Fascism — as everyone knows, as we have learned — is the opposite of democracy: unlawful rule instead of rule of law, arbitrariness from above instead of control from below; German Nazism, in particular, a system of crime that nullified all the civilizational achievements of modern politics. And yet, half a century after Hitler's end, long after the system of civil liberty was successfully restored, there are frequent warnings that fascism is threatening to return any time. It is said to be a constant danger that can only be kept in check if all democrats tirelessly work at it, and especially keep the memory alive of how badly it ended. — How can that be when democracy and fascism are as incompatible as good and evil?

When the unemployment figures in a fine democratic nation rise above the 2-, 3-, or 4-million mark — as a result of economic constraints, as the politicians in charge assure us, which only they know how to handle properly — this is accompanied by an equally growing fear of fascist tendencies and a new Hitler. — So freedom-based economic reason is not that convincing an offer for the masses laid off by their companies after all, while an attractive alternative is dictatorship and oppression (if that is what fascism is supposed to be about)?

In such a “difficult situation," solid democratic parties commit themselves to the task of “integrating” the masses of voters, who will otherwise all too easily follow fascist “pied pipers” if democrats leave right-wing radicalism to the right-wing radicals. — What factual difference remains between noble democratic patriotism and reprehensible fascist nationalism?

There is no doubt that democrats take a dim view of fascism; otherwise they wouldn’t be democrats. What is rather dubious, however, is the way they justify their so vehement rejection of fascist rule. Citing the atrocities committed by the Nazis seems compelling, more or less putting an end to any political appraisal and closing the debate before it even starts; but no one really trusts it. Democratic anti-fascists see their own polity as a precarious affair full of creeping transitions to the other system. And this is not even just because there are bad people everywhere. They are aware of any number of national “problems,” especially ones involving “social policy,” that fascists could any time start competing with them to “solve” without necessarily having a bad chance of winning out — so their “policy blueprint” cannot be that much different from the democratic one. The vast difference disappears completely when responsible democrats turn a critical, and self-critical, eye on the average political mood among the broad masses: hardly anyone will swear that they and people like them, or at least “the others,” would not have gone along with things “under the swastika.” Together with their chancellor, the democratic descendants of Hitler’s generation are grateful for “the luck of being born late.”^[*] This is quite an admission; and when they warn that it is a reason to be all the more watchful and “nip it in the bud” while there is still time, they are carrying the admission through rather than going back on it. If it were not common knowledge how the business ended, what the unnipped rise and rule of the Nazis blossomed into, then these democrats who have learned so much from their mistakes would be deprived of any argument to base their strict rejection of fascism on. “After Auschwitz” they see everything — before it apparently nothing. That must be why they constantly have to keep the “memory” of concentration camps, mass murder, and disastrous war alive. Otherwise they would no longer be sure of their own aversion to the fascist alternative. Conversely, looking at Hitler’s piles of corpses spares them a political critique of fascism, which they would admittedly find difficult.

So when it comes to this polemical way of distinguishing democracy from fascism, the two aspects that belong to a proper comparison are in sorry shape. What the two forms of rule have in common is not even named, let alone explained, but instead from a worried point of view taken for granted and denied at the same time. And the difference between them is left equally undetermined, being replaced by a moral declaration that they are incompatible, that the two forms of state are actually not even comparable. Nonetheless there is a persistent fear that the good form of rule will all too easily turn into the other, evil variant…

*

It is no improvement when more radical anti-fascists make their more critical comparisons. An entire left-wing movement once felt a need to distance themselves from West Germany’s official anti-fascism and oppose the nation’s good conscience, and developed a theory of fascism. They took bourgeois thinkers to task for posing “simplified questions” and tried more critical “approaches” one after the other^[1] — and still only ever reached the conclusion that fascism was the negation of the democratic good that real democracy contained as a half-fulfilled reality and a beautiful promise. Because it was only half fulfilled, however, real democracy was already well on its way towards fascism… Ascertaining that capitalism was the bad half of democratic reality did nothing to correct this moral approach. Instead, these critics believing that state power basically has a good democratic mission got caught up in a methodological debate over whether Nazi rule should be seen as the state strictly submitting to capital or whether it should be granted that the SS dictatorship showed a tendency to assume an independent existence adverse to the economy. They came up with no arguments that criticized fascism properly or made it easier for us to do so. We cannot even cite any of their considerations as a source for ours.

