Between 1926 and 1943, the Fascist regime arrested thousands of Italians and deported them to island internment colonies and small villages in southern Italy. Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy analyses this system of political confinement and, more broadly, its effects on Italian society, revealing the centrality of political violence to Fascist rule. In doing so, the book shatters the widely accepted view that the Mussolini regime ruled without a system of mass repression. The Fascist state ruled Italy violently, projecting its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination and other quotidian forms of coercion. Moreover, by promoting denunciatory practices, the regime cemented the loyalties of 'upstanding' citizens while suppressing opponents, dissenters and social outsiders. Fascist repression was thus more intense and ideological than previously thought and even shared some important similarities with Nazi and Soviet terror.

Beginning with the question of the role of the past in the shaping of a contemporary identity, this volumes spans three generations of German and Austrian writers and explores changes and shifts in the aesthetics of VergangenheitsbewAltigung (coming to terms with the past). The purpose of the book is to assess contemporary German literary representations of National Socialism in a wider context of these current debates. The contributors address questions arising from a shift over the last decade, triggered by a generation change-questions of personal and national identity in Germany and Austria, and the aesthetics of memory. One of the central questions that emerges in relation to the Hitler youth generation is that of biography, as examined through GA1/4nter Grass' and Martin Walser's conflicting views on the subject of National Socialism. Other themes explored here are the conflict between the post-war generations and the contributions of that conflict to (West)-German mentality, and the growing historical distance and its influence on the aesthetics of representation.

For decades scholars have pored over Hitler's autobiographical journey/political treatise, debating if Mein Kampf has genocidal overtones and arguably led to the Holocaust. For the first time, Hitler's Mein Kampf and the Holocaust sees celebrated international scholars analyse the book from various angles to demonstrate how it laid the groundwork for the Shoah through Hitler's venomous attack on the Jews in his text. Split into three main sections which focus on 'contexts', 'eugenics' and 'religion', the book reflects carefully on the point at which the Fuhrer's actions and policies turn genocidal during the Third Reich and whether Mein Kampf presaged Nazi Germany's descent into genocide. There are contributions from leading academics from across the United States and Germany, including Magnus Brechtken, Susannah Heschel and Nathan Stoltzfus, along with totally new insights into the source material in light of the 2016 German critical edition of Mein Kampf. Hitler's views on Marxism, violence, and leadership, as well as his anti-Semitic rhetoric are examined in detail as you are taken down the disturbing path from a hateful book to the Holocaust.

Totalitarianism: The Basics is an easy-to-read introduction into the main concepts, ideologies, and regimes associated with totalitarianism.

Starting with an overview of how scholars have attempted to define totalitarianism, Phillip W. Gray begins with an examination of the various types of terms used, helping the reader think about how these terms do – and do not – apply to different ideologies and governments. Easily accessible language and the use of numerous examples aid readers in seeing the connections between certain types of ideologies and some forms of organization/movements in their relation to historically well-known totalitarian regimes. Gray concludes with the tools necessary to think through how to distinguish between an actual (or potential) totalitarian system and regimes that, while oppressive or authoritarian, would not be totalitarian in nature. A rich bibliography containing additional readings bookend the text.

Totalitarianism: The Basics offers an essential introduction for students from all backgrounds seeking to understand totalitarianism and for general readers with an interest in political ideologies and extremism. For those knowledgeable in this field, it adds conceptual relevance and a variety of ways of thinking about the term.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction: What is Totalitarianism?

2. Ideology: How Totalitarianism Thinks

3. Movement/Party: How Totalitarianism Organizes

4. Regime: How Totalitarianism Governs

5. Totalitarianism in History

6. The Future of Totalitarianism

Bibliography

Addressing the question of why many Latin American fiction authors are writing about Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust now, this book charts the evolution of Latin American literary production from the 19th Century, through the late 20th century 'Boom', to the present day. Containing texts from Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Chile, it analyses work by some of the most well-known contemporary writers including Roberto Bolano, Juan Gabriel Vasquez, Jorge Volpi, Lucia Puenzo, Patricio Pron and Michel Laub; as well as notable precursors such as Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Ricardo Piglia. Nazism, the Second World War and the Holocaust in Contemporary Latin American Fiction argues that these authors find Nazism relevant to thinking through some of the most urgent contemporary challenges we face: from racism, to the unequal division of wealth and labour between the Global 'North' and 'South'; and, of course, the general failure of democracy to eliminate fascism.

