, saying that they were at fault for World War One. Italy was extremely poor by this time. The people were suffering. Italy as well. Italy had felt cheated by that peace, the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One, felt that they had not received enough compensation for their part in the fighting in World War One. So the economy was hurt. You know, lots of men had been killed from World War One. Italian economy was just devastated. And, uh, a lot of the, the Italian people blame their very weak rulers for not getting what they needed. And so we see that, uh, this, the situation is ripe for this kind of totalitarian state to emerge and and flourish there, at least for a while. Obviously, it doesn't last. So let's learn more about totalitarianism in the fascist states.

Hello. Today we're going to talk about fascism in a totalitarian state. The period between World War One and World War II is often known as the fascist period because fascism as a movement emerged during this era, and it really didn't gain any significance until the end of World War One, and it was basically over by the end of World War II with the Axis loss of World War II. Now, the term fascism comes from the Latin word fasciari, and that means to bind or to unite. The symbol of the powerful fascist party in Italy was the fasces, or the Roman two-headed axe, and that had been the symbol of the Roman Empire thousands of years previously, symbolizing authority. Unity and authority were extremely important to a fascist regime.

The economic devastation of World War One and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire at the end of World War One, followed by the Great Depression in 1929, led many nations to seek strong leaders. They were looking for saviors, people to bring them out of this economic morass, out of this devastation, and they were willing to believe anything that these leaders told them. Many strong leaders promised to restore their nations to their former glory and to their former economic prosperity with stories of miracles and promises of miraculous recoveries that were actually just campaign promises, but many people believed them and accepted those stories because that's what they wanted to hear. Now, in return for electing these people to power, or in some cases, allowing these people to seize power illegally, the leaders were able to take almost unlimited control over society. And because they had almost total control over their societies, we tend to call these regimes totalitarian regimes.

Now, totalitarian regimes don't have to be fascist. Fascism is on the far right end of the political spectrum. Totalitarian regimes can also be left-wing. For example, many Communist governments had totalitarian regimes, like Stalin's Soviet Union. But whether they're right-wing or left-wing, a totalitarian regime exercises extreme political control over its people, not just in their behavior, but also in their beliefs. It wants to make people into true believers. It does not want any dissenters. It does not tolerate any kind of opposition in a totalitarian regime.

Now, after the Bolshevik Revolution of the Soviet Union in 1917, the emergence of the reaction against that was fascism. And a lot of times we see this happen that politically, when people emerge in one direction, when there's a movement that's say left-wing, that if that's perceived to be failing, people will run in the opposite direction to the right-wing, or vice versa, they'll run back to the left-wing. And so the emergence of Soviet Bolshevism in 1917 also contributed to the rise of fascism throughout Europe. It was a reaction against communism. Sometimes students get confused and they think that communism and fascism are the same. They might appear to be the same because they both can occur in totalitarian regimes, but they're very different. And we're going to look at fascism today and see how that is so different from communism. In fact, the fascist governments of the fascist period saw the Soviet Union and its communist government as a serious threat to their authority, and they tried to fight against communism and root it out within their own societies.

So we can look at it almost like an equation. You have World War One and its aftermath, plus the fragmentation of the Habsburg Empire, which collapses at the end of World War One, plus the 1929 Great Depression, you know, people's discontent and disillusionment with civilian rule and democracy, plus the Bolshevik threat of the 1917 Soviet Revolution. And all that converges to create kind of a perfect storm that creates fascism. Now, this reaction against the far left, as I said, caused people to run in the opposite direction to the far right and to create fascist movements.

Now, many of us, if we're asked to identify fascist governments, we can come up with Germany, and maybe some people might even offer Italy. But most of us don't really realize that there were many, many other fascist movements and many other fascist regimes besides just Germany and Italy. Fascism was widely popular during the fascist era, and even though Germany became well-known for fascism, fascism and fascist political parties and movements were popular even in the United States, and of course, you know, they were extremely popular in Europe.

