The book “Faszyzm, który nadchodzi” (The Upcoming Fascism) by Dr. Przemysław Witkowski a researcher and lecturer at Collegium Civitas, has just been released in English.
Dr. Witkowski invited renowned international and Polish experts on fascism to contribute to this book, including Prof. Roger Griffin, Prof. Enzo Traverso, Prof. Tamir Bar-On, Prof. Peter Staudenmaier, Prof. Szymon Rudnicki, Prof. Rafał Pankowski, and Prof. Zbigniew Mikołejko.
“What interested me most about fascism was not how it bloomed but rather its meager beginnings, those seeds from which a tree would grow in the future. It was a moment when having properly recognized the symptoms of the disease, it was still possible to react, saving Europe, the world, and millions of victims. With the development of this movement each year, the spiral intensified and eventually broke out into war and the Holocaust. But what if we had noticed something going on along the way? Could we have predicted what happened? Would we have been able to respond? Catch the first symptoms when this snowball could still be stopped. And what gave it strength and momentum? Was it the decay of religion? Economic crisis? Or maybe anti-Semitism? Paganism? Traditionalism? The spirit of counter-revolution? What kind of mental construct was its engine? What were the social conditions? I was interested in how one goes from the state of – I have a neighbor, and he is who he is – to the moment in which I am smashing the head of his two-year-old son against the wall of the house, thinking that I am saving the world, my culture and civilization, and the lives of my loved ones from some deadly plague.
Wanting to understand this, I asked not only historians and political scientists about fascism but also sociologists, film experts, psychotherapists, literary critics, and Romologists. I wanted to see a fascist response by analyzing the threats it would seek to remedy rather than by extrapolating past trends. The result of these conversations – which opened my eyes to how many problems that seemingly belong to different areas so quickly intertwine in the fascist machinery – is this book“- writes Dr. Witkowski.
Dr. Witkowski’s book was published by the Institute for Book and Press Publishing (Instytut Wydawniczy „Książka i Prasa” ) and is available for free on the website of the Polish branch of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
You can also download the book here: The-Upcoming-Fascism.