The Rest Is History - 17. Fascism

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

What is fascism and where did it come from? No one admits to being a fascist yet it continues to be a term of abuse hurled on a regular basis. Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss the history of this most unacceptable of political models. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello, welcome to The Rest Is History. Today we're going to be talking about one of the big isms. You know, you'll often meet a socialist, an anarchist, even a communist. It's very rare that you'll meet somebody who will willingly describe themselves as a fascist. So what is fascism? What are its roots? Are all fascists Nazis? Are any fascists Democrats? And

are all fascists uniquely evil? Welcome to The Rest Is History, the podcast that roams down the dark alleys of political history and shines a torch on the sometimes disturbing ideas that you find in the corners. I'm Dominic Sandbrook and with me is Chief Liberal Elite Investigator Tom Holland. Hello, Tom, how are you very well thank you dominic thanks so tom we had the most colossal postbag on fascism as you might expect it's a subject that basically never fails to sell books or let's hope podcasts so um what have we found share some of your some of your um some of your questions that you've dug up well looking through them um i think that large numbers of them are saying, actually, what is fascism? And there's a question from Kelvin that I think zooms in very well on perhaps what's the core issue. He asks, is there an actual historical definition of fascism? Or is it more of a I know it when I see it type of scenario? And then he adds, for instance, could retrospectively the Spartans of ancient Greece count? So I think that at the heart is, is fascism something that can be

abstracted from history? Is it something that can describe maybe an attitude towards authoritarianism or racism or whatever, that is a constant throughout history? Or is it something that is rooted in very specific cultural, political, economic circumstances? And personally, I would go for the latter. I don't know how you feel. You're the modern historian. What's your take on that? I absolutely would go for the latter. I would say it is, people use fascist now to mean evil, don't they? Which I think is sort of wrong. I mean, I'm not saying fascists weren't evil, but it's not, to use it as a moral shorthand, I think is sort of wrong. I mean, I'm not saying fascists weren't evil, but it's not, to use it as a moral shorthand, I think is wrong. I think fascism was rooted in a very specific time and place in the decades after the First World War. I think the First World War was absolutely

central to fascism. And historians, to answer Kelvin's question, historians have spent enormous amounts of time and ink debating what fascism is. And they come back to, by and large, people like Robert Paxton and Roger Griffin, these sort of landmark historians of fascism, they come back to the same things. So it's rooted in a nation that has a sense of victimhood and humiliation, and often through war. And it strives for a kind of national rebirth. It rejects democracy. It defines itself against communism. It argues that there's room for a kind of revolutionary movement that will remake the nation and will restore its lost kind of virility

and its lost pride and create new men, in fact, will create a new kind of human being through speed and spectacle and technology and violence and violence is always at the at the core of it and you can see I think now maybe you'll disagree with me about this Tom but I think although you can see elements of all those things in earlier movements and some of them are kind of timeless the formula is very specific and is rooted in that experience of of the first World War and the sort of sense of humiliation afterwards. Yeah, I mean, my take on it is perhaps a kind of slightly strange one,

because I've never studied fascism. I never did it at school, never did it at university. And the only time I've written about it was in the context of writing about Christianity. And it seems to me that fascism is the most profoundly revolutionary movement that Europe has witnessed, because it represents an overturning, not just of institutional Christian norms, as the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution did, but an attack on some of the core fundamental values of Christianity that liberal post-Christianity has inherited. And I would fix on two in particular. At the heart of Christianity, as evinced by the image of Christ on the cross, is the idea that there is a kind of a virtue in victimhood, that those who are the first shall be last, the last shall be first. The Nazis obviously do not agree with that, neither do

the fascists under Mussolini. The other core Christian idea is that there is a universal human dignity, that all human beings are created equally in the image of God. And that, as St. Paul puts it, there is no Jew or Greek. Now, obviously, the Nazis in particular are very, very keen on the idea that Jews and Greeks are fundamentally separate and distinct. And I think that fundamentally, we've already talked about Nazis and fascists being evil. That, of course, is essentially a kind of Christian categorisation. And I think that the reason that we do that so readily is precisely the fact that the fascists and the Nazis in particular assaulted the core moral values of what the core moral values that we still have today, to the degree that I think that to an extent, we no longer, one of the reasons that institutional Christianity has declined

