The Birth of Fascist Ideology: Passages from a Book by Zeev Sternhell

Why doesn't anyone call fascism what is really is??? PSYCHOPATHY!!!

http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=5740

The Birth of Fascist Ideology: Passages from a Book by Zeev Sternhell
By Andrew Bard Smookler

As I study more about fascism, and in particular the cultural and political and ideological sources from which it emerged, I am impressed BOTH that what we see in America today on the right does have meaningful kinship with some of fascism AND that there are differences.

Most recently, I’ve been extending my researches with a book by Zeev Sternhell (Princeton University Press, 1994), which explores the roots of the fascist ideology in the waning years of the 19th century and the beginning years of the 20th century. Sternhell is looking at the ideological currents at work in various European countries, especially France and Italy.

Two points that Sternhell makes, which I found of interest: 1) fascism was a movement with a thought-out ideology, an intellectual structure that, he says, was as developed as that of other political systems, including liberalism; and 2) fascism should not be regarded as a synonym for Nazism, with which it had some things in common, but with other elements –like the centrality of anti-Jewish racism in the Nazi ideology– strongly differentiating the two.

Here are some passages from that book that struck me as illuminating –to at least a meaningful degree– of what we are encountering in America in our times.

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“Fascism rebelled against modernity inasmuch as modernity was identified with the rationalism, optimism, and humanism of the eighteenth century, but it was not a reactionary or an antirevolutionary movement in the Maurrassian sense of the term. Fascism presented itself as a revolution of another kind, a revolution that sought to destroy the existing political order and to uproot its theoretical and moral foundations but that at the same time wished to preserve all the achievements of modern technology. It was to take place within the framework of the industrial society, fully exploiting the power that was in it. The Fascist revolution sought to change the nature of the relationships between the individual and the collectivity without destroying the impetus of economic activity– the profit motive, or its foundation– private property, or its necessary framework –the market economy…

“This point requires special emphasis. If fascism wished to reap all the benefits of the modern age, to exploit all the technological achievements of capitalism, if it never questioned the idea that market forces and private property were part of the natural order of things, it had a horror of the so-called bourgeois, or, as Nietzsche called them, modern values: universalism, individualism, progress, natural rights, and equality. Thus, fascism adopted the economic aspect of liberalism but completely denied its philosophic principles and the intellectual and moral heritage of modernity.”
(p. 7)

“The first of the two essential components of fascism to appear on the political scene at the end of the nineteenth century was tribal nationalism, based on a social Darwinism and, often, a biological determinism…This formula of Barres [can't discern what "formula" he's referring to] was in fact only the French counterpart of the German formula Blut und Boden (Blood and Soil), and it showed that the old theory, consecrated by the French Revolution, that society was made up of a collection of individuals, had been replaced by the theory of the organic unity of the nation.”
(p. 9)

“This ‘total’ nationalism claimed to be a system of ethics, with criteria of behavior dictated by the entire national body, independently of the will of the individual. By definition, this new nationalism denied the validity of any absolute and universal moral norms: truth, justice, and law existed only in order to serve the needs of the collectivity. The idea of society as something isolated and shut in, a violent antirationalism, and a belief in the supremacy of the subconscious over the forces of reason amounted to a truly tribal concept of the nation…

“This cult of deep and mysterious forces that are the fabric of human existence entailed as a necessary and natural consequence the appearance of a virulent anti-intellectualism. For this school of thought, the fight against intellectuals and against the rationalism from which they drew their nourishment was a measure of public safety. There were a great many nationalists at the turn of the century who, like those of the interwar generation, constantly attacked the critical spirit and its products, opposing them to instinct, intuitive and irrational sentiment, emotion and enthusiasm– those deep impulses which determine human behavior and which constitute the reality and truth of things as well as their beauty. Rationalism, they claimed, belongs to the ‘deracinated’; it blunts sensitivity, it deadens instinct and can only destroy the motive forces of national activity.”
(p. 10)