Introduction
Fascism is an oppressive political movement that first developed in Italy after 1919, and then in various countries in Europe, as a reaction to the political and social changes brought about by World War I. The name comes from the Latin word fasces, meaning a bundle of rods tied around an axe which symbolized authority in ancient Rome.
A lictor from ancient Rome. He walked in front of Roman magistrates and held a bundle of rods in his hand as a symbol of power and authority.
The term "fascism" was first used in Italy by the 1922-1924 government led by Benito Mussolini. And the figure of a bundle of sticks tied around an axe became the emblem of the first fascist party. After Italy, fascist governments came to power in Germany from 1933 to 1945, and in Spain from 1939 to 1975. After World War II, dictatorial regimes set up in South America and other undeveloped countries were generally described as fascist.
To understand the philosophy of fascism, we may consider the description that Mussolini wrote for the Italian Encyclopedia in 1932:
Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism—born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put men into the position where they have to make the great decision—the alternative of life or death.... [The Fascist] conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, but above all for others—those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after.1
Evidently, the main idea behind fascism, as stressed by Mussolini, is Darwinist conflict and war. For, as we saw in the foreword, Darwinism claims that "the strong survive, the weak are eliminated," for which reason it suggests that people need to be in a constant state of struggle in order to survive. Fascism, having been developed from this idea, promotes the belief that a nation can only advance through war, and regards peace as an element that retards progress.
The same line of thought was expressed by Vladimir Jabotinsky, widely regarded as one of the foremost representatives of Zionist Jews, and proponent of the Israeli radical right, who summed up the fascistic ideology in a statement he made in the 1930s:
Stupid is the person who believes in his neighbor, good and loving as the neighbor may be. Justice exists only for those whose fists and stubbornness make it possible for them to realize it . . . Do not believe anyone, be always on guard, carry your stick always with you—this is the only way of surviving in this wolfish battle of all against all.2
As is evident from these words, and as we shall be seeing in some detail in the pages that follow, fascism is actually an ideology that is set in accordance with "the law of the jungle" as developed by Darwinism.
Another feature of fascism to consider is that it is a nationalistic and aggressive ideology based on racism. This nationalism is far removed from mere love of country. In the aggressive nationalism of fascism, one aspires to see his own nation dominating others, and utterly humiliating them, and has no compunction about inflicting great suffering upon its own people in the process. Moreover, fascistic nationalism consists of using war, occupation, massacre and bloodshed as tools towards such political aims.
In the same manner as fascist regimes use such means to dominate other nations, they also use force and oppression against their own nation. Fascism's basic social policy is insistence on an idea, and obliging people to accept it. Fascism aims at making individuals and all of society think and behave in the same way. In order to attain this end, it uses force and violence along all kinds of methods of propaganda. It denounces as an enemy anyone who does not comply with its ideas, even going as far as genocide, as in the case of Nazi Germany.
The above has been just a brief description of the nature of the social structure and political structure of fascism. But the real problem is in identifying where the idea of fascism was born, how it then spread, came to power, and took hold of entire nations. It is important to understand these, because, although people think that fascism was done away with at the end of World War II, it still rears its head in a number of forms. Fascism is not just a political system, it is also a mentality, and even if this mentality no longer leads to the establishment of political regimes, such as Nazi Germany, or Mussolini's Italy, it nevertheless continues to inflict suffering on people all over the world.
So we shall now examine the roots of the fascist mentality, and how it was able to grow in strength to the point of outraging the whole world in the first half of the 20th century, and fill it with suffering.
The Origin Of The Fascist Mentality
Fascism is an ideology which has its roots in Europe. The foundation of fascism was laid by a number of European thinkers in the 19th century, and put into practice in the 20th century by such countries as Italy and Germany. Other countries, which were influenced by fascism or adopted it, "imported" the ideology from Europe. So, in order to examine the roots of fascism, we must turn to the history of Europe.
European history has gone through several stages and periods. But, in the broadest sense, we can divide it into three fundamental periods:
- The pre-Christian (pagan) period.
- The period when Christianity assumed cultural dominance in Europe.
- The post-Christian (materialist) period.
War and violence exercised an important role in pagan culture, as indicated in these figures of warriors on murals and gravestones.
The idea of a "Post-Christian" period may strike many readers as odd, because Christianity is still by far the majority religion in European society. But Christianity is no longer a dominant aspect of European culture: all that remains is lip-service paid to it. The real ideologies and concepts that now direct society have been formed, not by the dictates of religion, but from the materialist philosophy. This anti-religious current began in the 18th century, and came to dominate science and the realm of ideas in the 19th. And, it was the 20th century when the catastrophic results of materialism were finally witnessed.
In regards to these three periods, we can see that fascism belongs to the first and third. In other words, fascism is a product of paganism, and was later reinforced with the rise of materialism. Fascist ideology or practice was non-existent throughout the thousand or so years when Christianity dominated Europe. The reason being that Christianity is a religion of peace and equality. Christianity, which calls people to love, compassion, self-sacrifice, and humility, is the complete antithesis of fascism.
Christianity is originally a divine religion, incepted by the Prophet Jesus. After Jesus, it departed from its original form with some applications and interpretations. Nevertheless, it has managed to maintain certain aspects of the essence of the true religion, with concepts such love, compassion, sacrifice, and humility, as set out above.
Let us now have a brief look at pre-Christian Europe and examine the roots of fascism.
Fascists in the Pagan World
Essentially, as a pagan culture, religion in pre-Christian Europe was polytheistic. Europeans believed the false gods they worshipped represented various forces or aspects of life, and most important were the gods of war, much like those who have appeared in just about every pagan society.
This prestige the gods of war enjoyed in pagan belief was the result of these societies' regarding violence as sacred. Pagan peoples were essentially barbaric and lived in a state of permanent warfare. To kill and spill blood in the name of their nation was seen as a sacred duty. Savagery and violence of almost every kind could find justification in paganism. There was no ethical foundation to forbid violence or brutality. Even Rome, thought of as the most "civilized" state in the pagan world, was a place where people were made to fight to the death or torn to pieces by wild animals. The Emperor Nero came to power by having countless numbers of people killed, including his own mother, wife, and stepbrother. He had Christians devoured by wild animals in the arena, and tortured thousands of people simply because of their beliefs. An example of his cruelty was his setting the city of Rome on fire, as he played the lyre and watched the horrible scene from a window in his palace.
Though Rome was immersed in a culture of violence, the barbarian and pagan nations of the north, such as the Vandals, Goths, and Visigoths, were still more savage. They strove to wreak devastation on each other, as well as plundering Rome. The pagan world was a place where violence prevailed, where the use of brutality of every kind was encouraged, and where there was no consideration at all for ethics.
The best example in the pagan world of a "fascist" system, in the modern sense, was the Greek city-state of Sparta.
Sparta: A Model for All Fascists
Sparta was a military state, dedicated to war and violence, and alleged to have been founded by Lycurgus in the 8th century BC. The Spartans implemented highly regimented system of education. Under the Spartan system, the state was very much more important than the individual. Peoples' lives were measured according to whether or not they would be of use to the state. Strong, healthy male children were dedicated to the state, while unhealthy babies were abandoned to the mountains to die. (This Spartan practice was taken as an example by the Nazis of Germany, and it was claimed, under the further influence of Darwinism, that the sickly needed to be eliminated to maintain a "healthy and superior race.") In Sparta, parents were responsible for raising their sons until the age of seven. From then, until the age of 12, children were placed in teams of 15, and those who stood out for their abilities were selected to be leaders. Children spent their time strengthening their bodies and preparing for war by practicing sports.
Literacy was not considered important, and there was little interest in music or literature. The only songs children were allowed to sing and learn were those of war and violence. (The education of children from the age of four under the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler was very similar). The Spartan custom was to indoctrinate people in the spirit of war, at the expense of art, literature, and education.
One of the most important thinkers to have offered detailed statements about Sparta was the famous Greek philosopher Plato. Although he lived in Athens, which was governed democratically, he was impressed with the fascist system in Sparta, and in his books portrayed Sparta as a model state. Because of Plato's fascist tendencies, Karl Popper, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, in his famous book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, describes him as the first source of inspiration for oppressive regimes, and an enemy of open society. In support of his contention, Popper refers to how Plato calmly defended the killing of infants in Sparta, and describes him as the first theoretical proponent of "eugenics":
...[I]t is important that the master class should feel as one superior master race. 'The race of the guardians must be kept pure', says Plato (in defence of infanticide), when developing the racialist argument that we breed animals with great care while neglecting our own race, an argument which has been repeated ever since. (Infanticide was not an Athenian institution; Plato, seeing that it was practised at Sparta for eugenic reasons, concluded that it must be ancient and therefore good.) He demands that the same principles be applied to the breeding of the master race as are applied, by an experienced breeder, to dogs, horses or birds. 'If you did not breed them in this way, don't you think that the race of your birds or dogs would quickly degenerate?' Plato argues; and he draws the conclusion that 'the same principles apply to the race of men'. The racial qualities demanded from a guardian or from an auxiliary are, more specifically, those of a sheep-dog. 'Our warrior-athletes .. must be vigilant like watch-dogs', demands Plato, and he asks: 'Surely, there is no difference, so far as their natural fitness for keeping guard is concerned, between a gallant youth and a well-bred dog?'3
These views of Plato, who regarded human beings as a species of animal, and proposed that they should be "evolved" through "forced mating," came to the fore once again with the advent of Darwinism in the 19th century, and were implemented by the Nazis in the 20th. We shall be examining this in the pages that follow.
While defending the Spartan model, Plato also advanced another aspect of fascism, the state use of repression to administer society. In Plato's view, this pressure should be so comprehensive that people should be unable to think of anything apart from the orders of the state, and behave in complete adherence to state policy, forsaking the use of their intelligence and free will. The following words of Plato, quoted by Popper as a complete statement of the fascist mentality, describe the structure of fascist order:
From infancy, Spartan soldiers were trained to know only war. Shedding blood was their only aim in life..
A bronze statue of a Spartan soldier going to war.
The greatest principle of all is that nobody, whether male or female, should be without a leader. Nor should the mind of anybody be habituated to letting him do anything at all on his own initiative; neither out of zeal, nor even playfully. But in war and in the midst of peace—to his leader he shall direct his eye and follow him faithfully. And even in the smallest matter he should stand under leadership. For example, he should get up, or move, or wash, or take his meals .. only if he has been told to do so. In a word, he should teach his soul, by long habit, never to dream of acting independently, and to become utterly incapable of it.4
A Spartan soldier
Plato: An enemy of "open society"
These ideas and practices, promoted by the Spartans, as they were by Plato, exemplify the fundamental characteristics of fascism—the perception of human beings as mere animals, fanatical racism, the promotion of war and conflict, state-sponsored repression, and "formal indoctrination."
