A leftist analysis of the failure to implement authentic transnational fascism.
Read the whole thing; here I examine excerpts and summarize my thoughts on the matter. To start with – the author.
Abstract
To better understand cross-border fascist solidarity, this article suggests a new conceptual framework revolving around the term ‘pan-fascism’ and its ‘paradox’. It argues that the existence or non-existence of a pan-fascist ‘paradox’ in the minds of historical fascists is a matter of optics, as it all depends on who is mobilizing the notion of fascist transnationalism.
It is always easy to identify pseudo-intellectual leftist pablum by reading such phrases as “mobilizing the notion of fascist transnationalism.” And now we have “unpacked” -
Because of such optical issues, which all must be unpacked historically...
…the conceptual framework of ‘pan-fascism’ does not offer a simple solution. It, rather, puts emphasis on a key question: how did certain fascists, at various moments in their lives, think about the possibility of fascist transnationalism? To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, this paper takes the work, thought, and practices of the French editors of Je suis partout as a case study, and demonstrates how they attempted to reconcile their commitment to French nationalism with fascist transnationalism.
If we overcome the Culture Retarding petty nationalism promoted by some on the Far Right, then there would be no need to “reconcile” national and transnational fascism.
Although these editors at JSP publicly engaged in collaboration with foreign fascist movements from mid-1936 onward, they never renounced their commitment to French nationalism. This, then, raises a thought-provoking question that transcends the particularities of these French fascists and their unique contexts: how do nationalist-minded fascists think transnationally?
The people best suited to answer that question are actual fascists, not snide leftists writing superficial analyses that use obfuscating language to hide the lack of intellectual heft.
This article sets out to answer this question. The first section examines the historiography on transnational fascism and argues that the current theoretical framework for understanding cross-border collaboration and interaction between fascists is limited. It, thereafter, demonstrates that cross-border connections between fascists can best be examined from the conceptual framework of ‘pan-fascism’. Pan-fascism, as defined in this paper, contains the capacity of a very distinct way of understanding fascism, seeing that it seems to bear a paradox within its own name: how does transnational fascism comport with nationalist and imperialist aspects inherent to many fascist ideologies?2 It is this friction which makes ‘pan-fascism’ inherently unstable.
Putting aside the irritating leftist jargon, the core point here is the assumption that a paradox exists because fascism is inherently hostile to the other, with self and other defined in strictly ethnic and national terms; therefore, any type of transnational ”pan-fascism” is “inherently unstable.” This fallacy – or is leftist wishful thinking – will be exposed by my critique and comments below. At this point, we can understand that is petty nationalist/ethnonationalist versions of fascism that results in the stereotype underlining the assumption leading to the “paradox.” It should come as no surprise that the name “Yockey” does not appear, not even once, in this leftist screed. After all, a certain agenda must be promoted and, hence, source material must be cherry picked to fit that agenda. The agenda is, of course, to delegitimize transnational fascism, and, by extension, pan-European racial nationalism, and promote division within the international Far Right. That the Left finds willing accomplices for this agenda among certain denizens of the Far Right supports the Yockey’s contention that petty nationalist Culture Retarders are, essentially, traitors to Europe and to the West.
The word ‘paradox’, here, helps to underscore that there is a tension between the desire to create a community of fascist nations, or perhaps even a supranational fascist community, and the seeming impossibility of achieving this.3 This goes beyond the question of how one could create an international movement out of national movements, as there are a multitude of examples from the eighteenth century onward where nationalism was not primarily organized around defeating other nationalisms, but where nationalist movements aimed to dismantle—for instance—absolute monarchies, and dynastic state formations. Buried in there was also a latent possibility for conflict, but ‘ideologically’ these forms of nationalism were mostly structured around a common enemy. A great deal of ‘fascist’ ideologues in the first half of the twentieth century, however, primarily structured their thinking about ‘nationalism’ around defeating other nationalisms, rather than implying that national movements in different countries could happily exist besides one another.