so profoundly since the Second World War is that in a sense, the Nazis do the job for us. Hitler, in a sense, is Satan. The Nazis are the demons. Auschwitz is hell. And so if we want to know, in previous generations, if we wanted to know what the right thing is, what is good, what is morally good, we would say, what would Jesus do

and do it? Now we tend to ask what would Hitler do and do the opposite. So it's become a sort of moral yardstick, hasn't it? But let me drag you for a second away from Christianity and towards the Romans, which is one of your other big fields. So the first fascists, I mean, there's lots of questions about the origins of fascism, but the first really successful fascist party was obviously in Italy. And it was in Italy and Mussolini that you had the invention of the term fascism and the fascist iconography. And they were looking back straight away to the Romans. And what is that? I mean, the fasces, I assume that's the right pronunciation. What's all that about? What are those things? So the idea of the fasces is that they're rods, birching rods. And in the Roman Republic, they are emblems of a magistrate's

right to beat those who oppose him. And they're carried on the shoulders of officials called lictors who march around with the magistrate. And the symbolism of the fast jays is that you can break one rod, but if they're bundled up, you can't. And so the appeal of that to Mussolini is evident that if you can join the entire nation together, then it cannot possibly be broken. But of course, the fact that it is redolent of ancient Rome, and for Mussolini, of course, the Roman Empire, which governs the whole Mediterranean is a reminder of a kind of state of lost Italian greatness. That is absolutely kind of fundamental to the appeal. And it's kind of the strangeness of it is, I mean, as you mentioned in your is modern, that I think is pretty fundamental to the definition of fascism. Yeah, I'd agree with that. I mean, Prashant Rao asks this question,

who was the first recorded fascist? And my answer to that, I mean, maybe you'll delve back into, further back into history, but my answer to that would be Mussolini is obviously the first sort of fascist, successful fascist leader. He is the person who sort of turns fascism into an international brand and who turns it into a governing creed rather than a sort of oppositional one. I mean, he had predecessors. You'll maybe know this brilliant book, The Pike, by Lucy Hughes Hallett about Gabriele D'Annunzio. Now, D'Annunzio was this poet, but he was also a kind of playboy and a

celebrity and an aviator. He had led the campaign to get Italy into the First World War. And D'Annunzio anticipated all the themes that we associate with Mussolini about speed, excitement, virility, violence, blood, a sort of rebirth of Italy, which he saw as this failing state, a new state, but a failing state, through war. And I think, actually, before Mussolini, I think a lot of people, historians would buy this, D'Annunzio is the kind of John the Baptist, to use your Christian sort of formula. He is John the Baptist to Mussolini's Messiah. And in the wake of the First World War, he sets up a kind of proto-fascist state in Fiume, doesn't he? He does, in what's now Rijeka. Yes. I mean, and he introduces an awful lot of what will become iconically fascist, including the Roman salute, including the black shirts,

including addresses from balconies. He was very keen on feeding castor oil to his enemies, which was something that Mussolini was very big on as well. So I guess, yeah, D'Onozio is kind of, but he's, as you say, the kind of the John the Baptist figure. But Mussolini really is the, I mean, he's the guy who blazes the path, isn't he? So, well, he is.

But so Kelvin, you mentioned in Kelvin's question, Kelvin asked about the Spartans. Right. Maybe we're going to do this. No, I think we should do this now, actually, because it's hanging there in the air. Are these people that they look back to, is it in any way reasonable

to see them as proto-fascists or is that merely imposing the 20th century onto the ancient world? Well, so Mussolini looking back to Rome, I mean, that's kind of understandable and that's something that Italians have done pretty much since the Roman Empire implodes. For Hitler, and Nazism, I guess, is kind of to a degree qualitatively different. The perspective that he brings to ancient history, and I think ancient history is really important to Hitler as well as to Mussolini, but it's kind of, again, fused with something that is very, very distinctively modern. And for Hitler, that is a kind of garbled sense of Darwinism and an emphasis on the idea that there are different races, that these races are in competition, that ultimately you have to be strong to prevail. And the appeal of Sparta, say, for Hitler is precisely that it is a model, Hitler thinks, of a Nordic state. So Hitler's take on the Greeks and the Romans is that they are Nordic.

The Spartans are blonde, are strapping. They notoriously had a revolting black broth that Hitler thought had originally come from Schleswig-Holstein. He genuinely thought this? It was absolutely fundamental to Hitler's sense of history and therefore of the future as well, that the Spartans, the Athenians, the Romans in their greatness were basically from Nordic stock. And so when Hitler says that Sparta is the most transparently racist state in history, he is, of course, retrospectively claiming the Spartans for his Nordic brand of racism. And this is also where the Jews come in, because what happens to Sparta, what happens to Athens, what happens to Rome, of course, they collapse. And so Hitler is obliged to explain why.

