Introduction
In the final
phase of the 2024 Presidential election in the United States of America,
various Democrats in politics and media reporters have pressed the idea that
the Republican candidate is a fascist. People my age know what fascism is in particular in light of what it
stood for and how it was implemented in Nazi Germany in 1920s-1945. I'm not so sure people in their 20s know this very well. Some may have a grasp of what it was in Italy
as well. A few of us will have lived
during Apartheid under the Nationalist government in South Africa and recall
how it was a milder but still very nasty version of German and Italian fascism. All of us today withdraw in horror that
fascism might be back in some form or another.
This essay provides an answer to the question, ‘What is fascism?’, and
one hopes that the reader will see that the charge of fascism against
Republicans today is merely a political ruse to garner votes by today’s
left-leaning and socialist Democrat Party. In this essay, I intend to define fascism, explain it in some historical detail, and return in the conclusion to the present, political accusation in the American election.
Defining Fascism
Fascism is a national
socialism grounded in eugenics. (I will define these terms below.) Like
Communism, it is a form of extreme socialism.
Both are also totalitarian and have proven to be brutal and
genocidal. Fascism derives its name from
‘fasci’, an Italian word for ‘bundles’
of sticks. The image is a metaphor for
social strength as opposed to individual strength—or, more accurately,
individual rights. The Italian origin of
the term draws attention to the fact that the origin of the ideology was in
Italy, with Benito Mussolini, following the First World War. The German form of fascism developed as
Nazism, initially termed ‘National Socialism’, under Adolf Hitler. It developed
in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the Second World War (1939-1945).
Eugenics
Fascists
advanced the notion of social Darwinism and racial hygiene politically. The state, they believed, could and needed to
help in the progressive evolution of the allegedly stronger race, dominate and enslave
inferior races, and eliminate any race that undermined this progress. While for Italian fascists, Ethiopians were
the population to dominate in their brutal imperial expansion in northeast
Africa, for Germans, the Jews were the race to eliminate in Europe.
The term ‘eugenics’
(‘good stock’) was introduced in 1883 by Francis Galton, a brilliant polymath
and half-cousin to Charles Darwin. He was
interested in studying of hereditary characteristics of humans in order to explore
the ‘practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains’. defined it as a system designed to advance for
‘the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing
speedily over the less suitable’. His studies led him to advocate ‘eugenic
marriages’.
In 1895, Alfred
Ploetz wrote Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene
(Racial Hygiene Basics),
introducing the language of ‘racial hygiene’. German eugenic practices were
systematically implemented in the German colony of South West Africa (Namibia),
with tens of thousands of Herero and Nama enslaved, incarcerated, brutalized,
and executed in a genocidal programme between 1904 and 1908. Eugenics featured in this brutality. The German doctor, Eugen Fischer, examined
traits (hair colour, skin colour, and skulls) of mixed-race individuals in
Rehoboth, South West Africa. He also conducted
painful experiments on Africans in the concentration camp, measuring skulls (many
being sent to Germany for further study), removing body parts, injecting them
with arsenic, opium, and other substances, and sterilizing women. With such ‘scientific’ studies as ‘proof’, Fischer
promoted racial purity and opposed intermarriage among races. Germany outlawed interracial marriage in its
colonies from 1912. (This was also a
lasting policy of the Nationalist government’s Apartheid policies in South
Africa.)
This concern for
racial health led to the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with
Hereditary Diseases. (The state’s control or heavy-handed
involvement in health is still defended in varying degrees in different
countries: national control of health insurance that funds abortion of children
with Downs Syndrome, transgender surgeries, euthanasia, government control of
the population during the Covid pandemic, etc.)
The Swiss psychiatrist, Ernst Rüdin, guided the writing of the 1933
law. He was the director of the Psychiatric
Research Institute of Munich and later, in 1935, the director of the German
Society of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1935.
This law permitted sterilization for:
1. congenital mental deficiency, 2. schizophrenia, 3.
manic-depression, 4. hereditary epilepsy, 5. hereditary St. Vitus dance
(Huntington’s chorea), 6. hereditary blindness, 7. hereditary deafness, 8.
serious hereditary physical deformity. [9] ... chronic alcoholism (paragraph
2).
The individual, a
legal representative, the state physician, or heads of hospitals, nursing
homes, and penal institutions could apply to the eugenics court for the
sterilization in these cases. The state
physician and police were required to proceed with the court’s decision of sterilization,
even against the individual’s will, and were allowed to use force (paragraph
12). The law was signed by Adolf Hitler,
Germany’s Nazi dictator. Its initial
purpose was to sterilize 50,000 Germans per year. In 1939, Hitler signed permission for a
programme that came to be called Aktion T4,
which lasted through 1945 (the end of World War II). T4 authorised
the killing of asylum inmates with mental or physical abnormalities.