Now, sometimes it's hard to figure out, you know, what fascism is because it occurs in so many different societies. Fascism was not a single ideology. It didn't have one person pushing it and creating social science models of it like communism did with Karl Marx. Fascism didn't have one particular leader or one particular proponent. Fascism really emerged as many variations of far-right political ideology, and there were many different independent grassroots movements of fascism throughout Europe. In fact, there were 23 European nations with 49 competing fascist movements. Half of these movements developed after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933. So it's clear to see that the success of the fascists in Germany influenced and encouraged fascists in other nations. It encouraged them to seek political office, to try to be elected legally, as Hitler was. You know, sometimes we assume that Hitler seized power illegally. That's actually not correct. Hitler's National Socialist Party was elected to power, as was Mussolini's Italian Socialist Party. And once they had gained power legally and had the authority to exercise political control over the other branches of government, then they began their illegal seizures of power to exert total control and to become totalitarian regimes.

Now, after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the public in many democratic nations started to lose confidence in their civilian and democratic governments. And a great deal of that was caused by the Great Depression of 1929. After the Great Depression of 1929, you know, people were devastated economically. You had high rates of unemployment, incredibly high rates of poverty and starvation. If things were bad in the United States, but they were much worse in every other nation of the world. And in the United States, we were fortunate because we were looking for a savior too, and we elected President Franklin Roosevelt. But he did not suspend democratic rules. He did not seize total control. But in many other nations, that did happen. Nations that were looking for a savior got what they thought was someone who would pull them out of this devastation, but it was actually someone who would drag them down and bring them to the brink of destruction by World War II.

Now, not all of the fascist movements came to power in their nations, but a significant number of them actually did. And most of these fascist movements emerged from the devastation of World War One and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, as I mentioned. Even before World War One had ended, during the period of 1914 to 1918, a fascist regime ruled by various dictators emerged in Portugal, and that regime lasted until the end of World War II. So it was a very long-lasting fascist regime in Portugal. The collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, at the end of World War One also left Hungary vulnerable to fascism, and Hungary came under the control of the military dictatorship of Admiral Horthy from 1999, or I'm sorry, from 1919 until nearly the end of World War II. Then in Italy, competing fascist movements emerged at the end of World War One, but Benito Mussolini quickly seized power and led his faction fascism to rule. He ruled the nation until the Italian resistance movement deposed him near the end of World War II.

Now, you also have other groups. For example, in 1920, fascist groups started emerging in Germany, and those groups in Germany competed against each other, and eventually the National Socialist Party of Germany was elected to govern in 1933. And that was mainly because voters had grown increasingly bitter about the loss of World War One for Germany, the Great Depression and its economic devastation, and the demilitarization process and the democratic government that was forced upon Germany after World War One. As you may know, World War One ended with the Versailles Treaty, and some of the conditions of the Versailles Treaty were that Germany, as the loser, Germany would have to pay war reparations, they would have to pay for losing the war, they would have to demilitarize, which means disassemble their military so that they would no longer be a threat to their European neighbors, and they were forced to create a democratic government, the Weimar Republic. And even though democracy might be the best form of government in the world, if it's forced upon a nation by a foreign occupier or by, you know, troops or a nation that has won a very bitter war, that nation is very unlikely to accept democracy, no matter how good a system it is. And that's what happened in Germany, that people were resistant to democratic rule and to the democratic mechanisms of politics because it was a phenomenon that was being forced upon by outsiders, and they did not want to accept that.

Now, in Norway, fascist movements were also popular, and they grew very strongly after the Great Depression and lasted until World War II. And Norway's neighbor, Finland, also experienced fascist groups, but they were never successful in gaining control of the Finnish government. Romania's fascist movement was fairly weak as well, gaining power only for a very brief period, and part of that is due to its proximity to the Soviet Union and the influence of communism. So there was a power struggle going on here in Europe between the communists of the far left and the fascists of the far right. The fascists of Spain, also known as the Falange, waged a bloody civil war against the elected government, the democratic government, from 1936 to 1939, and they installed a military dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Franco ruled Spain from the end of the Civil War in 1939 until his death in 1975, long after the end of World War II and the collapse of other fascist regimes. So some fascist regimes, you know, were very long-lasting and lasted long after the end of what we call the fascist period, that interwar period.