And the reason he gives is that they are corrupted by the cosmopolitan universalism of the Jew Paul. And so there's this kind of grotesque paradox that one of the reasons that Hitler ends up targeting the Jews for genocide is that he is blaming them for Christianity and the universalism of Christianity. And he feels that, you know, that when he proclaims a thousand year Reich, the only prospect of it lasting a thousand years is if it doesn't share in the fate of Greece and Rome, if it doesn't get racially corrupted and therefore collapse and destroyed. And it's this kind of weird fusion of, you know, what has been a constant throughout European history, looking back to the example of the Spartans, the Athenians, the Romans, but fused with this very

distinctively modern understanding of race, of the survival of the fittest. And of course, what those two extremes do is to excise Christianity, because you're looking back to the Spartans, and you're looking to Darwinism. Everything in between is kind of dismissed. Well, one of the fascinating things about fascism, I think, is that one of the reasons it was successful is that, like a lot of successful political creeds, it looks simultaneously backwards and forwards. So that sort of ancient iconography and that sort of invention of an ancient history goes hand in hand, as you said earlier, with all this stuff that sort of ancient iconography and that sort of invention of an ancient history goes hand in hand as you said earlier with all this stuff about sort of um planes and flight

and technology which fascism was seen to i mean one of the reasons that young people in particular were attracted to fascism in the 1920s and 30s was because it seemed cool and it was seemed modern and new and they often talked about the old men who were running democracies. And it's that sort of double-facing side of fascism that makes it sort of so interesting. That it's, you know, they're taking old myths, but they are dreaming of a new world. And I guess you would say that that's one thing

that has in common with communism, is that dream of the new, isn't it? That it's not rooted in, as it were, the new isn't it that it's it's not rooted in as it were in the here and now it's sort of always aspiring to this sort of utopia but it's um it's it's glamorous in the way that um extremely violent films are glamorous um brutality and war and violence are glamorous to people um yeah i mean there's a famous um comment that um Woolf made, who obviously is not someone you would associate

with the glamour of violence. But in May 1940, when she's looking at the success of the German armies, and she says that they seem so young, they seem so vigorous, they seem so alive. Yeah. And we look plodding and old. And as you say, that sense that fascism, and I guess particularly Nazism, was kind of the future,

was something that kind of hung like a shadow over defenders of liberal democracy in the 30s. Oh, in the 20s and 30s, you see that all the time. People lamenting and saying, is democracy... They don't know what we know, so they don't know that democracy will endure. A lot of people did think, and particularly before Mussolini started invading people,

so in the 20s, I mean, Mussolini got a lot of praise from people on all sides of the political spectrum. He said, oh, he does a lot of public works. He's a very manly fellow. Churchill visited Mussolini. Yeah, Churchill praised Mussolini. Because if he was Italian, he would have been a fascist. Absolutely.

And that's sometimes used as a stick to beat Churchill with, that he got that wrong. But in Churchill's sort of slight defence, lots of people said things like that about fascism in the 1920s. I mean, when the new American administration ends up winning the war, the Roosevelt administration comes in in 1932-33, they send people to Italy to go and look at how Italians are doing public works and building roads and all this kind of stuff,

to look at how Italian fascism works, because they think it may have some ideas that they can use in the New Deal in America. And since then, sort of people who hate the New Deal, so very, very right wing Americans say, oh, well, it's really fascist and inspiration, which isn't true. But it's true that up to that point, fascism didn't quite, it was still violent, of course, but didn't quite have that sort of uniquely sort of moral taint that it was to get after Hitler comes to power. But I guess what fascism does still have is a kind of allure and glamour, even if it's the glamour of evil. I mean, I think the fact that we've had so many questions on this topic suggests that part of the fascination, you know, evil is kind of glamorous. And so we've got two questions

that I think are not kind of flippant i think i mean i think they're actually really important one from i hope i'm pronouncing his or her name right mac maith mac matthew um who asks why were shirt colors such a big deal for mid-20th century fascists and with another question from christian what's with the uniforms and actually the uniforms are really important aren aren't they? I mean, beginning with the nuncio and the black shirts. They're massively important. I mean, I think what you have to do with the uniforms is you have to see them in context. So in a world in which a lot of people are wearing uniforms, and this will

sound to many people as sort of incredibly trite and silly thing to say, but this is a world in which, you know, thousands and thousands of youngsters every year are joining the boy scouts and joining groups that where you dress up in uniforms in military type kind of costumes so the boy scouts had sort of come you know edwardian so around about the same time as as people the first sort of fascist sort of stirrings are getting underway then you have the first world war So lots of people are in uniform. And then there are a lot of paramilitary movements at the end of the First World War. And so you're living in a world in which a lot of people have been wearing uniforms and liked wearing them. It gave them a sense of belonging and a sense of identity.

And it's part of Mussolini's sort of evil genius that he pushes the uniforms. And of course, Hitler does that later on when the nazi party starts the party is structured in a military kind of way and there are sort of ranks and different kinds of uniforms and all the rest of it and that gives it a sort of it anchors it in that world in a way that people understand and of course as you know what's sort of hanging over this is that to a lot of people at the time, the uniforms looked cool. They wanted to wear them. I mean, that's a terrible thing to say, but it's true.

And even now, you know, children, for example, have a fascination with the Nazis because they see them as they do with the forces of evil in Star Wars. They all have their ranks and they all have different helmets and they all have their different insignia. And that has a kind of weird hold over us, doesn't it? But I mean, you mentioned the Boy Scouts and Baden-Powell was kind of fascinated by Hitler. Yeah. Pretty much up to up to the start of the war. But there is also this kind of um kind of modernism uh poetry uh you know the kind of figures of uh that denunzio represents so that is also part of it and denunzio who's a kind of famous dandy um you know he's he's he's not just a poet he looks like a poet he does kind of glamorous things in a kind of byronic style

and so it's kind of telling i I think, that he is the guy who invents the black shirt, because he obviously has the aesthetic sense to that, I suppose, particularly in the Mediterranean Sun, perhaps it has a kind of particular quality of menace and glamour that really makes it stand out. Just looks shabby when Oswald Mosley does it. You're right. And actually, Maya asked a question about that on Twitter. She said, can you discuss why so many modernist writers were attracted to fascism and fascism's general influence on the arts um and that's that's part of the set that's almost part of the same topic as the as the uniforms because you're right it's a poet who comes up with the uniforms

and you know modernism literary modernism or cultural modernism was all about excitement and style and breaking with the past and creating something new. And an intolerance of what they saw as the sort of the fusty old men with all their fudges and compromises. Wing collars and umbrellas. Exactly that. So if you've ever read this sort of, I mean, God knows who reads these things for pleasure but the italian futurist poets of the 1910s their stuff is all about you know smashing destroying isn't it destroy venice that's sort of the the beauty of the punch all this kind of stuff that just seems now like the kind of thing a 17 year old boy writes in his bedroom because he's never you know he doesn't know how to talk to any girls and he's feeling very miserable. That sort of literary aesthetic explains, I think, why a lot of intelligent, otherwise intelligent people, kind of Wyndham Lewis type people, poets and stuff,

flirted with fascism because they thought it was cool, exciting, radical, new, as opposed to, as you say, the sort of tweedeedy yeah collary sort of world of the edwardians and we must come to a break in a minute but just to just to add to that another crucial figure who's not a pervert a philosopher is nietzsche um mussolini is a great admirer of nietzsche nietzsche essentially proclaims i mean he he basically is the philosopher who dismisses christianity as sapping innovating get rid of it. And he says that with the death of God, a new order will emerge in which the blonde beast is released. It will be a time of great convulsions. And Mussolini absolutely picks up on this. I mean,

Mussolini is writing about Nietzsche before the First World War. And although Nietzsche was kind of very, very hostile to German nationalism, really hostile, became a kind of stateless person, even so you can see in Hitler's perspective on history, his attitudes to classical antiquity, to Christianity, to Judaism, that there is a kind of garbled understanding of Nietzsche there. So I think that also is part of this kind of fascist mix. But I think on that note, we must go for a break. So much to talk about. We will continue. I'm going to go and iron my black shirt. And yes, be tuned in a second. Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to

therestisentertainment.com. That's th Is History. We've pressed our uniforms. We're ready to go. Tom, I'm going to ask you a question. And I think what we should do, Tom, is get through loads of the questions because we've got so many. I think we got through about two in the first half and we've got only about 500 to go. So let's see how many we can do. Chris Cope, I'm going to kick off with Chris Cope. Chris Cope says, are there any regimes today which would meet your definition of being fascist? Have you got any nominations? I don't think there are, because I think, as we've been talking, I think fascism is an expression of particular confluence of circumstances that essentially was brought to an end with the Second World War, with the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler. So, no, I don't think there are any.