Similar fascistic practices are also discoverable in other pagan societies. The system set up by the pharaohs, the rulers of ancient Egypt, is in certain aspects comparable to Spartan fascism. The Egyptian pharaohs built up state systems founded on ideals of military discipline, and used them to oppress even their own people. Rameses II, the tyrannical Egyptian ruler, who is believed to have lived in the time of the Prophet Moses, ordered that all male Jewish children be killed, a cruelty reminiscent of the infanticide in Sparta, and the psychological forms of oppression he inflicted on his own subjects also recalls the fascistic system described by Plato. As God revealed in the Koran, Pharaoh offered his subjects the following tyrannical ultimatum: "...I only show you what I see myself and I only guide you to the path of rectitude." (Koran, 40:29) And he threatened those magicians who rejected his pagan beliefs and led to the true religion by following Moses, "...Have you believed in him before I authorized you to do so?...I will cut off your alternate hands and feet and then I will crucify every one of you." (Koran, 7:123-124)
Fascism's Retreat in the Face of Religion
The fascistic pagan culture which dominated Europe disappeared in stages with the spread of Christianity in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD, first to Rome, and then to all of Europe. Christianity carried to European society the basic ethical characteristics of the true religion revealed to man by the Prophet Jesus. Europe, which had once encouraged violence, conflict and bloodshed as sacred, and been composed of different tribes, races and city-states constantly at war with one another, underwent an important change.
1) Racial and tribal wars disappeared: In the pagan world, all tribes and races saw each other as enemies, and there was constant fighting between them. Each pagan society had its own gods and totems which it invented, waging war in their name. With the coming of Christianity, there was a single belief, culture, and even language in Europe as a whole, thus the conflicts of the pagan world came to an end.
2)Peace and compassion came to be considered sacred, instead of violence: In pagan societies, inflicting bloodshed, suffering and torture was seen as heroic, actions that appeased the imaginary "gods of war." Under Christianity however, European societies learned that people should love each other and exercise compassion (even for their enemies), and that the shedding of blood was a great sin in the sight of God.
3) The perception of human beings as a species of animal disappeared: The Spartans regarding their warriors as equivalent to "watch-dogs" was an extension of the "animist" belief widespread in pagan societies. Animism implied ascribing a soul to nature and animals. According to animism, there was no difference between a human being and an animal, or even a plant. But when religion came to predominate, this superstition disappeared, and European societies realized that human beings possessed a soul given to them by God, and were completely different from animals, and could not, therefore, be subject to the same laws.
These three aspects of paganism—racism, bloodshed, and equating human beings with animals—are also the basic characteristics of fascism. In Europe, they were vanquished by Christianity. In the Middle East, the same victory was achieved by Islam over Arab paganism. Before the advent of Islam, the Arabs (and other Middle Eastern and Central Asian societies) were warlike, blood-thirsty, and racist. The Spartans' barbaric "abandonment of unwanted children to die" was adopted by the pagan Arabs, in the form of burying their female children alive. The Koran mentions this savage practice:
The Arabs, and other Middle Eastern and Central Asian cultures, were only transformed into peaceful, civilized, intelligent societies opposed to bloodshed after they were enlightened by Islam. Thus they were freed from the old tribal wars and nomadic savagery, and found peace and stability in religion.
Neo-Paganism and the Birth of Fascism
Although European paganism was suppressed by Christianity, it did not die out. It survived under the guise of various teachings, movements, and secret societies, such as the Freemasons, and re-emerged in a definite form in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. A number of European thinkers, influenced by the works of ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato or Aristotle, began to revive concepts from the pagan world.
This neo-pagan current became increasingly influential, and in the 19th century, surpassed Christianity and imposed itself on Europe. It will be useful to examine the main outline of this lengthy process here, without necessarily going into details.
The vanguard of neo-pagan movement was those thinkers known as "humanists." Influenced by ancient Greek sources, they tried to spread the pagan philosophies of such philosophers as Plato and Aristotle. The belief they professed in the name "humanism" was a perverted philosophy that ignored the existence of God and man's responsibilities to Him, but instead considered man a great, superior, and independent being. The influences of humanism took on further aspects with the philosophy of the Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries. Enlightenment philosophers were influenced by and fiercely defended materialism, an idea which developed in ancient Greece. (Materialism is a dogmatic philosophy put forward by such Greek thinkers as Leucippus and Democritus, positing that only matter exists).
THE LIBERTY CAP: The picture below was thought to represent the unity and indivisibility of the republic established after the French revolution. In this and many other illustrations of the period, the symbol of the liberty cap was used to represent the revolution, but was actually a legacy of the pagan myth of Mithras from the ancient world.
In this picture, painted in honor of Jean Jacques Rousseau after the French Revolution, are symbols of ancient paganism, such as the liberty cap and the tied staves.( picture on the left)
The rebirth of paganism is clearly evident in the French Revolution, widely accepted as the political end-product of Enlightenment philosophy. The Jacobins, who led the bloody "terrorist" period of the French Revolution, were influenced by paganism, and nurtured a great hatred for Christianity. As a result of intensive Jacobin propaganda during the fiercest days of the revolution, the "rejection of Christianity" movement became widespread. In addition, a new "religion of reason" was established, which was based on pagan symbols rather than Christianity. Its first signs were seen in the "revolutionary worship," on the Festival of Federation on July 14, 1790, which were then widely disseminated. Robespierre, the ruthless leader of the Jacobins, brought about new rules for "revolutionary worship," setting out their principles in a report under the name "Cult of the Supreme Being." The most significant outcome of these developments was the conversion of the famous Notre Dame Cathedral into a "temple of reason." The Christian icons on its walls were torn down, and a female statue known as the "goddess of reason" was erected in the center of it, in other words, a pagan idol.
Robespierre
The Cordeliers Club card belonging to Robespierre, ruthless leader of the French revolution. Pagan symbols such as the red cap and a bundle of rods strapped around an axe are particularly evident.
These pagan tendencies were portrayed among the revolutionaries by a number of symbols. The liberty cap worn by the revolutionary guards of the French Revolution, and which often became a symbol of the revolution, descended from the pagan world and the worship of Mithras.5
The rebirth of paganism, and the beginning of its intellectual dominance over Europe, also led the way to a rebirth of fascism, itself a system rooted in the pagan world. In fact, Nazi Germany, with its system reminiscent of that practiced in Sparta, was based on paganism. Towards this development, a number of fundamental cultural changes were necessary between the French Revolution, at the end of the 18th century, and Nazi Germany, at the beginning of the 20th. These important changes were brought about by a number of thinkers during the 19th century. The most important of these was Charles Darwin.
Darwinism and the Revival of the Pagan Superstition of "Evolution"
One of the superstitions to survive from paganism, but which only began to be revived in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, was the "theory of evolution," a theory which maintained that all living things came into existence as the result of pure chance, and then developed from one to another.
Unaware of the existence of God, and worshipping false idols which they themselves devised, pagans answered the question of how life came about with the concept of "evolution." This notion is first seen in inscriptions from ancient Sumeria, but was given shape in ancient Greece. Pagan philosophers such as Thales, Anaximander and Empedocles, claimed that living things, in other words human beings, animals and plants, formed themselves from such inanimate substances as air, fire and water. According to their theories, the first living things suddenly emerged in water and then adapted to the land. Thales had spent time in Egypt, where the superstition that "living things formed themselves out of mud" was widespread. The Egyptians believed that in this way the frogs which appeared when the waters of the Nile receded were formed.
Thales adopted the superstition and attempted to present a number of arguments on its behalf, proposing that all living things came into existence by and of themselves. These claims of his were based solely in theory, not on experiment and observation. Other ancient Greek philosophers employed the same method.
Anaximander, a student of Thales, developed the theory of evolution, giving rise to to two important modes of Western thought. The first of these was that the universe had always existed and will continue to exist into eternity. The second was the idea that living things evolved from each other, an idea which had slowly begun to take shape in Thales' time. The first written work to discuss the theory of evolution was the classical poem On Nature, in which Anaximander wrote that creatures arose from slime that had been evaporated by the sun. He thought that the first animals lived in the sea and had prickly, scaly coverings. As these fish-like creatures evolved, they moved onto land, shed their scaly coverings, and became humans.6 Books on philosophy describe how Anaximander shaped the foundation of the theory of evolution:
We find that Anaximander of Miletus (611 B.C.-546 B.C.) advanced the traditional evolutionary idea, already quite common in his day, that life first evolved from a type of pre-biotic soup, helped along a bit by the rays of the sun. He believed that the first animals developed from sea slime which had been evaporated by the sun rays. He also believed that men were descended from fish.7
In short, one of the two fundamental components of Darwinism, the claim that living things evolved from each other as a result of coincidences, was the product of pagan philosophy. The second important element of Darwin's theory, "the struggle for survival," was also a pagan belief. It was the Greek philosophers who first suggested there was a war for survival between living things in nature.
The notion of evolution, which the pagan philosophers had construed, not by experiment and observation, but by abstract reasoning, began to be reiterated in 18th century Europe. In pagan thought, the concept of evolution was called "the Great Chain of Being," an idea that influenced such early defenders of evolutionary theory as the French scientists Benoit de Maillet, Pierre de Maupertuis, Comte de Buffon and Jean Baptiste Lamarck. In his Histoire Naturelle, Buffon reveals himself as "an exponent of the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being, with man being placed at the tope of the Chain."8 Buffon's evolutionist views were passed on to Lamarck, and eventually inherited by Charles Darwin.
Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an evolutionist who adhered to pagan beliefs. Erasmus Darwin was one of the masters at the famous Canongate Kilwining Masonic lodge in Edinburgh, Scotland. He also had close connections to the Jacobins in France, and the Masonic organization of the Illuminati, whose founding principle was the hatred of religion. From the research he carried out in his eight-hectare botanical garden, he developed the ideas that would later go on to shape Darwinism, collected together in his books The Temple of Nature and Zoonomia. The concept of "the temple of nature" that Erasmus employed was a testament to the pagan beliefs he adopted, a repetition of the old pagan belief that nature possesses a creative force.
Darwinism Prepared the Foundation for Fascism
The myth of evolution, a legacy of Sumerian and Greek paganism, was introduced into the Western agenda with Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, published in 1859. In this work, as in The Descent of Man, he discussed certain pagan concepts that had disappeared in Europe under Christianity, and gave them "justification" under the guise of science. We can outline these pagan concepts which he attempted to justify, thus preparing the groundwork for the development of fascism, as follows:
1) Darwinism provided the justification for racism: In the subtitle to The Origin of the Species, Darwin wrote: "The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life." With these words, Darwin was claiming that certain races in nature are more "favored" than others, in other words, that they were superior. He revealed this dimension of his ideas regarding human races in The Descent of Man, where he proposed that European white men were superior to races such as Africans, Asians and Turks, and were permitted to enslave them.
2)Darwinism provided a justification for bloodshed: As we have seen, Darwin proposed that a deadly "struggle for survival" takes place in nature. He claimed that this principle applied to both societies and to individuals, that it was a struggle to the death, and that it was quite natural for different races to try to eliminate others for its own sake. In short, Darwin described an arena where the only rule was violence and conflict, thus replacing the concepts of peace, cooperation, self-sacrifice, that had spread to Europe with the advent of Christianity. Darwinism thus resurrected the notion of the "arena," an exhibition of violence devised in the pagan world (the Roman Empire).
