I was quite surprised when I saw Ilya Shiptser calling NRx “New Fascism” in a comment at the SSC blog. We aren’t, of course, and the best argument I can give why exactly is not merely that Fascism is evil and we aren’t, nor that Fascism is destructive of civilization and NRx wishes to rebuild civilization, but even that Fascism is an virtual evil: there is no such thing as Fascism. It is hard to convey tone in writing, but if I was speaking aloud, my tone would be that of a reassuring kind: calm down and fear not, nobody intends to revive those kinds of horrors anymore. Don’t be afraid. If it is any help in not being afraid, I am a descendant of Holocaust survivors. My “anti-Fascist” immune system is fairly strong and yet my spidey sense is not tingling. It is dead. It stays dead. And I am not even sure it ever existed in that ideological sense today people think it did.
Why do I say there is no such thing as Fascism? Let me offer a parallel. I am an Atheist. I don’t believe Satan exists. And I think about Fascism roughly the same way I think about Satan: the Satan concept is a projection generated by Christians, they simply project whatever they fear and hate most, and reify it into a virtual entity or symbol. And the fact that Satanist murders actually happened does not change it: folks who claim they are Satanists do exist, but Satan does not. In fact, if todays Liberalism is a direct Descendant of Puritanism, the popular concept of Fascism can be an inheritance from the popular concept of Satan.
Another way to look at it is comic book evils like Joker. They are described not from their own angle, not as a man with motivations a man could reasonably have, but simply as whatever the good-minded reader – or Batman – fears and hates most.
We can see this process in movies like V for Vendetta or the Hunger Games. Such movies are clearly about fighting against Fascism in a fantasy universe. And look at how such political systems are described in such fantasy universes! They are entirely described from the angle of the good guys – they are what they fear and what they loath. The don’t have any sort of a consistent existence on their own. They just exist to have something the good guys can fight against. They exist as negatives, they exist as Others, seen through the eyes of the heroes. The Enemy.
This is what I mean by Fascism not existing. It is not something you would want to be: it is something you imagine your enemies are. Fascism is always The Other.
My point is not that Fascism isn’t or wasn’t evil. The kind of men who are commonly described as Fascists were, beyond any doubt, clearly evil. My point is that Fascism hardly ever existed as a thing in itself, an ideology, a mind virus, independent of the historical circumstances and the personalities of those men. It is perhaps a useful label for whatever those evil men did in those historical circumstances, but the label is almost useless outside of that. I’ll be fair: it is largely the same with Bolshevism. I don’t fear a Bolshevik takeover. Liberals should not fear a Fascist takeover either.
The 1920’s and the 1930’s
The 1920’s and 1930’s of Europe had three major ingredients:
A) Large numbers of WWI veterans brutalized by both the extreme viciousness of that war and the hysterically hateful athmosphere thereof. They were generally open to the things they got used to: totalitarian leadership, rank and discipline, extreme nationalism, and extremely hateful rhethorics. In other words, the attitude of Total War. Fascism was very, very strongly based on this particular attitude generated by this particular historical setup. And this is why the whole concept of Fascism is void today – we don’t have such masses of young men, we don’t have this historical scenario and I don’t think it is coming back any time soon. It would take a WW3 to brutalize men enough to be Fascists afterwards. While my argument is that Fascism doesn’t exist, if you think it is, perhaps think about it like this: it is not the 1920’s and the 1930’s. It is 1917. In 1914, nobody was Fascist, in 1917, many young soldiers adopted a mindset – through the brutality of the war and through the hateful propaganda – that you could call proto-Fascist. Without the Somme or Isonzo, no Fascism.
B) This historical mental vulnerability was exploited by certain evil demagogues.
C) The Orwellian ingredient. There was a certain kind of a brutal totalitarian ideological drive kicking around, most visible in Stalin and Hitler. Orwell described how this could take over the world extremely well in 1984. In his honor, I will call this ingredient Ingsoc. The important part is that while Orwell was himself a Leftist, he still clearly described how Ingsoc is a Leftist thing. From my angle, the Ingsoc drive is something like a really virulent form of Jacobinism. National Socialism was basically racialized Bolshevism: take the usual Bolshevik hatred of capitalists, racialize it into a hatred of Jewish capitalists, and you got it. All this came from the Left.
My point is, Fascist ideology didn’t exist. Mussolini made it up as he went. He was one of the evil guys who abused the WWI veterans openness for totalitarian aggressivity and of course their attitude towards obedience, and just made up bullshit as he went. Part of the bullshit was of course based on the Ingsoc drive in him. But it was only after he consolidated his power when he charged Giovanni Gentile with writing a doctrine for Fascism. He really didn’t care that much.
