“Fascism has to be a contender for one of the most loosely understood terms in the political lexicon.”
-Ryan Chapman
In fascism the authorities view the nation to be the highest spiritual value, if a religion is part of this the religion has to synchronize with this, seeing the nation as the chosen people for example. More than in nationalism, fascism works in the extreme with inner and outer enemies to instill a feeling of “oneness” and an embodied sense of the nation in each individual. They demand individuals to renounce their individuality and to unite with the state.
Violence is a chosen means of politics. Purifying and cleansing from traitors is as much a core element of the fascist state and its ideology as war against its neighbor states or out-groups, whoever is considered to be an out-group by that particular fascist state.
Transcript of Ryan Chapman’s talk.
What is fascism?
Hey, what’s up everyone?
So today’s video is going to be answering one question and one question only. And that is:
What is fascism?
Fascism has to be a strong contender for one of the most loosely understood words in the political lexicon, and in my opinion that’s probably not going to be changing anytime soon. But if you’re someone, that wants to develop a tighter understanding of it, this video is going to be targeted for you. To date there have only ever been two governments, that have even remotely uncontroversially been considered fascist, and those are the governments of Italy and Germany. Established between World War I and World War II calling Germany fascist is slightly controversial, but I’m not gonna get into that here. In my opinion Nazi Germany was fascist and I think that will become clear, as I talk about it in the video. But either way, it shouldn’t change my conclusions. You should be able to theoretically drop Germany from my analysis here, and my conclusions should still hold up. But I will talk about Germany in this video, so I’m going to mostly cover Italy first and Germany’s second. But I will to some extent go back and forth between the two, for the sake of comparison. To the surprise of no one, this video will get dark. I’m not going to show anything very graphic, but I’m also not going to intellectually shy away from the subject matter either. And the subject matter will get dark, especially when we cover Germany. So if you’re trying to, I don’t know, go on a picnic or something after this, this might not be the video for you. But for the rest of us, we’re gonna cover Italy first and Germany second and then, at the end, we’re gonna circle out and see what we can say about fascism, based on that. And yeah, that’s the plan.
Part I – Italy
So we’re going to go back to the time and the place, where fascism was invented, which was interwar Italy. After the march on Rome in 1922, Benito Mussolini came into power and became the face of fascism known around the world. Mussolini had a background in academia and considered himself something of a philosopher.
Influences on Mussolini
We’re going to get into Mussolini’s ideas, but first I think we should get into some of his influences.
Gustave Le Bon
And a good place to start with that is Gustave Le Bon, whose book the crowd was of a special interest to Mussolini. By the end of the 1800s the nature of politics seemed to be changing and Le Bon believed that civilization was at a turning point as he wrote:
While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase. The age we are about to enter will in truth be the era of crowds.
What Le Bon is describing is the beginning of mass politics. It was a time when politics were getting less elitist and more populistic. So to gain political power in that context, people would have to spend less time targeting educated people and elites, and more time trying to win the support of everyday people, who would then express their support in a crowd.
So he argued that that was making politics more simplistic and more homogeneous. Le Bon believed that there was something like a psychological law of the mental unity of crowds, which is this idea that when individuals identify with crowds, they to some extent lose their ability to think for themselves, and they instead think with the crowd.
So then you have a crowd of like-minded people, which can then be directed and influenced. So in this analysis crowd psychology acts as a hypnotizer and individuals in the crowd are hypnotized. So if an individual becomes swept up in a crowd, then all feelings and thoughts are bent in the direction determined by the hypnotizer.
Le Bon believed that to sway a crowd didn’t require telling the crowd the truth. What it required was telling the crowd, what they wanted to hear and appealing to the crowd’s emotions.
As he put it, the masses have never thirsted after truth.
They turn aside from evidence, that is not to their taste preferring to deify error, if errors seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master, whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.
So to gain power in the era of mass politics, it was thought that you would have to simplify your political ideas and win over a crowd of like-minded people, that would then express support for them. The best way to do that wouldn’t be to be concerned with truth, but rather to emotionally charge your ideas, that can get the crowd excited; to tell them illusions, that they want to hear.
So this is already describing the core assumptions behind fascism.
