The Trash Who are Obstacles in Our Way

RESEARCH on the Italian Fascist regime has advanced considerably in recent years; but what remains to be written is a comprehensive history of the Italian Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, or PNF), the most important agency of the Fascist totalitarian regime in the 1930s. The need for such a history has become especially evident, given that the Italian historian best qualified to meet this need, Emilio Gentile, has stalled in 1922,1 the year when Benito Mussolini came to power, and given the way in which the idea of ‘totalitarianism’ has been revived as a useful interpretative tool in the analysis of the two fascist regimes in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.2 Instead of writing his history of the party, Gentile has devoted his energies to another fashionable revival, that of viewing fascism as a ‘political religion’3—which lies behind the recent ‘cultural turn’ in fascist studies, that has focused on fascist culture, or fascism as culture. The interpretation of fascism as secular religion is, I think, more illuminating as an analogy, rather than as an explanation of the fascist phenomenon. But the concept of ‘cultural revolution’, understood broadly as the attempt to create a ‘new fascist man’ by means of a fundamental transformation of mentality and consciousness as people passed through a range of totalitarian organisations, is an appropriate way to label the totalitarian intentions of the two fascist regimes in interwar and wartime Europe.

Nazism · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Law

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