The Deep Roots of Fascism

What is the link between a tropical tourist beach where human remains sometimes emerge, a Bavarian beer hall, the winged symbol of Chile and a famous 19th-century demographer? The answer will require the help of historian Ishay Landa’s work. He identified a clear evolutionary and genealogical line that connects economic liberalism to fascism. According to his reconstruction, fascism emerged as the apprentice’s sorcerer in which the sorcerer of Goethe’s famous ballad is impersonated by fascism, coming to the rescue of a liberalism in crisis. In a reversal of the title of the ballad, liberalism is thus seen as an apprentice, unable to contain the democratic forces it unleashed in the world. At the basis of this process, Landa finds the 1848 split between economic and political liberalism. While the latter insisted on the imperative of widening the democratic principle, it is the former that opened the door to fascist sorcery, called in to cage the spirit of democracy threatening to flood the workshop of capital. Thanks to the instruments provided by historians such as Landa, Mosse and Hobsbawm, anthropologists of fascism and populism like Holmes, Pasieka and Cammelli, and the recent publication of Vincent Bevin’s book on the forgotten brutality of the Cold War, the paper will reflect on the nature of the fuel that feeds fascism’s toxic flame. Indeed, the various developments of this ideology appear to always share a common necessity of economic liberalism to remove (sometimes violently) threats to the capitalist organization of the world. Events such as Suharto's massacre in Indonesia, Operation Condor in Latin America and the Munich Beer Hall Putsch that tried to shift the Bavarian dictatorship further to the right years before Hitler’s ascension to power, will prove united by older principles than we are used to believing. Finally, the new xenophobic, localist, neo-Malthusian and eco-fascist tendencies that are becoming visible on the horizon of an incipient global ecosystem crisis prove the adaptability to present conditions of basic crypto-fascist principles that continue to re-emerge.