Does "fascism" mean anything?

By A Colleague:

Specifically considering fascism, I have a fat book from 2002, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s, that gave me the strong impression that “fascism” on any given day was simply what Mussolini thought when he woke up that day. I may be wrong about this, but I couldn’t detect anything coherent.

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  More about the book: I was very impressed by it, yet I’ve never finished it. I really should go back and start over. It’s a history of that “dark, dishonest decade” in all the leading industrial nations of the time – U.S., England, France, Germany, U.S.S.R, Italy, Spain and Japan, with multiple chapters on each, sort of in “rotation” throughout the book.

Here’s a lengthy amazon review that strikes me as helpful:

An epic book about a dark, dishonest decade

Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2004

“the 1930s was a ‘dark, dishonest decade,’ a time when the nations of the earth were ‘struggling with one crisis and hurtling towards another,’ one that turned out to be greatest in history. a grim and gloomy time over much of the world, author Peirs Brendon has chronicled in the dark valley that decade with amazing detail and an epic sweep. he wrote that the great depression – which was worldwide and hardly limited to the United States – was perhaps the greatest peacetime crisis to afflict the world since the black death. the old liberal order – which had barely survived the first world war and the communist revolution in russia – was nearly annihilated in the 1930s; the depression ended the weimar republic and brought Hitler to power in germany; fatally eroded the fragile pro-international parliamentary democracy in japan, replacing it with a racist, expansionistic, militarist regime; brought Mussolini to power, who once in control sought to reap domestic rewards by means of foreign aggression; and completed the isolation of the soviet union, wracked by purges and Stalin-created famines. the strength and confidence of the democratic major powers were severely tested as well; britain experienced a naval mutiny, hunger marches, and even some fascist demonstrations; france was torn by the worst civil conflict since the commune; and the United States embarked on the most comprehensive and far-reaching peacetime program ever in its history, a nation where the crash had caused people to be disillusioned with wall street and for business to lose its prestige. the democratic countries were divided when they should have been cooperating, guilty of erecting tariff barriers, rival devaluations of their currency, flagging (or in the case of the U.S., non-) participation in the league of nations, and not presenting a united front to the fascist powers but instead one of appeasement and begrudging military expenditures.

“again and again Brendon focuses on a single thread amidst the tapestry of events he wove, that much of the world was enveloped during that time in something akin to the fog of war. the 1930s was a time of ‘systematic obfuscation,’ when governments fought for control of their own population and that of other nations by ‘manipulating minds and mobilizing opinion.’ propaganda and mass media were used to a degree unparalleled in previous history to obscure the truth. Brendon provided many examples of this in his work. in the united kingdom the bbc presented itself as being objective with regards to british labor disputes but was anything but; instead it presented the view of the authorities, the government approving many of the stories. Mussolini sought to grab the world’s attention with daring aviation adventures (such as the crossing of the atlantic several times by a squadron of italian aircraft led by Italo Balbo), obscuring the truth that the italian air force’s development was neglected for the sake of these stunts, obsolete and ill-prepared for actual combat. Stalin sought to hide the ukrainian famine, continuing to sell grain on the international market as if to deny there was any mass starvation in that region, erecting Potempkin [sic] villages of apparent plenty for the benefit of western visitors, denying to outside relief agencies such as the red cross that millions had died due to his policies. Leni Riefensthal created masterpieces of nazi propaganda with her elaborately staged parades and rallies involving elaborate sets, carefully controlled crowds of extras, platoons of cameramen, and novel film techniques like aerial photography, wide-angle shots, and telescopic lenses. Mussolini’s agents ruthlessly censored reports of use of chemical weapons in the conquest of ethiopia, declaring that victims of poison gas instead suffered from leprosy. The new york times instructed its reporter, sent to cover the french refugee camps that contained several hundred thousand spanish exiles fleeing Franco’s rule, from not filing anything too ‘sentimental’ about the often tortured and starved prisoners, while the french minister of the interior, Albert Sarraut, toured the camps and proclaimed them working in perfect order. Hitler for the 1936 berlin olympics even had some hand-picked Jewish athletes in order to give a gloss over his fiercely anti-Semitic practices. the depressing list goes on.

“the book is thick, at around six hundred pages, covering the history of france, italy, germany, the United States, the united kingdom, japan, the soviet union and spain. many events are covered, including the dust bowl, the bonus march on Washington, the night of the long knives, the concorde riot, the bombing of guernica, the rape of nanking, the anschluss, the soviet show trials, kristallnacht, the lateran pact, the new deal, the Invergordon mutiny, and the wretched gulags of the soviet union such as vorkuta, kargpool, belomor, pechora, krasnodar, karaganda, and those of the kolyma network, which the author wrote should be etched in memory alongside dachau and auschwitz as places of pure hellish torture where people were literally worked to death. though the decade may seem peaceful when compared to the 1940s, it was one filled with strife – the japanese invasion of china, the italian invasion of ethiopia, and the spanish civil war – which is well covered in this work [sic] as grim as the subject matter is, there were still bits of humor in the book, interesting anecdotes, ranging from witty quotations of Churchill to discussion of hollywood films of the time to other stories (such as that of the man employed to flush all the toilets every day in the empire state building so that chemicals in the water would not mar the porcelain finish, as when completed during the depression the building had only 20% occupancy). the book was quite gripping for the most part though I did find my interest waning at times during discussion of some of the more esoteric aspects of british and french labor relations. a great read, one that will leave the reader begging to read something on world war ii, as the book is a great prelude to any study of that conflict.