On Fascists
The third part of a seven-part summer reading series on ideology
Communism may have defined itself in the 19th century as the specter haunting Europe, but in the 20th and beyond, the animating spirit of the age has been fascism.
Fascism is everywhere and nowhere at once. Purposefully nebulous, deliberately vague, and capable of emerging, like a changeling, from any body and any form, it is notoriously hard to pin down, predict, or identify. Yet it is omnipresent, lurking behind every political position, occupying every position of power, visible in every mote of dust. It’s said that the true power of fascism is that the fear of it makes its opponents to do all its most important work for it, and this cannot be denied; the devastation that it wrought in the early part of the 20th century, when it looked as if it might emerge as the dominant political expression of the future, has so spooked the generations that grew up in the aftermath of its defeat that some of them are afraid to even think about it too hard lest they conjure it into reality, like muttering the name of Mary Whales into a bathroom mirror.
Fascism, indeed, has become one of the world’s most valuable bugaboos. Even more than the communism and anarchism that preceded it or the neoliberalism that followed it, “fascist” has become an all-purpose smear of the “this is anything I don’t approve of” variety. Left, right, and center all toy with its pieces, turning them into a malignant piñata dangling in the middle of the political field, to be crushed with whatever rhetorical weapons are handy; the reward is collecting the sweet prizes of fear and obedience that are the most common reactions to hearing its name.
The irony should not be lost on anyone. Fear and obedience, of course, are the primary motivators behind fascism, which may be the most ironic political tendency in human history. It was considered a perfectly respectable thing for a long time in the west, thanks to its virulent anti-communism and its ability to strangle so many of the most annoying voices crying out for social and economic reforms; it only soured when the brands of nationalism it bred proved to be a threat to other domestic patriotisms. Many of those who fought it overseas came back to support it at home, and its revival has been met with fright and opposition less because of its content and more because of its history.
Although it seems to mean something different to everyone, the fascist brand has become a toxic one, and if one follows its threads carefully through the last century, it is easy to see a desire to rehabilitate it under another guise. Holocaust denial, in particular, should be seen as part of this ongoing project; since even the barest, most shabby forms of morality cannot countenance the genocidal aftermath of the Holocaust – an act inextricably linked with German fascism – efforts must be made to prove that it did not happen. If fascism is a belief responsible for the worst thing anyone can think of, fascism cannot become accepted and normalized. Therefore, for the brand to lose its taint, it must be decoupled from that event. For fascism to live, the Holocaust must not have happened.
And so we enter the morass of propaganda, a dark forest haunted by witches who periodically emerge from their huts to kidnap the young and teach them entirely the wrong lessons. It is indeed curious that fascism, which presented itself in no uncertain terms as a new and unprecedented way out of the left/right duopoly, has been so widely condemned by so many people who themselves have represented a ‘third way’ past the binary of communism and capitalism. Such people have done tremendous (in scope if not quality) work in trying to reverse the equation, and point to rickety public/private partnerships as the only true exit strategy from the twin nightmares of communism and fascism, which they describe as two sides of the same debased coin.
So, what is fascism? I won’t rehash the answers too much here. As I often do, I will refer it back to Robert O. Paxton, whose writings on the subject I consider authoritative and final. It was famously said of pornography that it is hard to define, but “you know it when you see it”; so, too, with fascism. It is a hallmark of its ghostly and malignant nature that it is far easier to define what it is not than what it is. It is certainly not communism; the left warned of its threat long before anyone else took it seriously, played the biggest part in fighting it and beating it down, and still occupies the vanguard when warning of its rebirth. But neither is it, as some leftists claim, just capitalism unfettered. This is a convenient and appealing characterization that properly assesses the kind of damage it can cause, but which does not capture its opportunistic and amorphous nature. The truth is, fascism truly is a third way, in the sense that it is no way at all.
