Fascism in a Religious Context
They would turn the masses over to big businesses run by a tiny elite that people do not vote for and who are not directly responsible to the people unless government regulation makes them responsible
FASCISM IN A RELIGIOUS CONTEXT
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
Fascism is hard to define. to make matters worse, fascists have gone underground: they deny that they are fascists. But of one thing we can be certain: despite their public praise of 'liberty' and 'democracy' and their identification with the economic interests of the masses, fascists are profoundly anti-democratic: they prefer that power be held in a few qualified hands - their hands, for they are, of course, most highly qualified to rule by nature or by nurture; that is, by birth or by culture.
Today many American fascists often insist that they are culturalists rather than racists, that their culture is superior and should be the model for the rest of society to imitate. However, when we examine their superior culture, we find it dominated by Caucasians of northern European or "barbarian" descent. Furthermore, many modern fascists profess an atheistic protestantism whose god is nowhere to be found on Earth. Hence to understand fascist culture, we must inquire into its religious content whether fascists on the whole are atheists or not.
European fascists revolted against the dismal failure of materialistic capitalism and liberalism. It was in effect more than a mere protest: it was a spiritual revolt with material consequences. But the Protestant Reformation was more than a religious protest: it was a revolt. Nonetheless, at least according to its spiritual founders, the political authority, no matter how unjust it might be, is not to be revolted against.
For instance, Luther advocated the feudal theory of a "just" war; his theory bars revolution against even the most vicious and depraved princes, for whom the population have a feudal duty to wage war - against Catholic princes. Hence Luther wrote his notorious letter advising the protestant princes to "stab and kill" the communistic peasants who flew the Rainbow Banner and who wanted a Kingdom of God of on Earth - here and now - the very same peasants who had loved and supported Luther in his rise to power. Approximately 100,000 peasants were routinely slaughtered by well-armed professional soldiers. Of course Luther contradicted himself in regards to Catholic princes, and recommended what sophisticated fascist leaders today would call today a "pre-emptive strike in self-defense against the forces of darkness and evil."
Thus in respect to Catholicism, Luther contradicted himself, and he, like every human being, was hypocritical in one way or another; for instance, the founding fathers of the United States, to whom we are to be loyal, were in fact traitors.
We do not excuse Luther for his particular faults; we know he was caught up in his context. Nonetheless his work was fraught with self-contradictory, paradoxical, ambiguous and oxymoronic statements, which he explained by reference to "God's mysteries."
When we defrock fascists - who protest the economic abuses of welfare liberalism - of their facile rationalizations, we find a similar sort of irrationality among them. They associate social welfare liberalism with internationalism or catholic socialism; i.e., with the 'humanism' hated by fundamental Christian and fascist alike; humanism with its predicates of liberty, equality, and fraternity; the idea that all forms of power should be broadly distributed among the society under the protection of a people's government.
Now Luther wanted to reform the economic abuses of the Catholic Church, and he wound up with a revolution on his hands - the Reformation was the spiritual aspect of the secular economic revolution. Notwithstanding its abuses, the Church had for centuries identified itself with charitable works; it was the defender of the illiterate and ignorant poor who had to work very hard for a living. The Church was communistic and worldly in that sense, and to its regime the protestors opposed their intuitive salvation faith. As far as the Church was concerned, the protestants were atheists whose primary interest was unregulated economic power - their god was Mammon. Of course the protestants made the like charge against the Church.
Ironically, many protestants, while plundering Church property, identified Catholics with the hated "greedy" Jews. In Germany during the development of National Socialism under its "might is right", Cult of Power doctrine, protestants did their best to take the Jew out of Jesus the Christ; that left them with an unregulated spiritual Christ, freed from the regulated - by moral law - historical Jesus. Mind you, the fascist theologians, like Luther, preferred Paul, who, although a Jew, represented the Western or Greek spirit of Christianity. We note well that Judaism had a profound historical interest in the establishment of a Kingdom of God on Earth, an interest that became, as a consequence of the dispersal, catholic or universal instead of strictly national. More recently, although not all Jewish intellectuals were Bolsheviks, American fascists, hiding behind the pretext of "democracy," identified all Jews as 'Reds.'
The protestant revolt had an enormous impact on the Church, which gradually adopted many of the reforms and attitudes demanded, almost to the current point that it is difficult to distinguish any substantial difference between the Catholic and protestant faiths except in their superficial ritual behavior, with one important exception: the Church's continued emphasis on charitable works, a feature inherited from the ancient Jews, who were always careful to include that plank in their platform. Indeed, Emperor Julian the Apostate noted that Jewish communities enjoyed full employment.
As bourgeois protestantism developed under its "keep your hands-off my bible and capital" aspect, sacred power in its various forms was consolidated again in fewer and fewer hands as the modern power elite took shape. Neo-Hegelians on the left called the 'Jewish Question' moot, claiming that Catholic and Protestant and Jew were actually atheists; once the religious veil was removed, they said, it was obvious that the economic motive and not the moral motive determined their conduct, a reprehensible or immoral conduct inasmuch as it constituted a naked worship of ungoverned power employed by a combination of a few anti-social criminals to exploit the society at large under one pretext or another while making their crimes legal. Many German "fascists" - as opposed to the "communists" - under the influence of Nietzsche's Will to Power and Haeckel's Evolutionary Monism - dropped the religious and moral pretext altogether and asserted pseudo-Darwinian, "barbarian" evolutionary principles. The great German sociologist, Max Weber, who has virtual sainthood status among fascists to this very day, while retaining his "god in heaven" protestantism, reformulated the Might over Right, World Power State political doctrine for the German National Socialists - incipient Nazis).
In its historical context, the term 'Fascism' may be strictly limited to Italian history. But "loosely" speaking, fascism today connotes right-wing authoritarian political systems in contrast to what is known as 'socialism.' Again, fascism is anti-democratic. Fascists identify true democracy with socialism in the sense that the latter is a broad distribution of power pursuant to notions of social justice and equality, a distribution that can only be maintained by reasonable governmental regulation of the economy. Fascists might praise liberty while at the same time disparaging liberalism - they mean welfare liberalism as opposed to the primitive "hands-off" liberalism. Fascists will speak of dismantling the welfare state, of devolution, deregulation, downsizing government, and so on; they would turn everyone over to the "free" market so they can have "free trade" and enjoy the virtues of "small business." But in fact they would turn the masses over to big businesses run by a tiny elite that people do not vote for and who are not directly responsible to the people unless government regulation makes them responsible. It becomes increasingly apparent when we examine the fascist façade that their 'small' government is really big government run from the top down, and that this is accomplished with the assistance of their centralized bureau in Washington.
But how can this be? Surely the government belongs to the people! Fascists are not in charge of our government! Look again. Since the Red Scare, fascists have been infiltrating all branches and departments of our government, from the White House, to the Congress to the Judiciary on down to the city councils and agencies. Even the fire departments have been infiltrated by fascists, as we shall soon show. We are not so sure about the driving schools, but the investigators of un-American activities should looking into them too.
Kansas City Missouri September 2003
Painting by Sebastian Ferreira