Arthur Kenneth Chesterton, cousin of G.K. Chesterton, grew up in South Africa where he developed his "colonial outsider" view of England and of the First World War. By the age of 21, Chesterton was an archetypal "angry young man" - ex-colonial, ex-officer with literary interests and accomplishments. As an increasingly disillusioned literary critic and newspaper editor, he created a world based on his reading of English literature - an idealized version of British society. The result was a cultural despair which sealed his acceptance of fascism in 1933. In this biography, David Baker examines the socio-psychological profile of A.K. Chesterton to help explain the nature of fascism. The author questions previous academic interpretations, suggesting that a definition of fascist ideology must be broadened to take account of its fatal attraction to those who might have remained self-assured members of a democratic society.

Fascism, Nazism, and Communism dominated the history of much of the twentieth century, yet comparatively little attention has focused on popular reactions to the regimes that sprang from these ideologies. Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes is the first volume to investigate popular reactions to totalitarian rule in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and the communist regimes in Poland and East Germany after 1945.
The contributions, written for this volume by internationally acknowledged experts in their fields, move beyond the rather static vision provided by traditional themes of consent and coercion to construct a more nuanced picture of everyday life in the various regimes. The book provides many new insights into the ways totalitarian regimes functioned and the reasons for their decline, encouraging comparisons between the different regimes and stimulating re-evaluation of long-established positions.

This vivid biography is a study of the life and times of the Italian poet-activist, Lauro de Bosis. Remarkably productive as a poet, cultural diplomat, and political subversive, de Bosis founded and lead an underground resistance group, the National Alliance for Liberty. His actions culminated in a dramatic solo flight over Rome in October 1931, showering the city with protest leaflets against the Fascist dictatorship before plunging to his death. This feat brought world attention to the existence of anti-Fascism, much to Mussolini's chagrin and rage.

De Bosis's story, told against the backdrop of Rome's politics in the 1920s, is at once personal, national, and international. World figures --- from Mussolini, Croce, Ezra Pound, to Walter Lippmann, Thornton Wilder, and his lover, the actress Ruth Draper --- were all within de Bosis's compass. Gifted, quirky, original, and impulsive but principled to the point of giving up both personal love and family for his cause, his life shows how Mussolini's regime systematically cleared out the cream of Italy's young liberal intellectuals. Based on previously untapped archival resources, this is the first biography of a young, gifted Italian poet who dared to challenge the power of a totalitarian state with his practical idealism and fierce determination to protect Italy's fragile democracy from il Duce.

Elazar examines the social and political processes that determined the character of Fascist organization in Italy and its seizure of state power first in the provinces and then in the nation. She argues that the Fascists' "modus operandi" shaped the political struggles they engaged in and reflexively determined their own political significance. Employing both primary and secondary historical sources, Elazar reveals the crucial internal political struggles and inner contradictions through which Fascism was invented.

The political strategy of paramilitary organization and assault on labor and the Socialists carried out by the Fascist Action Squads in collusion with men of property was crucial in determining their seizure of power. But this also determined the ideological and organizational contours of Fascism itself. The Fascist Squads' alliances with men of property made them a formidable faction within the Fascist organization that could and did challenge Mussolini's authority. The making of Fascism is thus marked by the irony of the relationship between Mussolini and his political power base--the Squads. The very element of paramilitary organization that was decisive in the Fascists' seizure of power in the provinces had to be submerged by Mussolini if he was to preserve his power. Historical and comparative sociologists, political sociologists, and students of Italian Fascism and Italian history will find this new explanation of the making of Fascism both provacative and fascinating.

Helen Graham here brings together leading historians of international renown to examine 20th-century Spain in light of Franco's dictatorship and its legacy. Interrogating Francoism uses a three-part structure to look at the old regime, the civil war and the forging of Francoism; the nature of Franco's dictatorship; and the 'history wars' that have since taken place over his legacy. Social, political, economic and cultural historical approaches are integrated throughout and 'top down' political analysis is incorporated along with 'bottom up' social perspectives. The book places Spain and Francoism in comparative European context and explores the relationship between the historical debates and present-day political and ideological controversies in Spain. In part a tribute to Paul Preston, the foremost historian of contemporary Spain today, Interrogating Francoism includes an interview with Professor Preston and a comprehensive bibliography of his work, as well as extensive further readings in English. It is a crucial volume for all students of 20th-century Spain.