Hunter S. Thompson is best remembered today as a caricature: drug-addled, sharp-witted, and passionate; played with bowlegged aplomb by Johnny Depp; memorialized as a Doonesbury character. In all this entertainment, the true figure of Thompson has unfortunately been forgotten. In this perceptive, dramatic book, Tim Denevi recounts the moment when Thompson found his calling. As the Kennedy assassination and the turmoil of the 60s paved the way for Richard Nixon, Thompson greeted him with two very powerful emotions: fear and loathing. In his fevered effort to take down what he saw as a rising dictator, Thompson made a kind of Faustian bargain, taking the drugs he needed to meet newspaper deadlines and pushing himself beyond his natural limits. For ten years, he cast aside his old ambitions, troubled his family, and likely hastened his own decline, along the way producing some of the best political writing in our history. This remarkable biography reclaims Hunter Thompson for the enigmatic true believer he was: not a punchline or a cartoon character, but a fierce, colorful opponent of fascism in a country that suddenly seemed all too willing to accept it.

In this ground-breaking study, Andrew Chandler examines the complex relationship between religions and politics, church and state, and national and international politics during the period that witnessed the rise and fall of the Third Reich. He explores these dilemmas within the context of the tumultuous years when many British Christian confronted and challenged the Nazi regime. Chandler shows how many of the key moral questions which came to define the modern world now crystallized: What view should the Christian take of the political state? How should the claims of dictators and democrats be judged? How should the Church protest against injustice - and what can be done about it? How should peace be preserved and when should war be declared? How should a just war be justly fought? It is a history which places the Third Reich firmly in an international perspective, revealing the moral arguments and debates that Nazism provoked across the democracies. It is also an important study of the many ways in which men and women outside Germany intervened, protested, and campaigned against the Hitler regime and sought to support its critics and its victims.

Scholars, clergy, teachers and writers present stimulating essays on the theme that Anne Frank's Diary movingly symbolizes the triumph of childhood innocence over totalitarian brutality. This may be of value for classes and study groups with interests in religion and religious ethics, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, discrimination, the role of the individual in society, and the daunting moral dilemmas posed by emerging nationalisms all over the world.

Scholars, clergy, teachers, and writers present stimulating essays on the theme that Anne Frank's Diary movingly symbolizes the triumph of childhood innocence over totalitarian brutality. This is a valuable volume for classes and study groups with interests in religion and religious ethics, the Holocaust, ethnic cleansing, discrimination, the role of the individual in society, and the daunting moral dilemmas posed by emerging nationalisms all over the world.

The Nazi Germany Sourcebook is an exciting new collection of documents on the origins, rise, course and consequences of National Socialism, the Third Reich, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Packed full of both official and private papers from the perspectives of perpetrators and victims, these sources offer a revealing insight into why Nazism came into being, its extraordinary popularity in the 1930s, how it affected the lives of people, and what it means to us today.
This carefully edited series of 148 documents, drawn from 1850 to 2000, covers the pre-history and aftermath of Nazism. Organised into seven chapters, The Nazi Germany Sourcebook focuses on key areas of study, helping students to understand and critically evaluate this extraordinary historical episode:
* the ideological roots of Nazism, and World War I
* the Weimar Republic
* the consolidation of Nazi power
* Hitler's motives, aims and preparation for war
* World War II
* the Holocaust
* the Cold War and recent historical debates.

The year 1932, the tenth anniversary of Mussolini's March on Rome, was fascism's Decennale. Commemorating Italian fascism's seizure of power, the Decennale was celebrated by the regime in a deliberate attempt to radicalize the original movement and develop it into an imperial and racist regime. In Mussolini's Decennale, Antonio Morena explores a cross-section of Italian culture during the Decennale. Studying literature, speeches, documentaries, films, textbooks, and the 1932 Exhibition, he discusses how the regime, its patrons, and even its critics all appropriated the historical events of 1922 for their political advantage. Positioning the 1932 anniversary celebrations as the crux of the fascist transition from conservatism to totalitarianism, Mussolini's Decennale broadens our understanding of fascist ideology, cultural politics, and Realpolitik.