3)Darwinism brought the concept of eugenics back into Western thought: The concept of maintaining racial supremacy through breeding, known as eugenics, which the Spartans had implemented, and which Plato defended by the words, "Our warrior-athletes must be vigilant like watch-dogs," re-emerged in the Western world with Darwinism. Darwin devoted whole chapters in The Origin of Species to discussing the "improvement of animal races," and maintained, in The Descent of Man, that human beings were a species of animal. Some time later, Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, was to take his uncle's claims a step further, and put forward the modern theory of eugenics. (Nazi Germany would be the first state to implement eugenics as official policy).
As we have seen, Darwin's theory seems to be a concept that concerns only the science of biology, but it actually formed the basis for a totally new political outlook. Within a very short time, this new attitude was redefined as "Social Darwinism." And as many historians have come to accept, Social Darwinism became the ideological basis of fascism and Nazism.
The effect of Darwinism's portrayal of war and conflict as necessary has been analyzed in great detail in Paul Crook's Cambridge University publicationDarwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from 'The Origin of Species' to the First World War. Crook has made it clear that by presenting war as a "biological necessity," Darwinism formed both the formal justification for the First World War, as well as for various other warlike tendencies in fascism. Crook writes:
Darwinist discourse conferred approval on a range of doctrines glorifying power, status, elitism, conquest and repression. Differences between cultures, genders, classes and races were reduced to fixed biological differences, imprinted in humans during eons of selective struggle. Darwin's conflict model generated militarist and racist extrapolations that conferred approval on war and imperial struggle as 'biological necessities'.9
From such [Darwinist] assumptions, a variety of unpleasant consequences could be derived... War is rationalised... As Frederick Wertham has argued, if violence 'is all in human nature, and if we are all guilty, then nobody is guilty. And if we are all responsible, no man is responsible' ...The First World War was portrayed as the final vindication of the mythology of bestiality, encoded anew in terms of neo-Darwinian genetics and instinct theory.10
Darwin thought of using Hobbes's phrase 'war of nature' as a heading to his chapter on struggle in his projected 'big book' Natural Selection ...He spoke of creatures 'overmastering' one another: 'through his continual use of highly dramatic language representing the life of organisms in nature as some heroic war, with attendant battles, victories, famine, dearth, and destruction, Darwin creates the image of a great literal struggle for existence – an image which pervades the Origin.'11
As Crook has stated, Darwin not only proposed that human beings were a "species" descended from animals, but portrayed war and conflict as "the origin of species." This fallacy would be the justification for the promotion of war and the ideology of conflict, in fact, for the growth of fascism itself.
Friedrich Nietzsche: An Ill Mind Who Praised Violence
There was another 19th century thinker influenced by the neo-paganism attendant to Darwinism, and who expanded on it, thus helping to establish the foundation for fascism: The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nietzsche was born in a village near Leipzig in 1844, and was fascinated by Greek culture, learning Greek at an early age. In 1868, he began studying philosophy in the Swiss city of Basel. Nietzsche hated divine religions, such as Christianity, Islam and Judaism, but was fascinated by the pagan culture of ancient Greece. He formed a close friendship in Basel with Wagner, the best-known composer of the age. Wagner, who had come to fame with his Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), was a German racist who was also fascinated by pagan culture and hated divine religions. (Wagner would be regarded as Germany's greatest cultural genius throughout the Hitler period)
Nietzsche, A Fanatical Opponent Of Religion
Nietzsche was influenced by the neopagan ideas brought about by the popularity of Darwin's theory, and laid the foundations of fascism. Nietzsche was a fierce enemy of religion, and his books Anti-Christ and Thus Spake Zarathustra, are clear evidence of his interest in paganism.
Nietzsche's publisher, Peter Gast, called Nietzsche "one of the fiercest anti-Christians and atheists."12 Another testament to Nietzsche's hatred of religion is the title of his book Anti-Christ. In his book Thus Spake Zarathustra, he tried to set up an ethical system beyond divine religion. According to H. F. Peters, Nietzsche's biographer, his philosophy rested on Roman and Greek paganism, and in his writings he called for "a new Caesar" to transform the world.13
Nietzsche had a particular hatred of the ethical views of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In his opinion, concepts such as love, compassion and humility, must be abandoned and replaced with a so-called "master morality" which accepted the warlike and ruthless state of nature. In Thus Spake Zarathustra, he wrote, "Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit."14
Nietzsche was also a racist. He maintained that one part of mankind was composed ofübermensch (superman), and that the others had to serve and obey them. Furthermore, he claimed that these so-called "supermen" would found an aristocratic world order, a theory which was put into practice by Hitler's armies at the start of the Second World War in 1939.
These two aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy, his racism and reverence for violence, are allied closely to Darwinism. Nietzsche's thought was in fact strongly influenced by Darwin. Darwin's discrimination between the different races conformed closely to Nietzsche's perception of "superior and inferior peoples." Nietzsche also adapted his hatred of religion with the atheism of Darwin.
In his book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, the Darwinist writer Daniel C. Dennett describes Darwin's influence on Nietzsche in the following way: "Friedrich Nietzsche saw …an even more cosmic message in Darwin:...If Nietzsche is the father of existentialism, then perhaps Darwin deserves the title of grandfather."15 Dennett explains in great detail how Darwin and Nietzsche's ideas run parallel, and although Nietzsche seems to criticize Darwin in some of his writings, he gives many examples where Nietzsche clearly approves of Darwinist thought.
After Nietzsche's death, the most important exponent of his philosophy was his sister, Elisabeth Nietzsche. She stood out as an avowed supporter of Nazi ideology in Hitler's Germany, and announced that her brother's model of the "Superman" had been brought to life by Hitler.16
Nietzsche's influence on Nazi ideology is a reality that has been stressed by a great many historians. W. Cleon Skousen writes that, when "Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, it was as though Nietzsche was speaking from the dead."17 Another historian, George Lichtheim, writes, "It is not too much to say that but for Nietzsche the SS—Hitler's shock troops and the core of the whole movement—would have lacked the inspiration to carry our their programs of mass murder in Eastern Europe."18
As the historian H. F. Peters puts it, many have cursed Nietzsche as "the father of fascism."19 In his book, The Myth of the 20th Century, the Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg openly praised Nietzsche. Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), the youth wing of the Nazi movement, took Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra as a sacred text. Adolf Hitler had a special monument erected in Nietzsche's memory, and incepted the foundations of an educational center and library "where German youth could be taught Nietzsche's doctrine of a master race."20 Finally, the Friedrich Nietzsche Memorial Building was opened by Hitler in August 1938.
Nietzsche's influence was not limited to Germany, it was also important in Italy, the birthplace of fascism. The poet Gabriele D'Annunzio, who may be regarded as the inspiration behind Mussolini, was greatly influenced by Nietzsche's philosophy.21 Historians note that D'Annunzio's successor, Benito Mussolini acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Nietzsche as well.22
The Nazi Massacres in Eastern Europe
According to historian George Lichtheim, Nietzsche was the main inspiration behind Hitler, whose SS units were responsible for terrible massacres of Jewish and Slav populations in eastern Europe.
The disasters inflicted upon mankind by fascism, which Nietzsche had inspired, provide historical evidence of just how harmful were the German philosopher's Darwinist ideas. Nietzsche, who opposed the divine morality that God revealed to mankind to show it the true path, and who proposed taking mankind to the modern age by replacing that morality with a brutal and oppressive society, had put forward Darwin's idea that man is a species of animal, and divided man into superior and inferior races, is the best example of the dark reality into which a lack of religion draws individuals and societies. Moreover, Nietzsche's life itself serves a warning. At 44 he was taken to a mental hospital, where his illness grew steadily worse, until he died raving mad. In 1902, a doctor called P. J. Mobius warned people "that they should beware of Nietzsche, for his works were the products of a diseased brain."23 But the Germans had great respect for the diseased philosophy of this disturbed mind, and so Nazi Germany was born.
Hitlerjugend (The Hitler Youth), the Nazis' youth wing, considered Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra to be a "sacred text."
Nietzsche died of syphilis in a state of mental decay in a lunatic asylum. His private life was no less troubled or diseased than his philosophy.
Like all those who have ever denied the existence of God, he met a very unpleasant end.
Francis Galton: The Inspiration Behind Eugenic Killings
Another important 19th century ideologue, who helped lay the foundations of 20th century fascism, was Francis Galton, known as the founder of the theory of "eugenics."
We have already discussed the concept of eugenics. It saw people as a species of animal and was the product of a mentality that imagined that the same rules applied to human beings as to animals. It held the belief that the human race could be developed by "breeding methods," as with dogs or cattle. According to the theory, society's sick and deformed must be prevented from multiplying, (if necessary, they should even be killed), and healthy individuals should "reproduce" as much as possible to ensure strong and healthy later generations. This policy was one that had been implemented by the warrior city-state of Sparta, and defended by Plato.
With the domination of Christianity, eugenics had found itself relegated to the dusty shelves of history. Until Darwin's The Origin of Species was published. Darwin devoted the opening chapters of his book to the subject of raising animals, drew attention to those breeders who raised more productive breeds of horses and cattle, and then proposed, later on in the book, that these methods could be applied to human beings. Ultimately, it was Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who widened the road of eugenics opened by his uncle, and who brought the subject onto the world stage by formulating it into a comprehensive program.
As we might imagine, Galton was a fierce supporter and follower of Darwin. In his autobiography Memories of My Life, he writes:
The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science. 24
The concepts that Galton denigrated as "dogmatic barriers" and "ancient authorities" were religious systems and beliefs. In other words, Darwin was the reason for Galton's "great turning point," giving up his beliefs, and turning to the atheism and the racism, remnants of paganism.
Other than Darwin, Galton was also influenced by another evolutionist ideologue, the French physicist Paul Broca, who proposed that human intelligence was directly related to brain size and, hence, to the size of the head. In order to allegedly "prove" this, he tore up Paris graveyards and measured hundreds of skulls. Galton united Broca's superstition about brain size—which would subsequently be proved to be utterly wrong—and Charles Darwin's "animal breeding" philosophy. The result was the theory of "eugenics," being that certain races of humanity are superior to others, and that those superior must be kept uncontaminated by those inferior.
Francis Galton, Charles Darwin's cousin, was influenced by Darwin and the French physicist Paul Broca, himself another evolutionist. Galton put forward the theory of "eugenics," which suggested that some races were superior to others and that the strong should be kept uncontaminated by the weak.
Galton first published his ideas in 1869, in his book Hereditary Genius. It discusses a number of "geniuses" in British history and claims that they bore pure racial characteristics. (Among these "geniuses," he did not neglect to include his uncle, Charles Darwin). In accordance to his claim, Galton then suggested that the English nation possessed an inherently superior blood to other races, and that steps needed to be taken to protect that blood from contamination. These theories he considered to be applicable not just to the British, but to all races. The Canadian author Ian Taylor has this to say in his book In the Minds of Men, in which he considers the social effects of Darwinism:
He [Galton] was now left with the claim that certain races were inherently superior and that their superiority was fixed forever from the past as well as into the future… The conclusion to Galton's argument then followed that, for the sake of mankind's future, pollution of the precious superior gene pool by interbreeding with inferior stock had to be stopped at all costs.25
The Racist Science Of Darwinism: Skull Measurement
Paul Broca, one of several Darwinists to have influenced Francis Galton, proposed that human intelligence was directly related to brain size, and consequently, to the size of the head. In order to "prove" his theory, he dug up Paris graveyards and measured hundreds of skulls. Although Broca's theories were subsequently proved wrong, skull measurements were carried out in a number of countries, particularly Germany. "Superior people" were supposedly identified from these measurements.
Galton proposed that legal measures needed to be taken to prevent "inferior races polluting the superior." In his view, marriages needed to be legally regulated. To name his racist-evolutionist theory, Galton looked to the pagan world which had once practiced the same ideology. It was Galton who coined and first used the word "eugenics," from the Greek for "good birth." Inevitably, those who believed in Darwinism, also believed in eugenics. Finally, the Eugenics Education Society was established in 1907, based at the statistics department of University College, London. In 1926, the name was simplified, and it became the "Eugenics Society."
The Eugenics Society maintained that all handicapped people should be "sterilized." Charles Darwin's son, Leonard Darwin, was president of the organization between 1911 and 1928, and its most active member.
After Great Britain, eugenics began to attract supporters in the United States. Evolutionist circles there carried out a great deal of propaganda on the subject in the 1920s and 30s, and certain states passed the laws known as "Sterilization Laws." These laws allowed men and women believed to be genetically weak or sick to be sterilized.
These laws are now seen in the United States as an example of the detriment of racism. What is more, the idea is now seen as a superstition, totally at variance with the scientific facts. The recent human genome project has shown that the genetic differences between races and individuals are very small, and that it is stupid to even attempt to construct any reproduction policy based on them. Human races were created equal by God. In the Koran, God says:
The weak and genetically sick must be treated with affection and compassion, protected and nurtured, not "sterilized." But instead of this approach, revealed to us by God as a religious moral duty, the Western world, at the beginning of the 20th century, turned to eugenics, a product of paganism and the theory of evolution. And, the scale of the savagery that this pagan-evolutionary theory led to will be revealed when we consider the case of Germany.
Handicapped People Killed According To The Theory Of Eugenics
According to the theory of eugenics, developed by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, society's sick and handicapped must be prevented from reproducing, and healthy generations ensured by requiring the healthy to "reproduce" as much as possible. Ernst Haeckel, Darwinism's most avid proponent in Germany, took the idea one step further, and suggested a commission be established for the killing of handicapped people by poison. His ideas were implemented by the Nazis. The pictures on this page show some of the handicapped killed by the Nazis.
- Ernst Haeckel (upper left)
- Darwin's cousin Galton, the founder of the theory of eugenics(bottom left)
Ernst Haeckel: The Nazis' Racist Theoretician
The last name along the path from Darwin to the Nazis that we need to consider is the zoologist Ernst Haeckel, Germany's best-known Darwinist and a fanatical supporter of eugenics.
In the history of science, Haeckel is known for his theory that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny." According to this evolutionary theory, Haeckel was claiming that embryonic development repeats "evolutionary history." He thought that the stages of embryonic development repeated the adult stages of the ancestors of a species. In order to support his theory, which he developed under the influence of Darwin, Haeckel made a number of drawings of embryos, in which, it was later realized, he had made deliberate distortions, and that his theory was a forgery. Haeckel was a charlatan who used falsified evidence to make Darwinism scientifically acceptable.
Another instance of Haeckel's erroneous science is the theory of eugenics. He adopted the theory, from such names as Charles Darwin, Francis Galton and Leonard Darwin, and took it further, by suggesting a return to the Spartan model of ancient Greece: In other words, to murdering children! In his book Wonders of Life, Haeckel proposed the "destruction of abnormal new born infants" without hesitation, and claimed that it could not "rationally be classed as murder", becaıse these children were not yet conscious.26
Haeckel wanted all the sick and deformed, who may be an obstacle to the so-called evolution of society, not just children, to be eliminated as a requirement of the "laws of evolution." He opposed treatment for the sick, claiming that this obstructed the workings of natural selection. He complained that "Hundreds of thousands of incurables—lunatics, lepers, people with cancer etc—are artificially kept alive in our modern communities…without the slightest profit to themselves or the general body." He further recommended that a commission should be set up to decide the fate of individuals. Upon the decision of the commission the "'redemption from evil' should be accomplished by a dose of some painless and rapid poison."27
This barbarism, upon which Haeckel built his theory, was to be put into practice in Nazi Germany. Shortly after coming to power, the Nazis instituted an official policy of eugenics. The mentally ill, the deformed, the blind from birth, and those with genetic diseases, were gathered up in "sterilization centers." These people were regarded as parasites that spoiled the purity of the German race and its evolutionary progress. Some time after being separated from society, they were eventually killed under special orders from Hitler.
It is a well known fact, pronounced by many historians who have studied the subject, that Ernst Haeckel's ideas and the Darwinist ideology in general, were the ideological basis of Nazism. In his book The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League, the American historian Daniel Gasman presents extensive proof of this. According to Gasman, Haeckel "became one of Germany's major idealists for racism, nationalism and imperialism."28 Haeckel left Nazism an organizational and an ideological legacy. On the one hand he developed the theory of eugenics and racism, and on the other he founded the "Monist League," an atheist association, and this played a major role in the effect the Nazis had on the educated section of society.
The Idea Of Man As An "Animal," The Ideological Foundation Behind The Nazi Murders
Eugenic killings, which had been defended by Ernst Haeckel, and were put into practice by the Nazis after 1933, as well as other Nazi genocides carried out against various ethnic groups such as the Jews and the Gypsies during the war, share one common principle: the idea that people are animals. By the inspiration they drew from Darwin's theory of evolution, the Nazis considered mankind to consist of different animal groups which made up the different human races, and believed that there must necessarily be continuous conflict between them. As a result of this superstition, they felt justified the murdering innocent women and children, the sick and the elderly, in the name of "racial purity."
Cambridge historian and London Times journalist Ben Macintyre explains the Darwinist thought that Haeckel left as his legacy to the Nazis:
The German embryologist Haeckel and his Monist League told the world, and in particular, Germany, that the whole history of nations is explicable by means of natural selection: Hitler and his twisted theories turned this pseudo-science into politics, attempting to destroy whole races in the name of racial purity and the survival of the fittest...Hitler called his book Mein Kampf, "My Struggle," echoing Haeckel's translation of Darwin's phrase "the struggle for survival."29
This Darwinist influence at the root of Nazism and other fascist ideologies will be examined more closely in later sections of this book.
Fascism: The Return of Paganism
At the beginning of this chapter, we identified fascism as a system of violence that emerged in pagan societies. The basic reason for this violent tendency in fascism comes from the philosophy of "worshipping strength," that might is right. The strong have the right to rise to the top and crush the weak. Fascists greatly admire the strong, but hate and despise the weak. The fundamental principles of this perverted philosophy are waging war, shedding blood, ruthlessness and cruelty.
Against this perverted mentality that emerged in Sparta, in the arenas of the Roman Empire, and in the pagan barbarian tribes from the North of Europe, there is the beautiful morality God has revealed to us by means of religion. As revealed to man throughout history by prophets and holy books, such as the Torah, the Gospel and the Koran, what matters is not" strength," but "truth." Human beings must be judged by whether or not they conform to what God has revealed as the truth, not by their strength. The strong are charged with being gentle and compassionate to the weak, not crushing and oppressing them. A human being's duty is to protect the weak and be merciful and peace-loving, not to be cruel and ruthless.
Modern fascism, with its roots in the 19th century, is a product of ideologies that desire to oppose those rules of morality revealed to man by religion, and to replace them with a racist, blood-thirsty and cruel culture of paganism. The neo-Pagan tendency, which began with the French Revolution, was given shape by Friedrich Nietzsche, and carried forward to Nazi ideology. Evolutionists such as Charles Darwin, Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel strove to give so-called scientific support to this rising paganism, by denying the existence of God, and attempting to demonstrate that all of life consists of a "struggle for survival", thus justifying racism.
The American historian, Gene Edward Veith, sums up these developments in his book Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview this way: "Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for paganism.... It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God."30
The Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg maintained that Christianity could not provide enough "spiritual energy" for the German Reich, that was to be established under Hitler's leadership, and thought it necessary that the German race return to their ancient pagan religion.
Nazism clearly revealed that fact. The Nazis defended paganism, both during the early stages, and also when they came to power in 1933. They tore German society away from Christianity, and tried to turn it to pagan beliefs.
Propaganda By Means Of Art
The Nazis also employed art to reawaken paganism. Ancient Greek forms, statues and symbols suddenly also became a part of German culture. Portrayals of powerful men and women, intended to represent the Aryan race, were made to resemble ancient Greek statues.
Even in the 1920s, Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazis' foremost ideologue, was already claiming that Christianity would be unable to generate sufficient spiritual energy under the Third Reich that was to be set up under Hitler's leadership, and that the German people would have to return to the old pagan religion. According to Rosenberg, when the Nazis came to power they would have to replace all the Christian symbols in churches with swastikas, copies of Mein Kampf, and swords symbolizing German invincibility. Hitler was influenced by these views of Rosenberg, although he refrained from implementing the so-called German religion because he was afraid of what society's reaction might be.31
However, important neo-pagan practices were experimented with during the Nazi era. Not long after Hitler came to power, Christian holidays and festivals were replaced by pagan ones. "Mother Earth" or "Father Sky" were called on at wedding ceremonies. In 1935, Christian prayers in schools were stopped, and then all lessons concerning Christianity were banned.
As made clear in the book The Pink Swastika, which discusses the Nazis' pagan ideologies (and homosexual tendencies), "the revival of Hellenic paganism became a fundamental aspect of the Nazi identity."32
The same book stresses the fact that there was a homosexual tendency in that pagan movement which formed the basis of Nazi identity. It also gives an interesting example of the Nazis' links to Greek pagan culture:
Who were these "intellectuals" who popularized Nietzschean fascism in Germany? Stefan George, one of Germany's most popular poets of the time, was a pederast, and "a guiding example" to the Community of the Special…. "George and his disciples" writes Oosterhuis and Kennedy "revivified Holderlin's concept Griechendeutschen (Hellenic Germans)... His [Stephen George's] last book, Das neue Reich (The New Kingdom) published in 1928, "prophesied an era in which Germany would become a new Greece". In 1933, when Hitler came to power, he offered George a position as President of the Nazi Academy of Letters.33
Under Nazi rule, many policies were implemented that were aimed at establishing a re-awakening of pagan culture. Schoolchildren were taught the so-called "Glorious pre-Christian German history," and various rites and ceremonies, legacies of pagan culture, were held all over Germany. All Nazi meetings were in the form of traditional pagan ceremonies. There was almost no difference between Nazi rallies, held under the shadow of flaming torches, where slogans full of hate and hostility were shouted and Wagner's pagan music played, and the perverted ceremonies carried out thousands of years ago at pagan temples and altars.