Hitler’s National Socialism was closer to being an actual ideology, due to the Ingsoc, Bolshevik, Jacobin drive being clearer in him. But even Hitler was making up bullshit as he went. First his racism was entirely biological – Nordic superiority. Then he invaded Norway. That was a bit difficult to explain, so he turned his ideology into something of a more obscure “spiritual” racism: Norway was under British influence and Britain under Jewish “spiritual” influence so the blond Norse weren’t actually “spiritual” Aryans… I hope it is obvious for the reader that it was just random propaganda bullshit, made up as he went. Even National Socialism was not much of an ideology – the Ingsoc ingredient was there, but mostly it was just a historical accident: an evil demagogue abusing the openness of WWI veterans for such a policy. (Romania was perhaps the clearest case: Legionary State! I.e. a state for veterans, an ideology for veterans of WWI.)
The 1940’s and onward
Propaganda, psychological warfare is a normal ingredient in every war. Of course you want to portray your enemies as evil. It helps with morale. This tends to work especially well when A) your enemies, like, Hitler, are actually evil 2) they actually have elements of an actually evil ideological drivein them, which I called, after Orwell, Ingsoc.
Due to the actual evil of the Axis and the evil Ingsoc ideological drive in the Axis (also in the Soviets, of course), Allied propaganda during WW2 was extremely succesful at portraying the Axis as evil. After all, it was mostly true.
This succesful and largely true propaganda was both during and after the war swinged into creating one of the biggest straw men of all times: Fascism, in the modern sense. Orwell again described this perfectly. “Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathizers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’.That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come.”
But of course nobody sees themselves as bullies. The bully is always The Other. It is how you see others – when you think they are bullying you – not how anyone would want to see themselves.
Historical Fascism wasn’t an actual ideology but a bunch of evil men abusing the openness of WWI veterans had to a “Legionary State”. It was shot through with Ingsoc, to be sure, but that did not make it an full ideology.
Succesful war propaganda is always about making your enemy look like something a soldier would hate and and a defenseless civilian (esp. women) would fear, in order to influence the defensive instincts of your soldiers. Of course the Allied propaganda used this as well, and it was really helpful that Hitler was truly that kind of guy an Allied soldier would hate and a civilian woman would fear.
The point is, both during and after the war, Allied war propaganda turned into the postwar civilian Liberal propaganda of the Cathedral. Something similar happened at the Soviets.
Anyhow, my point is that this hate-and-fear (and true) war propaganda was turned into a hate-and-fear civilian Liberal propaganda about a certain concept of Fascism as a perpetual ideological enemy.
This new propaganda simply downplayed how the Ingsoc elements of Fascism and Nazism were fundamentally Leftist, and how everything else was just based on historical circumstances (WWI veterans, evil demagogues). Instead Cathedral propaganda used this to create the scary image of Fascism as a Perpetual Enemy – the generic projection of all the fears and hatreds Liberals have. Same job as Christians did with Satan. It is always The Great Other – something basically nobody would want to be, it is something you imagine your enemies to be. (OK, some young fools play at being Neo-Fascists or Satanists. It is a consequence of the projection: playing with forbidden fruit.)
Do you think Crowley was really Satanist? Do you think Satanism did ever seriously exist? I would say this kind of Satanism was just a reflection on the Christian propaganda projection of their fears and evils as Satan. It had historical basis: in Paganism – the Wiccan Horned God turned into the idea of Satan. But it was still just a made up projection.
And it is really the same with Fascism. It had a historical basis in the post-WWI era, when evil demagogues preying on the psychological vulnerabilities of WWI veterans, and this combined with a crazy Leftist Ingsoc drive resulted in horrific outcomes. But just like the Horned God cult, it was something tied to historical circumstances. Like how Christians projected their fears and hatreds into an Eternal Satan, Liberals projected theirs into an Eternal Fascist. And the Golden Dawn type idiots are just like Crowley – a reflection on the projection.
And this is why there is no such thing as Fascism. There is no Fascism and no Satanism, aside from some fools who play at it being one or the other, but only as a reflection of the projection. Both are just projections of fears and hatreds – mostly fears. The Fascist, or Satan, is the Other, it is what you imagine your enemy is. Not what you would willingly become.
And this is why NRx isn’t Fascist, aside from he obvious we aren’t evil and we are pro-civilization stuff. We are real people, not an imagined enemy, not The Other. We are not Leftists, so no Ingsoc drive. We aren’t evil demagogues and there aren’t huge masses of WWI veterans around anyway. As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as Fascism – it is just a liberal synonym for “nightmare” or “bad LSD trip” or “stuff I fear”.
