24
PARTISAN REVIEW
rational and irrational, between life and reason. Pehaps in this respect
I am rather like a pedestrian who has a horror of traveling by air.
I could not tell you at what atmospheric heights any such struggle
takes place. The struggle between Fascism and Socialism in Italy
and Germany, unlike the Trojan War in the
Iliad,
was not, so far
as I am aware, accompanied by celestial rivalries and battles.
Bo~
in Italy and Germany, Fascist propaganda became effective as soon
as the Socialist parties had shown themselves incapable of satisfying
the concrete hopes of the masses. Let me give you an analogy. When
an individual cannot face the difficulties of life and is incapable of
realizing his practical aspirations he ends by taking refuge from his
anguishes and desires in dreams. Similarly the masses, defeated as a
result of the incapacity of their leaders in their efforts to do away with
the present economic system, with its inevitable trail of crises and
of wars, seek refuge ·from the despair which would otherwise overtake
them behind emblems of an epoch in which all social contradictions
will have been "symbolically" resolved, men will have become "sym–
bolically" brothers, and capitalists' profits will have been "symbolic–
ally" abolished.
MR.
w.
Do you really believe that fiction plays such an important role
in Fascist ideology in Europe?
THOMAS THE CYNIC
It plays an important role in every ideology, in every state sys–
tem, Mr. W., but in authoritarian ideologies and states, its role is
particularly important. Sir James Frazer has stated that one of the
essential elements in the maintenance of public order and the author–
ity of the state is invariably the superstitious fancies formed about it
by the masses. Without that explanation, much
hum~
history
would be unintelligible; wars, for instance, the existence of parasitic
social classes, the relations between capital cities and colonies, and a
good deal more. Fascism did not fall from the skies, and those whom
it subjected were not free men, but mobs inclined by their very
nature to serve, and educated by all the political parties to obey. The
psychologist Bernheim claims to have proved that suggestibility is
"inherent in the human mind" and that the mental equipment of
the average man is built up of "successive suggestions." The existence
in man of this primitive tendency to submit to suggestion does not,
however, mean that it cannot be overcome and made to give place to
mental freedom and responsibility. But this is a disagreeable prospect
to the majority of politicians, who like to use their fellow-men as
docile tools;
it
is disagreeable to the latter too, because the lot of tame
animals, even if it is not always enviable, is often the only alternative
to starvation.
