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Title: Ur-Fascism Author: Umberto Eco Date: June 22, 1995 Language: en Topics: antifascism, Fascism, antifa, not-anarchist Source: The New York Review of Books http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1856
In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of
Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian
Fascists — that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with
rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of
Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?” My answer was positive. I
was a smart boy.
I spent two of my early years among the SS, Fascists, Republicans, and
partisans shooting at one another, and I learned how to dodge bullets.
It was good exercise.
In April 1945, the partisans took over in Milan. Two days later they
arrived in the small town where I was living at the time. It was a
moment of joy. The main square was crowded with people singing and
waving flags, calling in loud voices for Mimo, the partisan leader of
that area. A former maresciallo of the Carabinieri, Mimo joined the
supporters of General Badoglio, Mussolini’s successor, and lost a leg
during one of the first clashes with Mussolini’s remaining forces. Mimo
showed up on the balcony of the city hall, pale, leaning on his crutch,
and with one hand tried to calm the crowd. I was waiting for his speech
because my whole childhood had been marked by the great historic
speeches of Mussolini, whose most significant passages we memorized in
school. Silence. Mimo spoke in a hoarse voice, barely audible. He said:
“Citizens, friends. After so many painful sacrifices … here we are.
Glory to those who have fallen for freedom.” And that was it. He went
back inside. The crowd yelled, the partisans raised their guns and fired
festive volleys. We kids hurried to pick up the shells, precious items,
but I had also learned that freedom of speech means freedom from
rhetoric.
A few days later I saw the first American soldiers. They were African
Americans. The first Yankee I met was a black man, Joseph, who
introduced me to the marvels of Dick Tracy and Li’l Abner. His comic
books were brightly colored and smelled good.
One of the officers (Major or Captain Muddy) was a guest in the villa of
a family whose two daughters were my schoolmates. I met him in their
garden where some ladies, surrounding Captain Muddy, talked in tentative
French. Captain Muddy knew some French, too. My first image of American
liberators was thus — after so many palefaces in black shirts — that of
a cultivated black man in a yellow-green uniform saying: “Oui, merci
beaucoup, Madame, moi aussi j’aime le champagne …” Unfortunately there
was no champagne, but Captain Muddy gave me my first piece of Wrigley’s
Spearmint and I started chewing all day long. At night I put my wad in a
water glass, so it would be fresh for the next day.
In May we heard that the war was over. Peace gave me a curious
sensation. I had been told that permanent warfare was the normal
condition for a young Italian. In the following months I discovered that
the Resistance was not only a local phenomenon but a European one. I
learned new, exciting words like réseau, maquis, armée secrète, Rote
Kapelle, Warsaw ghetto. I saw the first photographs of the Holocaust,
thus understanding the meaning before knowing the word. I realized what
we were liberated from.
In my country today there are people who are wondering if the Resistance
had a real military impact on the course of the war. For my generation
this question is irrelevant: we immediately understood the moral and
psychological meaning of the Resistance. For us it was a point of pride
to know that we Europeans did not wait passively for liberation. And for
the young Americans who were paying with their blood for our restored
freedom it meant something to know that behind the firing lines there
were Europeans paying their own debt in advance.
In my country today there are those who are saying that the myth of the
Resistance was a Communist lie. It is true that the Communists exploited
the Resistance as if it were their personal property, since they played
a prime role in it; but I remember partisans with kerchiefs of different
colors. Sticking close to the radio, I spent my nights — the windows
closed, the blackout making the small space around the set a lone
luminous halo — listening to the messages sent by the Voice of London to
the partisans. They were cryptic and poetic at the same time (The sun
also rises, The roses will bloom) and most of them were “messaggi per la
Franchi.” Somebody whispered to me that Franchi was the leader of the
most powerful clandestine network in northwestern Italy, a man of
legendary courage. Franchi became my hero. Franchi (whose real name was
Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after
the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with
collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares?
Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood. Liberation was a
common deed for people of different colors.
In my country today there are some who say that the War of Liberation
was a tragic period of division, and that all we need is national
reconciliation. The memory of those terrible years should be repressed,
refoulée, verdrängt. But Verdrängung causes neurosis. If reconciliation
means compassion and respect for all those who fought their own war in
good faith, to forgive does not mean to forget. I can even admit that
Eichmann sincerely believed in his mission, but I cannot say, “OK, come
back and do it again.” We are here to remember what happened and
solemnly say that “They” must not do it again.
But who are They?
If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe
before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult
for them to reappear in the same form in different historical
circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a
charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of
Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an
exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in
black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on
anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the
Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI,
and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the
old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the
various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe,
including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is
about to reappear as a nationwide movement.
Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and
ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its
ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of
cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there
still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the
world)?
Ionesco once said that “only words count and the rest is mere
chattering.” Linguistic habits are frequently important symptoms of
underlying feelings. Thus it is worth asking why not only the Resistance
but the Second World War was generally defined throughout the world as a
struggle against fascism. If you reread Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell
Tolls you will discover that Robert Jordan identifies his enemies with
Fascists, even when he thinks of the Spanish Falangists. And for FDR,
“The victory of the American people and their allies will be a victory
against fascism and the dead hand of despotism it represents.”
During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were
called “premature anti-fascists” — meaning that fighting against Hitler
in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting
against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was
mainly done by Communists and other leftists… . Why was an expression
like fascist pig used by American radicals thirty years later to refer
to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits? Why didn’t they
say: Cagoulard pig, Falangist pig, Ustashe pig, Quisling pig, Nazi pig?
Mein Kampf is a manifesto of a complete political program. Nazism had a
theory of racism and of the Aryan chosen people, a precise notion of
degenerate art, entartete Kunst, a philosophy of the will to power and
of the Ubermensch. Nazism was decidedly anti-Christian and neo-pagan,
while Stalin’s Diamat (the official version of Soviet Marxism) was
blatantly materialistic and atheistic. If by totalitarianism one means a
regime that subordinates every act of the individual to the state and to
its ideology, then both Nazism and Stalinism were true totalitarian
regimes.
Italian fascism was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally
totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the
philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion,
fascism in Italy had no special philosophy. The article on fascism
signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or
basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian
notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized
by Mussolini. Mussolini did not have any philosophy: he had only
rhetoric. He was a militant atheist at the beginning and later signed
the Convention with the Church and welcomed the bishops who blessed the
Fascist pennants. In his early anticlerical years, according to a likely
legend, he once asked God, in order to prove His existence, to strike
him down on the spot. Later, Mussolini always cited the name of God in
his speeches, and did not mind being called the Man of Providence.
Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a
European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of
archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to
establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing — far
more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or
Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist
movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia,
Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece,
Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was
Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the
new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was
providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat.
Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient
reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a
word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is
not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their
quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of
totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism
was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and
political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a
truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with
revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant
of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence,
absolute state control with a free market? The Fascist Party was born
boasting that it brought a revolutionary new order; but it was financed
by the most conservative among the landowners who expected from it a
counter-revolution. At its beginning fascism was republican. Yet it
survived for twenty years proclaiming its loyalty to the royal family,
while the Duce (the unchallenged Maximal Leader) was arm-in-arm with the
King, to whom he also offered the title of Emperor. But when the King
fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with
German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its
old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones.
There was only a single Nazi architecture and a single Nazi art. If the
Nazi architect was Albert Speer, there was no more room for Mies van der
Rohe. Similarly, under Stalin’s rule, if Lamarck was right there was no
room for Darwin. In Italy there were certainly fascist architects but
close to their pseudo-Coliseums were many new buildings inspired by the
modern rationalism of Gropius.
There was no fascist Zhdanov setting a strictly cultural line. In Italy
there were two important art awards. The Premio Cremona was controlled
by a fanatical and uncultivated Fascist, Roberto Farinacci, who
encouraged art as propaganda. (I can remember paintings with such titles
as “Listening by Radio to the Duce’s Speech” or “States of Mind Created
by Fascism.”) The Premio Bergamo was sponsored by the cultivated and
reasonably tolerant Fascist Giuseppe Bottai, who protected both the
concept of art for art’s sake and the many kinds of avant-garde art that
had been banned as corrupt and crypto-Communist in Germany.
The national poet was D’Annunzio, a dandy who in Germany or in Russia
would have been sent to the firing squad. He was appointed as the bard
of the regime because of his nationalism and his cult of heroism — which
were in fact abundantly mixed up with influences of French fin de siècle
decadence.
Take Futurism. One might think it would have been considered an instance
of entartete Kunst, along with Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism.
But the early Italian Futurists were nationalist; they favored Italian
participation in the First World War for aesthetic reasons; they
celebrated speed, violence, and risk, all of which somehow seemed to
connect with the fascist cult of youth. While fascism identified itself
with the Roman Empire and rediscovered rural traditions, Marinetti (who
proclaimed that a car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace,
and wanted to kill even the moonlight) was nevertheless appointed as a
member of the Italian Academy, which treated moonlight with great
respect.
Many of the future partisans and of the future intellectuals of the
Communist Party were educated by the GUF, the fascist university
students’ association, which was supposed to be the cradle of the new
fascist culture. These clubs became a sort of intellectual melting pot
where new ideas circulated without any real ideological control. It was
not that the men of the party were tolerant of radical thinking, but few
of them had the intellectual equipment to control it.
