
Pre-WWI Britain harbored many of the preconditions for fascism - smacktoward
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fascism/2017/04/britain_shared_many_of_the_preconditions_for_fascism.html
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kristianc
Asking why Britain did not follow the same path as much of Europe in the early
part of the 20th C is a worthy question but this is an oddly ahistorical
article. The rise of the New Liberal government didn't happen by accident as
the article seems to imply, it happened in response to social conditions.

The fact that Britain took three years to win the Boer War (largely because
the army was unfit to fight) was a national scandal, and gave birth to a
national preoccupation with the condition of the working class.

Independently of each other, two wealthy British industrialists, Booth and
Rowntree, published two surveys into the state of working class life in
Britain. These found that 30% of people were living in poverty, and that the
conditions were such that people would be unable to pull themselves out of
poverty alone.

While the rest of Europe engaged in a great battle between Marxism and
Imperialism, British politics set about trying to improve the condition of the
working classes.

Political revolution has also never really been the British way. Almost all of
the major institutions of British society (including arguably the trade
unions) are under the pall of political conservatism. One of the reasons why
the recent Brexit has been such a surprise is that Britons have never been
given to overthrow the whole system.

Politics in Britain pre-war was also intensely local. Most people lived and
died close to where they were born, people were even more parochial than they
are now, and most people saw what was happening in Europe as completely
distant from their lives.

Politics in Britain pre war may have held some of the conditions for fascism,
but it was never likely due to a multitude of reasons never addressed in this
article. Also, it was a strange kind of crisis for conservatism - the
Conservatives went on to dominate 20th Century politics in Britain.

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danmaz74
> While the rest of Europe engaged in a great battle between Marxism and
> Imperialism, British politics set about trying to improve the condition of
> the working classes.

In all fairness, the UK could do that also because it had already developed
the biggest and richest empire on Earth...

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jacobush
This sounded fina to me at first but then I thought - why is this not a false
dichotomy? (Honest question)

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danmaz74
From just a purely economic point of view, creating/expanding an empire
required resources (investment), while having it brought you resources
(returns). Improving workers' conditions also required investments, hence the
dichotomy (or, more precisely, trade-off) I see.

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notahacker
Perhaps the book does a better job (or argues a different point entirely) but
I'm not sure the article does a particularly good job of justifying its
headline. Most of the things it describes (ambivalence towards democracy,
mostly latent racism) were the rule rather than the exception in most
historical societies; lack of mass democracy was if anything a bulwark against
populist movements like fascism. It was the liberals the middle classes
favoured rather than socialists they feared that were driving changes, and the
Right's preoccupation with vestiges of monarchical tradition and belief their
"racial superiority" could best be demonstrated by the Empire were the polar
opposite of the fascist fondness for radical new social contracts and
demonstrating superiority through self-reliance and military might

Above all, the early twentieth century UK didn't have the sort of massive
sense of grievance that fascists built their movement arount or a charismatic
far-right figure to lead a fascist movement.

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hprotagonist
Thus characters such as Roderick Spode in P.G. Wodehouse's works.

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hodgesrm
A far more interesting story is how Houston Stuart Chamberlain's writings
influenced the Nazi movement in Germany. The Slate article omits the fact that
Chamberlain married into the Wagner clan in Bayreuth, who were early and
enthusiastic supporters of Hitler. The family was also deeply enmeshed in a
nexus of virulent pro-Aryan and anti-semitic propaganda prior to WW I.
Chamberlain left England in the late 1800s and settled permanently Germany
where he became a citizen during WW I. This fact alone seems to indicate that
conditions for Fascist philosophy in England were less than salutary.

For a great read on the Wagner clan and their connections to Chamberlain, see
Oliver Hilmes' outstanding biography of Cosima Wagner. ("Cosima Wagner: The
Lady of Bayreuth", "Herrin des Huegels" in German).

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alphonsegaston
And the same was true of the United States, pre-WWII. While I certainly heard
a lot in school about our victorious rescue of Europe from the claws of the
Nazis, little was I told about our cultivation of eugenics and scientific
racism. Or anti-Semitic industrialists like Henry Ford allying themselves with
Hitler. The turning away of Jewish refugees. Charles Lindbergh and the
American Nazi Party.

How would the US be different today if we understood our own complicity in
fomenting fascism ideology in the aftermath of WWII?