The failure of the Weimar Republic and the rise of National Socialism remains one of the most challenging problems of twentieth-century European history. The German Right, 1918-1930 sheds new light on this problem by examining the role that the non-Nazi Right played in the destabilization of Weimar democracy in the period before the emergence of the Nazi Party as a mass party of middle-class protest. Larry Eugene Jones identifies a critical divide within the German Right between those prepared to work within the framework of Germany's new republican government and those irrevocably committed to its overthrow. This split was only exacerbated by the course of German economic development in the 1920s, leaving the various organizations that comprised the German Right defenceless against the challenge of National Socialism. At no point was the disunity of the non-Nazi Right in the face of Nazism more apparent than in the September 1930 Reichstag elections.

In Weimar and Nazi Germany, capitalism was hotly contested, discreetly practiced, and politically regulated. This volume shows how it adapted to fit a nation undergoing drastic changes following World War I. Through wide-ranging cultural histories, a transatlantic cast of historians probes the ways contemporaries debated, concealed, promoted, and racialized capitalism. They show how bankers and industrialists, storeowners and commercial designers, intellectuals and politicians reshaped a controversial economic order at a time of fundamental uncertainty and drastic rupture. The book thus sheds fresh light on the strategies used by Hitler and his followers to gain and maintain widespread support. The authors conclude that National Socialism succeeded in mobilizing capitalism's energies while at the same time claiming to have overcome a system they identified with pernicious Jewish influences. In so doing, the volume also speaks to the broader issue of how capitalism can adapt to new times.

Arthur Kenneth (A.K.) Chesterton was a soldier, journalist and activist whose involvement with fascist and extreme right-wing politics in Britain spanned four decades. Beginning with his recruitment to Oswald Mosley's 'Blackshirts' in the 1930s, Chesterton's ideological relationship with fascism, nationalism and anti-Semitism would persist far beyond the collapse of the interwar movements, culminating in his role as a founder of the National Front in 1967. This study examines Chesterton's significance as a bridging figure between two eras of extreme right activity in Britain, and considers the ideological and organizational continuity that existed across the interwar and post-war periods. It further uses Chesterton's life as a means to explore the persistence of racism and anti-Semitism within British society, as well as examining the political conflicts and tactical disputes that shaped the extreme right as it attempted to move 'from the margins to the mainstream'. This book will appeal to students and researchers with an interest in fascism studies, British political history, extremism and anti-Semitism.

In spite of the fact that Conservative, Christian democratic and Liberal parties continue to play a crucial role in the democratic politics and governance of every Western European country, they are rarely paid the attention they deserve. This cutting-edge comparative collection, combining qualitative case studies with large-N quantitative analysis, reveals a mainstream right squeezed by the need to adapt to both 'the silent revolution' that has seen the spread of postmaterialist, liberal and cosmopolitan values and the backlash against those values - the 'silent counter-revolution' that has brought with it the rise of a myriad far right parties offering populist and nativist answers to many of the continent's thorniest political problems. What explains why some mainstream right parties seem to be coping with that challenge better than others? And does the temptation to ride the populist wave rather than resist it ultimately pose a danger to liberal democracy?

In Confessional Cinema, Jorge Perez analyzes how cinema engaged the shifting role of religion during the last fifteen years of Francisco Franco's dictatorship. Perez interrogates the assumption that after 1957, when the Franco regime recast itself in a secular and modernizing fashion, religion vanished from the cultural field. Instead, Spanish cinema addressed the transformation within Spanish Catholicism following Vatican II and Spain's modernization processes. Confessional Cinema offers the first analysis of a neglected body of Spanish films, "nun films," which focus on the active role of religious women in the transformation of Spanish Catholicism. Perez argues that commercial films, despite being less aesthetically accomplished, delved more than oppositional, art-house films into the fluctuating zeitgeist of the development years regarding the transformations within Spanish Catholicism. Confessional Cinema offers a provocative and original analysis of the significance of religion not from a theological point of view, but rather as a socio-political force and cultural determinant in the Spanish public sphere of this period, known as desarrollismo (development years) from 1960-1975.