That is not surprising. It shows no better insight, either into fascist rule or into democratic rule, to attack actually existing democracy with anti-fascist radicalism and see it as failing far worse to nip Nazism in the bud than the more readily consenting supporters of democracy claim to fear. Polemically equating everyday life in a democratic state with the brutalities of fascism, attenuated and at the same time made incontestable by the escape clause that it is all “in the bud,” is just as far from attempting an honest comparison as the usual appeals and warnings. It neither identifies the national cause that fascists and democrats are in fact equally after, nor does it address the specific problem definition or problem-solving methods that in fact distinguish fascists from democrats and put them in competition with each other. A person whose worst accusation of democratic society is that it is one big slippery slope down to fascism is operating with a moral disjunction, assuming like all democrats that the two alternatives are “not comparable” in moral terms, and just drawing a different boundary line. Such a person is distinguishing between true and genuine democracy, which floats around as an ideal in every disappointed responsible citizen’s head and cannot be discredited by any democratic reality, and the totality of base realities, which are always morally exposed by this ideal. To the oppositional taste of radical anti-fascists, they are exposed almost just as outrageously as the Nazis’ atrocities.

*

This is all very unsatisfactory if only in theoretical terms. But there is also a practical reason for investigating the matter without any moral condemnations — which are never particularly honest anyway — and determining what democracy and fascism have in common and how they differ, i.e., making a proper comparison. If a political system lays claim to recognition for, of all things, the great achievement of sparing its subjects a fascist tyrant if they are loyal enough — i.e., if it threatens them that way — then caution is called for. One would certainly like to know where one stands with a state that makes no secret of its kinship and proximity to vividly depicted fascist terror, and makes that a reason to say its unbeatable seal of quality is to be different from it.

So when the subject is fascism, it is better to avoid the theoretically cheap and ideologically all too productive exercise of holding a good opinion of democracy (the “true” kind, preferably) alongside a bad opinion of the Nazis (their “atrocities,” that is) and delighting in the inevitable contrast. Instead, a proper comparison requires knowledgeably examining both sides. This produces somewhat different results if only because it is no longer fascism but democracy that provides the principles of political rule that the top league of states (and not only they) currently go by. This they do, incidentally, without wasting any political energy trying to draw a sharp line between their procedures and the ones the fascists once used in their attempt to outdo their democratic competitors. The form and substance of democratic rule therefore offer reason and material enough for continuous criticism, which our quarterly journal GegenStandpunkt endeavors to provide — managing quite well without any “reminders” of Germany’s Nazi past.

Nevertheless, explaining this past is not merely of historical interest. After all, this “dark chapter” plays such a prominent role in (not only) Germany’s ideology department, both for its democratic apologists and for its accusers with their democratic ideals. This will be specifically dealt with in Parts 3 and 4 of this book.^[2] The concept of fascism — Part 1 — and its German boss’s political alphabet — Part 2 — indicate the factual identity that gives rise to the affinity that prompts democrats to warn each other about fascism being a constant temptation. We clarify how extensively democracy’s definition and ideologies of a national emergency coincide with fascism’s view of a political problem, and how they are even consistent with fascism’s polemical rejection of organizing state power the democratic way. And it will be determined where democrats and fascists beg to differ, and what consequences there are in using political force to remedy national “ills" when fascists try to outperform their democratic opponents, and in retrospect appear downright insane to them.^[3] But at the same time they impress them. After all, in Germany it was democrats who — with the support of a whole lot of disappointed nationalists among the people — recognized Nazism as “the better solution” and brought it to power.