GEORGE L. MOSSE
THE FASCIST REVOLUTION. Toward a General Theory of Fascism.
230 pages. Howard Fertig.
he ethnic cleansing being carried out by the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo makes this enlightening volume on the nature of fascism by George Mosse especially timely. As Lawrence Wechsler noted in The New Yorker last week, Milosevic is a classic fascist. His appeal is to a kind of fanatical Serbian nationalism; he is popular; he has fused the historic sense of Serbian victimhood with a cult of blood vengeance against non-Serbs.
Mosse, a distinguished student of European and especially German history who taught for many years at the University of Wisconsin, does not speak specifically of Milosevic. But his new book, "The Fascist Revolution," certainly brings the Serb dictator to mind. Mosse rejects the view of fascism as a kind of thin veneer imposed by force and terror and maintained there by a manipulative leader glorified by a huge and monolithic propaganda machine.
In Mosse's view, fascism, as his title suggests, was a genuine revolutionary movement, comparable in this sense to communism. Fascism (in this sense unlike Communism) was constructed on the basis of popular consensus and arose out of deeply ingrained values and traditions. Far from being a thin veneer, a sort of nonideological terror that merely manipulated nationalist and racist emotions, it profoundly changed the societies in which it came to power and imposed a complete world view, a different vision of history and its meaning on them.
"The fascist myth was based upon the national mystique, its own revolutionary and dynamic traditions," Mosse writes. "It also encompassed remnants of previous ideologies and political attitudes, many of them paradoxically hostile to fascist traditions. It was a scavenger which attempted to co-opt all that had appealed to people in the 19th- and 20th-century past; romanticism, liberalism and socialism as well as Darwinism and modern technology."
Mosse, who died on Jan. 22, treats some of these matters as if he were leaping into the middle of an ongoing discussion among other scholars, and that makes the going a bit tough sometimes for lay readers. The early chapters are especially demanding in this regard, with Mosse not always clear about the theme he is meaning to pursue. But as the book continues, the tone becomes more impassioned, the argument more vigorous.
Richard Bernstein
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