Now, Poland's fascists were much less successful because, again, like Romania, they were competing against a strong communist government, so they never really came to power. They were never really a serious threat. And even Britain, our democratic ally and longtime friend, even Britain experienced homegrown fascist movements, grassroots fascist movements, and these influenced foreign policy before World War II, and they never gained control of the government, but they were strongly, you know, powerful in influencing the British government to appease Hitler, to to engage in conferences and negotiations with Hitler, for example, the Munich Conference of 1938, in which Britain agreed to accept Germany's takeover of Czechoslovakia in return for Germany's promise to let the rest of Europe alone, particularly Britain, of course. That turned out to be a very poor negotiation because Germany had no intentions of keeping that promise. Hitler was intent upon invading and taking over as many European nations as he possibly could to gain living space for the German people and to eliminate what he considered considered to be inferior ethnic groups throughout Europe.

Now, Sweden and the Netherlands had their own native fascist movements that developed after the Great Depression and its economic collapse, but these groups remained small and were unable to seize any kind of significant political power. The Great Depression also popularized fascism in Hitler's homeland of Austria, and that brought Chancellor Dollfuss to power, but he opposed Hitler's annexation of Austria, and that was very, very telling for Chancellor Dollfuss. He was assassinated in 1934 for opposing Hitler. Hitler soon annexed Austria with the Union, or Anschluss, and he brought it under German fascist control just four years later, in 1938.

Now, France also had some local fascist movements, but they were unable to compete with the strong democratic ideals of the French Revolution. And Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940, ruling the north directly from Berlin and setting up a puppet government in the South. And you have this puppet government of the South known as the Vichy regime. And so essentially, all of France was ruled by fascist regimes.

Now, we can see that there are a lot of different nations then that have experienced fascism, whether the fascist movements were simply popular and active and influencing the competition between communist, democratic, and fascist political parties, or whether they actually seized power and governed for a significant period of time. Look at the wide variety of fascist movements. These regimes shared certain common characteristics, and that's what we're going to look at now. The common characteristics of fascism that unite these fascist nations and bind them together and identify them as fascist societies for us.

First of all, fascists distrust rationality and reason. They encourage blind belief in government policies because they know that if people start to critically analyze government policies, that they'll start to question the rules that fascist regimes impose. This practice of distrusting rationality and reason makes it very easy for followers because as a follower, you really don't need to think or reflect or analyze policy. You simply march along and do what your leaders tell you. You believe what they tell you blindly, without criticizing it, without looking at the facts, without subjecting it to any kind of rational analysis. They can resort to pre-packaged dogma in times of stress. And even though it might seem like people would not want to do that, like they would want to think for themselves, many times people find that too complicated. They don't want a complicated answer. For example, during the period of the Great Depression, oftentimes people didn't want to hear about the complexities of capitalism and the highs and lows of a fluctuating free trade market. They just wanted someone to blame. And so if you could identify a particular group and say that they were responsible, you know, for the economic collapse, it was much easier to understand. And people tended to grasp that kind of explanation much more easily than a complex explanation of the international political economy and the, the emergence of globalization during the beginning of the 20th century. People like simplicity, and that is certainly what fascism offers them.

Now, with this pre-packaged dogma that the fascist regimes offered, they simply suspend reason and react out of habit. For example, they could use, uh, certain groups and say that they were an international conspiracy of Jewish bankers. That was a common explanation in Germany. They might target other groups in other nations. They might target the communists or or socialists in some of the more Eastern European nations. So this idea of dogma over reason, this is very much a fascist trait.

Now, linked to that, fascists also tend to use emotion, particularly fear, to maintain their followers and to motivate their followers. They dehumanize their enemies by describing them as sub-human, less than human, animalistic. And that actually makes it easier for their followers to act violently against people. If you think of someone as being less than a person, less than a human being, you know, less than someone who has a soul, then it's much easier to exterminate them or to torture them or to act in other violent means against them. Fascists might even demonize their enemies. That's a step further. In addition to being less than human, their enemies are now evil. And if you have an enemy who's evil, not only is it okay to treat them as less than human, but it's actually necessary because you're compelled to fight evil. And so demonizing your enemies is not unique to fascist regimes, but fascist regimes always use this. They always try to make their enemies appear as evil as possible so that their followers will be motivated to try and wipe out and eliminate these evil enemies.