What do you think? You've maybe got a finger on the pulse of contemporary politics. Of course I do. Of course I do. No, probably not. I mean, for example, people might say Vladimir Putin is a fascist, but he's not a fascist. He doesn't believe in... He doesn't have a totalitarian regime. He doesn't believe in creating a new kind of society.

He's an authoritarian, you know, he's an authoritarian kind of nationalist, but that's not the same as being a fascist. I think people often sort of muddy those things. So I'd probably agree with you, no. Okay, well, there's another question here from, definitely for donald from harold wilson oh harold and uh harold wilson is asking does salazar and franco fit into the same mold as hitler or are they different in a substantive way so again this this is really kind of focusing on the question is is anyone who is a dictator fascist is it to be a dictator and a fascist, is that synonymous?

Well, I knew Harold Dawson would ask a good question. And that is a great question. It's one that's very popular. So I don't think Salazar, who's Portugal and Franco, who's Spain, are fascists. They both flirt with elements of fascism, but they both actually end up, particularly Salazar, suppressing their local fascist parties after sort of flirting with them. They're both authoritarians, and they're slightly, you know, they have good relationships with Mussolini and Hitler, but the big difference is Salazar and Franco just want

to freeze their societies in aspic. They want to preserve the kind of very Catholic, conservative, landowner-dominated worlds of 19th century Portugal and Spain. They don't want to create anything new. They're not into the technology. They don't like big meetings of people. They don't like youngsters sort of expressing themselves and excitement and speed. They want everything to be stuck. And that's the difference. They're not fascists in that sense. So they're reactionaries. Exactly. They're pure authoritarian reactionaries. And fascism may have reactionary elements and may do deals with reactionary people.

So Hitler and Mussolini both did deals with conservative elites, but they were radicals. I mean, that's the interesting thing, that Mussolini started way on the left. He was a sort of radical socialist who then basically rebranded himself. But that's the great theme of the John Lukacs book on the duel about Hitler and Churchill, that Churchill is a reactionary, Churchill is a kind of embodiment of an order that seems antiquated compared to Hitler, who is absolutely seems, you know, in the summer of 1940 to be the embodiment of the future. And I, you know, I really summer of 1940 to be the embodiment of the future. And I, you know, I really do think that Hitler

is the most revolutionary figure in European history. I think he pushes, you know, he tramples down more that Europeans over the course of the past thousand years have taken for granted than any other figure in European history. Whereas, as you say, you know, Franco is, I mean, he makes the Virgin Mary a kind of an official in his regime, doesn't he? Yeah, I mean, that's the interesting thing about Salazar.

I mean, if you look at Salazar and Franco, Salazar was an economics professor, a very highly respected economics professor in Portugal. Franco was a general in the Spanish army. So they're both, you know, by their own lights, successful people. Mussolini, as Churchill was, of course, you know, descended from an aristocratic family, very successful politician. So they've got a stake in the system. Mussolini and Hitler were both outsiders. I mean, Hitler was a complete and utter nobody and a failure. So of course he wants to smash everything and revolutionize everything. Because to him, the old world is associated with failure and misery and loneliness and all these kinds of things and that's why his regime has an appeal to people who

who share that that view and his that genius of both muslim and hitler is to win all those people who are kind of losers if you like but also to win over and to do deals with the people who already have a stake the landowners and stuff. Can I follow that up with a question from John Delay, which I do not feel qualified to answer, but you I'm sure do. And he asks, was fascism a revolution of the middle class? I think there's probably a lot of truth in that. So fascism often appealed to people who are kind of lower middle class or very upper working class, sort of respectable type people.

