Transcript Retreat from Democracy: The Authoritarian, Fascist and

Retreat from Democracy: The Authoritarian, Fascist
and Totalitarian States
aka – Thug Politics
By 1939 only France and Great
Britain are democracies
Pay close attention
Tomorrow is pseudo-communist day
Shared responsibility, credit for participation
Extra-credit for a totalitarian coup using tactics
learned in class today, keeping in mind the goal
is to learn and prep for test Friday
Totalitarianism
• National gov’t controls all
aspects of public and private
life
• Active commitment of
citizens
• Mass propaganda techniques
• High speed communication
• Led by single leader and
single party
• Can be left or right wing
• Seeks to erase line between
gov’t and society
Gov’t controlling people? That’s
nothing new.
Examples from history?
Changed, due to modern
communication, modern surveillance
Born out of Total War
The bloody 20th century
• Estimates by RJ Rummel
• 38 million die as a result
of war in 20th C
• 169 million die as a result
of gov’t sponsored
persecutions / murder
• Why?
Ideas from historian Vejas
Terror and• Utopia
Liulevicius
• Utopia + Terror (modern
technology + mass politics) +
“mafia politics” = 20th
Century
• Utopia - born out of French
revolution and utopian
experiments
• Terror - extended due to new
technology
• Mafia politics - organized
conspiracies to consolidate
power, with master plans
promising a future utopia
We’ll start in Italy
Fascism
• A type of
totalitarianism
• Right-wing
• Extreme militarism
and nationalism
• Denial of personal
rights
• Dictatorial, one-party
rule
Fascist• Italy
Italy had only existed for
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aprox 50 years
Impact of World War I
Lost: 700,000 men and
148 billion lire
Were not compensated in
land as they’d hoped
they’d be
Got S. Tyrol and Trieste,
didn’t get Fiume and
Dalmatia
Suffered from
unemployment and
inflation like the rest of
Europe
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945)
• Failed elementary school
teacher
• Socialist, editor of socialist
newspaper Avanti
• Kicked out of Italian
Socialist party for
supporting Italian
intervention in WWI
• Fascio di Combattimento
(League of Combat), 1919
Italy getting more and more
• Parliamentary
coalitions
unstable in
1920s
unstable
• Violent Strikes
• Growing fear of
communist revolution
• Mussolini drifts to the
right
– Nationalistic, antistriking workers, anticommunist
• Creates Squadristi, armed
Fascists, who attack
striking workers, socialist
papers, etc.
– Fascist movement
gains support from
industrialists
Alliance with liberals
• Giovanni Giolitti and
transformism
• Liberals hope to use
Mussolini’s forces and
popularity, plan to
drop him
• He plans the same
thing in reverse
Growth of fascism
• 200,000 black shirts
by 1921
• Creating disorder up
and down the
peninsula - so fascists
can be the party of
order
• Support:Veterans,
students, middle and
upper class
March on Rome, 1922
• Mussolini plans march
with black shirts
• Delivers ultimatum to the
gov’t
• King Victorio Emmanuel III
• Mussolini appointed
prime minister, October
29, 1922
• October 30, actually
march on Rome to make it
look legit
Fascist Government
• Winning the majority in
parliament
– Acerbo Law - 25% of vote
gets 2/3 of seats
– Election day tactics
• All parties outlawed, 1926
– Fascist dictatorship
established
• Press laws - illegal to
disrespect the church,
state or monarchy
• No more due process
Il Duce
• Never had sophisticated
media of Hitler or Stalin
• “Mussolini is always right”
• But he did have…
• Young Fascists
– 66% of population between
8-18 are enrolled
– Camps drills, etc.
• Dopolavoro - fascist fun in
every town
Women
• Traditional ideas of women
– Babies
• Family is the pillar of the
state
• Employment of women
forms “moral and physical
habits contrary to
childbearing”
• Prizes, awards, subsidies for
women with large families
• 12/24 - mother and child day
How shall he deal with the
Catholic Church?
Lateran Accords, February 1929
• Vatican City (109 acres in
the center of Rome)
recognized
• Church recognizes Italy
• Catholic church gets
financial support from
fascists
• Church urges people to
support fascists
Mussolini may have paved the
way
But he never achieved totalitarianism
Never controlled monarchy, military,
church
Spain
• Still illiterate, rural,
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essentially undemocratic
Growing industry, post
war inflation
General Miguel Primo de
Rivera and the End of
Parliamentary
Government (1923)
– A coup with the king’s
consent
Collapses with the
depression, along with the
monarchy
Alfonzo leaves Spain in
19312
A Spanish republic?
