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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, October 17, 1980
Page 13
learn some history. Neither Hitler nor Mussolini came to power through
arbitrary murders of innocent people-
.�They exploited ari-atmosphere of
public insecurity which their parties had helped to create, but they
were put into power by the voters, and in the belief that they would
bring order and dignity.
"Theirs
were popular movements. That is something which a good many of
the new fascists' enemies are reluctant to admit. Both Mussolini and
Hitler� to power legitimate!Y, through votes. Mussolini's Fascists
marched on Rome in 1922 to threaten the government, but Mussolini was
himself a parliamentary deputy leading a bloc which everyone recognized
to be the most rapidly growing force in the country.... People believed
him. The king invited him to form a government, and Mussolini did so in
the constitutional manner. His first cabinet had only four Fascists in
it, while the Social Democrats, Liberals, and the Catholic Party all were
given portfolios. Mussolini subsequently won the support of 65.25% of
the vote in the parliamentary election of 1926, an undeniable mandate,
notwithstanding the intimidation and frauds which marked the election.
It was only afterwards that he seized complete power and imposed the
dictatorship.
"Hitler's revolution, as British historian Alan Bullock says, also came
after power, not before it. Germany's last pre-Nazi chancello�e�
Kurt von Schleicher, ceded to Hitler in 1932 after failing to find a
non-Nazi parliamentary majority with which to govern.. ..Hitler's party
had won only a little more than a third of the vote for the Reichstag
that year, but the opposition could not or would not combine against
him. Yet in his original cabinet, only three of 11 portfolios were held
by Nazis. In the parliamentary election which followed in 1933, the
Nazis won 43.9% of the vote. By proscribing the Communists they obtained
a simple majority in the Reichstag by themselves. But unchecked power
came only with the so-called enabling law voted by the new parliament--
441 votes to 94.
"Nowhere in Western Europe today is there the slightest sign of fascist
parties obtaining the support of half or � third of the electorate.
Nowhere have they a chance of more than a few percentage points of the
vote. [Note: the German neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) got
only 0.2 percent of the vote this time, down from 0.3 in 1976 and nearly
5% in an election in the 1960's.] Every episode of terrorist 'destabili
zation' in contemporary Europe has made the voters move even more
massively towards the democratic center.
[This happened in Germany on
October 5, with a surge of votes to the moderate center party, the FDP.]
There are no demands for strong men to save the state. Adventure finds
no constituency today--which provide�one explanation for the extreme
right's recourse to violence: its frustration.
"But the matter is very serious nonetheless••..There has emerged recently
in France a form of right-wing thought, not itself anti-Semitic, which
nonetheless in the past had a serious influence on the development of
fascism and Nazism. .•.This New Right is not at all like the traditional
right. It spurns nationalsm and religion. It is radical, not conserva
tive. It is pagan, internationalist and claims to be scientific. It
rejects Western monotheistic religion--Christian as well as Jewish--as
'a cult of weakness.' It believes in heroic virtues, which it attributes
to the 'Aryan' Inda-European ancestors of modern Europeans. It is
against egalitarianism of every kind--religious, Marxist, socialist or