Fascism and Dhimmitude

What is Dhimmi Fascism? We'll see a great deazl of it in action in the coming few days when the dust over London settles.
***
The traditional distinction between Left and Right has been Rationalism and Irrationalism. The Left, and today it is still true, believe themselves to be, over-all, intellectuals; the right think in terms of irrationalities, of mysticism, intuition, feelings, and activities as opposed to critical analysis, nit-picking, doing nothing but reading. There are a dozen main precepts of fascism, those things that make one fascistic or not; and below we'll take a look at some of them, though not in any great depth yet, this being a short introduction to fascism. What we will see is the tips of the icebergs of fascism in the Left ideology visible in a cursory look at Leftism today. We will do what fascists generally, and Leftist in particular to day do not do: we'll analyse fascism.

Our first peek at fascism comes from a book review by one of the better authors on the nature and history of fascism. Even so, Mosse doesn't cover all the ground he could have. Fascism is far wider than he allows. For a start he'll do well enough. In further posts we'll look more closely at the specifics of fascism so that when we correctly identify Left dhimmi fascism as exactly fascist, no one will be able to weasel out of accepting our true statements.
***

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0005/reviews/anderson.html

Copyright (c) 2000 First Things 103 (May 2000): 59-62.
The Cultural Revolution of Fascism

The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism. By George L. Mosse. Howard Fertig. 230 pp. $35.

Reviewed by Brian C. Anderson

"Everything for the state, nothing outside the state, nothing above the state." So Benito Mussolini trumpeted the ideal of fascism, the wild–eyed political movement that he rode to power in Italy in 1922 and that died with Adolf Hitler's defeat in 1945.

Mussolini's infamous quote captures the remarkable hubris of fascism, its frightening impulse to rule over every dimension of life (the word is from the Latin fasces, the bundle of rods sporting an axe–head that symbolized the unchallenged state authority of Rome). In varying degrees, that hubris characterized fascism in all its historical forms: the Rexist movement in Belgium, the Spanish Falange, the Romanian Iron Guard, the French Fascists surrounding Jacques Doriot, and of course Mussolini's Italian thugs and Hitler's monstrous National Socialists.

But despite the bluntness of Mussolini's definition, fascism remains disturbingly enigmatic. What, exactly, were its central tenets? Unlike its equally murderous counterpart, Marxian socialism, fascism won power in the heart of Europe; it succeeded in gaining the uncoerced allegiance of ordinary men and women in a way Marxism never did. What was the source of its appeal? And is it historically obsolete?

Historian George L. Mosse, who died in January 1999, wrote extensively on fascism during his long and illustrious career; among his most important books on the subject were The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich and Toward the Final Solution. The present book collects ten of Mosse's essays on the subject, published over a period dating back to 1961. The essays, on everything from Fascist homoeroticism to Nazi political theater, are uneven, often turgidly written, and tend to leave promising suggestions frustratingly undeveloped, but at their best they help provide provisional answers to the three questions posed above. Most helpful of all is Mosse's method, which is to get inside the Fascist mind, to see fascism as it saw itself—a kind of phenomenology of politics that I believe is the most fruitful way to illumine the political world.

What were the main tenets of fascism? Though Mosse doesn't come close to a "general theory" of fascism, he correctly stresses the crucial role of nationalism—the "bedrock" upon which all Fascist movements built themselves. Fascism promised a "third way" between Marxism and capitalism that would celebrate the organic national community. To be German, Italian, or French, the Fascists asserted, meant something more than just inhabiting a piece of geography; it meant something outsiders could not really enter into, something beyond reasoned argument.

Mosse carefully distinguishes German National Socialism—in which a virulent racist ideology, drawing on social Darwinism, anti–Semitism, and various nineteenth–century racialist theories, wedded itself to nationalism—from other forms of fascism that downplayed or shunned racism. (In Italy, for example, fascism was nonracist for more than a decade until Mussolini cynically began to stoke anti–Semitism in 1938. The unholy alliance of racism and nationalism is one reason National Socialism proved so much more destructive than Italian fascism.)

