I know that the interwar Polish government was an authoritarian military junta. I’ve occasionally heard it described as fascist, although due more to surface characteristics than an explicit adherence to fascist ideology. In Pat Buchanan’s book on the “unnecessary war” he alternates between bashing the Polish government and praising them for their (foolish, in my view) decision never to surrender, and when doing the former certainly portrays them as bigoted & fascistic. Believe it or not, the Nazis actually used the mistreatment of ethnic minorities as a stick to beat both the Czechoslovakian & Polish governments under the disguise of a sort of “humanitarian intervention”. So that was my state of knowledge when I read (via the Monkeycage) this article on the recent plane crash which removed a large chunk of the current Polish leadership. A quote from there: “Poland faced a similar tragedy during the interwar period: the assassination of President Gabriel Narutowicz in 1922. His murder was the culmination of extensive right-wing propaganda against the president—and resulted indirectly in the military coup of 1926 and the rule of the colonels that ended Polish democracy.” Yes, the same sort of story we’ve heard about Allende or perhaps Rathenau and Erzberger. But then I read the wikipedia article on Narutowicz and found that it was his ally on the left, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, who was behind the May 1926 coup with the support of the Polish Socialist Party. Apparently things got worse after he died in 1935, but they say the same of Lenin.
April 18, 2010
Polacks are so dumb, their fascists are left-wing!
Posted by teageegeepea under Uncategorized[3] Comments
April 18, 2010 at 8:03 pm
How many people will end up on this page while searching for Polack jokes?
April 20, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Fascism certainly started as a left-wing idea. Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist. Oswald Mosley was a rising star of the Labour party before he was a fascist. It was Frances Perkins, FDR’s labor secretary, who said approvingly of Mussolini that at least he made the trains run on time. Schivelbusch has assembled a huge number of contemporary quotations in his “Three New Deals” showing that the New Dealers, Italian and British fascists, and Nazis formed a sort of mutual-admiration society during the ‘thirties. FDR actually spent a holiday with the Mosleys and they got on well with each other. All of this was of course swept under the carpet during and after WWII.
The way in which fascism became identified as a phenomenon of the “right wing” was that once it became a successful political movement, it attracted certain conservatives who, during the Great Depression, despaired of classical liberalism, and saw fascism as the only alternative to Bolshevism. Just as some communists defended their position after WWII by saying they were only “premature anti-fascists,” so certainly we can look back on some of the right-wing backers that Hitler, Mussolini, and Mosley eventually acquired by saying, in the aftermath of the Cold War, that they were “premature anti-Communists.”
April 25, 2010 at 2:00 pm
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