That’s the sort of petty nationalist ethnonationalist that treasonous filth like the Counter-Currents crew promotes.
Apart from a conceptual friction in the term ‘pan-fascism’, the existence or non-existence of a pan-fascist ‘paradox’ in the minds of historical fascists is clearly a matter of optics, as it all depends on who is mobilizing the notion of fascist transnationalism; as well as on their reasons for doing so. Because of such optical issues, which must all be unpacked historically, the conceptual framework of ‘pan-fascism’ does not offer simple solutions. Rather it puts emphasis upon several key questions: how did certain fascists, at various moments in their lives, think about the possibility of cross-border fascist solidarity? Why did they—or: why did they not—believe that fascist transnationalism was intrinsically paradoxical, and how did this affect them, their thinking, and their actions? This framework, in other words, offers a distinct perspective to analyze how fascists mediated the relationship between nationalism and transnationalism.
The preceding paragraph is essentially meaningless nonsense. It has no explanatory power nor does it point to any direction leading to such power.
The second section of this paper employs this conceptual framework in a very practical sense. It takes the work, thought, and practices of the French editors of JSP as a case study, and demonstrates how they attempted to reconcile their commitment to French nationalism with fascist transnationalism.
I’ll look at what this buffoon has to say about that, see below. Essentially, the French were hoodwinked by the Germans, but the delusional French were complicit in their own hoodwinking.
The third section of this article argues that one should consider ‘pan-fascist romanticism’ to understand how individual fascists thought transnationally. By zeroing in on the relationship between these French editors and foreign fascists, it illustrates that most instances of ‘fascist transnationalism’ were driven by distinct ‘romantic’ narratives.
I’m sure I will not like any of that nonsense.
Practically, this means that the ‘myths’ are altered to cater to a different ‘in-group’. These narratives could be grounded upon antisemitism, pan-Europeanism, various forms of transnational racialism (such as Aryanism or white supremacism), anti-Bolshevism, anti-capitalism, or a complicated combination and overlapping of these and other ideas.
Note – “myths.”
This third section also examines cases of interaction between the editors of JSP and various representatives of the German National Socialist regime in the 1930s.
This emphasis on “the German National Socialist regime in the 1930s” mirrors the “movement’s obsession with that regime. Given what we will learn here (see below), which is generally supportive of the known historical narrative of the Germans being selfishly focused on narrow ethnic – or at nest, pan-Germanic or subracial – interests, this obsession has been unfortunate and feeds into the “movement’s” Nordicism and culture-retarding ethnonationalism.
The fourth section of this paper demonstrates that the narratives of ‘pan-fascist romanticism’ could be employed to achieve contradicting goals. Whereas they could stimulate and facilitate interaction and collaboration between fascists, they could also be used to manipulate foreign fascist peoples, movements, and regimes. Certain representatives of the Nazi regime, for instance, fed into a specific narrative of cross-border fascist collaboration, as a vehicle to further their own ultra-nationalist, imperialist, goals. Some of these representatives saw ‘pan-fascist romanticism’ as a form of camouflage, which could be employed to—temporarily—conceal Nazi Germany’s drive for geographical expansion and physical struggle.9 Through the continuing assertion and dissemination of ‘pan-fascist romanticism’ in their communication with French fascists, these individuals hoped to implant ‘pan-fascist illusions’ in the minds of France’s ultra-right, and aimed to further ‘obscure’ something which these Nazis regarded as the irreconcilable paradox of fascist transnationalism.
This is important and exposes one reason why the “movement’s obsession with the Nazi experience is so destructive. Rather than being authentic “pan-Aryan” fascists, with an interest in the well-being of all Europeans, the Nazis had a “drive for geographical expansion and physical struggle” against other Europeans, and faked an interest in transnational fascism. Indeed, it was only after the disaster of Stalingrad that the more pan-European elements of the SS dominated over the more strictly Nordicist faction and it is questionable how sincere even that pan-European faction really was. Did they have an authentic attachment to the pan-European ideal, or was it a desperate expediency to mobilize anti-Bolshevik Europeans to “buy into” German war aims?