Mussolini believed that if the 19th century was the century of individualism, then the 20th century would be the century of collectivism. Mussolini thought that anyone who wasn’t thinking in terms of collectivism and mass politics, was going to be left behind in the 20th century. So by that he mostly meant liberals who, thought individualistically and conservatives, who thought aristocratically. So Mussolini described that as dead energy.
Karl Marx
One thinker he thought did get it right, at least in that regard, was Karl Marx, which I know is a name, that most of us were probably not expecting to hear in this video. But there it is.
By the beginning of the 20th century, both of the original founders of classical marxism had died and adaptations of marxism began to flourish.
One major path of adaptations went from Marx to Lenin to Stalin and Mao, which is the path that we refer to as Marxism-Leninism, and the other major path went in a very different direction and that began with Georges Sorel.
Georges Sorel
Sorel was a heterodox marxist, who thought that it was too narrow to interpret the world through the lens of class and economics and he thought that we should also look at sociology. So he thought that sociology would have an effect on the revolution, so he specifically thought that in order to create the ideological unity needed for the revolution, people would have to create mobilizing myths. These myths are stories that are supposed to contain all the strongest inclinations of a people. Stories that people are inspired by and cherish and hold above criticism. The myth that Sorel chose was the myth of strikes. So sorel tried to build up this mythology around the idea of strikes to get people to rally around the idea and to start the revolution.
Italian fascists liked Sorel’s ideas, but they adapted them. So to finish sketching out this path of adaptations, you have Marx, then Sorel, then Mussolini and Hitler, which is the path of fascism. Although unlike the path of marxism leninism by the time you get to Mussolini and Hitler, their ideas don’t really resemble marxism at all and Hitler was even violently anti-marxist which is to say this is a messy chain of influences and a lot of adaptation happened here.
Marx – A Simple Myth of Good and Evil – Necessary Tool, but Flawed
So, to finish up the marxist influence, fascists thought that marxist movements correctly tapped into the spirit of mass politics. they told the simple story of a binary struggle between good and evil, where regular people were good and elites were evil, in particular financial elites. And within that good people were deserving, especially deserving of political power. Hitler even tipped his hat to marxism in that regard, saying:
No movement has operated with such a thorough knowledge of the characteristics of the masses as the Marxist movement.
A point he elaborated on in Mein Kampf, saying:
The strong attractive power of the social democracy, yes, of the whole marxist movement, rested in large part on the homogeneity and hence one-sidedness of the public it addressed. The more seemingly limited, indeed, the narrower its ideas were, the more easily they were taken up and assimilated by a mass whose intellectual level corresponded to the material offered.
Which in the context of Mein Kampf is actually kind of a backhanded compliment.
He was arguing that this is a necessary component for a successful populist movement.
Replacing Class Struggle with Nationalism as a Uniting Myth
But fascists thought that marxist movements were fatally flawed and therefore likely to fail. To name a couple reasons why. They were inherently divisive, they turned one part of the population against the other, working class against property owners. And they also tended to be dogmatic. They tended to rigidly adhere to Marx’s ideas, whether they worked in practice or not. So fascists thought that thinking that that would work was wishful thinking, and they thought that something new had to be thought up.
As Mussolini said in his autobiography
It was necessary to imagine a wholly new political conception adequate to the living reality of the 20th century, overcoming at the same time the ideological worship of liberalism, the limited horizons of various spent and exhausted democracies, and finally the violently Utopian spirit of Bolshevism.
so they needed a galvanizing idea, an idea that crowds could rally around, something that excites people and binds them together, Something they thought wasn’t doing that was internationalism. As Mussolini put it:
I saw that internationalism was crumbling. The unit of loyalty was too large.
So he thought that internationalism wasn’t an idea, that people could feel passionate about and rally around and here he is on the next page following that to his conclusion
Facing this new situation, every political man including myself began to examine his conscience. The mere mention of this problem was sufficient to make clear and evident the hidden travail of national consciousness. I was transformed in my thought.
So national consciousness replaced class consciousness and became fascism’s Sorelian myth.
As Mussolini said in a speech:
We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it to be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation!
So what became the bottom of fascism, the mobilizing idea, that became the bottom of fascist ideology, was a passionate nationalism.