In 2007, the Pontine Marshes, are very much part of the Italian national landscape. A traveller who takes a Eurostar train from Rome to Naples will pass through the marshes, which are a marshland only in name (Agro Pontino in Italian). It is hard to see the landscape of the Pontine Marshes and to simultaneously cast a historical eye back eighty years to when the area was avoided by people. It is hard to realize, today, that the Pontine Marshes were the focus for an extraordinary national land reclamation and urbanization project during Mussolini's fascist regime. Between 1930 and 1939, the marshes became the target of massive national investment, internal migration (often non-voluntary) and engineering work. In the 1930s, the Pontine Marshes became key protagonists in national culture: featured in newsreels, newspapers and propaganda, they became a metaphor for the regime's modernizing drive and ambition to create a new Italy where one had not been able to exist before. In particular, the regime's planners clamored to create New Towns in the reclaimed marshes; these were to be planned along fascist lines, and populated with selected colonists from the north. Written by an Oxford University professor Federico Caprotti, this book is about the Pontine Marshes project and brings together cohesive strands of research which have not appeared alongside one another before. For example, the book explores the architectural and urban planning aspects of the totalitarian minds which devised and built the New Towns; the lived experience of the 'colonists' who were forced to populate the new cities; the technological aspects which made the project possible, such as the fight against malaria, seen by fascism to be a 'non-totalitarian' disease; and finally, the promotion of the Pontine Marshes project through the press and film. Mussolini Cities will be a welcome addition for collections in Geography and Italian Studies.

Based on original research using official documents, this illuminating account of the role of the police in the rise to power of Mussolini reveals the internal workings of the Italian Liberal policing system, the tensions between its different branches, and problems related to the shifting demands of its wheeler-dealer political masters. Explanations of the support that the Italian police gave to the fascist movement are to be found not only in the profound social, economic, and political transformations characterizing the years immediately following the First World War, but also in Italy's post-unification administrative system. Police support for the Fascists was often morally, if not physically, coerced by the Fascists themselves, while administrative ambiguities and weaknesses hampered any police attempts to repress the movement. The rise of fascism and its support from the police was the logical end result of a tradition of "private solutions" to problems of law and order. To illustrate this, the book examines the policing of the socialist movement between 1897 and 1918 before analyzing in detail the relationship between the police and the facist movement after the First World War, with a view to comparing behavioral trends emerging during both periods.

The prevailing sentiment of contemporary intellectuals is that the human condition has never been better. History is regarded as lengthy episode of oppression that human beings have gradually but steadily fought to overcome with considerable success. Evidence of these successes that are commonly offered include increased material consumption, better health and longer life expectancy, technological development and, above all, the ongoing triumph of "democracy" and "human rights."

However, the nineteenth and twentieth century produced an array of dissident thinkers that expressed a great skepticism of modern civilization. Their individual critiques were often vastly different from one another. Yet the common idea that emerges from work of these genuine intellectual mavericks is one that laments the loss of traditional societies, and pessimism about the new world that modernity has brought. Instead, the modern project has been regarded by thinkers as different as Nietzsche, G.K. Chesterton and Alain De Benoist to have been a cultural and spiritual degeneration that diminished rather than elevated the nobility of man.

This work by Keith Preston examines the ideas of these thinkers, and considers the potential relevance of their insights in the postmodern age.

This work seeks to take a fresh look at the contentious question of the longevity and popularity of Mussolini's regime in Italy. In particular, it draws upon new research to challenge what has been the most influential paradigm over the last couple of decades, namely, the interpretation of Italian fascism as a consensual dictatorship.

At the end of the Second World War, hundreds of thousands of German children were sent to the front lines in the largest mobilisation of underage combatants by any country before or since. Hans Dunker was just one of these children. Identified as gifted aged 9, he left his home in South America in 1937 in pursuit of a 'proper' education in Nazi Germany. Instead, he and his schoolfriends, lacking adequate training, ammunition and rations, were sent to the Eastern Front when the war was already lost in the spring of 1945. Using her father's diary and other documents, Helene Munson traces Hans' journey from a student at Feldafing School to a soldier fighting in Zawada, a village in present-day Czech Republic. What is revealed is an education system so inhumane that until recently, post-war Germany worked hard to keep it a secret. This is Hans' story, but also the story of a whole generation of German children who silently carried the shame of what they suffered into old age.