And here is another important point. Is it possible that the “movement” learned from the Nazis too well? Just as the German Nationalists used transnational fascism as a camouflage to mask their narrow national imperialist agenda, and thus hoodwinked foreign fascists into accepting Germanocentric agendas under the guise of “unity,” so do modern White nationalists who are really Nordicist hoodwink Southern and Eastern Europeans to follow an agenda that exclusively serves Northwest European interests, with those narrow interests camouflaged behind a mask of “White unity.” Thus, exposing the Nazi scam may assist in exposing the modern one, and pointing sincere pan-Europeanists away from the modern scam and toward an authentically pan-European movement.
The goal of this article, ultimately, lies beyond discussing the particularities of its case study.10 It demonstrates that approaching case studies from the perspective of ‘pan-fascism’ and its ‘paradox’ can make sense of the ideological flexibility found in the work, thinking, and practices of historical agents involved in fascist connections and collaboration across borders. It might stimulate scholars to turn, or stay, away from one-dimensional approaches to fascist transnationalism. And instead of trying to replace these inflexible perspectives with a new, global, or more complicated theory of fascist transnationalism, this paper—again—points towards ‘the pan-fascist paradox’. It does so for one reason in particular: fascism as a clearly defined body of ideas does simply not exist.
That last part is really a stretch. Fascism may be protean but there is always a core present. Whether one wants to deny that core id “a clearly defined body of ideas” depends upon one’s “optics” – to borrow the phraseology of this author.
The Heterogeneity of Fascist Transnationalism
Fascist politicians and intellectuals have often been depicted as ideologues who espoused extreme nationalism, condemned cross-border collaboration, and preached cultural parochialism.12 As a result, many scholars have approached fascism from a ‘national’ lens, and investigated their historical subjects in the context of national histories. Scholars of ‘international fascism’, in contrast, predominantly aimed to discern characteristics to differentiate between fascist ideologies and movements in time and space. Rather than examining fascist parties and practices in their unique historical contexts, they focused on constructing abstract typologies.13 A recent strand of research on ‘transnational fascism’, however, foregrounds cross-border cooperation and intellectual exchange between fascists. Certain scholars affiliated with this emerging school of thought have started emphasizing the pan-European elements of fascism, to challenge the conception that right-wing movements were purely driven by nationalism.14
Those “certain scholars” are on the right track, at least for fascisms other than the German variety.
One example of this is Arnd Bauerkämper’s article ‘Ambiguities of Transnationalism’ (2007) in which he effectively employed the idea of pan-Europeanism to emphasize the vital role of cross-border exchange and collaboration between European fascists.15 Recently, Bauerkämper published a collection of thirteen essays on the same topic with Grzegorz Rossollinski-Liebe, entitled Fascism without Borders (2017). The editors argued against the idea that fascism is inseparable from nationalism. Instead, they focused on ‘transnational connections and cooperation between movements and regimes in Europe’ and urged scholars to recognize the pan-European aspects of fascism.16 But while setting out to show that fascism transcended borders, the underlying thought that connected all the contributions in this collection was that a small group of right-wing politicians and intellectuals, to a certain extent, had substituted national borders with European borders. Rather than truly dismantling the logic of ‘thinking in borders’, and the nationalist sentiments underlying fascism, they simply displaced them.
So? Leftists are offended that the fascist ingroup is limited to Europeans and does not include their favored Colored populations of African and Asian racial descent? I realize that leftist academics become hysterical over borders and any exclusion, but an ideology based in part on “ultra-nationalism” needs to define some sort of “nation” – be it ethnic or racial. A “nation” encompassing all of humanity loses any substantive meaning.
Studies that approach fascism from this pan-European fascist paradigm are particularly effective in elucidating the limitations of ‘national’ approaches to fascism. When trying to analyze the transnational dimensions of fascism, however, this perspective is limited in its own right, as it heavily relies on one particular possibility of transnationalism: pan-Europeanism.
