The return of fascism: Youth, violence and nationalism

Fascism is hostile to egalitarianism and loathes liberalism. It champions ‘might is right’, a Darwinian survival of the nastiest, and detests vulnerability: the sight of weakness brings out the jackboot in the fascist mind, which then blames the victim for encouraging the kick. Fascism not only promotes violence but relishes it, viscerally so. It cherishes audacity, bravado and superbia, promotes charismatic leaders, demagogues and ‘strong men’, and seeks to flood or control the media. Even as it pretends to speak for the people, it creates the rule of the elite, a cult of violent chauvinism and a nationalism that serves racism.

—Griffiths (2017)

Fascism has been defined as a radical form of authoritarian nationism (Turner, 1975, p. 162). As Griffin and Feldman (2004) argue all forms of fascism have three common features: anticonservatism, a myth of ethnic or national renewal and a conception of a nation in crisis. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides some missing pieces, especially the conceptual and historical connection between ‘nation’ and ‘race’. Fascism is

a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition

‘Fascism’, the English word is derived from the Italian fascism first used in 1919 to refer to Benito Mussolini’s combat forces which seized power in 1922. Its opposition to parliamentary liberalism, Communism (and Marxism) and Conservativism place it on the far-right of the political spectrum. It is opposed to all forms of egalitarianism and motivated by a myth of rebirth (‘palingenetic’ a word that Griffin (1991) uses to distinguish it as a modernist political ideology). There are those among the current generation in the West who are still able to remember the rise of Fascism in Europe. It is rising again, all over Europe and in other parts of the world. It never died, like an ancient virus in the bloodstream of the body politic, it grows, multiplies and mutates. In order to understand its contemporary forms and the conditions that gave rise to it we need to re-evaluate its history, understand its background and to recognize its links with forms of government and institutions it wants to negate. We need to know it again within the propaganda era of digital media and to analyze and understand its power of attraction to young white men.

Rooted in a form of revolutionary nationalism, the Italian fascist party (under different names) led by Mussolini governed from 1922 to 1943. It stood for the value of national superiority based on Roman-ness (Romanitas) defined in the Doctrine of Fascism (1932). The Doctrine ostensibly written by Mussolini but substantially ghost-written by Giovanni Gentile the Italian Hegelian idealist philosopher and educator, aimed at combatting moral degeneracy and all forms of individualism by promoting ‘the will to power and empire’ as the ‘Third [Roman] Empire.’ As the Doctrine makes clear the State is all-embracing. There is nothing outside the State and it is the source of all spiritual and moral value. The practical dimension of Fascism such as the system of education is supposedly derived from its spiritual view of life.

Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists. http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm

As an ideology, it demands the form of a totalitarian State where political power is exercised by one leader buttressed by State-controlled media and political repression, including the use of terror. Totalitarianism is different from authoritarianism in that it attempts to change human nature and the world. The concept and its legal basis was developed by Schmitt (1932) in his The Concept of the Political that argues conflict is an anthropological trait of human nature. Fascism sees itself as a spiritual State evolved from Socialism that rejects individualism, pacifism, Marxism, parliamentary democracy, egalitarianism and economic liberalism, based on ‘the absolute primacy of the State’ and ‘a totalitarian vision of the future’. Its revolutionary fervor is given in the Doctrine in these words:

Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the “ right”, a Fascist century. If the XIXth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the “collective” century, and therefore the century of the State. It is quite logical for a new doctrine to make use of the still vital elements of other doctrines…. All doctrines aim at directing the activities of men towards a given objective; but these activities in their turn react on the doctrine, modifying and adjusting it to new needs, or outstripping it. A doctrine must therefore be a vital act and not a verbal display. Hence the pragmatic strain in Fascism, it’s will to power, its will to live, its attitude toward violence, and its value.

Italian Fascism appealed to the Aryan myth and employed a racial hierarchy that explicitly employed a white-black conception of rule based on an ideal of superior consciousness. It was also targeted at youth and the ‘moral hygiene’ of youth but reduced women to child bearers and prohibited all forms of contraception. Mussolini reputedly had relations with more than 400 women and propagated the ‘virile’ cult of fascism.

The link between Italian Futurism and Fascism is well documented. Fascist ideology was prepared and well supported by Italian Futurism, emphasizing values of speed, technology, youth and violence. It also celebrated modernity aiming to lift Italian out of its past to create a new culture. Marinetti’s (1909) Manifesto of Futurism exalted violence:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2. Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4. We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!… Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/

Futurism underlined the principles of aesthetic modernism in a negation of traditional aesthetic forms, trying to turn art practice into a revolutionary praxis and celebrating youth, virility of young man, and violence based on war as a kind of social hygiene based on Marinetti’s aestheticization of power and violence personified in Mussolini (Bowler, 1991, p. 776).

The connection between the two movements is now well known and while there was some short-lived direct contact around 1919, it could be argued that Fascism was informed by the aesthetics of Futurism before it became a mature political movement. The key figures of Marinetti, Boccioni, Severini, Balla, Carra and Russolo, influenced by Cubism, went on to celebrate modernism and modernization and to influence other art movements of the twentieth century including Surrealism and Dada.¹ Bowler (1991, p. 763) puts it:

Futurism inaugurated the avantgardist attack on the autonomous status of art in modern bourgeois society, the repudiation of tradition, and the emphasis on formal innovation that would characterize modernist movements for decades to follow.

