Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe

This book investigates how fascism – as an ideology and political praxis – reconfigured the ideological, political, and moral landscape of interwar Europe, generating an atmosphere of extreme ‘license’ that facilitated the leap into eliminationist violence. It demonstrates how fascist ideology linked the prospect of violent ‘cleansing’ to utopias of national/racial regeneration, thus encouraging and legitimizing targeted hatred against particular ‘others’. It also shows how the diffusion and internationalization of fascism in the 1930s produced a sense of a revolutionary new beginning and created a transnational fascist ‘new order’ in which Nazi Germany came to occupy a potent position of authority. The book analyzes how the eliminationist initiative and precedent of Nazi Germany became a second ‘license’ that empowered fascist regimes across Europe to embark on their own eliminationist projects with diminished accountability. Finally, it examines how this ‘license’ – enhanced by the actions of fascists and the collapse of order caused by World War Two – released individuals and communities from the burden of legal and moral accountability, turning them into accomplishes in the most wide, brutal, and devastating genocidal campaign that the continent had ever experienced.

Aristotle Kallis is Professor of Modern/Contemporary History, Department of History, Lancaster University UK. His publications include National Socialist Propaganda and the Second World War (2005) and The Fascism Reader (2003), as well as articles and essays on the history of fascism, genocide, and propaganda.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Main Concepts: Fascism, Nation-statism, Eliminationism and ‘Fascist Agency’

Part A – The Overlapping Circles of Nationalism and Race: Constructing ‘Other-ness’ and Rehearsing Elimination

Chapter 1 - Identity and ‘Other-Ness’: From Nationalism to the Elimination of ‘Others’

Chapter 2 – ‘Race’, ‘Nation’ and the ‘Internal Enemy’

Part B – ‘Rebirth’ and ‘Cleansing’: Fascist Ideology and the ‘Licence to Hate’

Chapter 3 - The Fascist Synthesis: ‘Rebirth’, ‘Cleansing’ and the ‘Ideal Nation-State’

Chapter 4 - Imagining Elimination: Fascist Ideologies, the Construction of the ‘Other’ and the ‘Licence to Hate’

Part C – National Socialism: The ‘Uniqueness’ of Synthesis and Implementation

Chapter 5 - The ‘Unique’ German Case: Long-Term Trends and NS Agency

Chapter 6 - The Radicalisation of the NS Project of Elimination and the ‘Licence to Kill’

Part D – Genocide, Agency, and ‘License’ in the NS ‘New Order’ (1939-45)

Chapter 7 - National Eliminationist Projects and the Emergence of The NS ‘Agentic Order’

Chapter 8 - The Fascist State as ‘Agent’: Collaborationism and Genocide

Chapter 9 - Fascist Disciples as ‘Agents’: The ‘Fifth Column’ of the NS New Order

Chapter 10 - ‘Licence to Kill’ and ‘Ordinary People’: The ‘Carnival’ of Eliminationist Violence

Conclusions

Notes

Bibliography

Index