Fascism's False Sacred Values

Fascism is a faulted creed which sets out to do away with divine religions and to replace them with pagan beliefs. And, it is to be expected that, if false, those values which it holds as sacred must also be false. For instance, the Nazis repeatedly used the slogan "Blut and Boden" (Blood and Soil), and made symbols out of both concepts. For instance, during Hitler's unsuccessful putsch in 1923, one of the swastika flags, wet from the blood of wounded Nazis, was turned into a sacred relic. Called "Blutfahne," (Blood Flag) it was conserved just as it was, and was the most sacred symbol at all Nazi ceremonies. Other, new flags were touched to it, so that it might transmit something of its own "sacred" quality.41

War and violence, two more fundamental elements of fascism, are pagan concepts that it attempts to portray as sacred values. In divine religions, the aim is to create a society and world free of violence and war, whereas under fascism, war is a virtue by itself. Fascism believes that a people gain honor and strength from the wars it wages and from its slain. Naturally, this belief leads to further wars and the shedding of more blood. Fascism continually prepares new atrocities and a river of bloodshed.

The Imaginary Enemies of the Fascist State

Fascism is a completely hollow ideology, and needs to be in a constant state of agitation in order to survive. The factor that most strengthens the fascist state in the eyes of its people is the myth of "internal and external enemies." All fascist states create imaginary enemies, and declare all out war on them. The dictatorship seeks to strengthen by repeated daily media coverage of glorious victories over the enemy. And this inspires the belief that, "in order to protect the people from these great dangers, it is necessary to be harsh and ruthless to the opposition." The fascist regime clings to power with the ever-prevalent idea of "us and them," and of imaginary enemies of the people. A justification is thus provided for the erosion of the force of law, violations of human rights, and state terrorism. Those who criticize fascism are automatically accused of cooperating with the imaginary enemy.

Hitler chose the Jews and communists, Mussolini the communists, and in our own time, fascists such as Saddam Hussein the United States, and Slobodan Milosevic the Muslims, as enemies, and all creating an artificial unity with this imagined threat. This fictitious danger is fascism's most important propaganda weapon, by which a grievous menace is said to exist, and the fascist leader is portrayed as a "hero" who will save his people from it. In this illusory scenario, the artificial enemy is always brought under attack, and the fascist leader heroically repels him and defends his people. That is why the people of Iraq are still so attached to Saddam Hussein, despite all his oppression. Saddam has expertly managed to use his own ruthlessness in the media to denounce other countries as enemies.

Fascist Paranoia

One of the most blatant features of the fascist state is its distrust of its own people, and the way by which it attempts to eliminate everybody it has doubts about through ruthless methods, even to the extent of murder. Nearly all fascist regimes institute "secret police" forces to keep their own populations under control and weed out the opposition. The infamous Gestapo is a proof of the scale of the torture and savagery that the paranoia of fascist regimes leads to. In his book The True Believer, Eric Hoffer describes the policy of fear implemented by the Nazis to keep the public under control.

The ran-and-file within the Nazi party were made to feel that they were continually under observation and were kept in a permanent state of uneasy conscience and fear. Fear of one's neighbors, one's friends and even one's relatives seems to be the rule within all mass movements. Now and then innocent people are deliberately accused and sacrificed in order to keep suspicion alive.42

Fascism believes that if people are left to their own devices they will both betray the regime and become decadent. The way to bring the people to heel is by the use of repression. The French philosopher George Sorel (1847-1922), one of the ideologues of fascism, and who was a particular influence on Mussolini, heads the list of those who believed in the idea. Sorel maintained that societies naturally became decadent and disordered. In his view, this decay had to be prevented by the use of force, through the establishment of a totalitarian order.

Fascist paranoia still continues today. It is this suspiciousness that lies behind Saddam Hussein's having his closest relatives killed on possibility of "betrayal." After ousting President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr in 1979, Saddam had more than half the Baath Party, of which he was a member, killed. The criteria for eliminating people were their intentions, he said, to avoid the harm they might cause the family in the future. His son Uday is in charge of the terror machine of liquidating the "traitors" in the family. Saddam's gang of assasins-all thugs, psycopaths and killers from his own clan-became the core of a special security apparatus that he moulded in 1960's on the Nazi SS style. It is known that Saddam showed them the video of the Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu's fall and execution reminding them that they could meet an end similar to that of the securitate if the regime was to fall.43

The Fascist Love of Violence

In a report titled "British in Africa Lack Killer Urge" published in The New York Times of June 24, 1942, James Aldridge describes the Nazi view of war and killing in these words:

The German commanders are scientists, who are continually experimenting with and improving the hard, mathematical formula of killing. They are trained as mathematicians, engineers and chemists facing complicated problems. There is no art in it, there is no imagination. War is pure physics to them. The German soldier is trained with a psychology of the daredevil track rider. He is a professional killer, with no distractions. He believes he is the toughest man on earth.44

This model of "professional killer" employed by the Nazis is a common feature of fascism. Fascists regard the use of force and violence as an end in itself. The influence of Darwinism plays a major role here. The Darwinist superstitions that human beings are nothing but developed animals, and that only the strong can survive, did away with the ethical values. Love and compassion were replaced by feelings of aggression, revenge and struggle, sentiments that were presented to people as a scientific necessity.

