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.

Stalinism

As background, we return to the Soviet Union, where Lenin died in 1924. He was succeeded after a series of complex internal political struggles by Joseph Stalin. The “Man of Steel” ended up as General Secretary of the Communist Party, after expelling Leon Trotsky from the Party; it was a position he held until his death in 1953.

Stalin was unusual in that he had been an Orthodox seminarian and a bank robber, albeit justified as raising funds for revolution. Under the Soviet Union’s power structure, in which government carried out decisions made by the Party in its members-only meetings, he didn’t become formally head of state — premier of the USSR — until 1941.

Stalinism is the kind of rule that became standard in the USSR and its satellites. Overtly it advocated rapid industrialization; the theory of “socialism in one country,” displacing the goal of international revolution with that of expanding the Soviet system; a centralized state control of every imaginable social activity; collectivization of agriculture.

Less overtly Stalinism generated a system of control that was as old as Tsarism and under Leninism had originally been devised during the Civil War, in which Stalin played an important role. This went from neighborhood committees to defend the revolution, to the various incarnations of the Soviet secret police — the Cheka, in 1937 NKVD and after Stalin the KGB — which were small bureaucracies to “purge” the Party of “deviationists,” until peasants refused in the 1929 to play along with collectivized farms, causing food shortages and eventually famine.

Then came a series of “Great Purges,” or broad based attacks first against peasants, then technical and professional workers when the economy failed, ultimately to allegedly Tsarist military officers. To house those who were not dispatched with the classic bullet to the back of the head — estimates of the slaughter go as high as 60 million — Stain established the Chief Administration of Corrective Labor whose acronym in Russian is GULAG.

Marx warned against revolutions in backward countries such as Russia, stating that they would degenerate into what he called “the Asiatic mode of production.” Not even Lenin, who recast a lot of Marx, ever envisioned Stalinism, argued Trotsky, who eventually fled to exile in Mexico, where an assassin killed him with an ice pick.

In opposition outside the USSR, Trotkyists formed the Fourth International — to rival the Communist Third, which had been set up against the socialist Second — and have argued that Stalinist USSR was neither socialist nor Leninist but a bureaucratized state controlled by a ruling caste, the Party’s Nomenklatura (or list of notables). The second was Maoism, in uneasy alliance with Stalinism, yet critical of putting Soviet interests above world revolution; Castro’s Cuba and North Korea are somewhere between Stalinism and Maoism.