Fascism is the political system by means of which the Versailles states—set up by Britain and France, but chiefly by Britain—at the end of the First World War, without regard for viability—established unchallengeable authority for themselves.

Those states were not the product of a struggle for national freedom.  Many of them had no national history.  They consisted of peoples thrown together to be nation-states when Britain decided to destroy the Hapsburgh and Ottoman Empires and had to do something with their bits and pieces.  

So the bits and pieces were grouped together in newly-minted countries, were told they were nation-states, and were required to function as liberal-democracies.

Liberal Democracy is functional only on a foundation of unchallengeable authority.  The liberal-democratic states are Britain and the United States—with perhaps Sweden, and Ireland since 1933.  All the others have passed through a fascist phase since the First World War.

Fascism is nationalist authoritarianism.  It establishes a necessary component of the nation-state.  Where the authority of the State is put beyond question, conflict about subordinate matters can come into play.

Professor Garvin published a book a generation ago (2005) that was widely appreciated.  He called it 1922, The Birth Of Irish Democracy.

His reasoning was that only States with unchallengeable authority are viable, and that it was Michael Collins’s war of destruction on the IRA, pressed home by William Cosgrave—with British support—that established unchallengeable State authority in Ireland.

The Republican State established in 1919-21 was brushed aside by Collins, and realpolitik reasoning says that, because it could be brushed aside, it was right that it was brushed aside.  

That State might possible have been saved if the President of the Republic had arrested the Delegates of the Republic who made a deal with Britain to destroy the Republic and made the IRA the unchallengeable source of authority.

But, since that was not done, it was the State that broke the IRA in the service of Crown authority that established unchallengeable State Power, and there made possible liberal democracy.

But unchallengeable State Power is not liberal democracy:  it is only a condition which makes it possible.  And the new Irish premier, Willliam Cosgrave, did his best to prevent the development of liberal democracy as the political mode of the State he established.

He failed to destroy Republicanism by force.  At its lowest point, in 1924, it made up a quarter of the population, and by 1927 it was equal to the Crown Party.

Cosgrave tried to remedy this failure by keeping Republicans out of the Dail by means of the Treaty Oath to the Crown and, when that raised the possibility of a majority of elected Deputies would be kept out of the Dail by a refusal to take the Oath, he considered making it obligatory for candidates to take the Oath in order to get onto the ballot sheet.  

Free State Government was merely authoritarian.  It was the effectiveness of Republican tactics following military defeat and in opposition to it, that generated liberal democracy.  The process began with Fianna Fail—with the complicity of sensible elements in the Free State bureaucracy, getting into the Dail by signing a document on which the Oath was written without swearing.  Swearing on the Bible was legally essential to Oath-taking in those Christian times.

Liberal democracy in Ireland began when this chicanery was abolished by the Fianna Fail Government in 1932.  But the Treaty Party (becoming Fine Gael) responded to the abolition of the Treaty Oath—which it saw as opening the way to anarchy—by becoming a Fascist party.

Ireland was out of kilter with Fascist Europe in the 1930s by being a liberal democracy.  Even England dropped the Parliamentary system by adopting an all-Party system of National Government!

And De Valera’s Irish democracy was liberal enough to allow perfect freedom to the Fascist Party in its midst.  Democratic Europe would do well to follow that practice today lest it become the thing it hates.

Professor Garvin was led by his approval of Free State authoritarianism, which he took to be democracy, to argue that Fianna Fail—which refused to limit the party political system by excluding unconventional parties—was the real Fascist party in Ireland.  That shows how easy it is to slip from the one thing to the other.

These considerations are a prelude to comment in an Irish Times editorial on the fourth anniversary of the start of the NATO/Russia War in the Ukraine (24.2.26):

“Four years was the duration of the fight against the Nazis in which Ukraine under German occupation lost 10 million of its people…”

The “fight against the Nazis” in the Ukraine was not fought by Ukrainian nationalists.  It was fought by Russians.  The liberation of the Ukraine from Nazi control was experienced as conquest and subjugation.  The years of Nazi control were experienced by Ukrainian nationalists as years of freedom—as was also the case in the Baltic states.

And, during these years of freedom, the Ukrainian nationalists co-operated actively with the Nazis in the extermination of Jews.

Ukrainian nationalism was murderously anti-Semitic on its first appearance in political history in 1918, when it saw Jews as agents of Russian and Polish landlords, and it was murderously anti-Semitic again in 1941, when it saw Jews as agents of Russian Communism.

It took many years after 1945 for Fascism to be rooted out of Ukrainian life in the Ukraine.  It was driven into exile in Canada.  It was presumed to be extinct when Ukraine was made independent by Russia.  It was not Ukrainian nationalist struggle that made it independent.  If there had been a national struggle by the successors of Petlyura and Bandera in 1991, Moscow would not have conceded Ukraine to it.

The Ukrainian Nationalism which enacted the coup d’etat, with American support and EU approval, in 2014, was a revival that had come about after the independence conferred by Moscow.

The Irish Times refers to “Putin’s fatal miscalculation”.  There is no doubt that Putin did make a miscalculation, but the Irish Times fails to identify it.  His mistake was to see Fascism as an absolute evil from which Russia had saved the West, and to deduce from European rhetoric that there would be agreement to its suppression, should it reappear in the Ukraine.

The Irish Times marvels at the “remarkable resilience” of the Ukraine.  Where does it think that the resilience comes from?  Certainly not from liberal democracy.

Ukraine, for a long period after independence was conferred on it by Russia, seemed to be without national purpose.  It became notorious as the most corrupt state in Europe.  However, it began to generate a sense of purpose as it reconnected itself with its nationalist past in the days of Petlyura and Bandera, raised statues to them, and took no heed of Yevtushenko’s effort to place concern about the great Kewan massacre at Babi Yar at the centre of things.

A strange pamphlet called The Sacred Egoism Of Nations was published in Dublin around 1918.  It was a kind of satire on Sinn Fein—probably fostered by the Irish Times, which thought there were much more important things in the world than nations.  In fact, Sinn Fein nationalism was very restrained by comparison with the Jewish nationalism that bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and carried out the Nakba, or the Ukrainian nationalism which considers itself to be worth a World War.

President Zelensky seems so sure of increasing European support that he declares that the Third World War has already begun.  And the Irish Times says:  “The EU must find a way to deliver ongoing support”.

A World War is needed to ensure that Putin’s miscalculation about the West’s relationship with Fascism proves fatal—and, even with a World War, who knows?

Brendan Clifford