The Black International

In the 1920s, from the Right, there emerged three movements in Europe that were loosely affiliated with one another in what is often called the Black International, after the color of the shirts of the Italian National Fascist Party (their allies, the German Nazis wore brown shirts and the Spanish Falangists, blue).

The three had in common a top-down view of government as commanding society through a single leader and political party that claimed to espouse a path toward restoring the nation to a mythologized greatness in the past. Benito Mussolini in Italy claimed ancient Rome as its heritage, Adolf Hitler in Germany referred back to the ancient Teutonic warrior tribes that brought Rome down and Francisco Franco in Spain basked in the erstwhile glory of the first empire on which the sun did not set.

They were expressly authoritarian and disdainful of elections even as they claimed to embody the popular will. Their economics were corporativist, meaning that they viewed society as made of social and economic blocs such as state-controlled unions, business associations and various interest and affinity groups (women’s groups among them), all of which formed a corporate, or bodily, whole. Their broader philosophy claimed some elements of a distinctly medieval Christianity and traditionalist values.

The three movements opposed almost everything that dismembered the social order and respect for traditional values of what I elsewhere have called “the Cathedral of Europe” — including humanism, the Protestant Reformation’s individualism, the French and American Revolution’s electoral democracy and capitalism and what they viewed as the heir of all these, Communism. Once the theocratic order was jettisoned in the Renaissance, they proposed, it was all downhill.

All three shared striking symbols symbols. Fascists has the fasces, a Latin word for a bundle of rods tied around an ax, which stood for the tightly bound members of the movement who figuratively chopped down whatever stood in the way of their ideas. The Nazis borrowed a turned and swiveled swastika, an ancient Indian religious icon; in Sanskrit the name has three roots “su” (good), “asti” (exists) and “ka” (make), which combined meant the coming to existence of goodness. The Falangists had a set of five arrows linked with a yoke representing the indissoluble union of the five kingdoms of Castile, Leon, Aragon, Granada and Navarre.

Fascists, Nazis and Falangists shared also European supremacist views. Italian Fascists focused on the claimed superiority of Italians over Africans and used it to justify conquests of Libya and Ethiopia. German Nazis claimed that the Germanic races were superior among all Aryans, or European peoples of Indian origin, like the swastika. The Falange was not particularly interested in ethnic distinctions, largely because Spaniards were multiethnic going back to Phoenician outposts in the peninsula in the pre-Roman period; nonetheless Franco himself was fond of the Visigoths of central Spain and their alleged “national love for law and order.”

All three used the scientifically discredited concept of “race” to describe the people they favored, along with those they despised, namely Jews, the Roma and various other groups.

Mussolini came to power in 1922 after a dramatic “March on Rome,” to radically reform a parliamentary monarchy; by 1925 he abandoned all pretenses and imposed one-man rule, subject only to the king, who overthrew him in 1943 when the Allies were at the gates of Rome. Hitler narrowly won a plurality of votes (43 percent) in 1933 and two weeks later had his party enact dictatorial powers with which he ruled until 1945. Franco came to power in 1939 and the end of the Spanish Civil War; he ruled as military dictator until his death in 1975.