But whatever the differences among the various Fascist movements, Mosse rightly underscores how the worthy evocation of national belonging can slide toward nationalism, and how nationalism, becoming aggressively xenophobic, can slide toward the abyss. Unfortunately, in these essays he gives little weight to the intellectual history of nationalism. (For that history one should turn to the recent, posthumously released book by Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, which describes the rise of fascism as growing out of the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment.)

A second major tenet or characteristic of all Fascist movements was the glorification of war and violence. Half–measures and compromises, Mosse notes, were anathema to all Fascists; these were typical of the craven bourgeoisie, Fascists held, not of the virile Fascist "new man." For Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, for example, a true National Socialist would willingly carry out a scorched–earth policy or ruthlessly gun down deserters. Mussolini at one desperate point even threatened to execute schoolchildren who skipped classes. Fascists stressed the greatness of dying for the cause in war, the dignity of a mad heroism, and a willingness to struggle against all odds.

Nationalism and the love of violence and war—these are familiar themes in the copious literature on fascism's attributes. Where Mosse is most interesting is on Fascist irrationalism and on fascism and revolution. In a fascinating chapter, originally published nearly four decades ago, Mosse explores the roots of National Socialism in nineteenth–century mysticism. Recreating the feverish world of such forgotten late–nineteenth century writers as Julias Langbehn, Alfred Schuler, and Paul de Lagarde, Mosse paints a disquieting portrait.

These irrationalists despised the cosmopolitan—and in their view largely Jewish—bourgeois universe of calculation, contract, and money. Instead, they surrendered themselves to "a belief in nature's cosmic life force, a dark force whose mysteries could be understood, not through science but through the occult." In some of the most vivid pages in The Fascist Revolution, Mosse describes Schuler trying to cure Friedrich Nietzsche of his madness with an ancient Roman spring rite, bizarre seances, theosophical preachments, and much other anti–Christian and anti–Enlightenment nonsense—seemingly harmless until one realizes the culture of irrational barbarism it did its part in conjuring. But the Nazis weren't alone in their irrationalism; Mussolini, too, drank from its well, in his case from the thought of Nietzsche and the theorist of violence George Sorel, though Mosse unfortunately neglects to discuss these intellectual sources of Italian fascism.

It is in Mosse's discussion of fascism and revolution that he makes his most important contribution. In contrast to those analysts, especially Marxists, who interpret fascism as reactionary—a kind of last gasp of bourgeois capitalism—Mosse accents its revolutionary thrust. Mussolini called for a "revolution of the spirit"; Hitler spoke of the "German Revolution." In Mosse's words, "Fascism encouraged activism, the fight against the existing order of things." Like all revolutionary movements, fascism in power had to restore order and prop up its own authority, diminishing revolutionary ardor; but fascism in its main thrust sought to remake the human world, to forge a new future—whether based on futurist ideas, as with Mussolini, or on an imagined pagan past, as with Hitler—that would break decisively with the corrupt and weak present. Though rightists and conservatives, sharing their rejection of the modern world, often supported Fascist movements, fascism was anything but conservative.

In a chapter dating from 1989, Mosse goes beyond the obvious political opposition between the spirit of the French Revolution and that of fascism to see deep commonalties and even subterranean influences that bind them across time. Mosse views both as products of the modern liberation of the will—rival manifestations of "the people worshiping themselves." Both the French Revolution and fascism sought to transcend the mundane complexities of politics and create perfect societies; both rejected the West's biblical heritage; both aestheticized politics in public festivals and songs. Writing of the French Revolution, Mosse observes: "This new politics attempted the politicization of the masses, which, for the first time in modern history, functioned as a pressure group and not just through episodic uprisings or short–lived riots." In fascism, says Mosse, "the age of modern mass politics had begun." The Jacobins' sacred spaces—the Champs–de–Mars or the Tuileries—would find their amplified echoes in Forum Mussolini in Rome and in Nuremberg.