Like Dr. Frankenstein’s new Adam, fascism is a thing both greater and worse than the sum of its parts. It is authoritarian, certainly, but it is not just authoritarianism, which is a tendency and not an ideology, and which can be associated with any kind of politics. It is often totalitarian, but it does not have to be, as evidenced by its most commonly accepted originator, Benito Mussolini, who was more a traditional strongman than a world-obliterating Big Brother figure. It can take on elements of all kinds of disparate ideological expressions; it can at the same time display bits and pieces of religion and mysticism, socialism and capitalism, tradition and disruption, nationalism and internationalism, lawlessness and order. It confuses us, because it wants us to be confused. It flaunts its inconsistency, because consistency is a value native to the systems it wishes to destroy.
And here we get to the heart of what fascism is. Fascism is the urge to destroy what is human.
In discussing what would come to be known as “the paradox of tolerance”, Karl Popper noted that a free, democratic, and open society must engage in the widest form of tolerance, but that it must not be tolerant of intolerance. The seeming contradiction becomes clear when one cuts through all the empty rhetoric it uses (for fascism has no use for genuine ideology): We cannot be so tolerant that we accept the existence of those who wish to destroy us. We cannot countenance freedom and acceptance so unlimited that they cannot move to stop those attempting to eliminate freedom and acceptance. Doing so is playing a game of chess where only one side is observing the rules. The fascist drive is a drive against all that is human, towards bestiality; it is the pure will to power, undecorated by any pretense towards justice or decency or equality. It makes no demands but rule, and it makes no judgements other than whether or not you are on its side. If you are, you may live and prosper (so long as you are willing to die to preserve it), and if you are not, you have no more rights than an insect, a nuisance to be crushed.
The reason it is so difficult to pin down the nature of fascism is that it intentionally frustrates our expectations. It is simply a gang mentality written on a societal scale. It is a wolf pack posing as a political project. It has no more use for ideology than a spider has for the Bible. Why do fascists ignore their own teachings? Because they don’t care about them. Why do they forgive the sins of their leaders? Because they are only interested in the leaders, not the sins. Why are their beliefs so inconsistent and their arguments so contradictory? Because consistency and harmony have no role to play in the brute exercise of force. Why do they ignore history? Because history is a human quality, and they seek to destroy the qualities of humanity wherever they find them.
Wherever there has been fascist rule, there has been change, but no progress. There is no endgame to fascism. It has no goal but perpetual action, no means but constant violence. Even its racism is a tool that can be discarded or forgotten; Japan adopted it with east, and Germany overlooked its own white supremacist foundations for the sake of convenient alliances. Its nationalism and patriotism are a joke, merely formal frameworks to be filled by the self-abnegating unity it relies on. If socialism represents a positive solidarity, fascism demands a negative one. It finds purchase in otherwise individualist cultures by unmooring struggle from class, presenting in-group identity for its own sake.
It cannot be exported, because it must always be able to find a new enemy to align against and destroy, and if one cannot be found within, it must be sought without. Fascism does not aim to build; it does not aspire, and it has no promise on a faraway hill. There is no day in which it realizes its ultimate victory or the realization of its vision; there is simply one combat after another. It fulfills no dreams other than dreams of carnage. It cannot be corrupted because it has no values to corrupt; it cannot be betrayed, because it has no principles to betray; it cannot be caught in a lie, because it does not have any interest in truth.
I cannot here improve upon the words of Paxton, so I will simply reproduce them: “Unlike [conservativism, liberalism, and socialism], fascism does not rest on formal philosophical positions with claims to universal validity. There was no Fascist Manifesto, no founding fascist thinker…fascism does not base its claims to validity on truth. Fascists despise thought and reason, abandon intellectual positions casually, and cast aside intellectual fellow travelers. They subordinate thought and reason not to faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest.”
Unlike the conservative, who seeks to uphold existing systems however oppressive because she believes in their moral, religious, or historical authority, the fascist is happy to overturn any tradition or structure that does not serve as a means for testing and furthering its sole motivation: the continued violent destruction of any challenge to his authority. Unlike liberalism, fascism cares nothing for argument, for logic, for reasoned debate; this is why it is impossible to combat it by these means. Unlike socialism, which studies power as part of a material analysis in order to win victory in a clearly defined class struggle, fascism seeks power purely for its own sake; its project is not to further any end or reverse any present dynamic, but simply constantly exercise itself to affirm its own potency. It is Nietzsche’s will to power stripped to a bare skeletal grin; it is not even the vampire of capital, which feeds on others to fatten itself. In its raw state, fascism does not desire or embrace comfort and will happily suffer deprivation and death for the sake of proving its mettle.