Another person who tried to revive German paganism was Stefan George, known as one of Germany's great poets, and for his deviant sexual inclinations towards small boys. George and his supporters claimed that Germany would become a new Greek state.
To re-awaken paganism, the Nazis also used the arts. Ancient Greek concepts and symbols began to predominate under Nazi rule, and many statues similar to Greek one were made portraying strong men and women of the Aryan race. Hitler dreamed that a "superior race" would be formed through eugenics, and a cruel and oppressive "world kingdom" would be established based on the Spartan model. The expression "The Third Reich" is a testament to this dream. (Hitler attempted to found the third and greatest German kingdom after two others which had existed previously). Because of this dream, 55 million people lost their lives in the Second World War, the bloodiest conflict that the world had ever seen. The genocides Nazis carried out against various ethnic groups such as the Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, as well as prisoners of war from other nations, were of a savagery unprecedented in history.
In the next chapter, we will see under what conditions fascism came to power, and how it proceeded once it had done so.
The Pagan Symbols Of Fascism
The Nazi symbol of the swastika is often thought to be a Christian symbol because of its similarity to the cross. However, it is actually a pagan symbol originating from pre-Christian pagan German beliefs. The first person to use the swastika as a symbol in 20th century Germany was Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, one of the foremost ideologues in the development of Nazi ideology, who may be regarded as the true founder of the racist theories concerning the German race. In his youth he was a Christian priest, but because of his deviant sexual tendencies, he was expelled from the Church, abandoning Christianity and turning to pagan beliefs. He founded the pagan organization Ordo Novi Templi (Order of the New Temple), and announced that they worshipped Wotan, one of the pagan gods of old German myth. (Wotan, or Odin in northern languages, was a god of war who rode an eightlegged horse and carried a spear).
Von Liebenfels wanted to reinstate this aberrant belief, and announced that he had selected the swastika as the symbol of Wotan. This pagan symbol was later taken over by the Nazis, who also became devoted to the paganism of barbarian Europe, and who thought they were carrying out their massacres, conquests and killings in the name of Wotan.
Adherence to pagan beliefs may also be discerned in symbols employed by Mussolini. As mentioned before, "fascism," which was an invention of Mussolini's, comes from the Latin word fasces, that is, a bundle of rods tied around an axe, used in ancient Rome. Senior officials known as "lictors" would carry this item before them, believed to be a symbol of power and sovereignty.
Liebenfels, who abandoned Christianity and turned to paganism, was the first person to use the swastika in 20th century Nazi Germany. The seal on the left is from Liebenfels' book cover. The symbol of the war god Wotan (Odin) was later taken over by the Nazis.
An Analysis of 20th Century Fascism
The previous chapter examined the cultural roots of fascism, how the ideology was a re-awakening of pagan ideas reinforced by Darwinism. These facts are most important for understanding the roots of the fascism and fascist movements which sprung up in the 20th century. However, we must also consider how these movements were able to come to power in so many countries in the 20th century, what methods they employed once they had done so, and the nightmare that resulted.
Right after the end of the First World War, the first fascist regime of the 20th century was established in Italy by Benito Mussolini. Hitler's Germany and Franco's Spain followed. In the 1930s, fascism became a popular political ideology, fascist parties both great and small were set up in many countries, and fascists came to power in Austria and Poland, thus the whole of Europe was affected by it.
There are numerous similarities between fascism in Europe, where the clearest examples of fascism were seen, and Latin America and Japan, where the movement also took root and flourished. Generally speaking, fascism made use of chaos and instability within a country to impose itself on its inhabitants, by presenting itself as an ideology of salvation. Once fascist governments were established, the people were kept under control by a mixture of fear, oppression, and brainwashing techniques.
Social Crises: Fertile Ground for Fascism
There were great similarities in the social and psychological backgrounds of those countries where fascist states came to be established. Most of the countries concerned had been defeated and heavily damaged in the First World War, and thus its people were worn-out and weary, having lost their husbands, wives, children, and loved ones in the war. As well, these countries suffered from a shattered economy, political instability, and a general feeling that the nation was in a state of collapse. People were suffering materially; the various political parties were incapable of rectifying the nations' problems, in addition to fighting amongst themselves.
Essentially, the poverty Italy was faced with as a result of the First World War was the most important factor in the rise to power of Italian fascism. More than 600,000 Italians had died as a result of the war, and up to half a million people were crippled. The greater part of the population was made up of widows and orphans. The country was beleaguered by an economic recession and high unemployment. Although the Italians had suffered great losses in the war, they had achieved very few of their aims. Like many other nations exhausted by the war, the Italian people longed to recapture their honor and former glory.
After World War I, much of the population were either widowed or orphaned. People were dealing with the sorrow of having lost loved ones and people close to them, and were also suffering the economic problems brought on by high unemployment. As a result, there emerged a longing for the old days of glory.
Actually, this was a feeling that had been gathering increasing strength since the end of the 19th century. Modern Italy looked back with nostalgia at the greatness of the Roman Empire, and felt it had a right to former Roman territory. Furthermore, there was a feeling of rivalry with the major powers of the world, and Italy hoped to raise itself to their rank, or, to rise to "the position it deserved." Affected by these aspirations, the Italians hoped to become as powerful as Great Britain, France and Germany.
The Saddening Results Of World War I
The "Great War" of 1914-1918 ruined Europe. 10 million people died, and many more millions suffered the emotional and economic crises that resulted from it. Germany, in particular, was eager for a way out. Fascism made use of the situation.
Social, political and economic crises also played the major role in the establishment of Nazism in Germany, which had been defeated in the First World War. Unemployment and a financial crisis added to the disappointment of defeat. Inflation rose to levels that had seldom been equaled. Small children played with banknotes worth millions of marks, because money, which lost value by the hour, had come to be worth no more than pieces of paper. The Germans wanted to restore their lost honor and return to a better standard of living. It was with the promise of fulfilling such wishes that Nazism would emerge and win support.
Pre-fascist Spain also demonstrated close similarities to these counties. The loss of its colonies on both sides of the American continent at the beginning of the 19th century had led to a serious diminishment of self-esteem. By the beginning of the 20th century, Spain was in a state of semi-collapse. Its economy was failing, and the privileges accorded to the aristocracy opened the way to great injustices. The Spanish looked back to the days of a great and powerful Spain with great longing.
Another country where fascism came to have enormous influence was Japan. In pre-fascist Japan, the higher strata of society were very concerned about the spread of Marxist ideas among the young. But they were unable to determine how to rid themselves from that pernicious ideology. In addition, such social changes were very disconcerting for a society so tightly bound to its traditions. Family bonds loosened, the divorce rate rose, respect for the elderly diminished, customs and traditions were abandoned, an individualist tendency began to emerge, degeneracy among the young reached grievous proportions and there was an alarming increase in the suicide rate. In these conditions, the future stability of the Japanese society was regarded as in jeopardy. All of the above led to a backward-gazing nostalgia. Longing for the glory days of the past, and attempts to revive them, was the first trap the people fell into leading to their becoming fully ensnared by a fascist regime.
Neither must we ignore the menace of communism, which at that time was threatening to overtake the whole world. It may be that a number of nations submitted themselves to fascist regimes in order not to fall victim to that brutal, ruthless and oppressive ideology, escaping one evil only to be trapped by another, believing fascism to be the "lesser of two evils."
The Vicious Circle Of The Darwinian Ideologies: Communism Vs. Fascism
People gathered in front of the German Communist Party building in an anti-communist protest in 1933, with SA units in the foreground. The slogan on the building reads, "Forward with the struggle against the threat of war, fascism, hunger and cold, in the name of work, bread and freedom." When the fascist movement began to gain momentum, communism had already been an emerging threat. In hopes of avoiding the brutality and oppressiveness of communism, many countries turned to fascism as the answer, jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.
The Uneducated: Fascism’s Hapless Prey
Another factor that opened the way to fascism was the ignorance and lack of education of many communities. Education had suffered heavily during the chaos of the First World War. A great number of young educated people had lost their lives on the battlefield. In general, this led to a lowering of the level of culture in society. It was largely the ignorant who supported fascism, fought in its name, and became pawns of its chauvinistic policies. Because the fundamental ideas on which fascism were based (in other words, racism, romantic nationalism, chauvinism and fantasy) could only be widely accepted by the uneducated, susceptible as they were to crude, facile slogans.
Such people, seeing themselves as trapped, looked for easy way out. They embraced fascist leaders, as if they were a kind of lifebelt, as Eric Hoffer says in his book The True Believer:
For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking.34
An examination of the societal conditions that preceded fascism makes light of the fact that many people had just such a psychology.
The Methods by Which Fascism Came to Power
Fascism had its first successes in Italy. Mussolini took advantage of the social tensions and longing for change among the Italians, and after the war, mobilized former soldiers, the unemployed and university students, with slogans calling for a return of the glory days of ancient Rome. Mussolini organized his supporters, known as "Black Shirts," in a quasi-military format, and whose methods were founded on violence. They began to carry out attacks in the streets against groups they identified as their rivals. With their Roman greetings, songs, uniforms and official parades, they aroused the emotions of the uneducated and the disenfranchised.
Mussolini's quasiparamilitary Black Shirts.
On October 29, 1922, 50,000 fascist militants under the command of six generals marched on Rome. Because the king knew what the force that opposed him was capable of, and that there was no way he could oppose them, he called on Mussolini to form a government. As a result of the developments that followed, the Italian fascists finally came to power. A while later, Mussolini banned all other political parties. Some of the opposition leaders were sent into exile abroad, and others were imprisoned.
Hitler came to power by similar methods. The Nazi movement was born in the early 1920s, and carried out its first violent act in the Munich Beer Hall putsch. On November 8, 1923, Hitler raided a meeting at the Munich City Beer hall where Bavarian State Commissioner Gustav von Kahr was speaking with military units, no different from an organized gang, and 600 SA troopers. Hitler entered the meeting in a great rage and occupied the premises. Firing at the ceiling, he said that he was announcing a national revolution. But this coup was a failure. Hitler was arrested and lived as an exile for nine months. Nonetheless, in later years, the Nazis grew stronger by terrorizing their opponents and inciting anti-Semitic hatreds. Eventually, the Nazi Party became an important party in parliament. Throughout all this, of course, the Nazis frequently resorted to illegal methods, much like the Italian Fascist party. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was made chancellor. The post was conferred upon him by the elderly President Hindenburg, who was aware that the growing power of the national Socialist Movement was increasingly menacing, and therefore, made Hitler chancellor in order to avert a civil war. When Hitler again ran for election in March, like all fascist administrations, the Nazis employed terror, intimidation, and deception. After the elections, the German parliament immediately passed the Enabling Act, which made Hitler dictator of Germany for four years.
The Nazi movement, which began in the 1920s, carried out its first act of violence in the Munich Beer Hall putsch. The picture below shows a good number of the accused in the trial following the Beer Hall putsch.
On January 30, 1933, Hitler was made Chancellor by President Paul von Hindenburg.