The concern for
racial purity was particularly directed against the Jews in Europe’s political and
social turmoil after World War I. The
Nuremburg Laws of 1935 forbade sex and marriage between Jews and Germans and
employment of Jewish women under the age of 45 (the Law for the Protection of
German Blood and German Honour) and restricted citizenship to Germans and those
of related blood (the Reich Citizenship Law). Dr. Gerhard Wagner proposed
sterilization of the Jews. In a short
time, the Nazi regime adopted the ‘final solution’ policy of the Holocaust, the
genocide against the Jews. The work of
eugenicists went hand in hand with that of the Nazi’s military, paramilitary,
and police forces. Dr. Otmar von
Verschauer, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, and Dr.
Josef Mengele (the ‘butcher of Auschwitz) collaborated in the study of race,
and the latter experimented on, maimed, and killed prisoners in the Auschwitz
concentration camp. Mengele sent eyeballs,
heads, and blood samples to von Verschauer.
Dr. Sigmund Rascher performed his own experiments on prisoners at the
Daschau concentration camp. He would
expose prisoners to freezing temperatures and then try to revive them.
Adolf Hitler
makes his argument for national socialism in his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in
1925 and 1926. In his chapter on ‘People and Race’, his
argument begins with the assumed science of eugenics advocated by academics,
researchers, and institutes. Importantly,
his argument appeals to ‘Nature’ instead of Communism’s utopian ideals, even though
his national socialism is, in fact, a eugenically defined utopia, an Aryan
state.
First, he notes,
animals mate with their own species. Any
cross-breeding results in an inferior animal. Second, Nature allows struggle so that the
species improves, as the weaker specimens do not survive. If this did not happen, the worst would
outnumber the best. Moreover, Nature
opposes the mating of a higher with a lower race. Whereas Hitler initially had different
species in mind, his thoughts have by this time migrated to consideration of different
human races. This was part of the
eugenics research, as we have noted, from the beginning. He says that any mingling of the superior,
Aryan race with others results in the end or inferiority of the
civilization. The superior races’ level
of evolution is depressed; it retrogresses physically and intellectually. He rejects any idea that man or ideas can
conquer Nature. He attributes the
erroneous view, which he calls pacifist, to the Jews. Rather, everything admirable (‘science and
art, industry and invention) is the result of ‘a few peoples, and perhaps
originally of one race’. He says, ‘The great civilizations of the past
have all been destroyed simply because the originally creative race died out
through blood-poisoning.’ He realizes that Japan appears to be an
exception, but he claims what is Japanese is only the outward dress of European
scientific and technological achievement.
Hitler takes a further step: the superior, Aryan race needed to use
lower races to advance; it required the subjugation of other races. This was also for the good of the conquered,
since the superior masters preserved and encouraged civilization.
National Socialism
To implement a
eugenics programme for society, the government needs to assume powers
associated with socialism. Just as
communism (extreme socialism) requires a strong, militaristic, centralized, one party, dictatorial,
and totalitarian government to implement its economic reforms, fascism (extreme nationalism) requires
the same for its goal of racial health. Ideology
of either sort justifies centralized power and the use of brutal force. Freedom of speech is rejected and replaced
with ideological propaganda. The government
uses military and police force to enforce its will on the people. Over against liberal democracy, government’s purpose is not held to be to defend the individual against the group, including the government, in
matters of speech, ideas, private property.
It is rather to implement policies of social reengineering. In the case of national socialism, these
policies are formed, allegedly, for the protection of the nation, and in a eugenic national
socialism, the state protects the superior race. In the case of the Nazis, this was the
so-called Aryan race.
Nationalism and
socialism arose in Europe as a rejection of monarchies by the population. With the American and French Revolutions in
hindsight, Europe experienced numerous revolutions in 1848-1849. The United States formed more of a federal republic made up of states, whereas in France a more nationalistic movement emerged. The United States developed as a nation under God whose rights were said to be God-given, whereas in France, rights were approved by the nation state. Nationalism identified the nation with the
state government, and so a nation might be made up of various ethnicities —as empires had been—but what held them together were their borders,
citizenship, language, culture, and laws. Initial rebellion by the people against the monarchies of Europe was in the
interest of greater freedom, better living conditions, economic improvements,
and so forth--concerns more associated with liberal democracy. Yet nationalism also developed as a means to assure these rights and meet these concerns.