Now, you also have other issues within fascism. For example, instead of teaching people totally new information, which is hard, you might try and teach them things that they already know, but tweak that information just a little bit. Sometimes we refer to that as a priori knowledge or prior knowledge, things people already know, and you can build upon that knowledge. People are more likely to accept new knowledge that fits in with knowledge they already have. So fascists might refer to a myth like Little Red Riding Hood, you know, a fairy tale, something that people are already familiar with, and then compare their enemies to the evil wolf. Or in other cases, they might even use religion and try to justify their violent actions by saying that God wants them to do these things. Franco's regime did this. Hitler's regime did this. And this was a very popular action. And of course, if you're distorting myth and religion and manipulating it for your own purpose, you can say that it means anything you want. And of course, anyone who disputes you at that point, you have enough power that you can put them in jail, put them in a concentration camp, or even kill them. So fascist regimes have a lot of power, and they're not afraid to use it.

Fascists cannot support democracy or government by the people, which is what a government democracy is, because fascists need to maintain control over the people. So they have to impose a government that is ruled by a small elite, what is sometimes called an oligarchy. Um, this small elite might be a racial group, like Hitler's Germany with their Aryan nation, or a political group, like the military in Franco's Spain. But whatever the group is, it's an important part of fascism to limit power to that small group of rulers. And you have to define the power and the elite to maintain that, that limitation within that very small group, because once you start to have democracy or rule by the people, then you're going to have a much more pluralistic government, you're going to have too many competing ideas, too much tolerance, too much openness. And fascists need to maintain a tight, rigid control, a tight, rigid ideology.

Also need to use violence and the threat of violence to control society. We already know that they utilize emotions like fear to keep people in check. Well, seeing the violent acts of fascist authorities and their militaries and their police forces helps to reinforce that fear in the public and it keeps the public in line so that they don't protest or ask for rights like fair voting or free speech or an uncensored press. So violence is key to fascist regimes.

Now, fascism cannot support the idea that humankind is basically equal either. This idea of equality, that is a democratic concept, and fascists reject that out of hand. The elite rulers are better than those they rule. That is part of the dogma. It must be accepted. That's why they rule. The people who question the regime are evil or sub-human. So they are not equal. In Nazi Germany, Aryans were considered better than other races, but even when it within the Aryans, certain groups were considered better than others. So even within the highest group of elites, you still had inequality. For example, people from the Pomeranian region were considered better than people from the Rhineland, and people from the Rhineland were considered better than people from the other regions. And so you had a whole hierarchy of who was more inferior or less inferior. It was a whole list ranking from the top to the bottom. And of course, the goal was to eliminate the people at the bottom, but that just meant that the next group would fall to the bottom, and then they had to be targeted. So it was a never-ending cycle of evaluating people, identifying them as inferior, and eliminating them.

Now, this inequality is not based on science, but on whatever the regime needs. So that's why you have different groups that are superior in different regimes, because there's not any truth with a capital T, you know, it's kind of hierarchy. There's not any truth to the idea that one group is actually better than the other. It's just the dogma that the regime needs to try and justify its actions.

Now, fascists often distort the ideas of Charles Darwin, who wrote about creatures adapting to their environments over generations. Fascists argue that certain groups of people are automatically better than others, and that inferior people don't deserve an equal share of resources like food or land or medical attention. Italian fascism did not really embrace this idea because it was based more on the idea of the Roman Empire, where you had a lot of different cultures and ethnic groups and societies kind of blending and merging into one. But German fascism used this social Darwinism, as it came to be called, to justify sterilizing and killing six million Jews and six million additional people, such as gypsies, homosexuals, Catholic priests, people who wanted a democracy, political protesters, anyone else who opposed the rigid views of the regime. And Germany argued that these people were inferior, and that's why they had to be exterminated.

Fascists emphasized the importance of the government and the state over the rights of the individual. They are not just patriotic, but fanatic. The needs and rights of the individual can be totally disregarded if that serves the needs of the state. The individual is irrelevant. The individual is simply a tiny cog in the big machine, and if the individual gets chewed up and spit out by the machine of the state, so much the better. That just means that the individual has fed the machine of the state and has served its needs. In a democracy, we don't view it that way. In a democracy, we say that the state is a creation of individuals to serve our needs. So it's exactly the opposite in a fascist regime.

Now, fascism does not acknowledge the sovereignty of the nation-state the way that many other philosophies do. International law and most nations agree that a nation-state is the basic unit of all international actions. That's why we call it international relations, relations between nations. Nations are the basic unit of interaction. You know, we do not invade other nations simply because we want their land or their wealth, because we respect the legitimacy of other nations and the right to exist, and we expect them to respect our right to exist as well. However, fascists believe that they are justified in invading and conquering other nations to build their empires if they need that nation's resources or if that nation is made up of supposedly inferior people. For example, Hitler said that Germany could invade Austria and Czechoslovakia because there were Germans living there, and they deserved the right to be ruled by Germans and German government. He invaded Poland because he believed that Polish people were inferior to Germans. So fascists do not abide by international law because they do not respect the nation. And that might seem like you, that that's a certain form of anti-nationalism, but in a sense, you're really focusing on ultra-nationalism, the German people, because a nation is a group of people with shared common characteristics like language, culture, and history. The nation-state is that group of people living in a bordered geographical region that can be identified on a map. So Hitler did not respect the nation-state, he respected the ethnic group, the nation, and he felt that, you know, that that had to supersede any kind of respect for international law of the nation's state.

Now, because the fascist regimes emerged after World War One, they sought to harness the political support and military experience of war veterans, and a military structure really helped achieve that goal. Fascists also needed to control and suppress any kind of opposition, and imposing the regimentation of a military hierarchy on civil society helped maintain that control. Boys and girls youth groups were converted into militaristic organizations like the Hitler Youth, and these groups socialized young people into believing the views of the regime. And that's important because if you can capture people while they're young and influence their ideas and their beliefs in their formative years, you're much more likely to be able to hold on to their beliefs and to be able to continue to influence them. We call that the primacy effect, that the first or prime influence early in your life has the most long-lasting effect. And so if you learn a fascist ideology early on in your life, you're much more likely to hold on to that and to believe it, and it's going to be much harder to convince you that that is not a correct and accurate view of the world. So trying to impose this militaristic society, particularly on the youth, was very important. It was also important because it established the idea of obedience and the acceptance of authority and obedience, sense, and authority are a big part not only of the military, but also of the Prussian cultural tradition. So this idea of propagating, you know, obedience, conformity, doing as you're told, that that's the right thing to do instead of thinking for yourself, but you know, rather to conform and to obey, that becomes a major part of a fascist regime.

Now, just as left-wing movements like communism look to the future, right-wing movements like fascism tend to look to the past. Fascism tries to recreate a golden age, you know, a perfect era where things were much better, you know, some kind of movement in the past. In this sense, fascists are not just far right, but they are actually beyond the political right, and we call that reactionary. They've gone so far to the right that they've fallen off the scale and they're becoming reactionary. Now, Hitler wanted to recreate the era of Charlemagne and his Holy Roman Empire. Mussolini sought to go back into the past and recreate the glory of the Roman Empire for Italy, and Francisco Franco in Spain tried to recreate the Paradise Lost of the biblical Eden. Now, of course, none of these leaders ever succeeded in these promises or plans, and it's impossible to, they couldn't recreate those societies, but, you know, trying to hold on to these goals and pushing them and holding tight to them with their dogmatic beliefs prevented any kinds of critics from offering new ideas to challenge the fascist state.

Now, you also have the issue of corporations and corporate rule, because fascists believe that powerful corporations are very well suited to work hand in hand with the fascist government to guide the economy. They do not believe in free trade. They do not believe in competition. They do not believe that the state should completely control the economy like the communists do, but they do not believe in free trade either. So it's really a different phenomenon than either free trade or a communist command market. Instead, they believe that the economy should be controlled by a small group of corporate elites, just as the government is controlled by a small group of political elites. The corporations in control of the economy and the political rulers in control of the political aspects support each other, and they act to keep each other in power as partners. So corporations and the elite rulers work hand in hand together to maintain this tight control over society. And of course, if you have corporations that are being favored by the government, they're being given preference for government contracts, then that means that you don't have true competition. So you don't have free trade. Free trade and capitalism rely on the significance of competition, the openness of competition, the ability to compete in the marketplace. And if you compete in a fair and neutral marketplace and then you fail, then that's what's supposed to happen in capitalism. It's not supposed to be a situation where certain corporations are protected and given special treatment, but fascists believe in corporatism. They believe in the importance of having those corporate rulers that work in tandem with the political rulers.