In his little-read but incredibly insightful book Male Fantasies—a two-part study of the German Freikorps—Klaus Theweleit lays bare the motivations of the fascist mind, which are more psychological than political. The Freikorps were roving mobs of armed thugs, not markedly different from their American manifestations in the Klan, the militia movement of the ‘90s, and the Proud Boys of today; most were veterans of the First World War, and they formed the backbone of the nascent National Socialist movement in the ‘20s and ‘30s. Male Fantasies, drawn from their own letters, publications, and memoirs, paints a bloody but recognizable portrait of their obsessions: Communism as a world-historical threat; Jews and Gypsies as lizard-like, alien excrescences; women as either pure, nearly invisible phantoms of innocence and domesticity or vile, florid sexual temptresses luring men to spiritual doom; the male body as a steely instrument of destruction to be proved against the enemies of society; apocalyptic imagery of fire, floods, ice, desolation, and doom. It is impossible to miss the similarity to so much of today’s rightist discourse.
Our present moment is a breeding ground for fascism. Although it never appears in the same form twice, and although it is always shaped by the time and place in which it emerges – a fact that is often missed by amateur analysts of fascist activity – there are commonalities that cannot be ignored: Traditional politics are failing. Institutions are crumbling. There is no faith in government. The left is weak and vilified. National leaders are corrupt and ineffectual. Traditional social roles are changing or fading. The economy has left many behind. New and strange kinds of people are appearing all over, and demanding to participate in society. People do not feel needed. Enemies mock and insult us, and we are forced to capitulate to those weaker than ourselves. There are fewer and fewer outlets for our animalistic urges. We sit on a mountain of arms and are told we cannot use them. The vitality of the in-group is made to be a joke. And the world seems to be coming to an end.
One thing that is identical in our world today to the conditions under which the first wave of fascism emerged a century ago is the inability of liberal democracy to cope with the emergence of fascist, crypto-fascist, and pseudo-fascist movements. Just as there were vast differences between Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo, there are very few similarities between Trump, Bolsonaro, Duterte, and Modi. But common conditions can be found in their countries that help explain the rise of a right-wing authoritarianism that may yet embrace the new Freikorps elements in their societies, and forge them into fascists.
All have gotten rich off unrestrained capitalism, but they are happy to play up the way it has failed so many on lower tiers of society. All correctly point out that their governments have become ineffectual, bought out, unresponsive, and riddled with contemptuous elites. All capitalize on the resentment of immigrants, the poor, criminals and the lumpenproletariat, foreigners, and the marginalized. All carry out their trade in the coin of resentment, and evoke the loss of a (usually imaginary) time of greatness. All demand power, more power, always and ever more power. And all have contempt for the ruling right, but absolutely despise the left.
History – real history, material history, not the false history of tribal triumphs the fascists peddle – teaches us what they already know: the liberal bourgeoise will not stop them. Our elites fear the possibility of fascists gaining power, but their fear is not enough to make them fight; as we have discussed here before, we have seen the liberal class, time and time again, abet and enable the fascists’ rise to power until it’s too late, at which point they throw in with them against the left, who are the only people capable of stopping them. We cannot forget history now. It is screaming at us to wake up from a nightmare that has been too often repeated.
Fascism has learned one lesson since its catastrophic defeat at the end of the Second World War. It has learned how to conceal itself, how to dress in disguise, how to leaven its words with the sweetener of discourse, how to pretend it is something other than a nihilistic death cult. But we have seen its works. And we have seen the only answer to its actions. There is an old thought experiment about whether it would be acceptable to go back in time and kill Hitler as a youth; but in reality, the new Hitlers have already been born, and they are well on their way to raising their newly made victory banners.
When the Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who sent over 300 Nazis to hell where they belong, was asked how many men she had killed, she had the correct response: “They were not men. They were fascists.” They are not human; they are an attempt to abandon and destroy humanity. There is only one way to stop them. We can do it now, or we can do it after they’ve authored a second Holocaust that will kill millions more.