How World War I created Fascism

There is a short way and a long way to explain this. The short way:

No other event in the twentieth century was more important to shaping Fascism than the First World War. I am not referring to the technologies, strategies, and aesthetics inherited from that conflict (though they did play a part), but to how it affected the petty bourgeoisie, leaving it feeling largely unrewarded, and thereby giving it new goals: most of the Fascists were petty bourgeois and fought in World War I. Why did the Fascists gain a reputation for being so obnoxiously strict? Because they inherited this strictness from their military training.

Pictured: Benito Mussolini in 1917.

The desire to acquire more land was critical to Fascism’s success in Europe. Although technically the Kingdom of Italy won the First World War, it received very little of the land that the Entente promised it. Italian nationalists felt cheated. In the German Reich’s case, the loss of land was obvious: the German bourgeoisie essentially lost its empire as a consequence of losing WWI.

Pictured: Adolf Schicklgruber (far right) and some of his brethren in arms in 1914.

Most other fascist movements shared this correlation. For example, many Ukrainian nationalists (e.g. Riko Iaryi) served in WWI and turned to fascism when their dream to realise an independent Ukrainian state came to naught. Some Zionists (e.g. Zeʻev Jabotinsky) also served in WWI but became frustrated when London declined to establish a Zionist régime on both banks of the Jordan River, resulting in Hebrew fascism. (An exception to this trend was Oswald Mosley, who served in WWI but already had his empire.)

Pictured: One of Schicklgruber’s several paintings depicting World War I, most or all of which he drew as he was in the middle of that very conflict.

World War I acted as Fascism’s soil: it provided petty bourgeois anticommunists with the military training that they needed, resulting in paramilitaries like the Freikorps, the squadristas, the szabadcsapatok, and the Whites; it instilled the petty bourgeoisie with ultranationalist sentiments, consecrating sacrifice for the ‘Fatherland’ and belief in one’s nation’s supposed superiority; and it encouraged anticommunism, as lower‐class rebels in Russia, Germany, and elsewhere impeded the war effort with their socialist activism.

\ Further reading: Hitler’s First War: Adolf Hitler, the Men of the List Regiment, and the First World War

Loose Cannons: War Veterans and the Erosion of Democracy in Weimar Germany

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