Fascism, the barbarous undercurrent of our time, finds the ground ripe for a re-emergence
Global politics has shifted to the right. Nationalists, conservatives and religious reactionaries have gained power across the world. Right-wing governments are spreading the politics of hate, division and intolerance. Xenophobia has been normalised. The times have gone bitterly sour.
Part of the reaction to the rise of dark forces within the hearts of individuals and societies has been to call all sorts of racists, thugs and authoritarians fascist. Donald Trump is the new Benito Mussolini. Back when he was the secretary-general of the ANC, Gwede Mantashe called Julius Malema a “Hitler in the making”.
For all its faults, the US democratic system has been strong enough to prevent Trump the dictator. If Malema was ever elected, an idea that 90% of the voting public rejects, SA’s constitution, chapter nine institutions and parliamentary system would be put to the most severe test. Malema is not a democrat.
Liberals and the left are making a terrible mistake when they use fascist as a political insult in this way. They are blinding themselves to the true nature of fascism, which is something far worse than authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism.
Dictatorships repress liberty. Conservatives impose their version of personal morality on all of society. As the 20th-century British philosopher Isaiah Berlin pointed out, fascism does something different: it provides an alternative and bizarre concept of freedom that inevitably leads to horrific results.
Italian philosophers during World War 1 gave birth to the political philosophy of fascism. By the 1920s, it was fleshed out and Nazism took it to its fullest form. Along with a fair dose of irrationalism and mysticism, fascism revolves around two key concepts: the body national and the leadership principle.
In 1933, German philosopher Martin Heidegger joined the Nazi party and gave a speech endorsing the leadership principle. He said, “The Führer alone is the present and future German reality and its law … Heil Hitler!”
In other words, the fascist leader is the embodiment of the nation. The fascist leader’s will is above written law, is always correct and demands total obedience. The Ten Commandments of the Italian Soldier put it quite simply: “Mussolini is always right” and “There do not exist things important and things unimportant. There is only duty.”
Within this political framework is the idea that the fascist state comes into existence through the collective will of a people. The fascist state rises up from the ashes of the bankrupt philosophies of individualism and communism to become a kind of single unit where individual identity is subsumed into a higher being, the body national. For fascists, this is freedom. Only in the submergence of the self into the body national can true freedom be found.
The leader’s will is thus the will to power of the entire body national: the two are synonymous. In Nazi propaganda, architecture and films, especially in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, the German body national dwarfs the individual. A fallen German soldier lives on in the greater German nation.
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler stated: “The individual should finally come to realise that his own pride is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation … above all the unity of a nation's spirit and will are worth far more than the spirit and will of an individual.”
Once a person or nation believes in these two concepts and political power is grasped, killing inevitably follows and duty will be paid in blood. Not only because there will always be people who disagree with the idea of complete obedience but also because the body national has to be “pure”.
Afrikaner nationalism was imbued with its own notion of the body national: die Volk. In 1939, the Ossewabrandwag was formed as a pro-Nazi, anti-British, Afrikaner nationalist and anti-Semitic organisation. In 1944, the German foreign office declared that the Ossewabrandwag was committed to, among other things, the leadership principle.
After World War 2, the Ossewabrandwag was absorbed into the National Party. BJ Vorster was a general in the Ossewabrandwag’s paramilitary wing and became the prime minister of SA in 1966, staying at the helm until 1978. The philosophy of fascism didn’t die in 1945 — witness Nazi posters at Stellenbosch University in 2017 and matrics at Somerset West Private School giving the Nazi salute in 2018. No, the barbarous philosophical ideas of fascism remain an undercurrent to our time.
This century will see, unfortunately, more war and economic turbulence, if for no other reason than the social consequences of catastrophic global warming. Conditions will ripen for some new version of fascism to return. Moreover, current authoritarian and nationalist politics are creating an intellectual milieu conducive to the re-emergence of fascism.
Because there is no life in fascism, only hatred and death, we cannot tolerate it. And in order to prevent its return as a political and economic system, we must not forget the ideas that form it. Taylor is a South African political philosopher.