I am not a Christian, so I don’t believe Satan or a serious Satanism exists. I am not a Liberal, so I don’t believe Fascism or serious Fascists exist. Both are just the projections of fears of of people who aren’t me. Clear?
Have you read Paxton’s “Five Stages of Fascism” paper? His argument is that fascism (small-f) is not an ideology but a process, and I think he has some good points.
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This article is gonna rustle some WN (and Christian) jimmies. Anyway, it’s obvious NRx isn’t “fascist”, because fascism is considered demotist and modernist, which NRx is not.
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Shipster’s point was that neoreactionaries are reinventing Fascism. Your argument,. if correct, would only mean they are inventing it.
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“Shpitser”? Oh whoops, I was reading it as “shitposter”
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Ah, to post something actually useful, there’s a Hitler quote from Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism regarding the Nazi party’s lack of a fundamental ideology.
I’ll try to find it, but the gist was his pride in the party not needing a coherent platform or ideology to justify its existence. It had members and a unified will, and that was enough.
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Maybe fascism could be redefined as personality-cult authoritarianism applied to an advanced society.
That has only happened a few times, since most authoritarian societies are imposed upon primitive lands with hard-to-govern tribes.
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Fascism is a real thing, but a clearer term for it is Statism — the almost universally accepted idea that all interactions between individuals, not just collective self-defense, should be managed by an all-powerful State. E.g. my father is an intelligent man born long before 1965, but he cannot imagine that any elderly person would ever receive medical attention if not for Medicare. Statism works something like this (paraphrasing Hayek):
(1) A Party gets voted into power by promising a Plan to fix some pressing social problem, ignoring the fact that if said problem could be solved by majority opinion, the majority would have just gone ahead and solved it.
(2) Representing a diverse coalition of interest groups, Party members cannot agree on a simple, specific Plan, so they cobble together a Rube Goldberg monstrosity with just the right mix of hokum and magic pixie dust to appease all factions.
(3) This Plan is put into action and quickly falls apart. Saboteurs of the opposing party must be blamed, and decisive executive action must be taken to save the Plan. Each fix exposes more flaws, so the Plan now changes unpredictably from day to day.
(4) WAR!!! We must defeat this other country! The enemy leaders also welcome war as a distraction from their own failed Plans.
(5) The war ends, and the vanquished leaders are hanged while the victors wave to vast cheering crowds. The old, failed Plans are forgotten, and it’s time for a new Plan to rebuild the country. Back to stage (1).
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Please try to put things into perspective. The fact that right-wing equals finds government health care weird is such an outlier, because it is an almost certainly uniquely American phenomenon, this does not directly come from traditional attitudes. I mean, in medieval attitudes there is a State Church, and they are the ones running hospitals (knights hospitallers, nuns doing nursing etc.) so the difference is fairly small. I think it must have came from the peculiarities of American history, such as the idea that the nation contains communities instead of being one community, which all goes back to old settlement patterns: https://popehat.com/2014/10/10/strange-seeds-on-distant-shores/
In other words, for much of the world, right-wing also means a form of statism, just with different priorities than the left-wing one. Maintains hierarchy, does not try to equalize it etc. And it is so without even such extremities happening.
The point is that if a hands-off government is not a traditionalist universal, F. probably cannot be seen as the radical reversal of it.
I know it is hard to understand the Euro tradition from a US individualist angle. Perhaps try to approach it this way: constant wars, and up close and personal, not just sending marines somewhere else. Thus, the state, while indeed having self-defense as its purpose, basically gets to organize everything in order to win those wars because the other option is destruction. Thus, even if leftism is never invented, state healthcare would have been easy to sell to euros, as a form of “keeping manpower healthy for conscription” type of stuff. The point is this was part of the cultural DNA since forever. It did not require extremist movements to invent this. First World War Germany kept a gigantic database of all horses owned by civilians, and drafted them too.
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Dave
Governments are how majorities get together to solve problems, not something that happens instead.
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It is clear Hitler and Mussolini did have a further component needed to gain power, it seems they fully embraced the political party, as invented by… maybe the Bolsheviks?
Jim would likely explain the ingsoc drive as a leftist singularity. Not a unique period but a feature of history. After WW2 it clearly was there in Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it seems to clearly be there in North Korea right now.
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In https://dividuals.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/a-group-dynamics-explanation-of-the-decline-of-the-west/ I argued they can be interpreted as an attempt to retain national unity at ALL costs, no matter how brutal. Are you saying they reinvented their nations themselves as a form of bolshevik party? This would make sense. That is what totalitarianism largely means, when the party is everything.
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