Again, so?
Firstly, this notion of pan-Europeanism deals awkwardly with fascism outside Europe or collaborations between ‘European’ and ‘non-European’ fascists. One thing that comes to mind is South African right-wing nationalism in the 1930s. Whereas many members of the Ossewabrandwag felt closely related to the Netherlands and Belgium as their Stamlande [‘root-countries’], some of them supported the Nazis in their occupation of these countries, as they felt that it was a necessary step to defeat the British and dismantle their empire. Other examples are how the leaders of the Chinese government in Nanjing had become particularly enchanted by Italian and German fascism, or how a group of predominantly white and Dutch settlers in the Dutch East-Indies wanted to establish an Indonesian ‘fatherland’ independently from the Netherlands; for which they employed anti-Dutch and anti-European fascist language and attempted to mobilize native nationalism among the population of Indonesia. To examine such complicated cases of fascist transnationalism, the prism of pan-Europeanism falls short.
It doesn’t “fall short,” you mendacious retard, if you realize that “pan-European” includes Europeans in the Diaspora, and not only in Europe itself. If that excludes your precious Chinese, then that is just too bad (HBDers weep).
Of course, no author seems to defend the position that fascist transnational solidarity was exclusively about European categories…
Why do non-fascist (typically leftist) academics feel the need to “defend the position” of fascists? Isn’t that the obligation of fascists themselves?
This is insufficient, as it perpetuates Eurocentrism…
Do you need any more evidence of the biases of this author? If academics objectively study the reality that White fascists are concerned with White people, then acknowledging that reality is perpetuating “Eurocentrism.” On the one hand, it is a good thing that anti-fascist academics are so deluded, but it does make much of their work more or less useless for our purposes.
Secondly, the pan-European paradigm sheds a very narrow light on the thought and work of fascists—both outside and within the presupposed borders of Europe—because it primarily fixates on the extent to which these fascists dreamt about (the rebirth of) a ‘Europe’ for the ‘Europeans’. It does not give much room to recognize that the thought and work of most fascists was only abstractly related to this pan-European perspective, that pan-European language was often employed to convey disparate meanings, and that most fascists evoked more complicated possibilities of transnationalism.18
A mostly meaningless paragraph, the only agenda of which is to be anti-“Eurocentric.”
There was a seemingly paradoxical relationship between France and Nazi Germany in Cousteau’s analysis of the contemporary political situation, as Hitler was regarded both as a threat to France, as well as its savior…What needs to be made clear, here, is that the JSP editors were not primarily driven by Germanophilia. They did not choose Germany’s nationalism over France’s. Instead, they regarded German officials as natural allies in their struggle against the Third Republic and the French government, while remaining loyal to a mythical image of France.
Mythical?
In contrast to Cousteau, Brasillach—who functioned as JSP’s editor-in-chief from June 1937 onward—was skeptical about collaboration between France’s ultra-right and the German National Socialists.30 Brasillach openly affiliated himself with fascism, but with ‘Latin fascism’ in particular.
Blasphemy!
While being particularly fond of Spanish fascism, he had also praised Benito Mussolini for being a Latin poet, and he recognized ‘the Latin fascist traditions’ in the Belgian politics of the French-speaking Léon Degrelle.31 Brasillach asserted that France, historically, had always been the primary guardian of the ‘Latin culture’.
Durocher weeps.
German fascism, however, was inherently different. Brasillach wrote in the early 1930s that he was worried about Hitler’s ‘primary racism’, that he regarded Hitler’s speeches as the work of ‘a sort of enraged teacher’, and that he believed that Nazi Germany was the greatest political threat to France.32
Blasphemy!