This study looks at nineteenth - and early twentieth-century opera as part of a culture which produced fascism as a crisis-state, and threatened to extinguish the genre as an influential and contemporary high form of art altogether. Jeremy Tambling highlights the themes of the cultural crisis through a detailed discussion of some dozen operas and a general overview of the works of Wagner, Verdi, Puccini, Strauss, and others, drawing on the writings of Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, and Heidegger, for an understanding of the ideological background. Reading fascism as a political, intellectual, and psychological phenomenon, the author draws on the works of Bataille, Theweleit, and Kristeva, for discussion of proto-fascist and fascist thought, and for its relation to gender-politics. Resisting the cliches about Wagner or Strauss's relationship to the Third Reich, Tambling takes the opera out the hermetically sealed-off state in which it is normally discussed, and presents it as both complicit in, and in opposition to, the reactionary and regressive pressures that made up the `culture of fascism', and those that tried to make opera part of the `fascism of culture'.

Many of the foremost experts in the study of European fascism unite to provide a contemporary analysis of the theories and historiography of fascism. Essays discuss the most recent debates on the subject and how changes in the social sciences over the past forty years have impacted on the study of fascism from various perspectives.

When it comes to explaining the origins of electoral populism in the United States, we often look to the characteristics and conditions of voters, overlooking the reasons why populist candidates emerge in the first place. In The Making of the Populist Movement, Adam Slez argues that the rise of electoral populism in the American West was a strategic response to a political environment in which the configuration of positions was literally locked in place, precluding the success of new contenders or otherwise marginal competitors. Combining traditional forms of historical inquiry with innovations in network analysis and spatial statistics, he shows how the expansion of state and market drove the push for market regulation in southern Dakota, where an insurgent farmers' movement looked to third-party alternatives as a means of affecting change. In the context of western settlement, the struggle for political power was synonymous with the struggle for position in an emerging urban hierarchy. As inequities in the spatial distribution of resources became more pronounced, appeals to agrarian populism became a powerful political tool with which to wage partisan war. Offering a fresh take on the origins of electoral populism in the United States, The Making of the Populist Movement contributes to our understanding of political action by explicitly linking the evolution of the political field to the transformation of physical space through concerted action on the part of elites.

This book explores the day-to-day 'lived experience' of fascism in Venice during the 1930s, charting the attempts of the fascist regime to infiltrate and reshape Venetians' everyday lives and their responses to the intrusions of the fascist state.

How did Italians living in Britain respond to Mussolini's fascism? What links did ex-pat fascists forge with the British Right? To what extent did Italophilia exist in Britain during the Mussolini years?"Exporting Fascism" addresses these questions, which have long been ignored by historians. While there is much material available about Nazi sympathizers in the United Kingdom, there is comparatively very little about Italophile fascist sympathizers. The author uncovers the policy of Mussolini's government to transform Italian communities abroad into 'little Fascist Italies'. Ambassador Dino Grandi had great success in the fascistization campaign of Italian emigrants through such means as Italian community newspapers and fascist summer camps and schools.The author also examines the links forged between Italian fascism and the British Right. Specifically, she uncovers the Italophilia that dominated the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the first half of the 1930s, later to be replaced with an admiration for National Socialism. She also examines the BUF's activities within Italy, which have thus far remained almost entirely unknown."Exporting Fascism "sheds new light on a neglected aspect of the international fascist movement at the dawn of the Second World War.

Birken challenges the conventional wisdom that Hitlerism was a revolt against Western values. Utilizing Adolph Hitler's major writings, speeches, and recorded conversations, this path-breaking study in intellectual history delineates the relationship of Nazism to other European ideologies, both past and present. National Socialism, Birken maintains, was nothing less than an attempt to create a metaphysical foundation for the German nation-state after both the Frankfurt Assembly and the Bismarckian pseudo-Reich had failed to do so. In this context, Hitler can be seen as the last great exponent of the Enlightenment tradition that glorified fraternity. However, by grounding German nationalism in race, Hitler sent his country on a path toward destruction in the Second World War. Birken closes with the warning that our current failure to provide a post-modern substitute for nationalism invites the reassertion of the Enlightenment obsessions of nation and race. Speculative and far-reaching, this book will stimulate the current debate over nationalism and will be of interest to students of politics and the social sciences as well as German history buffs.