This book is a long overdue in-depth study of the Italian Social Republic. Set up in 1943 by Hitler in the town of Salo on Lake Garda and ruled by Mussolini, this makeshift government was a last-ditch effort to ensure the survival of Fascism, ending with the murder of Mussolini by partisans in 1945. The RSI was a loosely organized regime made up of professed patriots, apostles of law and order, and rogue militias who committed atrocities against presumed and real enemies. H. James Burgwyn narrates the history of the RSI, with vivid portraits of key figures and thoughtful analysis of how radical fascists managed to take the Salo regime from a dictatorship in Italy to a Continental nazifascismo, hand in hand with the Third Reich. This book stands as an essential bookend to the life of Mussolini, with new insights into the man who duped the Italian people and provoked a war that ended in catastrophic defeat.

The Mark of Cain fleshes out a history of conversations that contributed to Germany's coming to terms with a guilty past. Katharina von Kellenbach draws on letters exchanged between clergy and Nazi perpetrators, written notes of prison chaplains, memoirs, sermons, and prison publications to illuminate the moral and spiritual struggles of perpetrators after the war. These documents provide intimate insights into the self-reflection and self-perception of perpetrators. As Germany looks back on more than sixty years of passionate debate about political, personal and legal guilt, its ongoing engagement with the legacy of perpetration has transformed its culture and politics. In many post-genocidal societies, it falls to clergy and religious officials (in addition to the courts) to negotiate and create a path for individuals beyond the atrocities of the past. German clergy brought the Christian message of guilt and forgiveness into the internment camps where Nazi functionaries awaited prosecution at the hands of Allied military tribunals and various national criminal courts, or served out their sentences. The loving willingness to forgive and forget displayed towards his errant child by the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son became the paradigm central to Germany's rehabilitation and reintegration of Nazi perpetrators. The problem with Luke's parable in this context, however, is that perpetrators did not ask for forgiveness. Most agents of state crimes felt innocent. Von Kellenbach proposes the story of the mark of Cain as a counter narrative. In contrast to the Prodigal Son, who is quickly forgiven and welcomed back into the house of the father, the fratricide Cain is charged to rebuild his life on the basis of open communication about the past. The story of the Prodigal Son equates forgiveness with forgetting; Cain's story links redemption with remembrance and suggests a strategy of critical engagement with perpetrators.

The premise of The Diversity of Darkness and Shameful Behaviors is to emphasize the need for enlightened, rational thinking as a paradigm of thought as the culture of shamelessness continues to grow and cast its repulsive dark shadow over those who embrace enlightened reason and basic human rights for all. Diversity of Darkness is an innovative work and represents the third book of a trilogy written by the author that underscores the reality that there are many shamefully hateful and deadly behavioral threats that have jeopardized the very notions of civility, decency and justice around the world. This unique book utilizes evidence-based approaches in the examination of human behaviors in society that have become increasingly shameful and tolerated among a growing number of enablers. Key features include a combination of academic analyses that draw on numerous and specific examples of the diversity of darkness that encompasses the world along with a balanced practical, everyday-life approach to the study of the socio-political world we live in through the use of contemporary culture references and featured popular culture boxes. Social scientists, social thinkers and the general audience alike will be intrigued by the diversity of topics covered, including anti-civil rights movements; the rise of supremacist groups; hate crimes; mass shootings and active shootings; terrorism, war and genocide; an increase in shameful behaviors and attempts to shame others; and attacks on science, reason and rationality. We should realize that humanity has the intellect to accomplish great feats but heed the growing culture of shamelessness, irrationality and the diversity of darkness.

Given their geographical separation from Europe, ethno-religious and cultural diversity, and subordinate status within the Nazi racial hierarchy, Middle Eastern societies were both hospitable as well as hostile to National Socialist ideology during the 1930s and 1940s. By focusing on Arab and Turkish reactions to German anti-Semitism and the persecution and mass-murder of European Jews during this period, this expansive collection surveys the institutional and popular reception of Nazism in the Middle East and North Africa. It provides nuanced and scholarly yet accessible case studies of the ways in which nationalism, Islam, anti-Semitism, and colonialism intertwined, all while sensitive to the region's political, cultural, and religious complexities.