Brasillach still asserted that the German National Socialism could function as a model for French fascism. He admired the fascist aesthetics of Nazi Germany, as well as the ‘social’ impact of National Socialism. In the Third Reich, according to Brasillach, people were energetic and joyful. There, people had a sense of sacrifice and honour. He wanted to reproduce this in France. But, to succeed, ‘the French must find their poetry, their myths, their French images, as well as confidence in themselves and in a national ideal’. He concluded that ‘we can make it ours, not by a useless copy or imitation but by a more developed knowledge of who we are’.37
That seems reasonable to me.
Brasillach’s early engagement with fascism was primarily intellectual, seeing that his journalism and writings mostly discussed aesthetics and racism, without putting forward a political, social, or economic program. His dreams and hopes, however, were of a political nature. He wanted France to arise ‘Phoenix-like’ from the political and cultural decadence of its time, but rather than pushing for this to happen, he believed that it would be the result of spontaneous combustion.
Passiveness never accomplishes anything.
Brasillach believed that the existence of a uniquely French fascism, grounded in French culture, would be enough to spark a fascist revolution. The fact that it did not, made him increasingly more disillusioned.
He should have blamed himself. You need to work for change. The greater the change, the more work and effort required. Nothing comes easy, least of all, a new society.
It made Brasillach’s later work—from mid-1938—more dismissive about France’s culture and people.
Projection.
It, at the same time, prompted his thinking about foreign fascist movements to become progressively heroic and romantic; as many foreign peoples, in contrast to the French, had brought about profound social and national revolutions.
And their leaders worked to make it happen; they did not assume it would occur automatically.
To instigate a French fascist revolution, some editors at JSP even considered asking the Nazis, once the exotic other, for military assistance. Rebatet, at one point, publicly invited Hitler to invade France.
Madness.
While diagnosing the decline and decay of France on countless fronts, these JSP editors prophesied that fascism could bring about a spiritual and cultural renewal. Fascism, for them, was the antidote to the decadency of democracy, capitalism, liberalism, and Marxism. According to them, a fascist revolution would—undoubtedly—lead to the cultural, spiritual, and national rebirth of France. They found proof of this in other countries, such as Nazi Germany. Although Brasillach, throughout the 1930s, kept regarding Nazi Germany as the ‘other’, due to the ‘foreign’ content of its national symbols and myths, the JSP editors consistently presented this country as a magical and safe place, untouched by the corruption of democracy, Judaism, capitalism, liberalism, and Marxism. It was depicted as a place where the Jews and Bolshevists could not impose their decadent ways. Germany, in other words, was sculptured into a purer mirror of an impure France.
More Germany worship from the Far Right. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
While agreeing on the goal, the editors of JSP employed different strategies to spark a fascist revolution: Cousteau warned the French people that they had to eliminate the ‘internal enemies’ and overthrow the French government themselves, in order to prevent Nazi Germany from invading France to eradicate the Judeo-Bolshevists. Brasillach, in contrast, asserted in his early work that intellectual engagement with a uniquely French fascism, grounded in French culture, would be enough to trigger a French revolution.
Cousteau was right.
Before thinking about the specific relationship between these French fascist editors at JSP and the German National Socialists, one must first recognize that the Nazis themselves were quite hesitant to export their ideology abroad. Hitler himself strongly doubted that exporting National Socialism would be possible, because he regarded it as an exclusively German phenomenon.
The man was an idiot, despite whatever other virtues he had. National Socialism as an ideology can be applied to virtually any ethny, at least in theory. It is a form of fascism that stresses biological race, in the form of a collectivist people’s community in which biological-genetic-racial-eugenic principles and interests are paramount. Now,the particular German manifestation of this ideology was “an exclusively German phenomenon” but not the ideology itself. It is like saying that communism was specifically Russian (or, more properly, Jewish).
He, however, also believed it to be counterproductive, as it ‘would only lead to a strengthening of nationalism in other countries’, which ‘leads to a weakening of Germany’s position’ on the world stage.