And it's basically an antidote to communism. So that's something we haven't really talked about, Tom, is how much fascism is created as a kind of mirror image of communism. No communism, I think no fascism. So people are drawn, the societies in which people are drawn to fascism tend to be ones where people are very, very worried about a red revolution. And that's obviously one reason why it starts in the 20s after the russian revolution but also is it i mean it both both emerge from um a climate of violence in which it's taken for granted that you um that opportunities for settling differences through democratic means um through liberal means are simply not there and so if you um you know if you're if you're a communist beating up a fascist

and if you're a fascist beating up a communist in a sense you have a kind of um mutual relationship there because both of you are serving to to rot the foundations of the liberal order that um otherwise would would regard both of you as the enemy so there is a kind of um absolutely i think that's absolutely right. You're both playing the same game, aren't you? You want to smash the system. And you hate all the sort of the liberal politicians who are compromising and making coalitions and all this sort of stuff. And actually, that's what... Hitler comes to power in part, I think, because the depression drives more and more people towards the extremes. So they think, well, the middle ground has failed. I have to choose one of these two alternatives.

And there are more people who will choose Nazism than there are communism. Right. Okay. So let's follow up that with a question from Michael Rush, who asks, why do we see fascism as the worst political movement in history, but communism is always seen as a noble cause, even though it has killed 100 million? Is it because we think in Western thoughts, and as communism didn't take over the West, like it did Eastern Europe, it's better? Well, it won't surprise you to hear that again, I think this is to be explained by the Christian context, because fascism, as I said, is, I think, more profoundly revolutionary than communism, because communism, although it overturns kings and churches and so

on, it does so for reasons that goes with the grain of Christian history, the conviction that the poor shall inherit the earth, that the first shall be last, that at the end of Christian history, the conviction that the poor shall inherit the earth, that the first shall be last, that at the end of days, a new Jerusalem will descend on the earth. And the worker's paradise is a kind of essentially a riff on utopianism that we see throughout the course of Christian history, whereas fascism overtly goes against that. Fascism says that the weak should essentially be crushed and that racism is a moral good. And we find that profoundly offensive in a way that we tend not to find communism. You know, Tom, I sometimes shake my head and roll my eyes at your Christian stuff, but I actually buy that. I think that's a really good... I hope they cut this out,

but I actually think that's a very good argument. Because it's obvious that that sort of well-meaning kind of, for want to use a sort of Daily Mail-ish word, bien pensant people, sort of wince at anti-communism, don't they? They think, oh, well, communism wasn't so bad. They built nice nursery schools or, you know, there's a sort of...

Yes, yes. That sort of utopianism plays well, doesn't schools or you know there's a sort of yes yes that sort of utopianism plays well doesn't it yeah there's a kind of unspoken feeling that that that killing 10 million people you know in the cause of establishing a worker's paradise is less bad than killing 10 million people because you're a racist yeah i think that is fundamentally the idea and i think also that the idea is is pretty strong that punching a nazi in the face is better than a nazi punching uh an anti-fascist protester in the face yeah you see but both are violent but but one form of violence is morally better than the other you see that on twitter all the time don't you people say oh you should you should punch nazis or you only defeat fascists by sort of confronting them and all this sort of there's

that there are there is a slight element i think of double standards one other thing i'd add there actually he asked about eastern europe and western europe and i think michael rush and i think that sorry it's actually michelle rush um michelle unless we've got a unless we've got a excuse um uh but michelle or michael I think is right that in Eastern Europe, it is remembered a bit differently. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been to these sort of museums that you'll see in the Baltic States or in Hungary or in the Czech Republic, where they'll often treat the occupations by the Nazis and the communists

sort of side by side. And it's, you know, you get a sense of them seeing the two things as completely equivalent and i can actually remember being in on holiday in bulgaria and a man selling having a big tray in a in this sort of village had this big tray full of um communist memorabilia you know badges and so my friend and i stopped and were looking at all this sort of stuff and then he said oh you're english I have a special tray. And he got out his special tray.

And that was full of SS memorabilia. And we were sort of, you see, we were shocked. I mean, oh, that's terrible. He's got all this SS memorabilia. We were just looking at the KGB stuff. As though, and of course, at that point, I thought, that's so interesting. That that's our instinctive reaction. That the KGB stuff, you can sort of engage engage in ironically as a Brit in the 1990s.

But the SS stuff is you can't. It's beyond the pale. It's unacceptable. And I guess we do have a kind of double standard in Britain that people might not have if they had lived through, you know, under the Iron Curtain. Right. Well, on the top again, going with the theme of communism and fascism here's one from jim longhurst who asks um here's one to get you cancelled before january is through um it's 1930 would you rather live in fascist italy or soviet russia i'm going to broaden that out would you rather live in fascist italy um democratic as it is then Weimar Germany or Soviet Russia? Whose history would you want to live through in the 30s?

