Books: Folklore of Fascism

In the early days of the Fascist dictators, U. S. citizens, confident that it could not happen here, made a political parlor game of speculating on a hypothetical U. S. dictator. After recent events in Europe the parlor game has become a little gruesome.

Ignazio Silone’s The School for Dictators (Harper, $2.50) is not written for those who like to play games. Tall, dark, 38-year-old Ignazio Silone, whose two novels (Fontamara, Bread and Wine) have been called the sum total of modern Italian literature, has had intense first-hand experience under a Fascist dictator. Editor of a labor paper in Trieste when Mussolini came to power, Silone was pursued by Black Shirts for three years (they killed his brother), escaped in 1931 to Switzerland, where he has since become Mussolini’s most embarrassing critic.

The School for Dictators consists entirely of dialogues, between three characters. One, Silone’s mouthpiece, is an exiled Italian Socialist nicknamed Thomas the Cynic, who, using mainly Italian and German sources, is writing a political treatise on the art of deception. He believes that “the deceivers have nothing to learn from it, while the deceived have.” His pupils are two Americans: Mr. W., a well-known U. S. politician and ex-jazz musician, regarded as the coming U. S. dictator, and Professor Pickup, a decayed Billy Sunday sort of fanatic, who originated “Neo-Sociology.”

Thomas the Cynic assures Mr. W. that his inhibited childhood, his artistic frustration, fake War record, headaches and schizophrenia constitute excellent personal assets for a dictator. He explains how these handicaps can be turned into heroic myths, explains how to fight Socialism with the catch phrases of Socialism, how to provoke disorder and terror as a pretext to establish order, how to avoid all argument based on rationality, how to exploit the plentiful relics of primitive barbarism which still survive in modern man, and thus turn to Fascist account a Freudian discovery which Socialists naively underrated.

Mr. W. wants to know what the chances are of starting a Fascist dictatorship in the U. S. That depends on the Americans, replies Thomas the Cynic. The Fascists’ main advantage, he says, lies in the inertia of democratic leaders who tend to live “on the yield of their ancestors’ conquests,” are prone to be morally defeated before the fight begins. After a big crisis from which there is no return to the status quo, these leaders cannot hold power and Socialists are too timid or too weak to take it. Says the Cynic: Mr. W., there’s your chance.