FASCISM DEFINED

    Judeo-Christian ethical monotheism featured intensely focused spirituality,  beautiful and joyous, won over sacrificial suffering. The “ethical” is transcendent morality turned (mysteriously pivoting) into charity to others, all God’s creatures, in time-oriented existence, Eden-bound.
    Its exemplars—following Abraham, Jesus—lead by example, are non-coercive, ideally “parental.”
    The depicted revolt by a little gang—the devilishly clever snake leading Adam and Eve—in Genesis, is highly suggestive of anti-spiritual, profane human history, largely unchanged by revolts and gang-warfare.
    Revolt against secular tyranny and “just war” in self-defense is sacred-affirming, but mostly these eruptive, violent mass-actions were in the lineage of the first gang.
    The anti-sacred theme is expressed in “you will be as gods,” primal arrogance and presumption, deviating from the pure original spirituality, using the later-come subordinate branch of the Tree of Life, the brain, and selfish will to evasively act and usurp.
    The roots of fascism are here. A clear example of this continuity of evil principle is the Nazi “triumph of the will” and the fiendish use of science and technology to murder millions as at Auschwitz.
    But all revolts are likely to have a fascist coloration. The Protestant revolt—the Reformation—against a preceding Judeo-Catholicism, centered in Rome, took on that negative coloration in Luther’s virulent anti-Semitism, for example, expressed in his pamphlet “The Jews and Their Lies” which as Paul Johnson and other historians observe, is in the main line leading to the Holocaust.
    The previous Marcionite movement in the Second Century, and the general Gnostic movement led in that direction, dangerously veering away from Old Testament transcendent morality, overall unity, and continuity of faith. The “protest” in “Protestant” signals a “protests too much.” The nationalist bent of Luther, anti-Southern and racist were further clues. The scattering of sect was another sign. Luther and Protestantism were favored by the Nazi leaders, Hitler and his associate Rosenberg.
    The Enlightenment revolt featured secular will and brain on the way to totalitarian modernism: Kant, for example, was a fierce anti-Semite who tried to prove Jesus was Greek. His book Religion Within the Boundaries of Reason was a dreadful portent.
    The fact that Protestantism, the Enlightenment (including Kant and Fichte) made impressive intellectual contributions also should not blind us to the danger-signals pointing to modern fascism, which despite World War II, is now again a major thrust in our time.
    Our premier historian, Robert Conquest, observed the rise of “pink fascism” (and “itsy-bitsy terror”) on the Stanford University campus, along with the other leading campuses and expressed his concern –after Trilling noted—in a preface to my book The Promise and the Snake.
    The well-known media and the ruling Northeastern intellectual establishment are comparably affected by the fetishizing of brain and dynamic (commercial, globalizing) will.
    Albert Camus cited, in The Rebel, Hermann Rauschning’s thesis (in The Revolution of Nihilism) that Nazism was, and is, essentially “dynamism” (one thinks of the ruthless Nietzchian “triumph of the will,” a Blitzkrieg).
    It is horizontal, violent, ruthless, crushing, forward-moving act historicists, ultimately oblivious of deep transcendent ttranscendent beautiful morality, as Camus lamented in “Helen’s Exile” (1948). It tends to pagan rigid neo-classicsim in architecture and art, scanting deeply personal inward imaginative intuition and past masterpieces.
    Hence it is false to see it as properly “romantic.” Romanticism was the antidote to Enlightenment’s neo-classical pre-fascism in Germany (Humboldt, Heine, Rahel Varnhagen) as it would be in France. It’s later phase, Symbolism, fought the fascistic “positivism” of Auguste Conte and the whole secularizing, post-Revolutionary flattening desacralization of France, leading to its current plight and ruined culture. The same is happening here, as Cynthia Ozick laments.
    There was a romantic aspect to Nazism (the cult of pagan Wotan noted by Thomas Mann in his “Europe Beware” prophetic speech in 1935), but Mann was an authentic, deep “oceanic” Romantic (to quote his anthologist, James Angell).
    The Nazis were emotionally, brutally neo-primitive and stunted, sentimental in that sense, as Heinrich Mann noted in The Straw Man, Thomas Mann’s story Mario and the Magician, features a grotesque charismatic fascist figure akin to Huey Long. Medioctriy enshrined. The evil of banality.
    Another error is induced by the fact that the totalitarian objects to modernism in art. The truth is that our genius moderns were not modernist except superficially: Proust, Joyce, Mann, Kafka, Camus, were all profoundly bound to solid tradition in spirit, eternally Romantic in that sense (as opposed to neo-classic and shallowly sensationally, innovative). The objection to Western modernism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia was directed, rather, at its scattering,  disunifying aspect politically often times directed against the long-range stultification of brain, though cancerous brain, systems, shallow middle class conventionalists in recent guises, “groupthink,” Bobbits and so on. The totalitarians, even as they revolted against the current order (Weimar, the Menshiva, republicanism) were usually an even more stifling system and conventionalists, “political correctness” of their own.
    This worst modern bourgeoise hustlers was the (and the fascists, including “red” or “pink” ones) were brothers under the skin. Neither cared for true spirituality and art.
    Only a few ever did. But there are times, as around World War II, in America, when the whole time lifts. Now, in our robotic atmosphere it has sunk very low.
    Sinclair Lewis in his prescient It Can’t Happen Here (1935) at the same time as the Manns and Churchill saw what was happening. The worst was staved off by World War II in Europe and America, but now watch out. The whole liberal-left is a monster-gang essentially fascistic, desperately warring against traditional spirituality, which as threatening still, in a  crisis with concrete dangers, worsened by inner fecklessness and cowardice, as in France. Arch cleverness is their weapon of choice (Jon Steward, Hollywood, Paul Krugman).
    It’s skin-of-our-teeth time again.