I mean, I suppose it depends. You know, are you a Jew? Yeah, this is really the... Are you a member of the bourgeoisie? This is sort of a David Starkey moment, isn't it? I think... It's got to be fascist Italy, hasn't it? So I was going to say, yeah, I'm sort of...

It clearly is. The least murderous of those societies is fascist Italy, not least because Mussolini was quite incompetent. So assuming that you're sort of in the middle of the... in the sort of middle of the social spectrum, you're probably less likely to be killed in fascist Italy. That's a terrible thing to say. But Soviet Russia, I mean, of course,

the more keen and eager a member of the party you are, the more likely Stalin's going to kill you. So I don't think Soviet Russia is a bundle of laughs. But also you've got the war coming up. And terrible, though, Italy's experience of the war was, I guess it's not as bad as Germany's or Russia's or Germany so um yeah I go on yeah I mean that's quite a sort of miserable question isn't it but um yeah glad I wasn't born in any of them um do we have another

question yeah let's uh so Peter Harpley um I'm just looking down the same page actually but Peter Harpley's got a good question about Napoleon. So there's lots of parallels between Hitler and Stalin. And he says, is there a parallel as well between Hitler and Napoleon? Hubris brought them down. Of course, they're both world conquerors. They both devise new systems. They redraw boundaries.

Do you think there's any comparison there, Tom? They both failed to conquer Britain. They did, and both went to russia um notoriously yeah um so what do you think napoleon no no no no i i don't he likes a uniform to reiterate i think i think that fascism is bred of very specific circumstances. And so I think that to associate fascism with just conquering Europe, say, or having fascists or whatever is inadequate. Clearly, Hitler and Mussolini draw on elements from history to spice up their look, their brand, their image. But at the same time, they are inimitably 20th century

they could only have existed in the 20th century because they you know muslimi is all about planes and yeah cars and fascism hitler's brand of fascism would be unthinkable i think without darwinism so let me uh challenge that or at least allow Anders Newgaard to challenge it. He says there seem to be two ways of discussing fascism. One is your way, Tom, and anything my way, which is historically based. And he gives the example of the historian Richard Evans wrote an article in the New Statesman the other week about whether a well-known current political figure was a fascist. And he said, no, because it's all about World War I. And he said, the other way of thinking about fascism is about a culture and a temperament.

So he gives the example, Umberto Eco talked about fascism. So there's a kind of violence and a kind of, and all those things. I mean, you can see that in earlier periods, can't you? You have fascist type, people with a fascist mentality. Well, I mean, I don't think that it's um it's a surprise to say that in the past there have been leaders who have put a value on violence and who have

launched wars of conquest and who have disliked um other groups of people but i think it's the i think i think particularly with uh with german fascism it's the way that this is kind of presented as a pseudoscience so right um the idea so hitler is um you know he he talks about how um apes massacre um elements that are alien to their community and he says well, well, if apes do this, then obviously this is what nature wants humans to do. And it's a crucial part of his perspective, of Himmler's perspective, that human dignity is a Jewish myth. There is no such thing that human beings

are a part of nature, like every other animal, and that the law of nature is the survival of the fittest, and that if you don't destroy your enemies, then your enemies will destroy you. And it's that distinctively kind of cod-Darwinian perspective that is imposed on it that I think gives to particularly German fascism its distinctive quality. And I think without that, it's not fascism. Okay, but let me ask you a question from Roland Miners. So Roland Miners wants to know about the Romans, and he says, how fascist were the Romans? Now, you've already said, you know, it's a distinctive movement, early 20th century. And yet, at the same time, you say, one of the things that's distinctive about it is its rejection of Christianity. So I'm wondering whether, to pick up Roland's question, you think that in a way fascism is turning the clock back to this

pre-Christianity, whether you can see the Romans and the fascists as bookends, and Christianity is in the middle, and there's a continuity there. That is how Mussolini and Hitler want to see it. And again, what Hitler is doing to the Romans is he is racialising them. And he's doing what people always do, which is to take their own perspectives, their own assumptions, and project them back onto the past. So Hitler's interpretation of the Romans is that the ruling classes in ancient Rome, in the Republic, the patricians, the aristocracy, the senate, are of Nordic stock, that they are blonde. And that the plebeian masses, the mob, are not, are inferior, are kind of shot through with Jewish and African racial characteristics. And therefore, Hitler says that they are inferior um and rome is great and is able to

