By Wayne Allensworth
The left has a bad habit of labelling anything or anyone it does not approve of as “fascist.” As I’ve written before, undoubtedly, the rage of the left — and the approval of its globalist elite allies of that rage — is sincere. They really believe that instinctive patriotism, religiosity, and adherence or at least giving lip service to traditional morality are sure signs of malignant “fascism.” That view is linked to the left’s fanatical faith in its victimology world view, which divides the world between oppressed and oppressors. “Fascists” are, by definition, oppressors. Ultimately, the Chief Oppressor is God Himself. I, for one, have never believed that militant atheists, whether Communist commissars or “new atheist” idealogues, really doubted the existence of God. Their rage betrays something else, either a sense of hubris and Luciferian refusal to acknowledge a deity, most notably among the globalist managerial class, or a wounded soul’s blaming the injustices of the world on the God who created it. Think of the romantic revolutionaries of the past, or the Antifa types who are playing that role today, the foot soldiers of the technocrats and bureaucrats. They dream of remaking the world by dethroning God and creating their own political morality.
But I digress. The subject is “fascism” and what lies at its core. Its many constitutive attributes might be necessary — militarism, regimentation, extreme nationalism, and a police state among them. But a military junta isn’t necessarily fascist. Authoritarianism can take many forms, and itself does not carry the essence of fascism within it. Normal patriotism, or even chauvinism, aren’t necessarily fascist, either. Most of us prefer our own country, our own compatriots to others, but we need not hate others or wish to subjugate them. And one can acknowledge traditional norms without being a puritan or a killjoy. Fascism isn’t merely a political-economic corporate arrangement in which big enterprises are managed in a partnership with the state. “Left” and “right” may be seen as shades on a political-economic color continuum, and we all know how much the state regulates market economies and probably should to some degree. James Burnham correctly identified fascism, communism, and modern capitalism all as manifestations of bureaucratic managerial systems.
Fascism is not a reactionary, much less a conservative, ideology. The fascists of the 1920s and 30s saw themselves as revolutionaries displacing a stagnant bourgeois order. The old order had failed a European civilization that was severely damaged — even disabled — by the Great War. The fascists saw themselves as reconciling modernism in its industrial and technological guises, as well as its bureaucratic integrated state structures, with nationalism, itself a modern invention. Fascism, especially its Nazi form, rejected Christian morality as weakening the folk, preventing the fascists from purifying the nation. The Golden Rule was a subversive element of “Jewish Christianity” in the Nazi ideology. And I would argue that the Nazis were not exactly nationalists, either, but eugenicists who did not see the German people in a narrow sense as the “Master Race,” but as the core of a broader Aryan race that would be purified and rejuvenated, or created, on the German base. Nazi fanatics hated Christianity as much as the Communists. Some tried to create a revived Nazified pagan religion, or a distorted and subverted German Church (as Communists had experimented with a state approved “church” in some cases), in which Jesus wasn’t a Jew, but an “Aryan” Galilean. Facism is a philosophy, while Nazism is an ideology that contains fascism within itself.
Both fascism and communism were reactions to the fragmentation of traditional societies and social and spiritual disruptions by the industrial and scientific revolutions. As noted in this space previously, the mass societies created by modernism and industrialism lost a sense of belonging, of identity and purpose that more rooted face-to-face societies had nurtured. It was partly a matter of scale, as the nation state expanded and homogenized varying sub-groups, as well as the standardization of economic relations for the benefit of efficiency, just as managerial bureaucracy had expanded and attempted to manage social relations. At the same time, fascists and communists, as modernists themselves, hoped to harness the industrial and bureaucratic apparatus to achieve their own utopian aims. Their mass movements provided a direction and purpose, a sense of belonging that community and religion had once nurtured.
Fascism and communism gained traction in the catastrophe of the Great War, arguably the final blow to the old world. I can’t recall exactly when it dawned on me that fascism was all about war, war as the eternal struggle, war as the mass scale manifestation of the Darwinian battle for survival. War as a remedy for the complacency, alienation, and fragmentation of urban, industrialized society. War as the assertion of man’s Will to Power in an otherwise meaningless universe. War as Lucifer ascending the throne following the “Death of God.” War as a game, an end in itself.
