12thharmonic Blog

Eternal Fascism:
Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

By Umberto Eco

In spite of some fuzziness regarding the difference between various historical
forms of fascism, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that
are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These
features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other,
and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough
that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

* * *

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it typical
of counterrevolutionary Catholic thought after the French revolution, but is
was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction to classical Greek rationalism.
In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths
indulgently accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation
received at the dawn of human history. This revelation, according to the traditionalist
mystique, had remained for a long time concealed under the veil of forgotten
languages — in Egyptian hieroglyphs, in the Celtic runes, in the scrolls of
the little-known religions of Asia.

This new culture had to be syncretistic. Syncretism is not only, as the dictionary
says, "the combination of different forms of belief or practice;"
such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages
contains a sliver of wisdom, and although they seem to say different or incompatible
things, they all are nevertheless alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval
truth.

As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth already has
been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure
message.

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled New
Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine, who, as far as I know, was not
a fascist. But combining Saint Augustine and Stonehenge — that is a symptom
of Ur-Fascism.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers
usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even
though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism
was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden).
The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic
way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning
of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake.

Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection.
Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as
it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world
has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering’s fondness for
a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach
for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate
intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities
are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged
in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed
traditional values.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of
modernism.

In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to
improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.

Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the
natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist
movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.

That is why one of the most typical features of the historical fascism was
the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic
crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure
of lower social groups. In our time, when the old "proletarians" are
becoming petty bourgeois (and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political
scene), the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says
that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.

This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an
identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology
there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers
must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.
But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target
because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.
In the United States, a prominent instance of the plot obsession is to be found
in Pat Robertson’s The New World Order, but, as we have recently seen, there
are many others.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force
of their enemies.

When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people.
They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and
help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers
of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus,
by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time
too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because
they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the
enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived
for struggle.

Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent
warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have
to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will
have control of the world. But such "final solutions" implies a further
era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war.
No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it
is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly
implies contempt for the weak.

Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the
best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens,
every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot
be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power
was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows
that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as
to need and deserve a ruler.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.

In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology
heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of
death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la
Muerte ("Long Live Death!"). In nonfascist societies, the lay public
is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are
told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast,
the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a
heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he
more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the
Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance
and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality).
Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play
with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism,
one might say.

In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their
entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view — one
follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals
as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic
entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can
have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost
their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play
the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. There
is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response
of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of
the People.

Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten"
parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy
of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we
can smell Ur-Fascism.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.

Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as the official language
of what he called Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are
common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks
made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to
limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready
to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent
form of a popular talk show.

* * *

Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much
easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, "I
want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian
squares." Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most
innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at
any of its new instances — every day, in every part of the world. Franklin
Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: "If American
democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by
peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength
in our land." Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

Umberto Eco (c) 1995

Taken from The
Modern Word who excerpted it from the Utne Reader ( November-December 1995,
pp. 57-59.)

Full article in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15.