The extraordinary German bestseller on the final days of the Third Reich One of the least understood stories of the Third Reich is that of the extraordinary wave of suicides, carried out not just by much of the Nazi leadership, but also by thousands of ordinary Germans, during in the war's closing period. Some of these were provoked by straightforward terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many could not be explained in such relatively straightforward terms. Florian Huber's remarkable book, a bestseller in Germany, confronts this terrible phenomenon. Other countries have suffered defeat, but not responded in the same way. What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood years of deprivation, aerial bombing and deaths in battle, to do this? In a brilliantly written, thoughtful and original work, Huber sees the entire project of the Third Reich as a sequence of almost overwhelming emotions and scenes for many Germans. He describes some of the key events which shaped the period from the First World War to the end of the Second, showing how the sheer intensity, allure and ferocity of Hitler's regime swept along millions. Its sudden end was, for many of them, simply impossible to absorb.

In 1936, Nazi Germany and militarist Japan built a partnership which culminated in the Tokyo-Berlin Axis. This study of interwar German-Japanese relations is the first to employ sources in both languages. Transnational Nazism was an ideological and cultural outlook that attracted non-Germans to become adherents of Hitler and National Socialism, and convinced German Nazis to identify with certain non-Aryans. Because of the distance between Germany and Japan, mass media was instrumental in shaping mutual perceptions and spreading transnational Nazism. This work surveys the two national media to examine the impact of transnational Nazism. When Hitler and the Nazi movement gained prominence, Japanese newspapers, lectures and pamphlets, nonfiction, and language textbooks transformed to promote the man and his party. Meanwhile, the ascendancy of Hitler and his regime created a niche for Japan in the Nazi worldview and Nazified newspapers, films, nonfiction, and voluntary associations.

In the 12 years that the National Socialist Party was in power in Germany, upwards of 15,000 concentration and labour camps were established in the Greater Reich and the occupied countries to incarcerate all who were deemed enemies of the state. Contents includes: GERMANY Dachau, Oranienburg, Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, Flossenburg, Neuengamme, Ravensbruck, Niederhagen/Wewelsburg, Bergen-Belsen, Mittelbau-Dora-Nordhausen, Arbeitsdorf. AUSTRIA Mauthausen. BELGIUM Breendonk, Mechelen: Caserne Dossin. CZECHOSLOVAKIA Theresienstadt. ESTONIA Vaivara/Klooga. FRANCE French Transit Camps, Natzweiler-Struthof, Wiesengrund/Vaihingen. HOLLAND Westerbork, Amersfoort, Herzogenbusch/Vught. ITALY Fossoli, Bolzano, Risiera di San Sabba. LATVIA Riga-Kaiserwald. LITHUANIA Kauen. NORWAY Falstad, Grini. UNITED KINGDOM Alderney, Channel Islands. BERLIN Wannsee Conference and Operation Reinhard'. POLAND The Warsaw Ghetto, Majdanek-Lublin, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, Chelmno, Gross-Rosen, Stutthof-Danzig, Krakow-Plaszow, Auschwitz , Birkenau, War Crimes Trials.

This is a truly unique account of Nazi Germany at war and of one man's struggle against totalitarianism. A mid-level official in a provincial town, Friedrich Kellner kept a secret diary from 1939 to 1945, risking his life to record Germany's path to dictatorship and genocide, and to protest his countrymen's complicity in the regime's brutalities. Just one month into the war he notes how soldiers on leave spoke openly about the extermination of the Jews and the murder of POWs, while he also documents the Gestapo's merciless rule at home from euthanasia campaigns against the handicapped and mentally ill to the execution of anyone found listening to foreign broadcasts. This essential testimony of everyday life under the Third Reich is accompanied by a foreword by Alan Steinweis and the remarkable story of how the diary was brought to light by Robert Scott Kellner, Friedrich's grandson.

This book provides a broad-ranging analysis of the global resurgence of right-wing forces in the twenty-first century. These parties, organisations and social movements represent a break from right-wing forces in interwar political history in Europe and the United States, and the right-wing dictatorships in Latin America. The book reflects on the most appropriate conceptual categories to account for this phenomenon and whether terms such as populism, fascism, authoritarianism or conservatism can explain the new manifestations of the right. The book also explores this through a range of national case studies written by country specialists, focusing on Austria, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador and the United States of America. Providing a much-needed global perspective, this book will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of populism, fascism, right-wing extremism and conservatism.