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digi_owl
There are times it feels like outside of the USSR's involvement, WW2 was a
battle between various fascist interpretations.

~~~
flexie
Communism shared the totalitarianism, militarism and racism (incl
antisemitism) of fascism. Communist art looked a lot like nazist art. Flags
and banners too. So did the way their soldiers marched. The way individuals
just didn't matter.

When you go to the far right you end up at the far left, and vice versa.

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RcouF1uZ4gsC
Yes, for example the far left "anti-fascists" in the US are the ones that are
assaulting people for their beliefs and using violence to suppress free
speech. However, because they are leftists, the left has not unconditionally
condemned their actions.

Remember, that both the far left and the far right are dangerous. For all the
talk currently about fascism, it was Communism in the 20th century that
produced the most death, suffering, and misery.

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mnyary
The Great War (WWI) was a 20th century event?

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jt2190
Yes. Confusing as it is, the first digits of the current year (2017) don't
align with the current century (21st) because we started counting centuries at
one, not zero. e.g. 1 A.D. / 1st, 100 A.D. / 2nd, 1000 A.D. / 11th, etc.

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olivermarks
The sub head "Edwardian Britain harbored many of the preconditions for
fascism—including rampant anti-Semitism—before war broke out and united a
divided nation"

Doesn't sit well with me because that competitive european colonial era was a
lot more complicated than Pugh describes.

I hope Pugh's book discusses the realities of the global rentier classes and
the origins of globalization, because I would argue this is at the root of
much of subsequent events.

England, Germany, Holland and France were all competing to colonize the globe
in a militaristic fashion during this era, and their internal and external
societies reflected that. The advent of fluid global capital unaligned to
nation states - including the 1910 Jekyll Island 'Federal Reserve' invention
in the USA - led to massive pressures on the parochial societies.

The semitic ethnic cleansing to create the predominantly Ashkenazi state of
Israel was largely the result of British capitulation to the global financiers
who orchestrated the Sykes Picant and Balfor treaties that enabled the state
of Israel to be reinvented.

The punitive reparations on Germany after WW1 was largely seen as this same
class extracting tribute from Germans ...and crucially the popular sentiment
was that German society was being dominated and overrun with Jewish capital.
These are obviously contentious issues but, just as the case now where the 1%
who own the world's capital 'haven't taken out enough insurance to protect
themselves from the rest' to paraphrase economist Mark Blyth, 'populism' ie
people waking up unsatisfied with the way their societies are dominated and
run, was a major motivator for change then and now.

Well over 100 million people died in WWII and billions were made by those same
stateless rentier classes (who are of all ethnicities and religions, this
isn't uniquely about Judaism).

The author's website

[http://www.martindpugh.com/page3.htm](http://www.martindpugh.com/page3.htm)

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jonyt
Hmmm..."capitulation to global financiers", "stateless rentier classes",
methinks I sense a common theme here. Not a supporter of David Irving by any
chance are you?

~~~
olivermarks
no

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cjslep
Kind of a "duh" headline to me. The headline of this article isn't that big a
deal to me, because every country harbors some level of the preconditions for
facism. So I found it more interesting to read about a country that did make
the transition from a strong liberal democracy to a facist regeime.

I just finished the book "The Coming of the Third Reich" by Richard J Evans
which covers Germany from ~1880 to 1933, and does a great job of explaining
how ordinary Germans at the time were living their lives and the greater
cultural shifts that gave way to the minority-populist uprising that was the
Nazi seizure of power. Way more insightful place to start, in my opinion.

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krona
Which pre-war countries with advanced societies _didn 't_ have, say, entire
scientific communities beating the drum of eugenics? It was an entire academic
discipline in the universities of many countries, and there were 3
international conferences in the early 20th century.

I don't see how you could write a balanced article on this topic without even
mentioning the rise and fall of Sir Oswald Mosley, because therein lies the
major difference. British fascism died once people realized what was happening
in Germany, most notably the Night of the Long Knives in 1934. The BUF didn't
even have enough support to run in the subsequent election in 1935.

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mannykannot
Moseley's black-shirts were certainly the closest Britain came to overt
fascism, but this article informed me about lesser-known (at least to me)
issues prior to WW1. The title of the author's book suggests that it does
indeed cover Mosley.

I imagine one will find fascism has always had its appeal to some portion of
the global population wherever there is dissatisfaction - and particularly
among people who think they are not getting what they believe they are
entitled to, rather than those who are in extremely dire straits, such as
refugees and oppressed ethnic groups.

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aaron695
How did Slate lose the plot?

They used to have good articles that seemed quite moderate?