In this manner, the administrative and law-making power came into Hitler's hands. But, shortly thereafter, the extent of his powers was increased still further. In August 1934, at the death of Hindenburg, the offices of president and chancellor were joined together, with Hitler assuming them both. Hitler followed policies much like those of Mussolini. In addition to brute force, Hitler also made use of various types of anti-democratic methods. For instance, he banned all opposition parties, and outlawed trade unions, thereby completely eliminating personal freedoms. Nazi influence was felt in all walks of life. Even university professors were required to take an oath of loyalty to Hitler.
In Spain, Franco came to power in the aftermath of a bloody civil war. Supported by Hitler and Mussolini, Franco's army defeated the communists after a long and fierce war, and took power over the entire country. Franco then set up a particularly oppressive regime, and ruled the country with an "iron fist" until 1975.
Brainwashing Techniques of Fascism
There was one particularly egregious feature of Italian fascism and Nazi Germany: its attempt to brainwash its citizens. This program was founded on two basic components, education and propaganda.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote, "Propaganda is a means and must therefore be judged with regard to its end... Propaganda in the War was a means to an end, and the end was the struggle for the existence of the German people; consequently, propaganda could only be considered in accordance with the principles that were valid for this struggle. In this case the cruelest weapons were humane if they brought about a quicker victory... All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower is purely intellectual level will have to be."35
Mass Hypnosis
On June 21, 1939, more than 120,000 Germans enjoyed a neo-pagan summer solstice celebration in the Berlin Olympic Stadium. The event was organized by the SS and the Ministry of Propaganda. The aim was to instill the Nazis' ideology of paganism on German society.
The Tools Of Fascist Propaganda: Incitement And Romanticism
The Nazis were highly effective in their use of propaganda. In propaganda publications, Hitler was portrayed as a divine being, while society as a whole was inspired to war and violence. Above are examples of Nazi propaganda magazines and newspapers, printed in various parts of Germany. Nostalgic and emotionally laden messages are typified on the propaganda posters below. The public were incited against an imaginary enemy, and ideas such as "The German people," and "The German Army" became false ideals honored by the public.
1- "The German student fights for the FŸhrer and the people"
2- "I have no other desire than to be the first soldier of the German Reich."
3- "Victory for Germany means freedom for Europe."
Mass Rallies: The Fascist Brainwashing Method
Crowded Nazi rallies were held with rousing anthems and pomp, and were specifically intended to awaken a feeling of awe and fear, thus enthralling the ignorant public. Effectively, fascism was an ideology based on emotion, not reason.
Hitler was certainly effective in his use of propaganda. For instance, the well-known director Leni Riefenstahl was requested to produce a Nazi propaganda film, Olympia. In Triumph of Will, another film by Riefenstahl, Hitler was shown as an almost divine being. Pagan Nazi ideology was praised in all these films, and ultimately imposed upon society. Olympia was one of the old centers of ancient Greek pagan culture. The city, with its famous statue of the Greek god Zeus, was a fitting symbol of the pagan ideology of Nazism.
All fascist regimes, not just Hitler's, used propaganda in a most effective way in order to impose their will on the public. Mussolini openly stated this:
For me the masses are nothing but a herd of sheep as long as they are unorganized... The Roman greeting, songs and formulas...all are essential to fan the flames of the enthusiasm that keeps a movement in being...Everything turns upon one's ability to control the masses like an artist.36
Propaganda methods were also employed by Mussolini. Above are some examples of publications reflecting Italian fascism and its pagan roots. Below is a slogan employed by Mussolini which reveals the thinking adopted by the educational system. It reads, "Believe, obey, fight," which even primary schoolchildren were forced to learn by heart.
"THE DUCE, THE PERFECT MAN" PROPAGANDA IN ITALY
Images and publications trying to portray Mussolini as the perfect man were widespread in fascist Italy. Images of him with farmers in their fields, or with children in schools, were everywhere. The picture above typifies Mussolini propaganda.
Propaganda posters (left) were also used for the purpose of inculcating fascist ideals into society.
The War-Cry Of Fascism: "Believe! Obey! Fight!"
Fascist propaganda portraying Mussolini as a noble Roman commander. Special attention must be drawn to the pagan symbols placed behind him (the axes and the legionary SPQR).
Fascism tries to interfere with people thinking for themselves. All it tolerates is obedience to the leader, rallied by contrived emotions, and a ready willingness to fight. These themes dominate the above propaganda posters from Mussolini's time.
The Use of Pressure To Eliminate Opposed Ideas
One interesting example of fascism's efforts to brainwash society were the book burning ceremonies in Nazi Germany.
The first of these took place on May 10, 1933. Students from German universities, which had previously been recognized as the best in the world, gathered in Berlin and other German cities, and burned books which contained "un-German" ideas. Thousands of books were burned, to the accompaniment of Nazi salutes, songs and military music.
In Berlin, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gave a speech to the students stating:
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (center)
The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path... The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death—this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong. great and symbolic deed—a deed which should document the following for a world to know—Here the intellectual foundation of the November (Democratic) Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise...37
The fascist state permits only its own ideology to be taught. Outside of that, nobody must be allowed to think anything else, or else, he will be punished, have his books burned, or be silenced in some other way. Each individual is seen as a tool at the service of the ideology of the state. Those who do not agree with the ideology are intimidated into doing so.
Therefore, the educational system was rendered to the complete service of the fascist state. The complete transformation of the educational system was outlined in the 20th article of the basic principles of National Socialism. Right from primary school, children were raised without any ethical values or human feeling, and in a way devoid of affection or compassion. They were educated under the principle that the strong are most right, and that it is essential to employ force to achieve one's aims. The organization created for German children between the ages of 10-18 was known as theHitlerjugend, or Hitler Youth. All those who joined the Hitler Youth were warned that they must be highly vigilant in their daily lives, and should spy on all those opposed to the Nazis. Some of them even denounced their own parents. The Hitler Youth grew steadily, and by 1935, 60 percent of youth were enrolled in it.
Another tactic used by all fascist regimes has been to conceal the true history from society, and in its place, to teach a fictitious version, written by themselves. The purpose to this has been to build a culture in which the fascists' ideals could thrive, enabling them to become both more popular and more firmly rooted in society. The understanding of history, as well as philosophy, throughout the educational process were entirely monitored by the fascist state. As they were educated by the system, people were entirely unaware that they were being brainwashed in fascist ideology, and that all other ideas were completely censored.
1- Goebbels addressing students in Berlin.
Nazi Book Burnings
The fascist state allows only its own ideology to be read and taught, being why book burnings are a distinctive feature of their methods. These scenes are from a book burning ceremony carried out by German university students in Berlin on May 10, 1933.
The Idols of Fascism: The Sacred Leader
The most important element of fascism is the leader, whose name is given prominence in every aspect of society. The Hitler, Mussolini and Franco regimes were clear examples of this. The titles used by these dictators, "Der Führer," "Il Duce" or "El Caudillo" all signify the same thing— "The all-knowing leader." And, indeed, the three ran their respective states totally according to their own desires, while their closest colleagues and most senior officers were left out of the decision-making process.
Fascism ascribes an almost sacred power to the leader, in order that he can maintain his appeal and increase his acceptance among the people. The leader is the ruler of the whole country and of its people, portrayed as being part of him. A Nationalist Socialist leader, Herr Spaniol, speaking at Saarbruecken in January, 1935, said:
I do not believe that the Churches will continue to exist in their present form. In the future religion will be called National Socialism. Its prophet, its pope, its Jesus Christ, will be called Adolf Hitler.38
In a similar way, Mussolini was seen in Italy as someone with special abilities, a superior being, chosen and formed especially for the task in hand. The commandments and pronouncements issued by Mussolini were called the "Fascist Decalogue," and the eighth of these, "The Duce is always right," became a slogan that was heard all over Italy in the 1920s and 30s.39 By 1935, membership of the fascist youth organization, the Opera Nationale Balilla, became compulsory for all Italian youth. Young Italians who became a member of Balilla swore to "...believe in Rome the eternal... in the genius of Mussolini, in our Holy Father Fascism."40
Another method employed to portray the fascist leader as sacred was the putting up of his picture and statues all over the country. This had a profound psychological effect on the public, who constantly felt themselves within the leader's power and under his control, and even, that he was always watching them. Mussolini's official propaganda service used to advise the press how, when and which of his pictures was to be printed, on which page, in what arrangement, and in what size. In these photographs, "Il Duce" appeared before his people in pompous poses: brandishing a sword, stressing economic development in a harvest area, addressing young fascists, as a tireless worker or sportsman.
In each case, Mussolini was presented as the hero of the people. Newspaper pages were adorned with pictures of him flying planes, jumping hurdles on horseback, swimming, skiing in the Alps, fencing, in parachutist costume etc.
So effective was this propaganda that even his oldest friends used to stand to attention whenever they saw him. Thus Mussolini was able to satisfy his enormous ego, not even allowing his oldest friends to sit down, but keeping them on their feet for hours.
The methods employed to portray the fascist leader as superhuman, during the eras of Hitler and Mussolini, are also used by modern fascists in our own time. The fascist dictator in Iraq, Saddam Hussein, is such an example. For years, the streets of fascist Iraq have been covered with huge pictures of him. And, in them, he is shown in different roles as leader of the people: as a farmer in the country, a worker in a factory, as a soldier in the barracks. He makes his presence felt everywhere, in an attempt to give the impression of being "one who sees and knows all," in other words, a sacred being.
1- Hitler was portrayed as a hero of the people.
2- One of the primary purposes of ensuring that Nazi propaganda posters were visible all across the country was to make people feel that the leader was everywhere and was watching them.
2- One of the primary purposes of ensuring that Nazi propaganda posters were visible all across the country was to make people feel that the leader was everywhere and was watching them.
Portraits of A Psychopath
According to psychiatrists, Hitler suffered a number of complexes and was psychologically unbalanced. But Nazi propaganda portrayed him as the infallible leader of Germany.
A People Hypnotized By Nazi Propaganda Could Not See The Truth
Filled with awe for Hitler, the German people were capable of ignoring the above evidence of massacres and torture.
Although Hitler and his staff were all civilians, they wore military uniform at all times and often held military ceremonies. The purpose of this was to inspire a warlike temperament in the German people, preparing them for the aggression of the Second World War.
Fascist Romanticism
However, fascism certainly does not consist merely of the leader and the fascist party around him. In both Nazi Germany and Italy, there was tremendous popular support for the regime. This was produced in a number of ways. Fascist regimes are not simply "authoritarian," crushing their people into silence; they are also "totalitarian."
The particular feature that attracts people to a fascist ideology in a totalitarian system is "extreme romanticism." People who have irrational and romantic or emotional attachments to ideals and movements in their own time or in history are easily led and manipulated, and can even be provoked to commit crimes. If such people can be convinced that the cruelties required of them are carried out for a sacred cause, such as the "superiority of their own race," there is no limit to the injustices they can be deluded into committing. Fascist regimes recognize this, and do their utmost to keep their people in a state of irrational emotional exuberance and agitation. They present what appear to be sacred values to the people and encourage them in self-sacrifice for the sake of the state, to despise other nations or races, and even to torture and kill.
