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FASCISM AND NATIONALSOCIALISM: Mussolini wrote the principle of work for the national good into the Italian Labor Charter which he promulgated in 1927. The ends of the Italian nation are “superior to those of the separate individuals which comprise it”. “Work in all its forms… is a social duty”. Production “has a single object, namely, the well-being of individuals and the development of national power.// Hitler said in 1928 that Germany was a people “torn into two parts”. Its nationalist part, which “comprises the layers of national intelligence”, is timid and impotent because it dare not face its defeat in the war. The great mass of the working class, on the other hand, which organized in the Marxian parties, “consciously rejects any promotion of national interests”. Yet it “comprises above all those elements of the nation without which a national resurrection is unthinkable and impossible”. The highest aim of the new movement is “the nationalization of the masses”, “the recovery of our national instinct of self-preservation”// The philosophical climate: irrationalism; To a policy of national expansion by war corresponded an «adventurer’s philosophy» deprived of rational calculation. Disciplin and heroism must replace rational purposes. It must be a philosophy of will and action.// Though an irrationalism of this sort had rarely any positive political or social implications, it had combined two tendencies that were at once logically opposed but emotionally compatible: a cult of the folk or the people or the nation, and a cult of the hero or the genius or the great man.// Schopenhauer saw behind both nature and human life the struggle of a blind force which he called “will”, an endless striving without purpose.// Schopenhauer pessimism was based upon a moral intuition of the vanity of human wishes in such a world, the littleness of human effort, and the hopelessness of human life. The liberation had to be achieved trough contemplation of beauty or religious asceticism. The artist and the saint master the will not controlling it but denying it. // The curious blending of irrationality and humanitarianism, of will and contemplation, was broken apart by Nietzsche: for if life and nature are truly irrational, irrationality ought to be affirmed morally as well as intellectually. Joyful acceptation of the striving . Values lies in struggle. Not pity and renunciation but affirmation of life and the will to power. All moral values must be “transvalued”// Philosophy and Hegelianism: Mussolini, thanks to Gentile, purported a theory of “the state” and of its supremacy and sanctity and all-inclusiveness. Its motto became “everything for the state, nothing outside the state”. “It is the state rather than the nation which creates and embodies this spiritual society. It is not the nation which generates the state; that is an antiquated naturalistic concept…. Rather it is the state which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity… Indeed, it is the state which, as the expression of a universal ethical will, creates the right to national independence”.// National socialism not only neglected or disclaimed Hegel but defended the thesis that the state was at most a means to defending the racial Volk and ought to be resisted if it failed to serve this purpose. In the minds of most Germans the word “state” meant the bureaucratic procedures of the Second Empire. The theory of the racial folk was far more in accord with the purposes of national socialism, with the national socialist conception of leadership, and with the totalitarian regime that national socialism instituted
RACIAL MYTH AND LEBENSRAUM: the racial myth: The idea of the Volk and the leader was supported by a general theory of race and of the relationship between race and culture, or more specifically by the myth of the Aryan or Nordic race and its place in the history of Western Civilization. The word “race”, may have originated with the Frenchman Gobinau at about the middle of the 19th century, who used it to support the claims of aristocracy against democracy. At the turn of the century a Germanized Englishman, Chamberlain, and his father-in-law Richard Wagner popularized the Aryan myth in Germany and made Germanism into a claim of national superiority// The basic postulates of the race theory were stated clearly though not very systematically in Mein Kampf: Social progress takes place by a struggle for survival in which the fittest are selected and the weak are exterminated. This struggle occurs within the race, thus giving rise to a natural elite. Hybridization are the cause of cultural, social and political decay. All high civilizations or important cultures are the creation of one race. In the culture-creating Aryan self-preservation is transmuted from egoism into care for the community// The race theory was elaborated by Alfred Rosenberg into a philosophy of history in Der Mythus des 20.Jahrhunderts (1930) which was the principal statement of national socialist ideology. All history, according to Rosenberg, must be rewritten and reinterpreted in terms of the struggle between races and their characteristic ideals, or more specifically as a struggle between Aryan or culture-creating race and all the lower breeds of mankind// The great need of 20th century is of a new reformation, a renewed belief in honor as the supreme virtue of the person, the family, the nation, and the race. Rosenberg’s pseudo-history was supported by a pseudo-philosophy which made all cultural achievements depend on race. All mental and moral faculties are “race-bound”. “Soul is race seen from within”. Every race is under an iron necessity to suppress what is foreign, because it does violence to the mental structure of the racial type.// The racial theory was developed by what purported to be “scientific” anthropology, especially under the direction of Hans Gunther, Professor of Social Anthropology at Jena. National socialists used race prejudice for ulterior purposes; they practiced what Thorstein Veblen called “applied psychiatry”.// The racial theory of nationalist policy: led to a general policy of encouraging increase of population, particularly of the supposed Aryan elements, by subsidizing marriage and large families. produced the eugenic legislation of 1933. produced the anti-Jewish legislation of 1935 and 1938. This legislation also purported to aim at increasing or maintaining purity of race// Racial theory and anti-Semitism seemed to help to solidify national socialism in at least two ways: It made possible to transmute a variety of hatreds and fears and resentments and class antagonism into the fear of a single tangible enemy. The racial theory supplied an excellent ideological support for the particular form of imperialism that Hitler’s policy contemplated, namely, expansion to the east and south at the expense of the Slavic peoples. It was only in this region that compact Jewish communities existed, and anti-Semitism coincided with the believe in the racial superiority of Germans to Poles, Czechs and Russian. The racial theory, which had often been allied to Pan-Germanism, could easily be used to foster the idea of a Germanic state in Central Europe surrounded by an expanding ring of non Germanic satellite states.// Lebensraum: Like the racial theory also it was not exclusively German. In fact it was a Swedish political scientist, Rudolf Kjellén of the University of Uppsala, who expanded the plan for a powerful Germany into a philosophy and gave it the name under which national socialism popularized it, Geopolitik. Its fundamentally sound scientific idea was that a realistic study of the history and growth of states must include such factors as physical environment, anthropology, sociology, and economics, as well as their constitutional organization and legal structure. // The national socialist version of Geopolitik was associated with the name of Haushofer. He made geopolitics into an effective organ of propaganda designed to make Germany “space-conscious.”
