After more than 40 years of neoliberal era, with the signs that the neoliberal era is drawing to a close and the ideology of ‘globalisation’ giving way to ‘protectionist’ practices, we are witnessing a much more heated discussion of fascism and National Socialism that swept Europe between the two wars in the 20th century. This is due not only to the inadequacy of liberal ideology when tested against new economic and geopolitical realities, but also to the re-emergence of (proto)fascist movements and ideas that have become widespread in Europe, the USA and, as seen in the case of India, in the ‘Global South.’
Of course, it can be argued that fascism/nazism has never actually declined in the USA and continental Europe. In the Cold War, the ‘old’ German Nazis and Italian fascists were at the service of the USA in the war against communism. In addition, some critical elements of fascism actually continued the line of thought of ‘conservative liberalism/aristocratic reaction’ that had flourished in the last quarter of the 19th century: Social Darwinism, hostility to progress, anti-democratism/anti-communism/mass hatred, racism and imperialism… Thus, fascism/nazism after the Second World War was at best dormant.
In his books (here and here) Ishay Landa of the History Department of the Open University of Israel traces the liberal elements in 20th century fascism and sheds light on a side of fascism that has not been much discussed: the hostility to mass culture and mass consumption. Landa argues that fascism/nazism is both ‘western’ and ‘hostile to western values’, which is precisely why, according to him, it is necessary to focus on the social and ideological function of fascism instead of debating this issue. In this respect, contemporary neo fascist movements both resemble and differ from classical fascism. Instead of abstract models, a concrete social-historical analysis is essential for understanding fascist movements today.
In your book, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism, you say that there are certain continuities between the 19th century liberal tradition and fascism. These include social Darwinism, imperialism and colonial wars. A common view is that fascism/nazism is a break with western traditions of thought. In what ways do you disagree with this view and in what ways should fascism/nazism be considered ‘western’? Do you think revolts against Reason and ‘common man’ are also a ‘western’ line of thought?
Both fascism and National Socialism are political ideologies that first emerged in the West, were thought out and fought for by westerners, and, if only for that reason, cannot be seriously considered as fully breaking with western traditions. Indeed, as stated in the question, they emerged in the context of what were largely western political and ideological processes, such as social Darwinism, racism, the sanctification of competition between individuals and nations, and so on and so forth.
That said, it is important to bear in mind two “complications” concerning fascism and its relation to the western tradition: the first is mostly a post-Second-World-war phenomenon, which has to do with apologetic efforts to shift the blame away from the West: because fascism and Nazism proved so disastrous and horrifying, some commentators, instead of dealing with the contradictions of western thought and society, claimed that they represented aberrations and deviations from western norms and traditions. German historians thus often claimed that Germany departed from the West in its Nazi period. Some even insisted that the horrors of the Holocaust were the result of the Nazis being swayed by the example of Bolshevism, as when Ernst Nolte notoriously and vacuously spoke of Auschwitz as an “Asiatic deed.” Some opponents of Nazism, too, found it so repellent and outlandish that they were driven to conceptualize it as an alien force, invading Western culture from without. This was done, for instance, by author Klaus Mann, who described the Nazis as “Persians,” alluding to the armies invading ancient Greece, threatening to obliterate its glorious civilization. While political thinker Hannah Arendt insisted that Nazism “owes nothing to any part of the Western tradition.”
A second complication is more intimately related to fascist and Nazi ideology itself. While often celebrating themselves as the last bulwark of the West —or the Abendland— against Bolshevism, fascists were also deeply hostile to intellectual and political currents that were associated with the West, such as democracy, the Enlightenment, feminism, universalism, etc. Hence, fascist thinkers often looked for non-Western models to counter what they considered decadent, egalitarian, and effeminate about the West. We find this in an important proto-fascist thinker as Nietzsche, who sought inspiration in such a text as the Laws of Manu, one of the most authoritative codes of Hinduism in India, where a caste order was defended. And later many fascist ideologues flirted with “Eastern” models, notably Julius Evola, the Italian hardcore fascist, or Savitri Devi, the French-born Greek fascist and Nazi sympathizer, who embraced Indian traditions. It should be noted, however, that these people were driven to “the East” to resolve the internal dilemmas of their own societies, and that this by-pass was largely “orientalist,” that is superficial and manipulative, ransacking Eastern traditions for motifs that seemed useful for their own reactionary purposes.
With regards to the revolts against Reason and the “common man,” these were simultaneously both Western and anti-Western — since their objects of hatred, such as democracy, rationalism, and mass society, were also important features of western modernity. In general, I would not lay great stress on deciding whether fascism was Western or not, as much as look at its social and ideological function, wherever it becomes a force. We see today neo-fascist models adopted in non-Western countries, such as India, but this is possible because the goals, of defeating modernity and its egalitarian implications, remain very similar.
You emphasize that hardcore anti-Semitism of Nazism embedded in the thought of revolt against ‘mass culture’, ‘leveling of man’ which are manifestations of ‘Jewishness’ in the German Right and Zivilisationskritik. Are ‘Jews’ and, let’s say, ‘colored people’ or ‘migrants’ interchangeable?