Greta Kuckhoff belonged to the anti-Nazi resistance group 'The Red Orchestra' and was condemned to death in 1943. Her sentence was later commuted to imprisonment and she was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. She spent the next thirty years working to commemorate the group's antifascist resistance. Through radio broadcasts, letters, exhibitions, journal articles, film, and autobiography, she fought against Cold War narratives which condemned the group as traitors or hailed them as Soviet spies. Using previously unpublished archival sources, this book traces the fascinating life writings of this key figure from the GDR. It draws attention to gendered politics of remembering, to the role of memories of the Holocaust, and to the political identities offered by these diverse forms of commemoration. In doing so, it provocatively intervenes in the contentious debates about remembering antifascism in contemporary Germany.

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee's Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934-1945 is the English translation of Catherine Collomp's award-winning book on the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC). Formed in New York City in 1934 by the leaders of the Jewish Labor Movement, the JLC came to the forefront of American labor's reaction to Nazism and antisemitism. Situated at the crossroads of several fields of inquiry-Jewish history, immigration and exile studies, American and international labor history, World War II in France and in Poland-the history of the JLC is by nature transnational. It brings to the fore the strength of ties between the Yiddish-speaking Jewish worlds across the globe. Rescue, Relief, and Resistance contains six chapters. Chapter 1 describes the political origin of the JLC, whose founders had been Bundist militants in the Russian empire before their emigration to the United States, and asserts its roots in the American Jewish Labor movement of the 1930s. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss how the JLC established formal links with the European non-communist labor movement, especially through the Labor and Socialist International and the International Federation of Trade Unions. Chapter 4 focuses on the approximately 1,500 European labor and socialist leaders and left-wing intellectuals, including their families, rescued from certain arrest and deportation by the Gestapo. Chapter 5 deals with the special relationship the JLC established with currents in the Resistance in France, partly financing its underground labor and socialist networks and operations. Chapter 6 is devoted to the JLC's support of Jews in Poland during the war: humanitarian relief for those in the occupied territory under Soviet domination and political and financial support of the combatants of the Warsaw ghetto in their last stand against annihilation by the Wermacht. The JLC has never commemorated its rescue operations and other political activities on behalf of opponents of fascism and Nazism, nor its contributions to the reconstruction of Jewish life after the Holocaust. Historians to this day have not traced its history in a substantial way. Students and scholars of Holocaust and American studies will find this text vital to their continued studies.

This book traces the activity of the neo-Nazis in Germany from the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 to the present. Lewis, who lived in Germany, based this pioneering study on first-hand research. He emphasizes the impact of unification on the growth of right-wing militancy throughout Germany--providing examples of neo-Nazi and skinhead activities--as well as the government's efforts to control the growing extremist movement. Although the movement remains relatively small, five years after unification, it is one that bears watching.

The first chapter reviews the events surrounding the unification and sets the stage for the increasingly vocal neo-Nazi movement. The primary goal of the following chapters is to trace the movement's chronological evolution from unification through the high points in 1992 and 1993 to the governmental efforts to reduce the growing threat in 1994. Key to the discussions are the examples of violence and brutality directly linked to the neo-Nazis in the 1990s. Numerous incidents are cited that reflect the sheer brutality and wanton disregard for authority in a newly formed nation struggling financially and emotionally with bringing two divergent societies together. Imbedded in the chronological dialogue are short, personal sketches of leading neo-Nazis both inside and outside Germany who directly influence the movement. The entire book encapsulates the rise, once again, of those elements of Hitler's Third Reich that were so abhorrent in the 1930s and 1940s.

'Lucid and damning ... an absorbing - and infuriating - tale of complicity, coverup and denial' PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE, author of EMPIRE OF PAIN A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions from the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II - and how the world allowed them to get away with it. In 1946, Gunther Quandt - patriarch of Germany's most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW - was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his arch-rival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz and still control Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight - until now. In this landmark work, investigative journalist David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany's wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave labourers and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler's army as Europe burnt around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how the wider world's political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.