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PARTISAN REVIEW
where a "Red-Brown" alliance of Communists and ultra-patriots has in
fact come into existence. Prospects are best in the Middle East and
North Africa, and also elsewhere in the Third World. There fanatics can
still be mobilized with much greater ease. Thirty thousand were killed in
ideological battle in Algeria, compared with a few hundred in Italy and
Germany prior to 1923 and 1933. The demographic weapon is
formidable. At the end of World War II, Algeria had seven million
inhabitants and Algiers, its capital, two hundred thousand. Today's
figures are thirty-one million and two million respectively. It is true that
in these areas the conditions which the demographic weapon gives rise
to, poverty and unemployment, make it certain that any political system,
however radical and aggressive, is bound to fail. But in our age of the
means of mass destruction, it may fail only after a major disaster.
All this is not foreordained, and it seems
to
lead far beyond fascism
and Bolshevism, beyond storm troopers and Black Shirts and the mus–
taches of Hitler and Stalin. And yet, Furet notes, "Bolshevism and Na–
tional Socialism shared a veritable religion of power, overtly professed.
In order to conquer the old and to maintain their power, all means are
justified." World conquest is not now on the agenda, but the belief and
the religion of power have not disappeared. The model of old-fashioned
dictatorship no longer will work. To be effective in the modern world,
tyranny will have to be in the fascist tradition.