Some common characteristics of fascism, I think we can understand what it is a little bit better. So to see how it compares to a more familiar concept, democracy, let's compare the two. In a democracy, the basic unit of analysis, the basic thing that we're looking at is the individual. The individual is believed to have certain inherent and inalienable rights. Inalienable means they cannot be separated from us. Simply by being a human being and by being alive, we have certain rights that cannot be taken away from us, whether we are rich or poor, tall or short, black or white, Catholic or Jewish or atheist, or what have you. That regardless of our differences, simply because we are human, we have rights that cannot be taken away from us. That's the concept of inalienable rights. And these inalienable rights that are granted by nature, they were granted before the state even existed. You know, that's why we believe that they are inalienable, that the state was just a creation of man that came along later, that our natural law, inalienable rights existed in the state of nature long before we ever created governments or political institutions. And these natural rights or inalienable rights cannot be taken away by man-made laws. Furthermore, the role of the individual, I'm sorry, the role of the state is to serve the individual, not the other way around. In a democracy, people create a government to serve their needs. The government is designed to build schools, to build roads, bridges, hospitals, to safeguard civil liberties, you know, freedom of speech, other kinds of individual rights, because the people come first, the individuals come first, and the state is merely a creation of the people to help them live better and to prosper and function more effectively. And in a democracy, we are free, we are active and mobilized for different causes. We believe in the free flow of information and the freedom of communication. We believe that the competition of ideas, even bad ideas, helps identify the good and bad of those ideas and brings the best ones into use. That's why democratic philosophers like Edmund Burke say that it's important that you allow even the bad ideas to be expressed because if you express bad ideas, then they can be critically analyzed and you can understand why they're bad ideas. If you suppress them and forbid people from speaking about them, they can take on some kind of mystique, some kind of, you know, aura of importance, and people will never really recognize why they are not effective. For example, they might say that a certain economic model is a good idea. Well, if you don't try it and prove that it's wrong, then you can't prove that it doesn't work and move on to something that does work.

Now, because democracies believe in the basic equality of all human beings, they also believe in the leadership of majority rule. If all people are created equal, we only need to count up how many people want one policy and how many people want another, and then we can determine how well supported each view is. That's majority rule. It's pretty simple, that everyone counts equally, everyone is worth one vote, everyone is worth an equal viewpoint. You don't get two votes if you're rich, or two votes if you're Aryan, or three votes if you have more education, or four votes if you get paid more, you know, you don't have this inequality. Majority rule is based on the concept of the equality of humankind.

Now, democracies don't have to use free trade in a free market, but they often do. Just as democracies try to limit the interference of the government in the lives and the political rights of individuals, they also try to limit the intervention of government in the economic activities and the property rights of individuals. It's all part of limiting the power of government to protect the rights of the people, because democracy believes in limited government, in, and not necessarily in trying to dismantle government, but in trying to have just as much government as you need, but not too much government, not enough government to interfere in the economy or to interfere in people's political rights, because of that emphasis on the individual. So generally, most democracies emphasize some aspect of a free market or capitalism.

Now, democracies also believe that the way you achieve a goal is just as important as the goal itself. If you cheat to win, you haven't really won. And that means that the means to the end, and remaining true to democratic principles, is just as important as the end itself. And so the means to the end is what's important in a democratic regime, that you have to do things the right way. You can't just look at the end result and say that that justifies any kinds of heinous behavior or egregious acts that have come before it.

Now, in contrast to democracies, we can see that in fascist states, we find that the state is the basic unit of analysis. That the basic component of, you know, of interaction is the actual nation-state, and it is the most important factor in its needs supersede that of all others. So due to this supremacy of the state over all else in fascist regimes, the individual must serve the needs of the state, rather than in democracy where the state serves the individual. The individual has no inherent value in a fascist society. His or her only value is in what he or she can provide for the state. His or her rights are allowable only to the extent that they do not infringe upon the needs of the state. So the individual serves the state in a fascist regime.

Miss regimes do not support civil liberties and freedoms either, because they are not essential to the functioning of the fascist state and they might even harm the state. For example, freedom of the press or freedom of speech might encourage people to criticize the fascist state, and of course, the fascist state can't allow that. They don't want any kind of criticism. So they don't believe in supporting civil liberties and civil freedoms. Individual freedoms can only exist within the stable structure of law and order that the state provides. Fascist states do not support freedom of information. For example, in democracies, we have Freedom of Information Acts to ensure that the public can gain access to information unless it is deemed to be classified and necessarily secret for security, national security reasons. But in fascist states, everything is a national security issue. Nothing can be known because the state doesn't trust the people to know about its own government. The fascist state feels that the need to tightly control and to manipulate and edit information is much more important, and they want to control that information so that it conforms with their views and policies, so that it supports what the state is doing. States do not want policies questioned or changed, so they censor information and they discourage any kind of intellectual inquiry or examination.