Boler also points out how ‘Futurist aesthetic principles articulated a language of nationalist violence and destruction explicitly congruent with the basis of Italian Fascism’s ascendence to power’ but ‘Futurism’s aesthetic vision of politics’ became disenchanted with Fascism turn to the routine of bureaucracy. Today the aesthetic shaping of the political community is achieved through social media. Twitter is a media form that maintains a broadcast function allowing Trump to directly communicate with his nearly 20 million supporters by-passing the liberal ‘fake’ media that he has been warring with since before his election.

In the last couple of years, journalists and political commentators have talked of the ‘return of fascism’ across Europe and in America. Schwarz (2018) is unhappy that the younger generations are becoming indifferent to the history of fascism. Benhabib and Rassmussen (2017) begin a photo essay by recalling the appalling carnage wreaked by Breivik in 2011 against a group of Norwegian youth and Breivik's attack on cultural Marxism that he regarded as the principal source of all problems. Amin (2014) writes of ‘The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism’ arguing that ‘Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.’ Snyder (2018) blames the Internet. Arvas (2018) talks of the return of Italian Fascism led by Luigi Di Maio’s Five Star Movement. Others like El-Gingihy (2017) talks of the return of fascism in the ‘age of Trump,’ recounting far-right election victories in Europe and warning that Trumps’ authoritarianism tendencies ‘could evolve into ever more sinister permutations.’ Papageorgiou (2013) examined the return of fascism in the Greek case that descended into a social crisis as a result of the debt crisis. And Blair (2018) warned that the rise of populism could mean return to fascist politics of the 1930s in anti-Brexit speech. Karlin (2017) in an interview with David Neiwert, author of Alt-America (2017), begins ‘Americans may not realize that democracy is over and the country has descended into fascism until it is too late’.

Riemen, the Dutch author, incensed by the rise of Geert Wilders far-right party, wrote a pamphlet The Eternal Return of Fascism in 2010. His new book To Fight Against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism (2018) argues that the West is not facing the threat of populism but rather the threat of fascism. He argues that the right response to this ‘sickness’ is education, teaching ‘care for the soul’ through European culture, philosophy and art. Only humanism can immunize Europe against ‘the deadly bacillus called fascism.’ One might also add the absolute necessity of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, public debate and public education built on these principles.

Albright, US secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, also reminds us in her new book, Fascism: A Warning (2018) that its contemporary resurgence releases global repressive and destructive forces that threatens democracy and ultimately economic collapse, humanitarian crises and sectarian violence. Giroux (2015), that restless champion of public pedagogy, talks of ‘Facing the Challenge of Fascism’ in what has quickly become an American Nightmare. He sees a uniquely American form of fascism emerging from white supremacism and ultranationalism promoted by Donald Trump who propagates and defends fascist policies while trying to shut-down public debate.²

In dealing we fascism we must understand that it is a political doctrine that subordinates the individual and the rights of individuals to the all-powerful state and national advancement. It discourages freedom of speech and does not believe in peace. In subordinating everything to the State it champions a concept of duty, spirituality, youthfulness and obedient submission. Its xenophobia, ultranationalism, racism, masculism and militarism not only sets itself against liberalism and Marxism, but also helps explain why contemporary identity politics that is based on the extension of rights and equality for all is so antagonistic to fascists. The characteristics of fascism as defined and spelled out by political theorists provides a clear checklist of criteria for judging Trump. In 2016, Donald Trump retweeted a quote from Benito Mussolini through an account called @ilduce2016 that had posted ‘It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.’ When asked why he had done so Trump said he knew it was Mussolini but what did that matter – he simply wanted to be associated with interesting quotes (Wright, 2018). Is Trump a fascist? Giroux and many on the Left certainly think so. Albright (2018) hangs back from the direct equivalence to say he is the ‘first antidemocratic president in US history’ (Cited in Wright, 2018). He is an odd and eclectic mix of doctrine and views. Narcissistic and self-interested, if he finds that something does not feed his ego or his capital, he will jettison it, whether it be an element of fascist ideology or Christian thought. That same old ancient unprincipled self-interested pragmatism makes him dangerous for the world, to himself and members of his administration, and to the new generation of hero-worshipping youth who grew up on social media and whose own roots of identity do not include a critical awareness of recent world history.

Michael A. PetersFaculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China[email protected]

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Michael A. Peters

Michael A. Peters, Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.

Notes

1 In this context it is worth noting Ezra Pound, influenced by Marinetti, praised Mussolini and wrote ‘The Pisan Cantos’ and other poerty in his honour. Morrison (1993, p. 4) writes: ‘Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism have their origins in a profound and potentially revolutionary dissatisfaction with the liberal settlement; the anticapitalist, antibourgeois fervor that motivates both need not have assumed the reactionary form it did.’

2 Johnny Noiπ, American Losers: Norman Mailer once remarked,/ that when one side wins a war,/ they take the other side’s prized/possession; so, winning WWII,/ what did America take? Fascism.