There you go, the self-centered petty nationalist culture retarding ethnonationalist par excellence. And how did that work out for Germany? In actuality, Germany’s long term stability and well-being would have been optimized as part of a strong and secure Europe in which all peoples enjoyed the protection of fascistic and national socialist principles. By attempting to selfishly grasp too much, Hitler and the Nazis lost all. It is analogous to a billionaire who destabilizes his host society by greedily trying to get more and more money of low marginal value, instead of protecting his already sufficient wealth by supporting a stable society to live in.
Hitler, therefore, was glad that the Nazi parties in other countries had ‘not produced leaders of his own calibre’, who were often ‘mere copyists’ without ‘original or new ideas’. As ‘they only imitated us and our methods slavishly’, he believed that they ‘would never amount to anything’.44
Wonderful. Some pro-White leader he was.
The primary issue here, for Hitler, was ‘belatedness’. Much of Hitler’s contempt for foreign fascist movements seems to come from the fact that they come late, making them inevitably minions and imitators. For this reason, Hitler did not expect much from most foreign fascists: ‘in every country you have to start from different premises and change your methods accordingly’.45
So? One could adopt basic principles to each people’s particular traits.
This, however, did not stop the Nazis from interacting with foreign fascists, nor from spreading ‘pan-fascist romanticism’. Already on 16 November 1933, Hitler proclaimed in an interview with the French journalist Fernand de Brinon that he wanted to start conversations ‘between the good French and the good Germans, between the good Poles and the good Germans, and between 100 % English people and 100 % German ones’. He asserted that cross-border collaboration between all ‘superior human races’—such as the ‘Aryan’ French and German races—could lead to a strengthening of the social, cultural, and political position of these peoples in their respective countries.46 People of ‘mixed race’ and ‘internationalists’, in contrast, had to be kept outside of these conversations.
Truth or lies?
This Nazi narrative of pan-fascist romanticism, drenched in transnational racialism, was fundamentally at odds with the core message of most of Hitler’s German-language speeches and writings, which was shamelessly German-nationalist. Hitler, for instance, consistently depicted the French as irredeemable since they had gone too far in their degenerative process of ‘Vernegerung’ [‘negrification’]. In his German speeches and writings, the Führer consistently repeated throughout the 1930s that the inferior status of the French people and race posed a lurking danger to ‘white humanity’ and ‘the white race’.47
So, the previous comments were lies. One could imagine his attitude toward Italians. Well, there's a passage in Mein Kampf about Southern Italy that makes the disdain clesr.
For the translation-process of Mein Kampf…This narrative, obviously, contrasted greatly from what Hitler wrote and said to his German audience. There, Hitler continued to argue that France as a country should be perceived as ‘a sin against the existence of white humanity’… Mein Kampf’s original narrative of German-nationalist, fascist, romanticism was thus substituted by a narrative of non-national, racialized transnationalism. Hitler’s book was profoundly altered to lead a second life as a carrier of pan-fascist romanticism.
So the Nazis were lying to non-Germanic Europeans about Nazi attitudes toward intra-European ethnoracial differences, camouflaging the real Germanocentric racial contempt with a false mask of transnational fascism. This is similar to how the “movement” lies to White ethnics, pretending to believe in “White unity” while in actuality the real attitude is contempt for White ethnics.
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Nazi propaganda originally aimed to cultivate and establish amicable relations with French ministers and diplomats. Until early 1936, the Nazis kept close ties with various French officials.56 To help these negotiations, and to further their cause, the Nazis deemed it advisable to deemphasize the ideological and political significance of Hitler’s blatantly anti-French statements in Mein Kampf.
More fundamental dishonesty.
Seduction, Deception, and Self-Delusion
That sounds like the relationship of the “movement” with White ethnics.
The relationship and interaction between certain members of the Nazi regime and the editors of JSP, however, cannot be fully explained by noting that these French fascists were solely passive recipients of ‘Nazi’ narratives of pan-fascist romanticism. The story, of course, was a whole lot more complicated. In the thought of a handful of Nazi officials including Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels, there was a certainly a strong belief that the nationalist and transnationalist dimensions of fascism were irreconcilable, or, in other words, that transnational fascism was intrinsically paradoxical. So, in their minds there was not really so much a ‘paradox’ as, rather, the recognition of a pattern of delusion on the side of the other fascist peoples and movements that they wished to exploit.