In his existential Western masterpiece, Blood Meridian, the late Cormac McCarthy used the character of the Judge, a demiurge of darkness, to pontificate on war as the Greatest Game of all. The Judge explained his philosophy of war to his fellow killers, a group of scalp hunters:
Men are born for games. Nothing else. Every child knows that play is nobler than work. He knows too that the worth or merit of a game is not inherent in the game itself but rather in the value of that which is put at hazard. Games of chance require a wager to have meaning at all. Games of sport involve the skill and strength of the opponents and the humiliation of defeat and the pride of victory are in themselves sufficient stake because they inhere in the worth of the principals and define them. But trial of chance or trial of worth all games aspire to the condition of war for here that which is wagered swallows up game, player, all…
This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and the authority and the justification. Seen so, war is the truest form of divination. It is the testing of one’s will and the will of another within that larger will which because it binds them is therefore forced to select. War is the ultimate game because war is at last a forcing of the unity of existence.
For a killer like the Judge, as he puts it, “war is god.”
Thus, in post-WWI Europe, the ground was ready for fascism to take root. The key to understanding the initial mobilizational power of fascism is the psychology of the so-called “front generation.” The phenomenon of the alienated veteran, the warrior who has experienced the heightened sensory awareness of the battlefield and is faced with the prospect of aimlessness and crushing boredom in civilian life is common enough in the annals of warfare. For the more philosophically inclined veterans, the Great War had been a welcome respite from what they saw as the inauthentic and life-negating ennui of modern bourgeois existence. Following Nietzsche, they thought of life as a fundamentally aesthetic experience, the war itself a huge canvas on which the technology of modern warfare had splashed the blazing colors of exploding artillery shells, the dark hues of clouds of gray and black pillars of smoke rising from the ruins of smashed buildings and the craters of a transformed landscape, one made strangely vital by the cacophony of the machinery of death.
The embrace of violence and death was the hallmark of a warlike philosophy, which found its expression in Nazism, and in Italian fascism and fascist-derived movements across Europe. War was a natural phenomenon, as natural as the Darwinian struggle itself. The eternal battle for dominance would play out on a giant scale, epic warfare with the industrial worker mobilized as a soldier playing the key role. Warfare was a natural event like hurricanes or earthquakes. The machinery of war was an extension of the human will, embodied in the collective might of the folk and the ecstasy and heroic vitalism of combat. Indeed, world war veteran and philosopher Ernst Junger, whose works had a great deal of influence in interwar Germany, entitled his wartime memoir Storm of Steel. The way back to a lost authenticity was in a fusion of romanticism and technology, the community of the trenches and the exaltation of war.
The widespread fear of communism following the Bolshevik revolution, German rage about the punitive Versailles Treaty, and the betrayal many of the front generation saw as the cause of defeat, as well as the decadence of interwar Europe as expressed so vividly in Weimar Germany, boosted fascist philosophy. Fascists recruited foot soldiers who found a place and a purpose in mass movements. They would combat the Reds on the streets, and in Germany found a promise of a heroic future under a man who was one of them.
In our popular culture, I can think of no better portrayal of the essence of fascism than Robert Shaw’s Nazi panzer commander Colonel Martin Hessler in the 1965 movie Battle of the Bulge. In a pivotal scene, Hessler tells his orderly, Conrad, who is concerned for the fate of his sons, that if necessary, his sons must be sacrificed. Yet Hessler admits that the war cannot be won. Conrad is taken aback. If Germany can’t win, then why were they still fighting? Hessler’s shouts that “The war must go on!” The war is the point. War is its own justification. War as a vital narcotic is the aim. Hessler proclaims that “victory” is the war’s indefinite continuance.
Conrad asks his commander to be transferred, calling Hessler a murderer — a man who would murder his sons, his country, the whole world to stay in uniform. Hans Christian Blech, who played Conrad, was a veteran of the Eastern Front. I think he knew a thing or two about the savage futility of war and fascism.
Of all the discussions I’ve seen about fascism, its motivations, and its narcotic appeal, I can think of no better portrayal of it than Robert Shaw’s brilliant performance in an otherwise mediocre war movie.
Fascism is hardly finding a home in the MAGA movement. Those who call Donald Trump “Hitler” and those of us who voted for him “fascists” don’t know a damn thing about either. The idea that the Charlie Kirk memorial was a modern Nuremberg rally is so preposterous that I’d find it amusing if the leftists weren’t serious. A memorial at which Kirk’s widow voiced her forgiveness for her husband’s murderer. A memorial during which a number of participants expressed their Christian beliefs. Fascism’s pagan war cult was about as far removed from those sentiments as could be. MAGA is far from perfect, and readers are aware of how critical I’ve been about some aspects of it as a movement, but calling the people I know, my neighbors, my relatives and friends “fascists” is simply a sign of a delusional mind. Real — not imagined — fascism was as repulsive and demonic as the revolutionary left and its globalist sponsors.
NB: I wrote about the fascist movement, its clash, as well as its flirtations, with the communists, and the complex history of relations between Russia and Germany in my book The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and post-Communist Russia.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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