[lbo-talk] My Ayn Randian, libertarian loving relatives aargh !

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Thu Jan 7 02:13:04 PST 2010


There are both traditionalist and revolutionary elements in Fascism. It was a revolution against democracy, and it appealed to traditional themes. (That those traditional themes are mostly invented traditions is not exceptional.) When Hitler tied the mark to 'the soil' he was making a pointed appeal to tradition. Party propaganda made much of the peasant back-bone of Germany (and the peasantry were an important electoral base) - but as Alfred Sohn-Rethel explains in his book on Fascism, at the same time as the government was pushing out propaganda about the independent farmer as backbone of the nation, they were in effect nationalising agricultural production.

Similarly, the evocations of family were important, though as Reimut Reiche pointed out, Nazi family policies took the state into private life, and made fecudnity a political celebration - which was in many ways a revolutionisation of personal relations.

Though the German nation was young as a political entity, German romanticism based on the common language and literature was much more entrenched, and the fantasy of the old Germany was a powerful element in Nazi propaganda, appealing as it did to people who experienced the turmoil of the 1920s as one of being uprooted.

The cult of the Fuehrer did contain an extreme kind of individualism, but it was a perverse expression of individualism, since only one individual expressed it, and even he appealed to a kind of fated destiny that must be fulfilled. The cult of the personality was a kind of sublimation of individualism, where the mass get to live their heroic life vicariously through the great leader, while they fulfil that basis by their own commitment to duty and obedience. That said, of course lots of people got to do lots of things that they would never have been allowed to do if the old niceties were still being observed. Invading Europe - at least west Europe - would have been exciting, though in the end it was a terrible trap.



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