That shows how absolutely despicable the Nazis were with respect to their relations with non-Germanic peoples, and is akin to how today’s “movement” treat White ethnics.
Consider what non-German fascists tried to do.
The conference was not able to bridge the gulf between those participants who proposed achieving national integration by a corporative socio-economic policy and those who favored an appeal to race.[9] Pretensions to "universal fascism" could not survive this rift, and the movement did not meet its goal of acting as a counterbalance to international communism.
If true, that analysis suggests that one reason for the failure of inter-war transnational fascism was ideological, not any “instability” due to the “paradox” of “ultra-nationalists” trying to engage across national identities. Also, the German resistance to transnational fascist cooperation and Mussolini’s capture as a vassal of Germany (another hoodwinked fascist) meant that such conference were no longer being promoted by an established fascist state.
Back to the original essay:
Because they were convinced that they saw through the paradox of transnational fascism, and believed they understood where German interests really lay, they attempted to manipulate foreign fascist peoples and movements by feeding into the narrative of ‘pan-fascist collaboration’, and feeding into the ‘delusion’ through a continuing assertion and dissemination of pan-fascist romanticism. This, for them, served the purpose of implanting ‘pan-fascist illusions’ in the minds of foreign fascists to further obscure, what they regarded as, the paradoxical nature of transnational fascism.
The paradox was not inherent, it was due to the petty nationalist tendencies of ethnonationalist filth.
There was, however, a lot of conflict among Nazi officials regarding the desired treatment of France. Himmler and Goebbels were especially hostile to the idea of collaborating with France’s ultra-right, and Hitler was initially hesitant as well.
Surprise!
When looking at the position of the French fascists working at JSP, one should not forget that they had actively sought out rapprochement with the Nazis themselves. They did so for a couple of reasons. The JSP editors had been extremely hostile to the French government from mid-1936 onward, which caused them to create two dissociated conceptions of France. In their minds, it was their mission to defeat France as a ‘political entity’ to save their ‘ideal’ and ‘mythical’ conception of France. From mid-1938 onward, however, they became profoundly frustrated after they believed that a uniquely French fascist revolution was postponed indefinitely due to the ‘weakness’ and ‘unmanliness’ of the French population. In addition to their racial disillusionment, they were jealous about supposedly successful ‘social’ and ‘national’ revolutions in other countries and hoped to learn—and to receive inspiration—from foreign fascists. At the same time, they understood their position as a relatively powerless minority group in France, which meant that their collaboration with the German regime and officials was grounded upon an asymmetrical power relationship…For the longest time, the JSP editors also kept explaining away anything that contradicted their ‘illusory’ convictions. Whenever Cousteau, for instance, was confronted with the anti-French sentiments from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, he asserted that these statements were simply outdated.
That is all perfectly consistent with the delusions White ethnics have with the “movement.” When confronted with ingoing “movement” Nordicism and disdain for Southern and Eastern Europeans, many ethnics try to convince themselves (and others) that it is “simply outdated” and doesn’t mean anything.
This logic, of course, was of a circular kind. To explain why they had omitted the anti-French passages in Ma Doctrine, the JSP editors referred to the Nazi’s pan-fascist narrative of the last years to illustrate and prove that Hitler had changed his attitude towards France and the French people, even though their Nazi-authorized publication, at the same time, propounded exactly the same pan-fascist narrative, and was produced and disseminated to re-assert it. Rather than regarding such examples of crooked logic as failed attempts to defend themselves against allegations from negative reviews, it seems to be emblematic of what the JSP editors themselves believed in from mid-1938 onward.
Sound familiar? I suppose I was guilty of doing the same in the past as well.
Reality be damned.
Indeed.