• Total political chaos
• The Spanish Civil War
• The Popular Front
– Antifascist coalition of leftists,
gain control of gov’t in 1936
– This does not work for the
army
• General Francisco Franco (1892
– 1975) leads 3 year military
revolt against the government
• Inspires working class revolt seizing factories, forming
militias, etc
Foreign intervention
Franco receives aid from Hitler and
Mussolini
Testing ground for new weapons
Popular Front asks Soviet Union for
help, they get some, not much
US, Great Britain and France
remain neutral
Abraham Lincoln brigade
Army of the Popular Front is
captured in Madrid, March 28,
1939
400,000 die, 200,000 executed
by Franco
Franco emerges victorious
The Franco Regime
• Traditional, conservative,
dictatorship
• Catering to large
landowners, business and
Catholic clergy
• Lasts until Franco's death
in 1975
• Portugal
– Antonio Salazar (1889
– 1970)
Patterns
What worked for these dictators and
what didn’t
Soviet Union
• Post-war issues
• War Communism had
nationalized industry,
transportation,
mining, banks
• Great famine of 1920 1922 claims 5 million
• Industry drops to 80%
of what it had been
New Economic Policy
• Modified capitalism
• Some privately owned
industry (if employ less than
20 people)
• Peasants can sell produce
• Gov’t still owns big
businesses, heavy industry
• Union of Socialist Republics
established, 1922
• No loans form America,
Europe, self reliance
Death of Lenin
• Lenin suffers strokes,
(1922-1924)
• Power struggle - 7
member Politburo
• Division
– Leon Trotsky, left, want
mass industrialization,
spread the revolution to
elsewhere in Europe
– Right, continue NEP,
concentrate on the needs
of the Soviet Union
• In the middle…
Ioseph Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvili
The Man of Steel
Stalin
Joseph Stalin
• 5’5”, born into
absolute poverty, son
of an alcoholic and a
washerwoman
• Not a great speaker,
thinker or writer
• General Party
Secretary
• Good organizer
Path to power
• Appoints and expels
• 10,000 party
appointments in 1922
alone
• Filling party with his
supporters
• Expels Trotsky, and the
rest of the old guard
• Controls state by 1929
The Stalinist Era, (1929-1939)
• First Five Year Plan, 1928
• The plan: to transform the
Soviet Union from an
agricultural state into an
economic powerhouse in 5
years.
• A series of them, amazing gains
• Industry by 1937
– Coal production 36 million
tons to 128 million tons per
year
– Steel 4 million tons to 18
million tons per year
Toll on the workers?
• Worsened living
conditions
• Lower wages
• Lack of freedom to
move or travel
• Propaganda used to
sell the dream
Rapid collectivization of agriculture
• Gov’t takes 25 million
privately owned farms,
merges them into
collectives, gives them
modern farming
equipment
• Kulak - land owning
peasants, fought bitterly
• Killed their own livestock,
burnt their crops
• Police force them onto
collectives with bayonets
Liquidation of Kulaks
• 3 million shot, exiled,
imprisoned
• 6 million die in gov’t
engineered famines of
1932 - 1933
• Stalin once boasted to
Churchill that 10 million
peasants died at his hands
• No Kulaks by 1935
• All peasants have for their
own is a little garden plot
Political Control
• Political purge, 19361938; 8 million
arrested, tried, killed
or sent to Siberia
• He may have been
responsible for killing
more people than
anyone ever (20
million?)
Propaganda
• Referred to self as
“The Greatest genius
of all times and
peoples”
• State has control of
education - primary
school through college
• “Thank you comrade
Stalin for this happy
life”
Propaganda
• League of the Militant
Godless
• Museum of Atheism shows religion as
superstition
• Superstar sacrificers
What advancements in women’s
rights had been made in Russia since
the revolution?
Declining birth rate
• Abortion is outlawed
• Fines for repeated divorce
• Homosexuality made
illegal
• Large families promoted
as patriotic duty
• Free childcare, as women
are still expected to work
By 1940, the Soviet Union
1 of top 5 industrial nations on earth
Has full employment
Free medical care, education and old age
insurance