In Memory of the Chicago Anarchists

Happy May Day, everyone. Remember the Haymarket Martyrs!

Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt

By Umberto Eco
Writing in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12-15. Excerpted in Utne Reader, November-December 1995, pp. 57-59.

The following version follows the text and formatting of the Utne Reader article, and in addition, makes the first sentence of each numbered point a statement in bold type. Italics are in the original.

For the full article, consult the New York Review of Books, purchase the full article online; or purchase Eco's new collection of essays: Five Moral Pieces.

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.

War Crimes

I just got back from seeing Taxi to the Dark Side, and if I had any doubt that this administration was guilty of war crimes, those doubts have been eliminated. Of course, it only takes his implicit admission to such by quietly trying to pardon himself in 2006 of any crimes connected with the torture and mistreatment of U.S. detainees, or that, on a more recent note, the CIA, DoD and other agencies are getting in more trouble over the destruction of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting harsh interrogations in 2005 to tell me that they're guilty.

What is more outrageous than this is that the American people could not care enough to prosecute them for such heinous crimes.

The New York Times has two frequent Op-Ed Columnists: William Kristol, leading neoconservative intellectual and founder and editor of conservative periodical The Weekly Standard; and David Brooks, a self-proclaimed conservative in the tradition of William F. Buckly, Jr. So to all you who call the NYT a bastion of liberalism: HA!

The NYT is a politically moderate, capitalist newspaper. I find it frighteningly ironic that the blow-hard propaganda artists on Fox "News" Network call themselves balanced because they have some half-twit like Colmes on as their token liberal and then at the same time call the NYT, which has leading conservative intellectuals as columnists, a liberal paper (spoken as though "liberal" was the quality of Satan that makes him so). Makes you wonder how far to the right the Fox blow-hards have to be to call "liberal" a paper that includes Kristol or Brooks three days a week, doesn't it?

On March 6th, a story appeared on the BBC website regarding the German military's unease about using the Iron Cross as a medal of honor. It strikes as particularly odd that the German military, who used the Iron cross well before the Nazi's co-opted it, would still nonetheless be unwilling to reclaim it for use considering we in the USA have no problem putting it on our vehicles or on our clothing, like the company West Coast Choppers likes to do.

Is the American public that ignorant of history not to be concerned about such cavalier use of such a problematic symbol? In the case of WCC, it's part of a band image of "toughness" and fearless that is related to fear and aggression -- qualities looked upon as superior by the SS. Am I the only one who sees this? My in-laws and I walked into a high-end clothing store once and saw jeans with an iron cross on each back pocket. So this is not just WCC.

So we Americans are either stereotypically historically ignorant or we are OK with the implicit racism in using this symbol. Either way, I'm very concerned.

In the context of protest management and non-lethal weaponry:

"There have been several studies that have shown that the militarization of the police doesn't just include the technology transfer and the tactics and the training, it's actually the personnel themselves are being largely drawn from the military. So people are bringing their experiences of occupation back from Iraq into your local neighborhood; and so a lot of that same mentality of seeing the public as a kind of enemy, as opposed to a citizen whose rights must to be protected, is being transfered in both formal and informal ways into civilian policing." - From The Invisible War

Feel like being looked at as an enemy combatant by merely exercising your right to peacefully assemble? Well, you might not have a choice in the matter. Now we have a militarized police force that is more likely to inflict harm on people because "non-lethal weaponry" makes it seem more acceptable. People are still killed by tasers, and they blinded and paralyzed by bean bags. Yet they are regularly used in protests to merely assert power, without provocation. When the political rhetoric makes protesters "terrorist lovers" and former Iraq soldiers, who were trained to see civilians as potential terrorists, begin to constitute more and more of the police force, it does not take much for the police to become by action and constitution a second military, whose members are much more psychologically capable of and ready to use unnecessary force against the American citizenry.

Slowly, the frog boils…

I have recently gone back to Hannah Arendt's 1958 work _The Human Condition_. This is a book that I would strongly recommend to anyone who is sympathetic to criticisms that modernity has brought us little more than alienation and consumerism. Someone who is sympathetic to much of Marx's criticisms, Arendt is also strongly critical of him, lumping him together with Adam Smith and saying they are both to blame for the "socialized man" and the glorification of labor. By glorifying labor -- either as the means of aggregating wealth or as the means of producing for all -- and by turning "public" into something that merely indicates the administration of things, we have been robbed of one our most fundamental liberties: the ability to speak and to act and to bring newness into the world, or, for that matter, to have a world at all. All become mere consumables to be manufactures and destroyed, and all of our labor power is directed at this cycle of futility. We thus let whiter away the space in which we are able to be political people -- people who have the freedom to engage with others as equals.

The argument is too nuanced for me to lay out here. A brief summary of the work can be found on the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Nonetheless, take this as a strong recommendation for anyone who is not sympathetic to capitalism.

Who would I be talking about if I spoke of a certain political leader who mastered propaganda in order to dupe his own government and people of his country, who used the mechanism of democratic governance to actively destroy it by centralizing more and more power in his hands, who invoking a hidden Enemy in order to achieve his ends, and who used a clandestine organization to surveil, abduct, interrogate, and in terrorize not only these alleged hidden enemies but also citizens of his own country?

Stalin?

Hitler?


This, two days ago from the New York Times:

President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence's latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

Add in a bit of Iraq WMD's, PATRIOT ACT, FISA modifications and more, and you've got one hell of a case for the slow progression towards tyranny. I remember being told once that if you put a frog in water and slowly turn the heat up, it won't attempt an escape, because the change happens so slowly it doesn't notice what's happening. It's not true of frogs, but the anecdote still has something to say to us. It starts by targeting people radically "other." Then people a little less radically "other". Then political dissidents become "enemy combatants"… You see where this heads if the logic is played out? It started with the tazing of Andrew Meyer, who was tazered for just asking Al Gore some questions.