For this reason, fascist regimes have always tended to attach great importance to mass rallies, marches, meetings and ceremonies. Their aim is to form a sheep-like sense of unity in the people. The people are first diverted from religion with symbols, statues, days of remembrance, flags, torches, and uniforms. Grand moving ceremonies are designed to replace the experience of religious ones. These indoctrinated crowds conform to the fascist ideals, in false joy and excitement, as if carrying out an act of divine worship. The frequent repetition of written and shouted slogans, cries, martial music and salutes are a vital part of fascist ceremonies.
Large Rallies Organized For Brainwashing
Great importance is attached to mass rallies, marches, ceremonies, statues, symbols, days of remembrance and flags in fascist regimes. These put the public under a spell, preventing them from seeing the truth.
These fascist crowds are devoid of any kind of intelligent thought or behavior. All that remains is a group of people whipped up by slogans, songs and poems, but deaf to all reason. These masses, who identify themselves and their leaders with heroes from mythology or legends from the past, carry out their atrocities with an artificially induced sense of "heroism." If the day comes when they are called to account for their actions, they say they did it for the nation, and that they are actually its heroes. Those who followed Hitler and Mussolini did so under the effects of such hypnosis, perpetrating their atrocities in this state of false excitement.
The Violence Hidden Behind The Show
Overleaf. Nazi Germany attached great importance to superficial show. The aim was to make people oblivious to its cruelty, and cast a spell over society. Above. A horrifying look at a mass grave, proof of Nazi atrocities.
Under fascism, a person's natural love for his people and country is turned into a dangerous sentimentality and a mindless loss of self-control, whereby whole societies are driven to kill by exploiting these emotions. (see Romanticism: A Weapon of Satan, Harun Yahya)
Hitler with a blood flag, the most sacred symbol in nazi ceremonies. (on the left)
Mussolini imitated the pagan rites held in ancient Rome calling for a return of the glory days of the past. These glorious shows were later taken up by the Nazis.(on the right)
Mussolini imitated the pagan rites held in ancient Rome calling for a return of the glory days of the past. These glorious shows were later taken up by the Nazis.(on the right)
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
The blood flag was the most sacred symbol in Nazi ceremonies. Tens of thousands of other Nazi Party flags were touched with it, in the belief that they would be effected by its "sacred" power.
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.
Imaginary Enemies, Imaginary Plots
A publication reflecting the paranoia of Nazi Germany, portraying the French as an enemy.
An over-exaggerated message in a fascist poster, showing Italy chained to the Mediterranean.(on the right)
An over-exaggerated message in a fascist poster, showing Italy chained to the Mediterranean.(on the right)
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 assassins—all thugs, psychopaths 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
State Terror Against The People
A characteristic of the fascist state is its distrust of its own people. Because fascists know they can only instill obedience and loyalty by policies of fear and coercion, they established secret police and intelligence units targeted against their own populations. The hundreds of thousands of murders carried out by the Gestapo are testimony of the extent of the paranoia of the fascist state.
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.
Fascism's Shock Troopers
Not only do fascists motivate their populations by brainwashing, but also intimidate by means of terror. Special units are set up to implement this policy of terror. The Nazis' SA, SS and Gestapo are typical examples.
A postcard printed to mark German Police Day(at the top left). An SS march-past. (at the top right).
Above. The SS Deaths Head Division (SS-Totenkopf) was famous for its ruthlessness. The above version of the Prussian-style death's head was worn by the SS until 1934.Left. General Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the Waffen-SS panzer corps.
A postcard printed to mark German Police Day(at the top left). An SS march-past. (at the top right).
Above. The SS Deaths Head Division (SS-Totenkopf) was famous for its ruthlessness. The above version of the Prussian-style death's head was worn by the SS until 1934.Left. General Sepp Dietrich, the commander of the Waffen-SS panzer corps.
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.
As the allied forces liberated Nazi-occupied lands, the brutal genocide the Nazis carried out in the concentration camps came to light. 11 million people had been murdered with horrible mass extermination methods, and those few who were still alive were half-dead. This form of barbarity shows the extent of the catastrophes that Darwinist racism has led to.
Franco And Hitler's Brutal Alliance
The fascist General Francisco Franco led his country of Spain into a bloody civil war in 1936, throughout which an average of 500 people lost their lives every day. By the time it ended, some 600,000 had died. Franco's greatest supporters were Hitler and Mussolini.
In return for Hitler's help, Franco gave to him the village of Guernica as a gift, where he tested the giant bombers that had been produced by Nazi technology.
Right. Hitler and Franco shaking hands.
In return for Hitler's help, Franco gave to him the village of Guernica as a gift, where he tested the giant bombers that had been produced by Nazi technology.
Right. Hitler and Franco shaking hands.
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 describe 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
Fascism's Policy of Conquest
Another feature without which fascism cannot survive is its policy of expansion by conquering other countries. The basis of this policy of conquest is racism, and the concept of "the struggle for survival between the races," a legacy of Darwinism. Fascist states believe that in order to develop as a nation, they have to conquer weaker nations, and grow by absorbing them.
According to fascist thinking, man can only progress by engaging in war. Therefore, "militarism" is fascism's most defining characteristic. In order to encourage this martial spirit, fascist parties attempt to impress their citizens with their uniforms and pompous ceremonies. In Mussolini's words, "Fascism... believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to meet it."52
Mussolini expressed his opposition to peace in another speech, saying, "I do not believe in peace, but I find it depressing and a negation of all human virtues of man."53
Mussolini inflicted great suffering, both on his own people and on those in the countries he occupied, in the name of his ideology. He occupied Ethiopia(Abyssinia) in 1935, and 15,000 innocent Muslims were killed towards his dreams of "reviving the Roman Empire." He had no compunction about ordering civilians who tried to fight the occupation to be shot. He was also responsible for terrible atrocities through the use of poison gas against civilians.
The most grievous example of fascism's politics of occupation is, of course, Nazi Germany. The Nazis claimed that the Germans, "the master race," needed "room to live" beyond the frontiers of Germany, and for that reason sparked World War II. Within a very short time, the German Army had occupied Poland, Belgium, the Baltic countries, France, the Balkan Peninsula and Northern Africa, invaded Russia as far as Moscow, and headed from there to the Caspian Sea. This murder, which ultimately culminated in a disaster for the German people as well as for those of other countries, left 55 million dead, and was the bloodiest legacy of fascism in the 20th century.
Nazi Germany is the worst example of fascism's policy of occupation.
The map shows those countries under Nazi occupation at the end of 1942.
The map shows those countries under Nazi occupation at the end of 1942.
The Fascist System's Attack on Art
Another disturbing aspect of fascism is that people living under such a regime are unable to develop their artistic talents, and that their scientific research fails to produce any productive results.
In order to determine the reason for this, we must first define what art is. Art is found in people taking pleasure in beauty and wanting to express it. Therefore, it first of all requires a soul capable of appreciating beauty. For instance, an artist who possesses feelings such as love and affection can see beauty in an animal, a landscape, or a plant. He experiences a feeling of joy, which he then tries to depict. A composer, in the presence of such beauty produces beautiful music, because his soul, feeling that beauty, longs to express it. The same applies to every other type of art, from literature to music.
However, it is impossible for those with a dark and cold soul, who are used to oppression and cruelty, and who have lost all semblance of humanity, to produce art. It is impossible for a person who believes in aggression and the superiority of force, who considers that bloodshed is necessary, who sees the world as a battleground, a kind of arena where only the strong have the right to live, to be affected by the beauties of nature or human beings, and influenced by their intricacies.
Those are the characteristics of fascists, and therefore, it is impossible for a fascist to possess any artistic feeling. The fascist soul is utterly debilitated and ignorant, and lacks all understanding, and considers art "unnecessary."
Actually, the fascists' hostility to art goes back to ancient Sparta, that ancient city which they took as a model. At a period when art was greatly prized in Athens, Sparta saw art as unnecessary, and raised its citizens instead to become warriors from an early age. It was virtually forbidden for Spartan children to take an interest in subjects such as reading and writing or art in their education.
Fascism's Errant Interpretation of Art
Fascist ideology removes any aesthetic value from art and turns it instead into a propaganda tool, as in this picture called "Friendship" by the Nazi artist Helmut Ullrich. The themes in this picture are "The heroic German warrior" and "A child representing the Aryan race."
In 20th century fascist states, works of art, if any, were prepared and controlled by the state to serve as propaganda. These were the products of a soulless and mechanical "art to order." No real works of art emerged. For instance, only those subjects that the state allowed could be painted, such as war. Subjects disliked by the state were forbidden. The same applied to the written word, only those things the fascist state permitted could be written about, and nothing else. As a result, art totally unrelated to true art emerged, that, aesthetically, rendered art, architecture and literature rigid, soulless and dull.
The most obvious examples of this were seen in Hitler's Germany. Because of his racist views, Hitler boycotted certain art forms. For example, because he looked on Africans as an "inferior race," the playing of jazz was forbidden in Germany, for it was regarded as "black man's music." In 1935, Eugen Hadamowski, the head of German radio, announced that by order of Hitler, he prohibited the playing of Negro jazz on German radio.
At the beginning of the 1940s, at the height of Hitler's power, jazz began to be used as a propaganda tool in radio broadcasts directed at Great Britain and America. At that time, and in most countries, jazz was one of the most popular forms of music. Europe's greatest jazz musicians were brought together. The first thing done was to translate all the English names of the famous jazz songs into German. The lyrics of these songs were altered to conform with Nazi propaganda, and was played only on programs aimed at the West, and completely forbidden on domestic German radio.
The lyrics of the songs were entirely fascist in content. Here is one example.
You're the greatest… You're a German pilot… You're machine gun fire… You're a heroic submariner… You're the greatest… You're a German bomber…54
That was the Nazis' idea of art and music. Paintings, song lyrics, music and literature were all expected to include subjects approved of by the state. Painters could only paint subjects that encouraged the spirit of war. For instance, when the above-mentioned "state controlled jazz group" produced a record that did not consist of Nazi propaganda, they were immediately accused of being "degenerate" and warned never to try such a thing again.
And, that was not the end of Hitler's measures against artists. After the race laws of 1933, theReichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber) required a registry of all German musicians. As a result, hundreds of talented composers had their work deliberately suppressed and careers ended simply because their race or style of music offended the Third Reich. Famous works by Mendelssohn, Mahler and Schoenberg were used as examples of unacceptable music.55
IN FASCISM, "ART EQUALS WAR"
The artistic themes most frequently employed in Nazi Germany were "heroism" and "war." This is evident in Franz Eichhorst's The Warrior in Poland.
According to Hitler, the role of art was to carry political messages in order to shape the mind of the public. What to Hitler was true art was that which portrayed life in the countryside, the healthy, and the Aryan race. In one speech, he offered his views on art and artists:
We shall discover and encourage the artists who are able to impress upon the State of the German people the cultural stamp of the Germanic race... in their origin and in the picture which they present they are the expressions of the soul and the ideals of the community.56
A 1940 wall painting by Massimo Campigli, one of the Italian artists employed by the fascist administration, at the entrance to Padua University.