Mosse, a historian and not a philosopher, remains on a somewhat superficial level in his account of fascism as a pathology of democratic modernity—as based, in essence, on a rejection of the West's Jewish and Christian heritage. Major scholars of fascismArendt and Ernst Nolte come immediately to mind—make no appearance in Mosse's book; a pity, since their more philosophically informed thinking would have added needed depth to Mosse's treatment. But his interpretation is essentially correct. National Socialism especially, as the Hungarian Catholic philosopher Aurel Kolnai wrote in 1950, sought to negate "Christian civilization as such," scripting a dark epiphany in which man "wrenched himself free from Christianity and construed the automatic workings of his fallen nature into a mirage of self–made heaven." As with all such self–made heavens, it opened the gates to a netherworld.

These four marks of the Fascist spirit—nationalism and racism, a love of violence and war, irrationalism, and revolutionary presumption—though not exhaustive, help us to understand its appeal during the first half of the twentieth century, particularly where democratic institutions were feckless and resentments bred by World War I festered.

Fascism brought with it a thick set of assumptions about the world's past, present, and future. It was, as Raymond Aron noted during the late 1930s, a "secular religion," a complete vision of life that brooked no pluralist opposition but that, unlike Marxism, crossed class divisions. In Mosse's similar language, fascism wrought a "sacralization of politics" that made it demonic but that also allowed it to sink its hooks deep into the soul.

What of our third question: does fascism have a future? It is fascism's modern genesis that gives one pause in declaring its historical senescence. Although Mosse does not stress this here, fascism shared with communism an antipathy toward the bourgeoisie, which helps explain its attraction for intellectuals like the philosopher Martin Heidegger and the French novelist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. Modern man's revolt against anything constraining the will is a problem that confronts the democratic world, too. For all the unprecedented freedoms and decencies of liberal democratic regimes, certain tendencies within those regimes—aborting unwanted children, euthanizing the old and burdensome, a rising irrationalism—are eerily reminiscent of the mental universe of fascism in their elevation of the untrammeled human will above any constraints of nature, grace, or even reason. Nationalist movements in Europe stand perilously close to fascism at times.

Perhaps fascism represents a permanent temptation of modern politics, the seduction to leave behind the ambiguities and trade–offs of prosaic liberal democracy for a true (and truly destructive) "politics of meaning." If so, we need to be perpetually on guard against it, and George Mosse's intelligent reflections are of much more than historical interest.
***

Fascism is a neologism for the state of Human life for the past 5,000 years to today across most of the world, excluding only the modern West, a creation begun a mere 500 years ago at best. Fascism is the way of the world. It is our modernity that is revolutionary and frightening to the primitives who will not or cannot move from the mire of evil barbarism that is the lot they were born to.

In a sense one might be right to sympathize with the barbarians of the greater world for the accidents of birth that "threw" them into such caves of being as they find themselves in. On the other hand, this world requires that people take responsibility for their own lives even if they refuse to do so right up to the time at which they are annihilated by superior forces. If people are born into states of primitive fascism, then they have to deal with it as either as individuals or as individuals who cling to identies as group members. Regardless, they have to pay the price in the world of the living. Sentimentality won't get anyone further than six feet under a small patch of ground.

The primitives, for the most part, are the least of our concerns. Yes, there are many of them, more all the time as they breed out of control, expanding over the face of the Earth unchecked by anything more than diseases mostly controlled by modern medicine. They are primitive, useless beings who cling to the ages of primitive fascism. We can ignore them for the most part to die out ss a redundant part of the Human population if they cannot or will not adapt. In a sense, then, we argue for social Darwinism, But not our: theirs. The primitives who cannot cope with adaptation will surely die out. We can do what we can to preserve them from becoming toy people in a sand diorama if we choose to, which isn't likely if they continue to turn to rabid violence motivated by hatred, fueled by Islamic poligion. The times come and go when we rightly shrug and think ourselves well rid of the primitives. In momnents of calm we can see them as victims of their own poison. We argue here for Western Modernist colonialism before it's too late to save them at all.

The dhimmi fascists of the West, though, they are a different story. We'll see more of them in the review below:

"The Surprising Roots of Facism" Arnold Beichman,
A. James Gregor, The Two Faces of Janus: Marxism and Facism in the Twentieth Century.

Janus was the Roman god after whom January is named. He was considered the guardian deity of gates and doors and is usually shown as two-faced, since doors face both ways. But there is only a single body to this deity. Berkeley Professor A. James Gregor, in his superbly researched book, has presumably selected Janus to symbolize the twinning of the two ideologies that have so scarred the twentieth century.