Now, fascists do not believe in equality. They cannot support majority rule. Instead, they believe that leaders have some kind of mystical authority. The vague nature and source of this authority makes it impossible to critically examine or question the legitimacy of leadership in a fascist state. And fascism argues that the results or the ends are paramount. That they are the most important. Thus, any means or action taken, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, is justified and it automatically becomes legal, moral, and legitimate simply because it does achieve the desired ends. So the ends justify the means in a fascist state.

Thus, by examining the context in which fascism emerged, the aftermath of World War One, the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Great Depression, and the rise of the Bolshevik threat in the Soviet Union, we can better understand the origins of this movement. We can gain a deeper understanding of the variety of fascist movements by reviewing the different nations that experience fascist growth and even fascist governments. Finally, by identifying the characteristics of fascism and comparing fascism to the more familiar concepts of democracy, we can critically examine precisely how fascism differs from other forms of political rule and better understand it.

And so we see that many times democratic regimes can become derailed because people lose confidence in them during times of economic crisis or during times of warfare, and they say, you know, if only we had a stronger government, if only instead of this civilian government, we had a powerful military dictatorship. And people want that strong savior, someone to come in and sweep them off their feet and take care of them and promise that everything will be all right. They want someone like Hitler to come in and say, I have engineers who will build an interstate highway called the Autobahn. I have manufacturers who will come in and create a car that isn't affordable for all the people called the Volkswagen, which means the people's car. You know, I will put people to work. I will put food back on the table. And so people like to hear those promises, but they always have to be wary of what is behind those promises. And so, you know, it's an ongoing battle to keep democracy from being derailed by fascism or by communism.

Now, we've gained a deeper understanding, I think, of the variety of fascist movements by reviewing these different nations that have had fascist movements and even the fascist governments that have taken control. And so I hope that, you know, you've learned a little bit from today's lecture and maybe even enjoyed it. If you're interested in the topic of fascism and different fascist governments, I have two books for your suggested reading. Otto Schützkov wrote Revolutions of Our Time, quite a while ago, but it is still a good classic text. Revolutions of Our Time is a comparative text that compares the different fascist regimes in Europe. Roger Griffin wrote International Fascism, which is a similar but much more updated text, and in that he's able to give us, you know, a modern look at fascism and some of the reasons why people today in some countries are returning to fascism and are saying, maybe we need to take another look at these fascist movements. You know, that's one of the things that is challenging democratic governments in some of our European nations today. And so fascist governments and fascist regimes are not just some historical phenomenon, they're something that needs to be studied and understood so that we can prevent their re-emergence in today's world and prevent their threat to democratic regimes.

All right. So now that we've learned about, uh, uh, totalitarianism in the fascist states, and on our next lecture, we will continue with the theme of totalitarianism, but we will focus on the Soviet Union, because quite a lot is going on in the Soviet Union. Remember, during World War One, the Soviet Union had a revolution which took them out of the war. The Soviets had been fighting on the Allied side, but after their revolution, their Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviets will withdraw from World War One. They will eventually, of course, kill the Romanov family, the Tsar and his family, the dynasty. They will, of course, gun them down. And we will see, of course, a man named Lenin at first will take over, and they will only have one party now in Russia. It's called the Communist Party. And Lenin, the leader at the time in Russia, well, uh, will rule. And then, you know, later, closer to World War II, we have obviously, I mentioned him, but we have a man by the name of Joseph Stalin that will come to power, because Lenin died in 1924. So he died not long after World War One was over. Um, Treaty of Versailles, 1919, and then 1924, Lenin's dead. There was actually a struggle as to who would control the Soviet Union after Lenin's death and who would control the party. And it was either, it was between a man named Trotsky or, of course, a man named Joseph Stalin. And we'll see that Trotsky doesn't win this battle. In fact, Stalin will eventually gain power and expel Trotsky because he can't have him hanging around the Soviet Union, and he's eventually murdered in Mexico in 1940, probably on Stalin's orders. But when we come back for our next lecture, we'll learn more about the Soviet Union. Until next time.