So Mussolini collaborated with a circle of Italian intellectuals, notably around the magazine La Voce and notably with the philosophy professor Giovanni Gentile. And they worked to develop a language and theory of fascism around nationalism, to turn nationalism into their mobilizing myth. And they did it by encouraging people to have a kind of mystical attitude about it.
They said, if you close your eyes and you feel deep inside you, you can feel your nation down in your bones, you can feel the spirit of your country inside you.
Here’s Giovanni Gentile using that language:
History is not a past that is of interest only to the erudite—it is present, alive, in the soul of us all. Those who are Italians feel themselves a part of this Italy. They find themselves not only in the blue of its sky, in its hills and its water, nor only in the desolate or mountainous land that alternates with its fruitful planes and its smiling gardens. We close our eyes. Let us make abstraction from the horizons of its landscapes so varied in beauty and light—and Italy remains in our soul; in fact, it enlarges and expands in the glory of that which it is.
So they created this myth around the nation and treated it not just as a territory, but something spiritual.
And then they talked about the nation in as passionate language, as they possibly could.
To give a shorter example, look at Mussolini describing his national identity here. He doesn’t just call himself Italian, he says “I am desperately Italian.”
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s about as emotional as you can get, when you’re talking about your country.
National identity is something that all citizens of a country technically share, so what fascism tries to do, is it tries to stir up the emotions of the public, to get them to unite and rally behind the idea. It tries to sway the crowd, using the myth of the nation.
Something that’s distinct about fascism, something that separates it from other versions of nationalism, is that for fascists their nationalism is an overriding principle. It overrides all other traditional or moral or political concerns.
Going back to this Mussolini quote:
Our myth is the nation. Our myth is the greatness of the nation!
and then look what he says next:
And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, we subordinate everything else.
That’s actually an accurate description of fascism.
If the question is:
What does a fascist say or do?
and we’re talking about Italian or German fascism, here the answer is:
Whatever brings about the greatness of the nation.
They say, whatever they need to say and they do whatever they need to do, in order to bring about the greatness of the nation.
At least in their minds.
Here’s Mussolini describing the common goal between German and Italian fascism: the objective, which both wanted to achieve and have achieved, is the same: the unity and greatness of the people.
So this is a two-part objective.
Part one is to unify the people, using the myth of the nation.
Part two is to bring about the greatness of the people, by bringing about the greatness of the nation.
So then I think it’s natural to ask, what do they mean, by making the country great?
And fascists tended to leave that answer pretty vague.
Here’s Mussolini saying a nation is great, when it translates into reality the force of its spirit.
So this is a Hegelian idea, the idea that history is marked by stages and those stages are defined by the human spirit.
And going to Hegel now: “Spirit … is the director of the events of the world’s history.”
So spirit directs the world’s history and drives it forward.
So Italian fascists aspired to use the force of the Italian people to make an impact on the history of the world. If they did that, they would be translating into reality the force of the Italian spirit, which was supposed to make history, which was supposed to make Italy great and the Italian people great.
A state is strong when the state and its citizens have identical interests
To understand exactly how to do that, again Italian fascists looked to Hegel, who Mussolini called the philosopher of the state. Hegel argued that in the history of the world, the only people that get noticed are the people that form a state and that the state is the embodiment of the human spirit. It’s the external manifestation of the will of people.
So therefore changes in the stages of world history are attached to the concept of the state and if you haven’t noticed I have to edit Hegel a bit to make his writing clearer, because right as it is, it’s not.
So anyway, so Hegel argued that you need a strong state, in order to manifest the will of the people and embody the spirit of the nation and drive history forward.
So then you might ask, what makes a state powerful? And here’s Hegel’s answer:
A state is well constituted and internally powerful when the private interest of its citizens is one with the common interest of the state.
So if the citizens and the state have identical interests that makes the state powerful which Hegel calls a desired harmony. He then says:
The epoch when a state attains this harmonious condition, marks the period of its bloom its virtue, its vigor, and its prosperity.
So according to this philosophy, the goal is to create a unity of interests between individuals and the state. So there’s no conflict between individuals and the state, and if there is a conflict, then the state wins.
As Hegel put it: this unified state as an ultimate end possesses the highest right in relation to individuals, whose highest duty is to be members of the state.
