Pandemic Fascism

There is an age-old issue of political labels and the naming of political philosophies.  It is a heated issue because each label has a brand and carries a history of associations.  It is hard, try as one might, to tackle the underlying ideas without tripping over the implications of the labels.  

A quite obvious example is "Nazi."  It is indisputable that this is the contraction of National Socialism which was the self-chosen descriptor of that party in Germany in the 1930s.  National Socialism held out the promise of the good life through centralized decision-making by experts.  

Today, of course, with the hindsight of history, there is an urgent desire in many quarters to erase the chilling horror of Nazism from the warmer and fuzzier idea of Socialism.  Ideologues and purists might want that, but it is inescapable that Nazism was a version of Socialism.

Classical Liberals have the same issue.  Once upon a time it was a label which covered the modern and progressive sentiments of the Age of Enlightenment.  The idea that all humans had equal rights which were to be protected under the rule of law with equality before the law, with due process and property rights, etc.  It was a revolutionary worldview in 1750-1850.  From 1850 to 1950 Classical Liberalism might be said to have become the establishment view, at least in the Anglophone.  Not so much revolutionary as conservatively institutionalized.

However, in the 1960s in America, Liberal came to mean, or at least include, some melange of free spirit communalism as well as statism to force material progress on everyone.  

Who is Left, who is Right?  The terms are largely unmoored anymore and are made to mean anything in the context of any particular argument.

My tentative view is that we can put various forms of government into a matrix.  On one dimension is the degree to which authority ultimately resides with individual citizens or with the State itself.  On the other dimension is the degree to which the people and the State institutions are governed by an Age of Enlightenment worldview or by a traditionalism and mysticism worldview.  

The gradations are of course subjective but it is relatively easy to place most current and historical configurations somewhere in the matrix.  Any given country at any given time will have all sorts of nuances, including the expected this but unexpectedly excluding that.  

The matrix looks something like this.

I came across an article today, Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco from The New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995.  It is a long explication of fascism and is especially pertinent with the Russia-Ukrainian war going on.  There is a massive barrage of Nazis and Fascist being hurled between the two.  The names are meant to cut, not clarify.  

Eco has some interesting insights, having grown up as a young boy during the Mussolini Fascist era.  

Ultimately Eco creates a list of fourteen indicators of a fascist government.  These are summarized in Open Culture as:

1. The cult of tradition. “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.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “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. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “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.”
5. 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. Appeal to social frustration. “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.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “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.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “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.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “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.”

It is interesting to take this list and look back at the past two years when the administrative state ran wild and people initially acquiesced with deference until they realized that the experts got nearly everything wrong and that the were a lot of ideological and financial interests being served to the detriment of citizens.  

Which of this checklist has salience given the recent experiences?  As Eco notes, not all need apply.

The cult of tradition. - Not relevant. “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 rejection of modernism.  - Definitely. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”  All the science and data around policies and vaccines were discarded at the beginning of the pandemic and replaced with arbitrary notions from the select.  Notions which all turned out to be failures.  

The cult of action for action’s sake. - Very much on point.  “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”  Much dramatic action was taken solely in order to be seen to be taking action.  The policy and science spoke against virtually all the actions taken. 

Disagreement is treason. - Definitely.  “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.”  The deplatforming, silencing and censoring of non-establishment views became prevalent and continues.  

Fear of difference. - Definitely.  “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”  There has been a cultivation of the alien "Other", the "domestic terrorist" the "white nationalist" to manipulate and target rage.  And all in the abstract.  No white nationalists or domestic terrorists are ever identified, they are merely talked into existence.

Appeal to social frustration. - Definitely.  “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.”  The whole appeal to resent the rich and the overwhelming effort to foster inter-group division, envy and hate via Critical Race Theory and Social Justice Theory are manifestations to both create and then appeal to social frustration.  

The obsession with a plot. - Again, certainly present.  “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 enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”  Anyone and everyone who, relying on reason and evidence, questioned the Covid mandates was accused of being part of various nebulous plots and conspiracies.  Despite repeatedly being completely correct.  See the fate of the Great Barrington Declaration.  The second line of Wikipedia's current GBD entry reinforces this "It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise continued functioning normally."  The "fringe notion" actually being well established pandemic protocols with a long and successful history.  

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. - Definitely.  “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”  The entire Covid pandemic has been presented as an existential threat and anyone not acknowledging that threat represented and danger to society.  

Contempt for the weak. Definitely.  “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”

Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”  The entire Administrative State has weighed in against the bottom three quintiles as a danger to themselves and others and thereby justifying extreme State measures against the freedom of those individuals.  See also the treatment of children, betraying a profound contempt for the weakest in society.

Machismo and weaponry. - Perhaps.  “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”  Not so much machismo as purity.  There has been enormous disdain for and intolerance of those with opinions incongruent with those of the State.  

Selective populism. - Definitely.  “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.”  The best example being Twitter where only 20% of the population is involved but it does include everyone in the mainstream media and academia, all affirming one another's notions that are at variance those of the other 80%. 

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. - Definitely “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.” Diversity, Equity and Inclusion becomes the guise for discriminating based on race and gender.  Also the guise for taking from some to give to others without the consent of those being plundered.  "Social Distancing" for isolation.  Claims of immunization and sterilization of the virus for vaccines which in fact do not sterilize or immunize.  Etc.  

 

At 13 out of 14 signals for fascism, according to Eco we have had a close brush with Pandemic Fascism.  I would certainly agree.  And we are not out of the woods yet.  At every step of the way, the public health State is still making decisions not supported by the evidence and repeating policies which demonstrably did not work the first time.