During those twenty years, the poetry of Montale and other writers
associated with the group called the Ermetici was a reaction to the
bombastic style of the regime, and these poets were allowed to develop
their literary protest from within what was seen as their ivory tower.
The mood of the Ermetici poets was exactly the reverse of the fascist
cult of optimism and heroism. The regime tolerated their blatant, even
though socially imperceptible, dissent because the Fascists simply did
not pay attention to such arcane language.
All this does not mean that Italian fascism was tolerant. Gramsci was
put in prison until his death; the opposition leaders Giacomo Matteotti
and the brothers Rosselli were assassinated; the free press was
abolished, the labor unions were dismantled, and political dissenters
were confined on remote islands. Legislative power became a mere fiction
and the executive power (which controlled the judiciary as well as the
mass media) directly issued new laws, among them laws calling for
preservation of the race (the formal Italian gesture of support for what
became the Holocaust).
The contradictory picture I describe was not the result of tolerance but
of political and ideological discombobulation. But it was a rigid
discombobulation, a structured confusion. Fascism was philosophically
out of joint, but emotionally it was firmly fastened to some archetypal
foundations.
So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot
label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is
fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist
game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not
change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a
game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some
special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are
different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as
Wittgenstein put it. Consider the following sequence:
Suppose there is a series of political groups in which group one is
characterized by the features abc, group two by the features bcd, and so
on. Group two is similar to group one since they have two features in
common; for the same reasons three is similar to two and four is similar
to three. Notice that three is also similar to one (they have in common
the feature c). The most curious case is presented by four, obviously
similar to three and two, but with no feature in common with one.
However, owing to the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities
between one and four, there remains, by a sort of illusory transitivity,
a family resemblance between four and one.
Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a
fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable
as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco
and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism
of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism
(which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a
cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to
official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus,
Julius Evola.
But in spite of this fuzziness, 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.
Traditionalism is of course much older than fascism. Not only was it
typical of counter-revolutionary Catholic thought after the French
revolution, but it was born in the late Hellenistic era, as a reaction
to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of
different religions (most of them 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 silver of
wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things
it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval
truth.As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth
has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep
interpreting its obscure message.One has only to look at the syllabus of
every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The
Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult
elements. The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the
new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and
Germanic Empire. The very fact that the Italian right, in order to show
its open-mindedness, recently broadened its syllabus to include works by
De Maistre, Guenon, and Gramsci, is a blatant proof of syncretism.If you
browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores, are labeled as 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.
Nazis worshiped 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, but it mainly concerned the rejection of
the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age
of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense
Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without,
any previous 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 Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of
culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as
“degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities
are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly
engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for
having betrayed traditional values.
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.
seeks for 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.
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.
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 U.S., 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.
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 must 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.
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 a “final solution” 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.
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 of the world,
the members of 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. Since the group
is hierarchically organized (according to a military model), every
subordinate leader despises his own underlings, and each of them
despises his inferiors. This reinforces the sense of mass elitism.
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 Falangists was
Viva la Muerte (in English it should be translated as “Long Live
Death!”). In non-fascist 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.
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.
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. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer
need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. 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. One of the first sentences uttered by
Mussolini in the Italian parliament was “I could have transformed this
deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples” — “maniples” being
a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he
immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he
liquidated the parliament. 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.
as the official language of 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.
On the morning of July 27, 1943, I was told that, according to radio
reports, fascism had collapsed and Mussolini was under arrest. When my
mother sent me out to buy the newspaper, I saw that the papers at the
nearest newsstand had different titles. Moreover, after seeing the
headlines, I realized that each newspaper said different things. I
bought one of them, blindly, and read a message on the first page signed
by five or six political parties — among them the Democrazia Cristiana,
the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the Partito d’Azione, and the
Liberal Party.
Until then, I had believed that there was a single party in every
country and that in Italy it was the Partito Nazionale Fascista. Now I
was discovering that in my country several parties could exist at the
same time. Since I was a clever boy, I immediately realized that so many
parties could not have been born overnight, and they must have existed
for some time as clandestine organizations.
The message on the front celebrated the end of the dictatorship and the
return of freedom: freedom of speech, of press, of political
association. These words, “freedom,” “dictatorship,” “liberty,” — I now
read them for the first time in my life. I was reborn as a free Western
man by virtue of these new words.
We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be
forgotten again. 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
Black Shirts 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:
I venture the challenging statement that 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. Let me finish with a poem
by Franco Fortini: