Fascism, Part I: The European Radical Right and the Birth of Fascism

Radical sects, ancient and modern, have “prefigured the intolerant, illiberal, messianic mind-set of some fascists.”

Artwork by Nathan Luppino. Wikimedia Commons

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We are re-sending our entire Fascism series this weekend because this weekend we’re seeing one on parade while our fellow country-folk in Minnesota, seizures of oil tankers, threatened invasions of Greenland, and maps indicating America owns Canada (it doesn’t) are fascist to the core. We live in dangerous times.

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As historian Kevin Passmore writes in Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, the rise in Europe of the sociopolitical reaction now referred to as the Radical Right, a precedent both of fascism and Nazism, occurred in a matrix of influences that was much more a synergy of sources and conditions than a family of direct causes.

Reduced to a “political religion,” fascism might be traced to the “radical sects of the Reformation or even the classical world.” These radical sects “prefigured the intolerant, illiberal, messianic mind-set of some fascists.”

Fascism also owes philosophical debts to the thinkers of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, an “inheritance [that] is complex” as it derives both from pro- and anti-Enlightenment positions: Fascism embraced the Enlightenment notion that “society need not be determined by tradition but could be organized according to a blueprint derived from universal principles”—even one universal idea, according to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who termed it the “general will.” From the diametrical position, however, Fascism gravitated toward the stances of anti-Enlightenment thinkers like Gottfried von Herder in Germany and the French counterrevolutionary Joseph de Maistre, who argued that “‘natural’ communities—nation, profession, and family—were more important than individual human rights.” Thus fascism comprised both the Enlightenment notion that society could be disengaged from tradition and organized around a universal principle—the very flower of rationalist thinking—and its reaction, the abhorrence of liberality and individual rights and, simultaneously, materialism and socialism.

Radical Right and fascist ideologues also drew on a group of nineteenth-century movements, among them the “Pan-German League, the League of Patriots in France, [and] the Italian Nationalist Association.” Such groups “believed that nations were—or rather should be—unique, and they were dedicated to capturing power or influencing governments in their own countries.” They “drew on intellectual, political, social, and economic developments that crossed national frontiers and were, in some respects, shared with the left … yet they re-worked common ideas and recombined them for their own purposes.”

The philosopher Gustave Le Bon “held that irrational crowds could be manipulated by demagogues”—a power potential that attracted both the left and the right—but Hitler and Mussolini cited Le Bon and put his work to devastating practical use.

Some historians see the emergence of the European Radical Right, Passmore writes, as “a ‘revolt against reason’, which was said to characterize the last decades of the nineteenth century. Certainly, many fin-de-siècle thinkers opposed rationalism and its ramifications: liberalism, socialism, materialism, and individualism. They were pessimists who refused to see history as progress, and instead saw it as a desperate struggle against degeneration.”

There were also specific social scientists whose theories of crowd psychology lie in the dark undercrofts of the fascism and Nazism that would come. The philosopher Gustave Le Bon “held that irrational crowds could be manipulated by demagogues”—a power potential that attracted both the left and the right—but Hitler and Mussolini cited Le Bon and put his work to devastating practical use. Allied to Le Bon were George Sorel, who believed that masses are motivated by myths and violence; Gaetana Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that violence is necessary to preserve the power of the political elite; and Friedrich Nietzsche, who yearned for a “man of destiny to bring a more spiritual community” and who believed that universalism undermines respect for the strong, apparently believing such respect to be a virtue.

Le Bon’s most dangerous offering, however, lay in his twisting of  “science to argue that evolution and natural selection had permitted the elite to rise above the mass through development of the faculty of reason.” Darwin’s evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest was hijacked to craft a social theory that privileged some and threatened the very existence of others. So-called Social Darwinists feared that “the comforts of modern society, coupled with assistance to the poor, would lead to survival of the unfit and social degeneration.” They “preached ‘eugenicism’ as the answer, proposing ‘negative’ measures such as the sterilization of the unfit, and/or ‘positive’ reforms such as encouragement of the reproduction of the healthy.” 

Social Darwinism “was allied to the even more questionable ‘science’ of race.” Composer Richard Wagner’s philosophy blended “antisemitism, Germanic Christianity purged of its ‘Jewish elements,’ and paganism into an idealized Germanic myth.” Wagner’s son-in-law, Huston Stewart Chamberlain, added racism and Social Darwinism to Wagner’s already toxic mix. Hitler was a “devotee” of Chamberlain’s, and “spent his life dreaming Wagnerian dreams of victory or death.”

Darwin’s evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest was hijacked to craft a social theory that privileged some and threatened the very existence of others. So-called Social Darwinists feared that “the comforts of modern society, coupled with assistance to the poor, would lead to survival of the unfit and social degeneration.” They “preached ‘eugenicism’ as the answer, proposing ‘negative’ measures such as the sterilization of the unfit, and/or ‘positive’ reforms such as encouragement of the reproduction of the healthy.” 

Even more ominously, Social Darwinism gave shelter to the notion that racism was not really racism at all. Racial privilege, they argued, was simply a reflection of the natural order in life and a just result of natural superiority. “Racism was an essential ingredient of imperialism,” Passmore writes. “European powers used race science to justify domination over ‘inferior’ non-European peoples, and that permitted them to disregard the rule of law where they thought it appropriate. Extermination of some native peoples provided precedents for the Holocaust.”

In fact, the entire Radical Right philosophical edifice was erected on a foundation of long extant, psychologically and socially endemic anti-Semitism radically worsened by the publication of a lethal work of fiction. Paul Preston, writing in The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, describes the emergence of the book:

The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin … by the dissemination … of one of the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russian in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.

The Protocols was a modernized re-visioning on a virulent older mythology. A belief in “an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages.” In the nineteenth century run-up to the fascist conflicts of the twentieth century, “the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging to their interests. In this paranoid fantasy … it was alleged that, using Freemasons as their willing intermediaries, the Jews controlled the economy, politics, the press, literature and the entertainment world through which they propagated immorality and the brutalization of the masse.”

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion poured gasoline on an already flaming bonfire of shifted blame, shadow projection, and scapegoating in the Western world. As scholar Hasia Diner relates to PBS in “Ford’s Anti-Semitism,” American automotive magnate Henry Ford published half a million copies of The Protocols, distributing them free at his car dealerships and to subscribers of the newspaper he owned. He continued to support The Protocols until 1927, six years after London Times correspondent Philip Grave published definitive proof, in an article titled “Jewish World Plot—An Exposure: The Source of the Protocols,” that the anti-Semitic book was based on fiction, not fact. Hitler applauded Henry Ford, with whom the Third Reich had business connections, and in 1938, Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross for the German Eagle. Hitler used The Protocols as an historical textbook with no reference to its fictional origin, as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains:

During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion played an important part in the Nazis’ propaganda arsenal. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1939. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, some schools used the Protocols to indoctrinate students.”

Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, author of Night, makes profound note of the influence of this most virulent of publications in his article “Protocols.” He writes that “if ever a piece of writing could produce mass hatred, it is this one.”

With all these elements now in place—reactions against the Russian Revolution and the loosening on controls over women, the elitist attitudes in France and England, the rising Nazism in German and militant fascism in Italy, the anti-Semitism and racism and anti-socialism in general—the stage was set for fascism’s fiery subjugation of Europe.

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An excerpt from the doctoral dissertation The Dark Fantastic of Guillermo del Toro: Myth, Fascism, and Theopolitical Imagination in Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth. Copyright 2017 by Morgaan Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.