Conclusion…many fascists often incorporated countless combinations of contradictory elements into their thinking and constantly kept modifying their ideas, definitions, and principles throughout their careers. Seeing that tackling their self-defined problems was usually seen as a matter of life and death, many fascists, and this is, of course, particularly the case for ‘fascists’ who had not managed to secure the support of their ‘target groups’, and who had become disillusioned by the social, cultural, and political realities of their time, were also overly flexible in their choice of allies.
Too much flexibility makes you snap, as what has happened to many in the “movement” today.
How did certain individual fascists, at specific moments in their lives, think about the possibility of cross-border fascist solidarity? How did they mediate the relationship between nationalism and transnationalism; and how did these fascists—in other words—‘think transnationally’?
For example, if one does regard nationalism as a core element of fascism, then that logically seems to mean that transnational fascism is—at least partially—paradoxical.
Again, this describes the ethnonationalist error. True White nationalism – the fascism that makes sense today – has race as nation (what this author decries as “Eurocentric”) and can eliminate the “paradox."
The thought, work, and practices of fascists, however, almost never followed simple logical assumptions. Fascist thinking, instead, is all too often molded by resentment, fear, and shame…
Typical leftist ad hominem.
When doing so, one will easily find that many individual fascists do not regard nationalism as a core element of fascism; and, because of this, most of them will not regard transnational fascism as inherently paradoxical.
Yes.
…especially after 1945, it is apparent that distinguishable groups of fascists have substituted nationalism with racism.
That’s my whole point. So much for the “paradox?”
For many of them, ‘the white race’ …
Note the scare quotes. Leftist alert!
…has become the common denominator, which is inherently transnational. The claim to defend ‘white superiority’ ..
Liar. Who on the Far Right (apart perhaps Spencer) talks about “white superiority?”
The main takeaway from this paper on the usefulness of ‘pan-fascism’ for future historical studies on transnational fascism is that it all boils down to optics.
Nonsense.
As regards footnotes:
This paper maintains Roger Griffin’s definition of ultra-nationalism, namely that it is essentially xenophobic and is known to legitimize itself ‘through deeply mythicized narratives of past cultural or political periods of historical greatness or of old scores to settle against alleged enemies’. Cyprian P. Blamires, ed., World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2006), 452.
The definition is palingenetic ultra-nationalism, you mendacious leftist scum.
In 2020, Anson Rabinbach wrote that fascism should be understood as an ‘ethos or Gesinnung, a willingness to adhere to the general precepts of a worldview, which was vague and indistinct enough to embrace a variety of related perspectives’. Somewhat similarly, Sven Reichardt argued that one should think about fascism as seven distinctive ‘processes’, because ‘fascism as a movement, acting within a democratic system, should be understood as fundamentally different from a state carrying out a genocide in the exceptional situation of the Second World War’. Sven Reichardt, ‘Fascism’s Stages: Imperial Violence, Entanglement, and Processualization,’ History of Ideas 82, no. 1 (2021): 85–107; Anson Rabinbach, Staging the Third Reich: Essays in Cultural and Intellectual History, eds. Stefanos Geroulanos and Dagmar Herzog (London, etc.: Routledge, 2020), 121, 160, 174.
There’s some truth in that, given that flexible and protean nature of fascism, but shouldn’t be taken too far.
Some individual fascists at various moments in time, however, were primarily committed to the ‘pan-European’ idea. As Roger Griffin wrote: ‘certain strands of interwar fascism were actively concerned with resolving the decadence brought about by the status quo as a whole, not just in a particular nation, and thus thought of rebirth in pan-European or even Western terms’. Roger Griffin, ‘Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of the European New Order 1922–1992,’ in A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 132–181.
And that’s a good thing.
My bottom line – genuine pan-Europeanism eliminates the so-called “paradox” in fascist thought, and the “paradox” lingers on today because of the culture-retarding ethnonationalists who divide Whites and who proudly self-identify as petty nationalists (e.g., Greg Johnson).
