Status Updates From A Fascist Century: Essays b...

the prevalent thrust of the ‘revolt against positivism’42 was a palingenetic one of regenerating society, which is why figures such as Vilfredo Pareto, Georges Sorel, and, above all, Nietzsche with their lurid depictions of Europe’s malaise and the ‘transvaluation of values’ necessary to move into a new era –exercised such a fascination.

The single most important ideological influence on Italian neo-fascism andfascist terrorism since the 1970s, Julius Evola, also saw Nazism, not Fascism, as comingclosest to realising his idiosyncratic vision of the rebirth of the ‘Tradition’ as the basis of a regenerated Europe.

The Third Reich as a palingenetic ‘political religion’

first, that fascism is to be seen as a revolutionary form of nationalism driven by the myth of the nation’s imminent1 rebirth from decadence; second, that analysing Nazism as a variant of fascism in this sense not only complements much scholarship applying other approaches, but also provides a new dimension to historical understanding

the NSDAP was not a ‘middle-class party’ (a Mittelstandspartei), or a party supported primarily by any one type of voter. Instead, Nazism was a ‘transclass party’ (a Volkspartei) with representation in all social groupings, age-groups, and regions of Germany

The structural affinities between fascist and Marxist revolution

Guy Debord

”Fascism was an extremist defence of the bourgeois economy threatened by crisis and by proletarian subversion. Fascism is a state of siege in capitalist society, by means of which this society saves itself and gives itself stop-gap rationalisation by making the State intervene massively in its management.”

With modernity violence becomes a technique, acted out through a division of labour turning personal responsibility into technocratic responsibility

Nazis fought a crusade against what they perceived as decadent aspects of industrial society (the cult of progress, the espousal of materialism, the pursuit of technocracy for its own sake), not modernity as such. In this sense, it was no counter-revolution, but a revolution in its own right.

Dupeux argues that the central preoccupation of the Conservative Revolutionaries is with decadence and degeneration, but the hallmark of their response to it is not cultural pessimism, but the belief in ‘Resurrection [Wiedergeburt, Auferstehung]’. ‘In contrast to ‘‘Cultural Pessimists’’, ‘‘Conservative Revolutionaries’’ do not feel prisoners of a hated century.

major pre-1945 German writers including Theodor Fritsch (prolific and rabid anti-Semite), Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt, Thomas Mann (often cited in these contexts by the right), Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Niekisch, and Ernst J¨unger.

Post-war fascism has spawned new varieties, notably the deeply anti-liberal European New Right, an international current of cultural criticism launched by Alain de Benoist’s sustained attacks on ‘ethno-pluralism’ and egalitarianism in the late 1970s.

Italian corporatism was not conceived as the return to medieval conceptions of the economy (which some Catholic theorists might have hankered after), but was seen in both its more proletarian-syndicalist and more statist-Nationalist versions as a Third Way between laissez-faire economics and the Bolshevik planned society.

fascists as providing a solution to several basic problems characteristic of liberalcapitalist; modern society, notably (i) the troubled relationship between the ‘masses’ and the state; (ii) the crisis of morality, identity, and authority posed by life exposed to modernisation; and (iii) the tensions between the individual’s private existence and ethnicity, culture, society, nationality, and history in the civicrealm

allfascistcelebrationsofthepastareinfactfuture-oriented, and an integral part of fascists’ quest to find a Third Way out of the cul-de-sac of Western history which they felt liberalism and Marxism represented.

Marx believed that socialism was not to ‘draw its poetry from the past’

By contrast, fascism celebrated precisely such forces as the waytorecreate asense ofreality, meaning, and subjective revolution.

The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the

To expand on this argument, fascism as an ideology and movement can be seen as proposing a radical alternative to liberal and socialist visions of modernity. It represents an uncompromising rejection both of thorough-going liberalism and of extreme ‘modernism’, whose logical culmination the latter sees as relativism, anomie, subjectivism, and the loss of definitive meaning and ‘eternal’ values.

fascism represents one response to modernisation within a protracted, complex, and unpredictable evolution of particular nation-states away from traditional society.

TheNature of Fascism presents fascism as an ideology whose core myth centres on the imminent rebirth (palingenesis) of an existing nation-state from decadence and dissolution prevailing within a post-liberal (and decidedly anti-Marxist) new order, a concept summed up in the (binomial) expression ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’

claiming that fascism (exemplified for him in Nazi Germany and more problematically Imperial Japan) emerged as a form of ‘conservative modernisation’ in an attempt to make an essentially reactionary political system populist.

One of fascism’s most influential ideologues in Italy, for example, has been Julius Evola. His impact is largely attributable to the way his occultist theory of reality and arcane philosophy of history satisfy the need experienced by post-war fascists for a comprehensive ‘vision of the world’ –one catering to the subjective sense of access to ‘sacred’ time.

ThecoreexperienceswhichtheNazimanipulationofsociety,inallitsaspects, sought to induce was that of being reborn from meaningless individual time into the epic communal time of the Volksgemeinschaft –a consideration fully borneoutbyscholarsworkingontheminutiaeofcultureundertheThirdReich.

What Vondung’s impressively scholarly investigation demonstrates is that Nazism cannot be fully understood if we ignore its efforts to bring about a sense of ‘metastasis’, or rebirth, subjectively experienced as moving from amere ‘existence’ of anomie and isolation into a qualitatively different time in which individual life and death itself is transcended by becoming merged with the eternity of the nation and race.

As in Fascism, the corollary of this project to recreate the ‘epic’ sense of time felt to be the hallmark of all ‘great civilisations’ was the creation of an all-pervasive political liturgy, its effects reinforced by the extensive use of propaganda, social control, and terror.

Fascism was the medium through which they would be reconciled and reunited with the living organism of the Italian state. The Risorgimento would be completed, the task of ‘making Italians’ finally fulfilled. Ordinary citizens would, for the first time since the Roman era, once more be able toparticipate mystically in Italy and hence, to become once again the focal point of world civilisation and progress