In Red Barn's defence, anybody could learn what they do at a university with a library card, when you get down to it. You're always spoon feeding students, no matter what you do.
More to the point, students are often lied to by the mainstream media. I have to use a whole class sometimes in order to define, "right," and, "left," since FOX News and them have successfully married fascism and communism to both mean, "big government," by which they mean the Democrats. I have had students that will just refuse to believe that, "left," and, "right," mean anything other than, "Bad (left)," and, Good (right)."
Because they've been told this their whole life, I have to go through the French Revolution and explain where the term came from. Then it starts to make sense. I see a value for such a class to just define the terms.
As per Red Barn, the others might be able to provide better, but things I've used in class:
Doctrine of Fascism for more advanced students, and
What is Fascism? For those that need the quick down and dirty.
The latter is nice for the above mentioned students that don't get that there's a difference between Marxism and Fascism since it simply states that, "Fascism is the complete opposite of Marxism." It blows minds.
Something I've thought of doing, but dismissed as I haven't had the time, is to put fascism in the context of the time and place—these poor wretches who lost the war and were looking for something to believe in. Which sounds cliche, but hear me out.
In Ireland (of course) there was something of a mixed victory in kicking Britain out. While nominally a republic, there was a big fascist movement in Ireland. Most famously the Blue Shirts, but in this case the Ailtirí na hAiséirghe. Which, in its own way, was not a completely illogical movement in Ireland (even if we don't like it).
De Valera himself confided to an American journalist in July 1940 that ‘the people were pro-German...
History Ireland wrote:Considered in retrospect, though, this ought not to come as a surprise. Many people during the Emergency thought that Ireland owed Germany a debt for her support of the Easter Rising in 1916. Irish commentators often drew parallels between Germany’s ‘partition’ at Britain’s hands in the Treaty of Versailles and the division of their own country—Maud Gonne McBride was only one of a large number who regarded the Sudetenland as a Central European equivalent of the Six Counties. If the Axis won the war, many believed, Irish unity would soon follow. But over and above these considerations was a current of genuine enthusiasm for the achievements of the fascist states. In contrast to the depression-ridden, backward-looking democracies, Germany and Italy within a few years had revived their national cultures, recovered their ‘lost territories’ and put their millions of unemployed back to work. The lessons for Ireland seemed obvious. In a Europe in which, after the fall of France, democracy appeared fated to disappear, the Irish people needed to abandon their failed experiment with ‘nineteenth-century’ Westminster-style parliamentary government and look to the systems that seemed so successful on the Continent.
A primary document for it goes over this hope of modernizing into something better.
And tied to this, the two futurisms. Italian Futurism tending to be fascist, and Russian Futurism tending to be socialist. Their manifestos, somewhat reflect this.
The
Italian Futurism Manifesto lists its points:
F. T. Marinetti wrote:1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
9 and 10, specifically, provide the framework for what excited these people for something like fascism.
The Russians are quite different in tone:
David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladmir Mayakovsky, Victor Khlebnikov wrote:We order that the poets’ rights be revered:
*To enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-novelty).
*To feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.
*To push with horror off their proud brow the Wreath of cheap fame that You have made from bathhouse switches.
*To stand on the rock of the word “we” amidst the sea of boos and outrage.
And if for the time being the filthy stigmas of your “common sense” and “good taste” are still present in our lines, these same lines for the first time already glimmer with the Summer Lightning of the New Coming Beauty of the Self-sufficient (self-centered) Word.
But it does draw a line for both the Russian peasant and the Italian peasant wanting to move ahead, just in different directions. Then, if you wanted, you could move into art. The Russians went to Constructivism and Proletkult and became the avant garde in Red Berlin.
The fascists went all classical art.
Might be interesting, but a little sophisticated.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!