The Kind And Gentle Fascist

This month we have a new and very transgressive novel to offer—The Kind And Gentle Fascist by Stewart Arthur Ravelin.

The title alone will tip you off that we've got something that treads rather heavily on thin ice here. A kind Fascist? A gentle Fascist?

Yet, that's what this novel about—a modern American who has become a "fascist," although he'd probably prefer the term "Revolutionary Nationalist," or "man of the New Right." Mr. Burnell, as our hero is named, is a true gentleman, kind and wise, who hates racism and anti-Semitism, and would die for world peace and social justice.

Yet, his political ideology is derived from the Radical Right.

A contradiction? Maybe not as much as you might think. "Fascism" is a complicated word. For most us it means simply Hitler and Mussolini and death camps and war and bloody-minded horror.

Yet, as the great historian Zeev Sternhell has pointed out, this has not always been the case. (See his Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in France.) At one time, prior to the 1930s, there were currents within radical right-wing thought that were neither racist nor anti-Semitic, that opposed imperialism and militarism, and that were far less authoritarian than (for example) what was happening in militant socialism at the same time—i.e., Communism, as made manifest by Lenin, Trotsky, and, later, Stalin.

Indeed, at one time, there was a "Fascism" or "Nationalistic Socialism" (not to be confused Hitler's National Socialism, Nazism, despite the similarity of the names) that was a genuine competitor with Communism for the hearts and minds of the European workingman and woman. 

Alas, that all changed with the rise first of Mussolini and then of Hitler. "Fascism" became (with Mussolini) a tool with which the wealthy and the powerful could corrupt, control, and repress the lower class. Then (with Hitler) it became as well an obscenity…the destroyer of whole peoples, the author of genocide and terror.

And, with Burnell, author Stewart Arthur Ravelin gives us a man who is desperately attempting bring that other Radical Right back, and to bring the Right as a whole to the inclusive socialism of men like Henri De Man and the organicism of men like G.K. Chesterton.

Does he succeed? We will provide no spoilers. But we will mention that here is an additional complication.

To wit, there is a viper at his breast.

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For a bit more on this remarkable new book, check out the next posting in this blog. It will be an excerpt the book.

As for the book itself, you can see it here: The Kind and Gentle Fascist

http://www.amazon.com/The-Kind-Gentle-Fascist-ebook/dp/B00EOZFK0M/