Gee’s Reviews > A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin > Status Update

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

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.