According to the definition of the subject formulated by the editors of Haushofer’s Zeitschrift für Geopolitlk, it was “the art of guiding practical politics” and “the geographic conscience of the state,” practical politics being in substance imperialist expansion.// The sentimental appeal was addressed to a long-standing German tendency to idealize the medieval empire, which existed “long before the American continent had been discovered,” and to the myth that all the cultural achievements of Central Europe were the work of German minorities. Hence the Germans were the “natural” leaders and rulers of this region. The supposedly scientific argument of geopolitics was a biological analogy. States are “organisms,” and so long as they live and retain their vigor they grow; when they cease to grow they die. The economic argument for imperialism was probably the most effective: by conquest foreign markets can be captured and prosperity insured.
NATIONALISM: A new style of politics: Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government.// The philosophy of the Enlightenment prevalent in Europe in the eighteenth century held that the universe was governed by a uniform law of Nature, that could be discovered by reason. It might be said that all men are born equal, that they have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or that men are under two sovereign masters, Pain and Pleasure, and that the best social arrangements are those which maximize pleasure and minimize pain. The state, on this philosophical view, is a collection of individuals who live together to secure their own welfare, and it is the duty of rulers so to rule as to bring about the greatest welfare for the inhabitants of their territory. This is the social pact which unites men together, and defines the rights and duties of rulers and subjects.// what was then meant by nation? Natio in ordinary speech originally meant a group of men belonging together by similarity of birth, larger than a family, but smaller than a clan or a people. Thus, one spoke of the Populus Romanus and not of the natio romanorum. The term applied particularly to a community of foreigners. Medieval universities were divided into ‘nations’: the University of Paris had four nations: l’honorable nation de France, la fidèle nation de Picardie, la vénérable nation de Normandie, and la constante nation de Germanie// In the years a nation became a body of people to whom a government is responsible through their legislature; any body of people associating together, and deciding on a scheme for their own government, form a nation, and if, on this definition, all the people of the world decided on a common government, they would form one nation. The French Revolution introduced a new style of politics in which the expression of will overrode treaties and compacts, dissolved allegiance, and, by mere declaration, made lawful any act whatever. By its very nature, this new style ran to extremes. It represented politics as a fight for principles, not the endless composition of claims in conflict.// self determination: Men, the revolutionaries asserted, possessed inalienable natural rights; society ought to be so arranged as to foster these rights; and the ancien régime was evil precisely because it violated them. To speak of natural rights, however, assumes the existence of an orderly universe, capable of rational explanation. In 19th century philosophers were tending to show that these things were obscure, uncertain, and incapable of rational proof. The mind is, in the beginning, a clean slate, on which, gradually, sensations leave their mark. If such is the nature of knowledge, how are we to assert that liberty, equality, and fraternity are the birthright of every individual? Are they not, at length, dissolving into a perplexing haze of opinion and sensations?// According to Kant, It was useless to seek to prove matters of morality by methods used for the understanding of nature. Morality had therefore to be separated from knowledge and experience. Only when the will of man is moved by an inward law can it really be free, and only then can there be talk of good and evil, of morality and justice. If virtue exists, it does not reside in an object, it does not consist in obedience to some external authority, or in the feeling of well-being which accompanies certain actions; virtue is the quality of the free will when it obeys the inward law.// Kant’s doctrine makes the individual, in a way never envisaged by the French revolutionaries or their intellectual precursors, the sovereign of the universe. In the eyes of this doctrine, he is not a mere element in the natural order, but, with the help of self-discovered, self-imposed norms, determines himself as a free and moral being. The existence of God becomes the guarantee of the moral perfection of man; God is an assumption which man makes in asserting his moral freedom. The inversion of the traditional order of thought, in which man was the creature of God, is complete.// state and individual : Fichte here argued that, just as an individual consciousness makes its own world, and nothing outside this consciousness can form part of this particular world, so the world as a whole, nature in all its variety and history in its past, present, and future, must necessarily be the product of a universal consciousness. According to Schelling, freedom is, even more emphatically than in Kant, an internal state, a determination of the will according to self-imposed commands. But individuals, as such, are phantoms; they gain reality in so far as they have a place in a whole. Consequently, the freedom of the individual, which is his self-realization, lies in identifying himself with the whole, belonging to which endows him with reality.// the excellence of diversity: The destiny of man is accomplished, and his freedom realized by absorption within the state, because only through the state does he attain coherence and acquire reality. Concept of struggle: for Kant evil was necessary in the passage from barbarity to civilization, from ignorance to knowledge. This change was effected only through struggle, violence, upheavals. So for Fichte war between states was that mechanism which introduces ‘a living and progressive principle into History’.// A nation becomes a natural division of the human race, endowed by God with its own character, which its citizens must, as a duty, preserve pure and inviolable.