John T. Flynn in 1944: "Fascism originated on the Left, not the Right"

The commonly accepted theory that fascism originated in the conspiracy of the great industrialists to capture the state will not hold. It originated on the Left. Primarily it gets its first impulses in the decadent or corrupt forms of socialism—from among those erstwhile socialists who, wearying of that struggle, have turned first to syndicalism and then to becoming saviors of capitalism, by adapting the devices of socialism and syndicalism to the capitalist state. The industrialists and nationalists joined up only when the fascist squadrons had produced that disorder and confusion in which they found themselves lost. Then they supposed they perceived dimly at first and then more clearly, in the preachments of the fascists, the germs of an economic corporativism that they could control, or they saw in the fascist squadrons the only effective enemy for the time being against communism. Fascism is a leftist product—a corrupt and diseased offshoot of leftist agitation.

It is equally superficial to assume that this job was the work of the practical men and that the world of scholarship remained aloof, ignoring the dark currents that were rushing beside it eating away its foundations, as one fatuous American writer has asked us to believe. Far from being the work of the practical men, it was much more the achievement of a certain crackpot fringe—the practical men coming in only when the work of confusion was well under way. They came in on the tide of confusion...

No one will wish to mitigate the dark colors of this evil episode in the history of our civilization. But it will not do to say it is just the work of bad men. Too many men who lay claim to being called good citizens have proclaimed their approval or at least a warm tolerance for the performances of Mussolini...

...It was after the vulgar brutalities of the march to power, after newspapers had been burned and editors beaten, political clubrooms sacked, after the sacred cudgel by God's grace had done its holy violence on its enemies and others had been gorged with castor oil, after thousands had been thrown into concentration camps and countless other brave men had been driven from their country, after Matteoti had been assassinated and Mussolini had proclaimed that democracy was "a dirty rag to be crushed under foot," that Winston Churchill, in January 1927, wrote to him, saying: "If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been entirely with you from the beginning to the end of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism." He assured the Duce that were he an Italian he would "don the Fascist black shirt." And a year
later, in Collier's Magazine, he wrote extolling Mussolini above Washington and Cromwell.

Does this mean that Churchill approves of beating and suppressions? Hardly. Its significance lies in the revelation of the extent to which evil deeds will be excused or tolerated or even defended when some cherished public or religious or social crusade is the excuse. Man's capacity for cruelty—even the good man's capacity for cruelty—in the prosecution of a spiritual crusade is a phenomenon to affright the soul.

One fruitful origin of much of the confusion about fascism in Germany arises out of the variety of people who hate it. Each hates it for some special reason. And while most people here abhor it for its brutal assaults upon the substance and implements of free government, there are many whose hatred is inspired by some special personal or group indignity or injustice suffered at the hands of the Führer. Thus Hitler is execrated by some who are themselves fascists—as, for instance, those fascist dictators whose regimes have rolled under his tanks equally with their democratic neighbors, or some of those former colleagues who were squeezed out of his congregation, or some of those disillusioned businessmen who gambled with him and lost.

A great many books have appeared, written either by these liquidated disciples or religious and political groups ruthlessly oppressed by him. It is a fair statement, however just their deep sense of wrong, that such books have reflected their flaming hatreds rather than their sound intellectual judgments. They have explained fascism in terms of their hatreds. These volumes have had a powerful influence here. They have gone far toward implanting the belief that fascism in Germany is the product of extraordinarily able yet evil men or that it is due to some demoniac possession of the German people themselves.

For the American honestly in search of the seeds of fascism no analyses could be more misleading than these. If fascism is the work of a handful of brutal and lawless men, we need have no fear of it here. We are never without leaders both able and corrupt. But they are not sufficiently numerous and powerful to make very much headway against the peculiar structure of our government. If the phenomenon is merely a manifestation of the paranoid mentality of the German people then certainly we are in no danger of infection unless we, too, are a little demented.

But alas, the most terrifying aspect of the whole fascist episode is the dark fact that most of its poisons are generated not by evil men or evil peoples, but by quite ordinary men in search of an answer to the baffling problems that beset every society. Nothing could have been further from the minds of most of them than the final brutish and obscene result. The gangster comes upon the stage only when the scene has been made ready for him by his blundering precursors.

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