Gregor has undertaken a difficult task in his attempt to deal with these two ideologies. I say difficult because while the ultimate consequences of Marxism were dreadful, there was at least a large collection of patristic writings, accessible and debatable, even intellectually respectable. Because Marxism provides a self-styled scientific socio-political analysis as well as a gallimaufry of beliefs and insights, it appealed to intellectuals and, alas, still does.

Not so with fascism, a name derived from the Latin, "fasces," a bundle of sticks, carried by judicial officers in Roman processions as an emblem of authority. (Hitler, of course, had his own emblem — the swastika — and his followers referred to themselves as Nazis, short for National Socialism.) Fascism had its theoreticians, and a distressing number of serious thinkers, the philosopher Martin Heidegger first among them, lent their support. But fascism in actual fact it had no intellectual basis at all, nor did its founders even pretend to have any.

Hitler's ravings in Mein Kampf, Giovanni Gentile's hortatory article in the Italian Encyclopedia, Mussolini's boastful balcony speeches, all of these can be described, in the words of Roger Scruton, as "an amalgam of disparate conceptions." It is about this "amalgam" that Professor Henry Ashby Turner Jr. has written:

Anyone who reads many studies of fascism as a multinational problem cannot but be struck by the frequency with which writers who begin by assuming they are dealing with a unitary phenomenon end up with several more-or-less discrete sub-categories. Regardless of what criteria are applied, it seems very difficult to keep fascism from fragmenting.

In spite of this, there has been a general reluctance to consider what must be regarded as a definite possibility: namely, that fascism as a generic concept has no validity and is without value for serious analytical purposes. . . . The generic term fascism is in origin neither analytical nor descriptive.

That such strictures have significance can be seen in Professor Gregor's confirming remark about the Russian extremist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky: "In what sense Zhirinovsky is a fascist is difficult to say with any intellectual conviction."

Yet Gregor is right to ignore the Turner finding, for one important reason: "Fascism" still has meaning in democratic societies. For a recent illustration of this, consider the fracas over Austria's Jörg Haidar. Labeling somebody you don't like a "fascist" is still a popular polemical sport: Call someone a communist and proof is demanded and even when proof is supplied there is the risk that you will be called a red-baiter; call someone a fascist, that's enough to convict. In the lexicon of the left, there is nothing lower than a "red-baiter" but there is no such thing as a "fascist-baiter." We've all heard about "communist hysteria," especially during the Joe McCarthy years, but there is no such phenomenon as "fascist hysteria." The name-calling got a little ridiculous when during the Sino-Soviet split, the Kremlin and Beijing called each other fascist.

Having combed their literature, Professor Gregor has shown beyond a shadow of doubt the affinities, too long ignored, between fascism and Marxism-Leninism. (It was Don Luigi Sturzo who provided the reductio ad absurdum: Fascism was black communism and communism was red fascism.) Richard Pipes has written that "Bolshevism and fascism were heresies of socialism."

Recalling that Mussolini began his political career as a distinguished Italian socialist, Gregor writes: "Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives' — the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism."

Even Nikolai Bukharin, the leading Soviet ideologist whom Stalin purged, began to have misgivings about the Revolution and began to allude to the fascist features of the emerging system. Gregor writes:

By the early 1930s, the 'convergence' of fascism and Stalinism struck Marxists and non-Marxists alike. . . . By the mid-1930s, even Trotsky could insist that 'Stalinism and fascism, in spite of deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena' . . . .

Fascist theoreticians pointed out that the organization of Soviet society, with its inculcation of an ethic of military obedience, self-sacrifice and heroism, totalitarian regulation of public life, party-dominant hierarchical stratification all under the dominance of the inerrant state, corresponded in form to the requirements of Fascist doctrine.