There are strong parallels but also, I think, important differences. Jews were seen by many reactionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries as the prime beneficiaries, and indeed as the hidden masterminds of secular, democratic modernity. Hence fighting “Jewish influence” was so central to the fascist worldview. “The Jew” was conceived as posing a mortal threat to European, racial, and national distinctiveness, to what we now call “identity politics” in its right-wing variants. This, of course, brings to mind the celebration of supposedly Christian, European, often expressly “white” traditions of the far-Right today, its ferocious racism and xenophobia, its opposition to immigration, especially from non-Western countries. But there is also a difference, in that Jews were seen as a universalistic force, allegedly bent on imposing a horizontal, grey, unanimous, mass civilization and eradicating all national and racial differences. By comparison, immigrants today are mostly seen as resisting assimilation, remaining stubbornly non-Europeans, preserving their own ethnic and religious characteristics. So the struggle against them is arguably less chiliastic in nature — as Marine le Pen could put it, “I’m opposed to wearing headscarves in public places. That’s not France. […] The people who come to France, why would they want to change France, to live in France the same way they lived back home?” For that reason, at least rhetorically, immigrants who are willing to renounce their own culture, might be absorbed into France. As Le Pen assured her interviewer: “people who behave need not worry. Foreigners in France who hold a job, who respect our laws, our codes, have absolutely nothing to worry about.” For many European antisemites, however, Jews were racially unassimilable. As the influential 19th century Austrian antisemite Georg Ritter von Schönerer famously declared, even if converted to Catholicism, Jews remained racial aliens: “Religion changes not a trace: in the blood lies the disgrace.” Schönerer was a figure much admired by Hitler. For the Nazis, hence, Jews were targets not just of exclusion or even expulsion but also, ultimately, of extermination.
It seems the ‘bourgeois laziness’ and massification triggered the ‘aristocratic’ reaction of the European intelligentsia. In one of his pro-Nazi writings, Martin Heidegger, glorifies masculinity, heroism, hardness, danger, courage, and daring. German writers like Oswald Spengler, liked to cite the saying, “God vomits out the lukewarm.” What do you think, recent revival of Spengler’s ‘Decline of the West’ analysis and Heidegger’s ‘meta-ontology’ in certain circles in Europe? Is it possible to say, neoliberal anti-democratic tendencies have created a fertile ground for a new Right in the West?
This is an imminent danger, indeed often a sad reality, as we already witness a new Right prospering across national borders, and not just in the West. The forces of reaction, often drawing on fascist and other conservative ideologues (think of Jordan Peterson, or Steve Bannon, or the Heideggerian Russian Aleksandr Dugin), but also selectively drawing, and indeed mostly distorting, religious traditions, are mobilizing to fight against modernity and seeking to create authoritarian alternatives, where hierarchies between ethnic groups (a polite way of speaking of races, essentially), and between the genders are firmly reestablished.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood brilliantly captured the danger of these reactionary dystopias in her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale recently becoming a successful TV show. It recounts the near future of a Unted States of America where a theological chauvinist order is brutally enforced, and it is highly significant that in contemporary Israel, protesters against the clerical-fascist government let by Netanyahu have used the imagery of that novel. Indeed, Israel also illustrates the seemingly strange, but nevertheless quite real convergence of neoliberalism with authoritarianism, since a vital impetus for the anti-democratic onslaught of Netanyahu’s government has been the extremist thought of a libertarian think tank called Kohelet Policy Forum, that espouses a complete destruction of workers’ organizations and a totalitarian “free market.”
What do you think about recent calls for ‘less consumption’ and growing debates about ‘overpopulation’? According to your research, it seems that those calls perfectly fit for any overt or covert fascist agenda. Can we say that the world is ripe for a new era of fascism?
Anti-consumerism and the attack on the masses’ material standard of living is a much-overlooked component of the fascist worldview.
Fascist leaders and intellectuals recoiled with great distaste from the masses’ “base” material aspirations, transforming them from frugal workers into spoiled contenders for higher incomes and greater comforts. The same consumerism was also seen as weakening the willingness of the workers to fight and die for their countries. “We fascists,” exclaimed Mussolini “reject any static concept of material or moral happiness. Our happiness is in the struggle.” Goebbels similarly avowed that “National Socialism and fascism have in common above all the contempt for a comfortable and therefore pleasant life.”
It is instructive and alarming that the rhetoric of the new Right is suffused in such anti-consumerism, whether we are dealing with ideologues of the German AfD such as Götz Kubitschek, to Nietzschean-inspired US American alt-Righters, or to successful politicians such Marine Le Pen or Giorgia Meloni. Le Pen argued that “Globalization means using slaves to manufacture products that are then sold to the unemployed!,” and Meloni asserted in a widely watched speech, that we will “defend our freedom because we will never be slaves and simple consumers at the mercy of financial speculators. That is our mission.” Unfortunately, the left today has to a significant extent renounced its belief in material progress, and acquiesces in the view that there’s simply not enough to go around and we need to turn to some form or other of “degrowth.” Once material scarcity is perceived as inevitable, then a universal struggle for dwindling resources appears natural, and fear-mongering demagogues can present themselves as national saviors of their own —strictly delimited— constituencies. This right-wing surge will be very difficult to counter on an abiding basis, unless an alternative vision of social and material progress coupled with equality and international cooperation, can be compellingly defended.