Fascists see conflict as a law of nature, and believe that peace, security and comfort impede the progress of mankind. Mussolini's words, when opening the Fascist Culture and Propaganda School in Milan in 1921, are an indication of this, where he identified action as the force that would lead fascism to victory.45

Acts of violence, destruction, assaults and fighting are what keep fascists' morale at a high level. These are the exact opposite of peace, brotherhood, peace and tranquility.

The ignorance of the fascists also plays a pivotal role in their tendency towards violence. That is why Hitler felt the need for fighters in his racist regime, not intellectuals.

The Nazis' acts of violence were carried to that end by specially formed organizations. The first of these, the SA (Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troopers) were formed in 1920, and in 1921 they took on a paramilitary quality. There were a great many street thugs in the ranks of the SA. The group was also known as the "Brown Shirts," and was led by Ernst Röhm, known for his psychopathic nature (and his homosexual tendencies). The SA carried out countless acts of terrorism throughout the 1920s in order to strengthen the Nazi Party. SA units carried out sudden attacks on opponents of the Nazis, spilt blood in street fights, and tortured those opponents they took as "prisoners of war." Hitler took pride in the violence of the SA. In Mein Kampf, he described one "successful" attack that was carried out on opponents of the Nazis:

When I entered the vestibule of the Hofbräuhaus [beer hall] at a quarter of eight, there could indeed be no doubt with regard to the existing intention. The room was overcrowded and had therefore been closed by the police... The small S.A. awaited me in the vestibule. I had the doors to the large hall closed and then ordered the forty-five or forty-six men to line up... My storm troopers - for so they were called from this day on - attacked. Like wolves they flung themselves in packs of eight or ten again and again on their enemies, and little by little actually begun to thrash them out of the hall. After only five minutes I hardly saw a one of them who was not covered with blood.46

The SA began to fall from grace when the Nazis came to power, and the star of the more professional SS (Schutzstaffel, or Guard Detachments), with their military discipline, began to rise. This corp wore black shirts. Young people were selected according to "racial criteria" for membership in the SS. They had to possess Aryan racial features. The Waffen-SS was the military wing of the SS. The Totenkopf, or Deaths Head, Division within the Waffen-SS was particularly renowned for its cruelty, and was brought in to man the concentration camps.

Similar camps had also been set up by Mussolini, and 18,000 of the 35,000 placed in these "extermination camps" were killed. There were a great many other deaths, murders, and unsolved killings throughout the fascist period in Italy. Mussolini admitted to the cruelty of fascism in one of his speeches: "Fascism is no longer liberation but tyranny, no longer the safeguard of the nation but the defense of private interests."47

It was also possible to see such examples of violence in Franco's Spain. Even at the very outset of the civil war, Franco's ruthless methods had attracted attention. For instance, in a small mountain village north of Madrid, 18 people were arrested for voting for the Popular Front. After questioning, 13 of these were taken out of the village by lorry and killed by the side of the road. When the fascists entered the small town of Loro del Rio with its population of 11,000 near Seville, they killed more than 300 people. Oppression took on a particularly violent form in the cities. To such an extent that the number of those killed is even today not known for certain.48 Franco had hundreds of thousands of his own people killed, even including the elderly, women and children. The words of a member of the anti-Franco resistance in June 1936 describes the situation:

Thousands of people have been tortured, women who refused to turn in their loved ones have been hung upside down, children have been shot, and the mothers who witnessed the torture of their children have gone mad…49

Franco dragged Spain into a terrible civil war. Brother fought against brother, and father against son. An average of 500 people died every day. Acts of violence, slaughter, mass torture, and killings went on without end. The Spanish Civil War left some 600,000 dead in its wake.

Hitler and Mussolini used Spain as a laboratory, a testing-ground for new troops and weapons.50 The most terrible example of this was a village that Franco presented to Hitler as a gift in return for his assistance. On the morning of May 5, 1937, the people of the village of Guernica were wiped out by the huge bomber planes manufactured by Nazi technology. Franco had left the little village as an experiment for Nazi planes.51

Selanjutnya