(This takes 5¼ minutes to read.)

Although I have occasionally touched on this in comments, I should have made a topic about this stereotype much earlier than I did, since Western conservatives along with other antisocialists are fond of stressing the presumed omnipresence and omnipotence of enemy states. (In actuality, antisocialists are nowhere nearly as opposed to ‘big government’ as they pretend, but that is a discussion for another time.) Basically, their idea is that if you have read George Orwell’s perpetually overrated 1984, then you already know how the Fascist states operated.

For the record, I can understand how somebody could arrive at this conclusion in good faith. I myself noted the common practice of Fascist Italy’s police disciplining suspects with little evidence needed, as well as Fascist Italy spying on Italians both within and beyond the fatherland, but perhaps I should have urged caution when interpreting such evidence, for reasons which I am about to give.

Many scholars, whether they realize it or not, exaggerate or oversimplify how the Fascist state intruded into private life, and it is easy for the less circumspect learners to extrapolate that the Fascist states must have had comedically large police forces that obsessively monitored everybody twenty-four hours a day and instituted Draconian punishments for even the pettiest offenses.

Can you imagine a police squad spying on a high-ranking general like Rodolfo Graziani around the clock and then arresting him on suspicion of rolling his eyes at the Duce?

In reality, no state — not even a fascist one — would have wasted anywhere close to the amount of resources needed for such an absurdly ambitious task; it is neither possible nor desirable.

Quoting Joshua Arthurs’s, Michael Ebner’s, and Kate Ferris’s The Politics of Everyday Life in Fascist Italy: Outside the State?, pages 1–2:

“Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” In an October 1925 speech marking the third anniversary of his party’s accession to power, Benito Mussolini presented Fascism’s “formula” for the transformation of Italian society.¹

The announcement arrived at a pivotal juncture in the development of his régime. The dictatorship had been proclaimed the previous January and by October was in the midst of dismantling all vestiges of civil society, including opposition ­parties, the independent press, and autonomous associational life.

Under the aegis of an all-encompassing “Ethical State” and guided by its omniscient Leader, the nation would be regenerated and revolutionized. Minds and bodies would be rendered muscular and steadfast, disciplined at home and aggressive abroad; families and farmland alike would be fertile and plentiful; Italy’s endemic discord, corruption, backwardness, and self-interest would all be overcome, relegated to a bygone era.²

Much of this grandiose vision was, of course, belied by reality. Mussolini’s proclamation notwithstanding, many aspects of Italian life remained stubbornly outside, and not inside, the state. Despite the régime’s best efforts, for example, Catholicism was never supplanted by a new “political religion”³ nor did Fascism eradicate deeply rooted traditions of working-class sovversivismo (subversivism).⁴ Even the Fascist Party itself remained largely “outside” the state, having failed in its attempts to wrest political and economic power from the monarchy, the military, and the industrial establishment.⁵

Italian Fascism therefore poses a conundrum to scholars of twentieth-century totalitarianism. On the one hand, Mussolini’s 1925 formulation remains one of the pithiest, and most enduring, definitions of the phenomenon. His régime was the first to identify itself explicitly with this new conception of the body politic and to attempt to put this totalizing vision into effect.

On the other hand, Fascist Italy was at best “imperfectly” totalitarian or, in the words of no less an authority than Hannah Arendt, “just an ordinary nationalist dictatorship.”⁶

Quoting Roberta Pergher’s and Giulia Albanese’s In the Society of Fascists: Acclamation, Acquiescence, and Agency in Mussolini’s Italy, pg. 1:

Over time, […] historians started to discover consensus where once they saw only terror. For Fascist Italy, the historiographical shift came relatively early, prompted by Renzo de Felice’s path‐breaking work in the late 1960s, claiming [that] Fascism had enjoyed widespread consent. At the same time the discovery of Palmiro Togliatti’s prewar notes revealed his reading of Fascism as a reactionary régime of the masses rather than a ruthless imposition from above.

For [the Third Reich], the move has been more piecemeal and, as we will see, has responded to a different intellectual and moral framework, but now the idea that the [German Fascists] created a genuine “people’s community” (Volksgemeinschaft) and represented a “dictatorship by acclamation” (Zustimmungsdiktatur) has become a dominant motif among a new generation of German historians of the Third Reich.

Pg. 6:

Some Italian historians, true enough, were conscious that Mussolini himself had presented his state as “totalitarian” and now asked how far his ambitions had been realized. But according to Alberto Aquarone, Mussolini’s totalitarian objective of “the complete integration of society into the State” was never fully attained. De Felice, too, felt that the Italian case could not be subsumed under totalitarianism and described Fascism as a “missed totalitarianism,” based on the régime’s own definition of a totalitarian state.

Stephen G. Gross’s Export Empire: German Soft Power in Southeastern Europe, 1890–1945, pg. 251:

[The Third Reich] was not totalitarian and Hitler did not control all aspects of foreign policy: infighting between government ministries shaped Germany’s foreign relations throughout the 1930s.

Quoting Elizabeth Harvey’s, Johannes Hürter’s, Maiken Umbach’s and Andreas Wirsching’s Private Life and Privacy in Nazi Germany, pg. 6:

The […] dictatorship and war made private life and pleasures all the more prized, and […] the régime knowingly channelled and manipulated Germans’ aspirations to a ‘normal private life’, even as it destroyed, for millions, the chances of achieving it. Indeed, by holding out the prospect of private life as a privilege for those deemed politically worthy and racially acceptable, the régime underscored its promise of integration into a newly cohesive national community.

Hence, state interference in Fascist-occupied Eritrea was quite modest, the Gestapo left many ordinary Germans unbothered, and many ordinary citizens under Fascism continued embracing their individuality, to name only a few examples that complicate the ‘totalitarian’ model. Listing all of the examples, such as the Kingdom of Italy firing as well as arresting its Duce in July 1943, or the Führer’s highest-ranking officials disobeying him in 1945, would take hours to read.

Thus, the terms ‘totalitarian’ and ‘totalitarianism’ are either too vague or too subjective to be useful. Only sporadically did the Fascists refer to theirselves as ‘totalitarian’, and the infamous ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State’ quote was a slogan, not an observation. People take it too seriously.

Now, make no mistake: liberating ourselves from the ‘totalitarian’ model does not mean seeing the Axis powers in a more positive light. On the contrary, if we want to identify and then defeat institutionalized neofascism, we have to accept that it is going to be more mundane than the totalitarian theorists’ cartoon caricatures would have us believe.

State intrusion is a phenomenon that long predates fascism: Karl Marx hisself was a victim of police surveillance, and as in his time the intrusion’s usual victims are not going to be ordinary people minding their own business but anybody whom the bourgeois state deems a threat or a nuisance. This intrusion is going to be imperfect: not every potential threat is going to become a victim, nor is every intrusion going to be severe. Nevertheless, the bourgeois state shall, as always, remain an obstacle to our emancipation, and the lower classes shall overthrow it for that reason alone.

Further reading: Hitler’s Compromises: Coercion and Consensus in Nazi Germany