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The Anatomy of
Fascism Robert O. Paxton |
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From the author of Vichy
France, a fascinating, authoritative history of fascism in all its
manifestations, and how and why it took hold in certain countries and not in
others. What is Fascism? Many
authors have proposed succinct but abstract definitions. Robert O. Paxton
prefers to start with concrete historical experience. He focuses more on what
fascists did than on what they said. Their first uniformed bands beat up
"enemies of the nation, such as communists and foreign immigrants,
during the tense days after 1918 when the liberal democracies of Paxton makes clear the
sequence of steps by which fascists and conservatives together formed regimes
in Fascist regimes were
strained alliances. While fascist parties had broad political leeway,
conservatives preserved many social and economic privileges. Goals of forced
national unity, purity, and expansion, accompanied by propaganda-driven
public excitement, held the mixture together. War opened opportunities for fascist
extremists to pursue these goals to the point of genocide. Paxton shows how
these opportunities manifested themselves differently in He goes on to examine
whether fascism can exist outside the specific early-twentieth-century
European setting in which it emerged, and whether it can reappear today. This groundbreaking
book, based on a lifetime of research, will have a lasting impact on our
understanding of twentieth-century history. Robert O. Paxton taught
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