Nationalism developed in various regions of Europe. Romanticism contributed to the rise of nationalism as people developed a love of the fatherland, a people's heritage, the land, and their language. A political motivation for nationalism was a natural response to a people's sense of domination by another country. German nationalism developed as a reaction to Napoleon's empirical reach throughout Europe, including German territories. Poland had Russia squeezing it to its east and Germany to its West. Italy's separate states, often under foreign control, felt the need to unify as a nation. A pan-Slavic movement also gained interest.
Toward the end
of the 1800s, German nationalism developed under the guidance of Otto von
Bismarck, who wanted to unite the various German kingdoms. This strengthened the ‘nation’ and tended
toward an ethnic and cultural national identity. The political effort toward this end required
a stronger, national government. An
alternative to such nationalism lay in the development of communism. While nationalism, socialism, and communism
emphasised a strong government to attain social engineering, communism envisioned this in terms of a Marxist, economic reform. German nationalism first took the form of social democracy. After the First World War, it took its next steps toward fascism. It moved step-by-step in the 1920s and 1930s toward a eugenic national socialism as Hitler rose to power.
In each aspect of this, it was fully opposed to Christianity, replacing
devotion to God with devotion to the state.
In his ‘People
and Race’ chapter in Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that the Aryan’s greatest
quality is not in intellect as such but in ‘his readiness to devote all his
abilities to the service of the community’. We have here the combined notions of a superior
race and its superior social qualities. Labour
for the community, even at the expense of one’s own happiness, is the first
step toward building a truly human culture.
The murderous concentration camps were presented as labour camps; over
the entrance to Auschwitz were the words, ‘Arbeit
Macht Frei’ (Labour Makes Free).
An even higher
ideal, Hitler claimed, is sacrificing one’s life for the community. This ideal is called Pfichterfellung, the performance of duty in service of the
community over against self-satisfaction.
While we might think that this is unnatural—is not self-preservation a
basic instinct?—Hitler relates this back to Nature. Nature ‘recognizes the primacy of power and
strength’. Applied to the evolution or development of a
great culture, the individual sacrifices his work and his life for the
community. The pacifist’s idealism—and he
has in mind particularly the Jews—is unnatural.
Hitler then enters on a lengthy tirade against the Jew as the opposite
of the Aryan in this chapter. Among his
many assertions, the Jew is accused of supporting Marxism. (It is true that Marxists attempts at
governing in European countries after World War I included a notable element of
Jews. Hitler was reflecting on recent political
turmoil in Europe that, in the minds of some, supported anti-Semitism.) One might note in Hitler’s argument, then,
that, while fascism claims to follow a naturalistic form of idealism (resulting
in ethnic nationalism), Marxism follows an unnatural (manmade) idealism
(resulting in an economic, international movement). His rant against the Jews included the fanciful
notion that there was a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.
Conclusion
The Republican
Party, and its presidential candidate, Donald Trump, are clearly not proponents
of national socialism, let alone a racially defined citizenship based on some
faulty science from over a century ago. America
is the land of immigrants, freedom, and—historically—devotion to God. The Republican Party is hardly fascist for
·
affirming a nation under God,
·
wanting law and order,
·
wanting legal and orderly
immigration,
·
protecting citizens’ rights
over non-citizens,
·
protecting individual rights
over group identities,
·
protecting the weak and
vulnerable (whether the unborn from abortion, the elderly and the sick from
euthanasia, and women in sports and locker rooms from confused or predatory
males),
·
protecting religious rights
over state authority, promoting small government and states’ rights from a big,
centralised government,
·
insisting that government is of
and by the people and serves the people rather than the people serving it,
·
understanding government’s
purpose as to protect freedom rather than control citizens,
·
believing that the courts must
not be used to impoverish or harass citizens but protect them,
·
wanting free speech,
·
breaking the back of state
funded education used to indoctrinate children,
·
undermining a media that
proliferates propaganda and supports a political party instead of reporting the
news,
·
valuing the family and its
independence from the state,
·
wanting a strong military for national
defense rather than for engagement in foreign wars, imperialism (fascist Italy),
or ethnic solidarity (fascist Germany),
·
wanting to strengthen the
nation’s economy—
All of these
policies (as policies or in their definitions) oppose socialist ideologies,
whether fascist or communist. Instead,
they reach back to the aims of America’s founding fathers and intend to protect
the Constitution and laws of the land.
As Christians, we have reasons to criticize the Republican Party of
today and its presidential candidate, but of one thing we can be sure: this is
not an anti-Christian, socialist political party, whether the eugenic, national
socialism of the fascists or, for that matter, of the atheistic, socialist
party that has emerged in the Democrat Party.