So Italian fascists were directly inspired by that philosophy. They saw the state as a means to their end of making the nation great and thought that individuals should be subordinated to the needs of the state. What those needs were, were determined by fascists, since it was a fascist state. So here’s them saying that:
The foundation of Fascism (and by the way the capital F here means Italian fascism) is the conception of the state, its character, its duty and its aim. Fascism conceives of the state as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the state.
What we’re seeing here, is a justification for totalitarianism. Having a powerful state with absolute right over the individual, a powerful state, that subordinates the individual to it. So totalitarianism was a word that Italian fascists openly used. Look at how Mussolini talked about the rise of Nazi Germany in relation to Italy:
Here is another great country in the process of creating a unitary authoritarian totalitarian state, i.e a fascist one.
Okay, so fascists wanted to unite the people, using the myth of the nation and then, once the fascist movement came into power, they wanted to create a unitary totalitarian state, a state with absolute power over its citizens, with no political opposition and then from there, they wanted to assert the spirit of their people on the world stage, and therefore make history.
Both Italy and Germany thought that process would create a new glorious civilization, which Italy referred to as the Third Rome and Germany referred to as the Third Reich.
That being said Italian fascism is often referred to as hollow. Italy had the language of fascism, but the execution wasn’t really there. As one Italian historian put it:
Fascist Italy was something of a police state, but of an idiosyncratic kind, one where tyranny was tangled with compromise.
And then later saying:
For all its proclaimed totalitarianism, fascist Italy was soon shown to be unable to fully mobilize its civilians or its ordinary soldiers, numbers of whom were unconvinced, that their identities sprang from Italian nationality.
Okay, so the Italian people didn’t buy into fascism very heavily and Mussolini was something of an impotent dictator. But we still have some loose ends here. Namely what exactly do fascists do, once they get into power? What exactly are their policies?
And again, in a nutshell the answer is, whatever they thought would bring about the greatness of the nation.
Attitude about violence
One thing Italian fascists were consistent about, in both theory and in practice, was their attitude about violence and war, which again took inspiration from Georges Sorel. They saw violence as a legitimate political expression, and extensively used violence on their way into power, which is something they shared with German fascists.
They also glorified war. They saw war as something, that would bind a country together, an attitude largely shaped by their experiences in World War I.
They were also expansionist. They saw the expansion of the nation as an expression of vitality and strength, which led them to go around conquering weaker countries. Notably Ethiopia and Libya, much to the detriment of the people living there.
In terms of economic policy, Italy took a hybrid approach. Mussolini theorized about something that he called a corporate state, which h was supposed to create a synthesis between liberalism and socialism. Or in other words, he wanted to create an alliance between capital and labor under fascist rule, which Italian fascists claimed abolished class conflict in Italy. Although how exactly that worked was far from clear. Regardless, it didn’t do the Italian economy any favors, and while Mussolini was in power Italy’s economic growth fell further behind the powerful countries of Europe.
On that note, there’s been something of an ongoing war of categorization, when it comes to fascism. In that regard people that are sympathetic to socialism try to push our understanding of fascism towards capitalism, and vice versa. People that are sympathetic to capitalism try to push fascism towards socialism.
I think neither side ends up being very convincing, because both sides are only partially looking at the subject. It’s true that fascists campaigned on socialist language and with socialist policies, but it’s also true that fascism came out of capitalist economies.
But the idea that fascism can only come out of capitalism, I think comes from a partisan mindset. Moreover, once fascists came into office, they pursued hybrid economic policies. They weren’t cleanly capitalistic and they weren’t cleanly socialistic. They had elements of both.
So, for example, they might nationalize certain industries and implement a certain amount of welfare, but then also cozy up to big businesses and allow them a high degree of autonomy. So I think this aspect of fascism is sort of a conceptual cul-de-sac. I don’t think it’s an illuminating way to be able to categorize fascism.
If anything I think they were categorized by pragmatism. So they weren’t dogmatic, once they came into office. They pursued the policies they thought they needed to pursue to make the economy work. I think in particular that was true for Germany.
So on that note, I think it’s time to turn our attention away from Italy and towards Germany.
Part 2 – Germany
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