Summary of Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 Fascist movements arose in many parts of the world between the two world wars. In the most industrialized countries, such as the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, they did not overthrow the constitutional regimes. In the most backward countries, such as Albania, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, they did.

#2 In 1919, former socialist Benito Mussolini transformed a collection of black-shirted roughnecks into the Italian Fascist party. They censured old-fashioned conservatives for not being more militant in opposing the socialist and communist movements that arose after World War I.

#3 After the March on Rome, Mussolini won the approval of many leaders in other countries. He won the friendship, support, or qualified approval of Richard Childs, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and many newspaper and magazine publishers.

#4 After the Great Depression, the Weimar Republic saw its fat years end and began to see the rise of the Nazi Party. Hitler, the only right-wing nationalist with a mass following, was hired by the coalition government in 1933.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: May 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822522473

IRB Media

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Insights on Bertram Gross's Friendly Fascism

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

Fascist movements arose in many parts of the world between the two world wars. In the most industrialized countries, such as the United States, Britain, France, and Germany, they did not overthrow the constitutional regimes. In the most backward countries, such as Albania, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, and Yugoslavia, they did.

#2

In 1919, former socialist Benito Mussolini transformed a collection of black-shirted roughnecks into the Italian Fascist party. They censured old-fashioned conservatives for not being more militant in opposing the socialist and communist movements that arose after World War I.

#3

After the March on Rome, Mussolini won the approval of many leaders in other countries. He won the friendship, support, or qualified approval of Richard Childs, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and many newspaper and magazine publishers.

#4

After the Great Depression, the Weimar Republic saw its fat years end and began to see the rise of the Nazi Party. Hitler, the only right-wing nationalist with a mass following, was hired by the coalition government in 1933.

#5

Hitler, using the S. A. to terrorize left-wing opposition and the Reichstag fire to conjure up the specter of conspiratorial bolshevism, won 44 percent of the vote in a national election in Germany in 1919. He then pushed through legislation that abolished the independent functioning of both the Reichstag and the German states, liquidated all parties other than the Nazis, and concentrated power in his own hands.

#6

In 1936, the Japanese army invaded China and began a long war with China. By 1937, with well-shaped support at home, the Japanese army had seized Nanking and started its long war with China.

#7

The establishments in Italy, Japan, and Germany were each made up of a loose alliance between big business, the military, the older landed aristocracy, and various political leaders. The origin of these alliances can be traced to the consolidation of government and industry during World War I.

#8

The fascist challenge did not threaten the old power structure, but rather concentrated on the fundamentals of imperial expansion, militarism, repression, and racism. They were heretics seeking to revive the old faith by concentrating on the fundamentals of imperial expansion, militarism, and racism.

#9

Fascist regimes were nationalist and militarist, and they used the bitterness felt by the Italian, German, and Japanese populations over the postwar settlements to push their expansion.

#10

For many years, Mussolini’s regime had been supported by American bankers. The appeasement of fascist aggression went back to Western flabbiness in the face of Japan’s seizure of Manchuria in 1932, the British negotiation of a 1935 naval treaty with Germany, and the general acquiescence to Hitler’s occupation and militarization of the Rhineland.

#11

The most powerful force behind noninterventionism was the widespread Western endorsement of the Axis powers’ anti-Russian stance. The Japanese seizure of Manchuria seemed more acceptable if Japan would then be encouraged to continue north and west into Siberia.

#12

The new fascist order was an exploitative combination of imperial expansion, domestic repression, militarism, and racism. Each of these elements had a logic of its own and a clear relation to the others.

#13

All three fascist regimes reduced real wages, shifted resources from private consumption to private and public investment, and channeled income from wages to profits. They also destroyed the very liberties which industrialization had brought into being.

#14

The three regimes developed an extra-virulent form of racism to justify their aggressive drive for more living space. Nazi racism was directed mainly against the Slavs, who were considered inferior and needed space for the German race.

#15

The Nazis also developed businesses to recycle the gold teeth from the Jews they were about to kill. They used the hair for furniture stuffing, human fat for making soap, and ashes from the crematoria for fertilzer.

#16

The motivating vigor of German, Japanese, and Italian fascism transcended ordinary versions of the carrot and the stick. The leaders of the fascist establishment and the many millions who did their bidding were impelled by sentiments and convictions.

#17

The use of any concept, idea, or theory that was useful at a particular time or place was indiscriminate. Liberals and monarchists were used interchangeably, as were individualists and collectivists, hierarchic leadership and egalitarianism, scientific management and organic spontaneity, private enterprise and socialism, and religion and atheism.

#18

The first weakness of the Axis was overextension, which was the case with all three countries. The Nazis were technologically backward, and they did not lack good scientists. They just lacked