conquer the mediterranean while it is led by blonde arians and the effect of conquering the mediterranean is that this nordic stock in in rome as in greece gets diluted by inferior elements and that is what culminates in the collapse of the Roman Empire. And, you know, this is ahistorical and it's ascientific, but it is a kind of way of understanding the world that is unthinkable without the legacy of Darwinian science. And yet, Tom, I mean, this is an immensely frivolous question, which to which I'm, you know, I'm no stranger to frivolous comments. Imagine that you took a Roman from the first century AD or something, and you dropped them in the 1930s. Is it not the case that they would look at Mussolini's Italy, or later on Hitler's Germany, and think of them as more

sane, well-ordered recognizable societies than what they would surely see as the sort of anarchic confusion woolly confusion of liberal democratic britain and france well they would obviously recognize um symbols and architectural styles because both mussolini and hitler are on them. Because of the cult of Rome. So it's easy for Mussolini, because he's Italian, so this is part of the kind of culture. For Hitler, Rome is the great archetype. He goes to Paris and says it's okay, but it's not as good as Rome.

That's what he wants to build when the Nazis win the war. He wants to build a city that will very consciously and deliberately put Rome, ancient Rome, in the shade. But I think, yes, I mean, the sense that the Romans are governed by a pre-Christian, as Hitler would frame it, a pre-Jewish sense of morality is obviously very important. And it's not just the Nazis who draw that equation. So Seaman Vale famously did this as well. I mean, she said that 2,000 years ago, it's not the ancient Germans who were like the Nazis, it's the Romans. And so she does kind of recognise that. I think there's an element that the readiness of the Romans to go to war and to celebrate war is something that Hitler and different. And just to kind of, you know, to take a few symbols from

ancient Rome here and a few kind of emblems from Sparta there doesn't mean that you are recreating the ancient world. Fascism is a very, very modern ideology. Okay, I buy that. Easy question for you. SMC, was Oliver Cromwell a fascist? No. Yeah. I'd agree with that. I think that's pretty... How about a more difficult one? Well, I think it's time for one for you, isn't it? Okay, we'll ask you. What's a difficult question you've come up,

but you can put it to yourself. So it's Rebecca Redil, who is historian herself. Yes. And she says, I don't know whether I should take this as a personal insult, does history and do historians enable fascism? So I guess it's, you know, does a sense of history, you know, do historians make fascism possible through their myth-making

and all the rest of it? Yes. Fascism, again, is unthinkable without a sense of history. Yeah. You need the backstory, don't you? Whether it's Mussolini's sense that his Italy is the inheritor of ancient Rome, or Hitler's sense that the history of Nordic supremacy is written in the pages of the history book. I think that an enormous number of historians, particularly in the Third Reich, were suborned by that. And, you know, it wasn't just that they were kind of

paying lip service to this theory, this understanding of history as a way of keeping their jobs. I mean, they enthusiastically collaborated with it. I agree completely. And I think actually one of my more sort of heretical ideas that sometimes annoys people is people often say, well, it's very important. We touched on this in the lessons of history.

It's terribly important that we learn the lessons of history and we study history as much as possible because it'll mean we're all very kind to each other. And I think often people who know a lot about history use it as an excuse to kill each other. Sometimes the more you know the more you remember the past the more the past becomes a prison and an and a sort of justification for violence i mean we can see in everywhere in the world societies where people remember history too much and in a

sense and they they use it as a you know they're imprisoned by it and history becomes um the sort of justification for for slaughter absolutely and i think the sense that um you know history is a nightmare from which we're struggling to wake up is the counterpart to the idea that history um sheds a light and enables us to understand the present and the future better um i think that that we have uh we've covered enough there well not least because we talked to our listeners away from the podcast by telling them that if they listen too much i i want to end on a triumphant note um because there's there was one tweet from dr esther o'reilly who said i dare you to do the whole episode without mentioning Trump.

Dab! We just mentioned him! I thought we'd done it! Dab! Well, that probably serves us right. If we're going to throw around words like fascism, we're bound to get an enormous postbag and we're bound to get caught out by our answers to the questions. Anyway, thank you so much for all your tweets. I'm sorry we couldn't get through them all. Now, this Thursday, we have a very exciting podcast it's all about the north south divide in britain tea or dinner bath or bath and we have a brilliant guest uh dan jackson um who wrote the definitive history of northumbria so don't miss that it's fascinating and it is fun in a way that fascism will never be. So bye for now. Goodbye.

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