What were the class dynamics behind the rise of fascism in Europe?
A while ago I read The Persistence Of The Old regime by Arno Mayer (I wrote a short summary here
>>>/edu/25554). It can be summarized as follows:
<"Down to 1914 Europe was preeminently pre-industrial and prebourgeois. Its civil societies being deeply rooted in economies of labor-intensive agriculture, consumer manufacture and petty commerce.">Mayer goes on to show that economically, politically and culturally the now post-feudal ancien regime was still dominant. The grande bourgeoisie did not yet exist as a class for itself. Its new industrial economic base was grafted onto the old, but still dominant, agricultural one, the latter of which the nobility held in their hands through their vast land ownership.Mayer asserts in Why Did The Heavens Not Darken, his book on the Judeocide, that Germany was "very much still an old regime" even after the revolution that ended the Wilhelmine autocracy. The same was true for much of Eastern Europe, hence why there too there was an aristocratic propensity towards empowering fascists as to use their popular base for the former's continued survival.
Right now I'm reading Hitler And The Peasants by Gustavo Corni and he too mentions the continued, but waning, supremacy that large landowners enjoyed on the countryside:
>[…] until 1940-5 the cast of large landowners in the east (aristocratic or otherwise) continued to exercise a hegemonic role from a social and politico-cultural point of view, rather than from an economic one.Hitler was appointed chancellor by Hindenburg, himself an arch-Junker, and entered into a coalition with the traditional conservatives of the DNVP. The latter were only willing to do so after losing many (countryside) votes to the NSDAP because they failed to copy their "popular" conservatism.
Corni notes on Nazi agricultural ideology:
>The vital role of the state, the preservation of the landed estates for strategic purposes, and imperialist expansion (which was much more a response to the deeply rooted demands of the Junkertum than a move in the interests of the peasants) — these were all muted notes in the 'leitmotif' which ran through [Nazi agricultural ideologist Richard Walter] Darré's idePost too long. Click here to view the full text.