The “fascism” word is thrown around a lot these days. Any big business person supporting the GOP is a fascist; every big business person doling out cash to the Democrats is a “progressive” “philanthropist” “climate protecting” warrior for the working class.
Leftist control feakism is “liberation”. Any traffic light under conservative control is fascist opression. It’s clear we need some usable definitions for the term fascism in order to tell who really has a fascist agenda and what that precisely means.
Modern age fascism considers the enlightenment to be a mistake that has to be reversed: Capitalism, individual liberty, various forms of republics, “democratic elements” etc. Even the term “fascism” comes from ancient Rome and all fascists have copied many Roman structures and the iconography.
In the old times, or even ancient times, order was supposedly strong, clear and guided by either Roman Catholicism or mystery cults. In modern times, however, everything went wrong, we are told by the fascists: Leadership became broken up and chaotic, individual citizens became involved without any competency and vision and a sense of empire. Capitalists were either short-sighted and self-serving, or a (jewish) conspiracy of their own. The emergence of modern fascism happened parallel to the cultivation of modern conspiracy mythology.
By blaming jews per se or mainly a few selected bankers such as the Rothschilds, fascists can trash fundamental freedoms and individualism without directly saying they want the masses to be enslaved or – to be precise – in a state of perpetual serfdom. FYI: Left Socialism was just a ruse to continue serfdom under a new leadership and call it dictatorship of the proletariat or liberation.
Fascists can’t quite decide whether to hate Socialism more than the enlightenment or equally.
Re-establishing the pre-enlightenment structures is the core of the fascist agenda. Sometimes this includes the wish to also re-establish a traditional monarchy as well. Leading German fascists came from simple backgrounds and crafted National Socialism as a movement where ideology and loyalty to “the Führer” came first. If your background check confirmed “Aryan” ancestors three generations back, that sufficed. Belonging to the high nobility with a 1000 year plus family history was only an optional bonus.
Typical is the fascist internal debate between choosing a dominant imperial Catholic church and ancient mystery cults. The first option was more or less ruled out by the German fascists because the catholics had their own very old secret networks and weren’t trusted. It was attempted to convert the Jesus story into something Aryan as a temporary compromise.
The latter option proved to be a conundrum: In the 1800s and early 1900s the ultra-right movement dabbled in a mix of ancient German, Roman and Greek beliefs. Adolf Hitler voraciously absorbed the contents of the magazine “Ostara” but was quickly left disappointed with the weaknesses of the folk cults. It is very likely he came into significant contact with serious ancient mystery groups from the high nobility. Documentation about this is extremely difficult and we have to try a careful reconstruction method based on historical facts and the nature of intelligence networks and operations.
The enlightenment was not really a simple decay of the old Roman ways, nor was it simply driven by altruism. The biggest weakness of any ancient system was the lack of modern science and hence the fragile economy. If your Achilles heel is grain production that has to pay for everything, and if competing empires are built the exact same way, the only road left to lasting success is espionage and luck. Once competitors get good enough at the spy game, ther is only luck left. One larger epidemic and your empire is on the decline. Modern science introduced a new factor in all of this. New inventions and mass production were the way to go but for that you need the populations to have more liberties and some money to spend. France could never let go of classic Roman ways, despite all the talk of liberty and fraternity and equality. Britain had the most fake enlightenment and used its spy networks to meddle internationally in the enlightenment circles. In old times, leadership was simple to understand and could not be questioned. Later leadership was intentionally disguised as extremely complicated and fluctuating. Now citizens could finally complain about everything while understanding nothing. Britain’s enlightenment was not decline but imperial progress. It is a silly idea of modern fascists to return to the old, obsolete model of running an empire.
Modern fascism obviously incorporates industry players, preferably conglomerates like we observed with the Nazis. The resulting problems centered on ideological leadership over specialized industries.
Heads of engineering wanted to please the “Führer” by entertaining his ever-evolving incompetent ideas of what tanks to develop, leading to absurd designs that failed on the battlefield. A modern assault rifle with an intermediate caliber was introduced too late. Submarines were long neglected. Ammunition production was not significantly improved over the WWI era.
The focus on ideology also made it difficult to distinguish between friends and enemies. American industrialists from Ford, GM, Standard Oil and other corporations initially sought a deeper connection to the Nazis, but then cut ties and became integral to the US war production. Henry Ford had mass published the fake Protocols of Zion and other additional texts. The Nazi leadership firmly expected the US to stay out of European affairs.
The other massive failure was the Nazi relationship with British aristocracy: Welfs, Wettins and Reginars have a history that is sometimes 1200 years old. A significant part of that history was spent on smaller German territories. Germany has almost never been a real, unified empire. Smaller kingdoms and principalities in some cases became conglomerates (especially Welfs, Wettins and Reginars), some were always enemies. When a Welf from Hannover became King George I. of the British Empire, the aristocratic triple cluster really took off while cultivating their older presence on German soil. We now know from historical studies like Louis Kilzer’s “Churchill’s Deception” that a massive operation had been conducted to feign sympathies towards the Nazis. This operation was preceded by a multi-decade ploy that focused on traditional conspiracy mythology. The British/German high nobility had recruited and controlled the Rothschild banking family as part of a wider pseudo-private system of merchant banks, while at the same time promoting silly fairy tales like Nathan Rothschilds scamming the British stock market after the Battle of Waterloo.
Even today’s fascists have not evolved one bit and they are proud of that. Not a single new idea has been presented, not one iota of real self-awareness or the ability to challenge their own way of thinking.
Read any modern rightwing author and what you get is warmed-over Julius Evola who himself had copied older ideas. Read Alexander Dugin and you get Evola. Read any Dugin follower and you get Evola. Read the manifesto of Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivil and you get Evola.
History books are filled with the stories of failed empires and societies who could not and would not evolve. African forces wanted to believe in their ancient magic to defend against modern invaders with guns.
The real reason the Roman Empire failed was not decadence, or Jews, or a lack of Roman-ness. It was the Roman ways that led to the end of Rome. Because all these ancient systems had the same weaknesses. Russia today bills itself as the “3rd Rome” which basically means the third (actually more like the 100th) attempt. If dysfunction isn’t allowed to be questioned and changed, the population will respond with dysfunction and reducing effort. More threats and more high-tech and low-tech surveillance can enforce more productivity but eventually the population will lose its will to live.