Left liberals have frantically denied the "Janus" notion that Marxism-Leninism and fascism have a common origin. With scholarly skill and an enormous amount of reading has Professor Gregor made such denials as dated as the Communist Manifesto.

http://www.policyreview.org/aug00/beichman_print.html
***
It's been a rule of thumb for some many long years that the difference between Left and Right violence is the determination of targets: The Left murdered individuals; the Right killed indiscriminately. The Left writes justifications; the Right makes phone calls and speeches. The left is articulate; the Right is oral and emotive. Well, look at what we have today: no Left critique since Adorno and Horkheimer, but much mass murder of civilians applauded by the Left agianst Isreali civilians, much apology for fascist Moslems, and so on, as one example of the degeneracy of the Left into full-blown fascism.

None of this is sufficient. We'll look at a two brief pieces on the history of modern fascism before we turn soon to further enquiry into the nature of fascism and how the dhimmi Left has adapted itself to failure by grasping the very enemies it supposedly fought against since 1776-1789 and onward till it quit the struggle and adopted fascist Islam as its bed-mate:
***
From a book review of Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism.

http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040301fabook83239/robert-o-paxton/the-anatomy-of-fascism.html

The term "fascism" originated with Mussolini in 1919 and has since often been stretched to apply to almost any political group to the right of the person using it. Paxton, a historian, sets out to rescue the term from such sloppy usage, even as he acknowledges that a narrow definition is impossible. In his quest for understanding, Paxton surveys how a broad array of fascist movements has sought out followers, formed alliances, and seized and exercised power. The comparisons show great variety over time and place but also reveal characteristics that distinguish fascism from other kinds of authoritarian rule. Fascists, he concludes, were identifiable most of all by a:
* style of political behavior that emphasized historical grievances;
* worshiped the cult of leadership;
* relied on a mass-based movement of national militants;
* repressed democratic liberties;
* and used violence as a political tool.
***
That is insufficient. Below are more reviews culled from Amazon.com readers:

Whose Reich Is It Anyway?, May 1, 2004
Reviewer: Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) -

The Marquis de Morés, returning to 1890s Paris after his cattle ranching venture in North Dakota failed, recruited a gang of men from the Parisian cattle yards as muscle for his "national socialism" project -- a term Paxton credits Morés' contemporary Maurice Barres, a French nationalist author, with coining. Morés' project was potent and prophetic: his national socialism was a mixture of anti-capitalism and anti-Semitism. He clothed his men in what must have been the first fascist uniform in Europe -- ten-gallon hats and cowboy garb, frontier clothes he'd taken a shine to in the American West. (Author Paxton suggests the first ever fascist get-up was the KKKs white sheet and pointy hat). Morés killed a French Jewish officer in a duel during the Dreyfus affair and later was killed in the Sahara by his guides during his quest to unite France to Islam to Spain. Morés had earlier proclaimed: "Life is valuable only through action. So much the worse if the action is mortal."

"Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Fascism is both [a] charged and blurry word these days, used by both the left and the right to assail their critics and enemies. The Nazi remains the evildoer par excellence in popular and political culture, invoked for a thrill of fear or the disciplinary scare or emotional incitement.
***
Paxton is concerned with rescuing the term from its present status as a convenient insult. As Paxton points out, all modern democracies contain nascent fascist elements. Given the destructive consequences of successful or even partially successful fascist movements, we should have a good understanding of fascism to be able to recognize fascist threats.

Fascist movements had important differences in ideology, and fascism in general, with its appeal to intense nationalism and exclusionary sense of identity, shouldn't be expected to have a uniform ideology.

Italian fascism, at least in its original form, lacked the virulent anti-semitism and social darwinist preoccupations of Nazism, while the fascist movement in Romania was aggessively Christian in ideological content.

Fascism appears in failed or highly stressed democracies, that fascism involves mass politics, that fascism emerges as a reaction to perceived threats from the socialist threat, that fascism depends on charismatic leadership, and that fascism always contains a cult of violent action. [T]he successful fascist movements, Italian Fascism and Nazism, were invited into power by traditional conservative elites seeking to coopt fascist mass mobilization in support of their own ends. In authoritarian societies where the conservative elites were more powerful or confident, such as Spain, Romania, or Hungary, fascist movements were consigned to the sidelines or actually suppressed.
***
Rather than test the patience of our readers we'll leave off here until next time to return to this look at fascism. We will see that the Left is fascist and in collusion with fascist Islam. As always, we welcome your comments.