Another intention of fascist art is to portray the leader as sacred. This was the aim in Hubert Lanzinger's portrait of Hitler The Flag-Bearer.
As can be discerned from all that has been mentioned, the artistic talents and scientific endeavor of people living under fascist regimes are ultimately fruitless. On the other hand, however, a society which lives by true religion sees great progress and development in the arts. Since religious people know that the universe and all living things in it were created by God, they look at everything around them with the intention of recognizing their beauty. They see the art in God's creation and are in awe of it. They see people, animals, plants and everything in nature as God's creations, and both love and appreciate them, realizing their beauty and detail. In fact, the greatest works of art in history arose out of inspiration artists have found in religious subjects.
Fascism's Hatred of Women
There is another little known but exceedingly important aspect of fascism. It has an inimical attitude towards women, and sees them as inferior to men.
This fact is recognizable in words and statements of 20th century fascist leaders. For instance, Mussolini's statement to Maurice de Valeffe, a reporter for the French publication Journal, on Nov. 12, 1922, openly belittled women:
There are those who say that I intend to limit the right to vote. No! Every citizen will keep his right to vote for the Rome Parliament… Let me also admit to you that I am not thinking of extending the vote to women. There would be no point. My blood opposes all kinds of feminism when it comes to women participating in state affairs. Naturally a woman shouldn't be a slave, but if I conceded her the vote, I'd be laughed at. In our state, she must not count.57
During the serious economic crisis beginning in 1930, Mussolini ordered that women should leave their places of work. Because he saw women as "thieves who reach out to steal men's bread, and responsible for men's unproductiveness."58
The Duce's views on women are strikingly apparent in an interview he granted the French journalist Hélène Gosset in 1932:
Women must submit… Even if they have an analytical power, they have no synthetic one. Have they ever put up an architectural structure? I am not talking about a temple: a woman could do no better than erecting a hut. Women are strangers to architecture, the synthesis of all the arts: and their destiny ends at this point.59
Through various measures, restrictions on women in the workplace were also imposed in education. For instance, a decree of Jan. 30, 1927 forbade women in high school from taking classes in literature and philosophy. A decree passed in 1928 resorted to legal measures to oppose women's education, and women were prevented from becoming directors of middle schools. Female students were required to pay double the fees in schools and universities.
A decree which Mussolini put before Parliament on Nov. 28, 1933 declared, "State bodies are empowered to impose conditions excluding women in advertisements for exams to take on new employees.. They must impose limits against a rise in the number of female workers in public offices…"60 According to a decree instituted by force of law on Sept. 1, 1938, women could only make up 10 percent of the workforce in public offices.
In Nazi Germany the status of women as "second class citizens" was even more pronounced. The German Education Ministry decided that women should make up no more than 10 percent of high school graduates. In 1934, only 1,500 out of every 10,000 female high school graduates were allowed to proceed to higher education. In 1929, there were 39 National Socialist education bodies. Only two of these were for women. Laws were passed banning women from taking Latin classes in middle school: before having even finished high school, they were prevented from going on to university.61
These decrees did not just represent a social ideology or merely imposed regulations to foster a division of labor, they were actually the implementation of the biological dogma of Nazism. Maria A. Macciocchi, author of Eléments pour une Analyse du Fascisme comments that in the eyes of the Nazis, women were a kind of animal.62 According to such a philosophy, women were a primitive race, at a lower level in biological terms.63
The Darwinist Roots of the Hostility to Women
The root of this prejudice among fascists towards women was, as in so many other matters, Darwinism. Fascists did not merely appropriate the idea of the inequality between the races from Darwinism, they also adopted the idea that men were superior to women.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote that women some of whose "powers of intuition, of rapid perception, and perhaps of imitation are characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation."64 According to Darwin, evolution meant "a struggle of individuals of one sex, generally males, for the possession of the other sex."65
In the Descent, Darwin also wrote, "Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal; therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of selection."66 Evolution was in the hands of men, and women were basically passive. As a result, women had evolved less and were more primitive, for which reason women were dominated by instinct and emotions, which was their "greatest weakness."67
Darwin maintained his views on the superiority of men and its importance for evolution throughout his life. He had this to say about this issue also by referring to his cousin Francis Galton's theories:
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man's attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman—whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands. If two lists were made of the most eminent men and women in poetry, painting, sculpture, music (inclusive both of composition and performance), history, science, and philosophy, with half-a-dozen names under each subject, the two lists would not bear comparison. We may also infer, from the law of the deviation from averages, so well illustrated by Mr. Galton, in his work on Hereditary Genius, that if men are capable of a decided pre-eminence over women in many subjects, the average of mental power in man must be above that of woman.68
Darwin's views could also be recognized in his personal outlook towards women. He described a woman's role in marriage as "constant companion, (friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved and played with—better than a dog anyhow—Home, and someone to take care of house ..."69 It is evident that Darwin looked at women and the institution of the family from a materialistic standpoint. There was not a trace of love, respect, loyalty, affection or compassion in his outlook.
The evolutionist and materialist Carl Vogt, a contemporary of Darwin and a Geneva scholar of the mid nineteenth century, also held disparaging views regarding women. "We may be sure that wherever we perceive an approach to the animal type the female is nearer to it than the male" he wrote. "Hence we should discover a greater [apelike] resemblance if we were to take a female as our standard."70
Many evolutionists, following Darwin, have continued to maintain that women are inferior to men, both biologically and intellectually. Some evolutionists have even classified men and women as two distinct psychological species: males were homo frontalis, females homo parietalis.71 One evolutionist, Elaine Morgan, noted that Darwin had motivated men into researching the reasons why women were "manifestly inferior and irreversibly subordinant".72
Paul Broca (1824-1880), an evolutionist physicist and anthropologist, was particularly interested in the differences in intelligence and brain size between men and women, ascribing their inferior intelligence to the smaller size of their brains.
Another follower of Darwin, the evolutionist social psychologist Gustave Le Bon, wrote;
In the most intelligent races ... are a large number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth discussion. ... Women ... represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and ... are closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They excel in fickleness, inconsistency, absence of thought and logic, and incapacity to reason. Without a doubt there exist some distinguished women ... but they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; consequently, we may neglect them entirely.73
Therefore, at the basis of fascism's disparagement of and contempt for women lies the theory of Darwinism. Mussolini's taking away of women's social rights, and Hitler's building of "breeding farms" to reproduce the superior race and obliging young girls to sleep with SS officers, are all reflections of fascists' attitudes to women. Both Darwinists and fascists are enemies of women. They see them as an inferior and backward species, and both despise them, as well as employing discriminatory and oppressive methods against them.
This fascist perspective is completely at odds with the ethics of the Koran. God has commanded in the Koran that women should be cherished, respected, and protected. In addition, He has shown examples of women with superior morals, such as Mary and the wife of Pharaoh. In the eyes of God, superiority does not lie in race, sex or rank, but in closeness to Him and strength of belief. In a number of verses of the Koran, God has revealed that all believers will receive their reward without discrimination between men and women.
However, as religion was abandoned, these truths were abandoned with it, and in their place were provided superstitions such as fascism and Darwinism, in which all forms of discrimination based on sex or race are seen as justified.
Fascism's Sexual Deviations
The hostility to women that we have so far examined is actually the manifestation of a dark subconscious tendency. Fascism equated feelings such as love, compassion and affection with womanhood, and thus regarded it as despicable. On the other hand, tendencies such as the love of war, bloodlust and ruthlessness were seen as typically "male," and for that reason "manliness" was elevated to the point of being sacred.
When fascism's myth of "manliness" is examined a bit closer, however, there we find homosexuality hidden within it. This little known but important connection between fascism and homosexuality dates back as far as ancient Sparta.
In earlier chapters of this book, we saw that fascism was founded on pagan culture, and that it emerged together with claim of re-awakening paganism. The most defining characteristic of paganism is that it lacks the moral criteria and laws revealed by God. In the pagan world, therefore, sexual deviance of all kinds was able to flourish. It was the city-states of ancient Greece that brought these to their highest point. In Athens and Sparta, homosexuality was seen as quite normal, an acceptable relationship, and even a virtue.
In Sparta especially, the ancestor of fascism, a special importance was attributed to the concept of "manliness," and under the name of "love of man," homosexuality was widely accepted. Spartan soldiers believed that they increased their strength by having sexual relations with each other. The historian Plutarch of Chaeronea, who lived around 50-120 A.D., wrote of "the sacred battalion" of Thebans made up of 150 male homosexual pairs.74 In Sparta, all healthy male children were taken into the army at the age of 12, and were immediately raped by experienced soldiers. It was believed that these perverted relations were the greatest source of strength for the Spartan army, with its "warrior" culture and passion for bloodshed.
Such a debased and deviant culture raised its head again with the neo-pagan movement of the 19th century. And, the major center of this deviancy was Germany. The leader of the movement, Adolf Brand, founded the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Elite) in 1902, together with Wilheml Jansen and Benedict Friedlander, both of whom were known for their deviant sexual tendencies. Friedlander published a book called Renaissance des Eros Uranios (Renaissance of Uranian Erotica) in 1904. On the cover was a picture of a naked Greek youth. Friedlander explained the aim of the book in these words:
The positive goal...is the revival of Hellenic chivalry and its recognition by society. By chivalric love we mean in particular close friendships between youths and even more particularly the bonds between men of unequal ages.75
The aim of the community was to transform Germany from a Judeo-Christian society to a Greco-Uranian one.76 This deviant organization was also known for its racism. Referring to the ideas of the Community of the Elite, Kurt Hildebrandt, the leader of the Society for Human Rights established in 1923, wrote in his book Norm Entartung Verfall (Ideal, Degeneration, Ruin) that the superior race was that composed of homosexuals. In his view, relations with women were only necessary for "reproductive reasons," but that in order to achieve an "ultramasculine" race, sexual "love" between men was essential.
These ideas were none other than those of the Nazi Party, which was basically a "homosexual club."
This fact was set out by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams in their book The Pink Swastika: Homosexuality in the Nazi Party, a wide-ranging study. The book examines both pre-Nazi movements and organizations, as well as the Nazi Party leadership, and reveals that there was a large number of homosexuals within it. It explains, with historical documentation, how the Nazis' policy of rounding up homosexuals and sending them to concentration camps was all for show, and that by doing so, senior Nazi leaders were trying to cover up their own practices. Among the known Nazi homosexuals were SA chief Ernst Röhm, Gestapo chief Reinhard Heydrich, Luftwaffe chief Herman Goering, Rudolf Hess, leader of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) organization Baldur von Schirach, Nazi Germany's Finance Minister Walther Funk, and Hitler's land Forces commander Freiherr Werner von Fritsch. There is also evidence to suggest that SS chief Himmler and Hitler himself also had homosexual tendencies.77
The Pink Swastika also demonstrates that this tendency was not restricted to Nazis in Germany, and that there are many homosexuals in neo-Nazi movements and racist organizations active in the United States, and shows that such deviance is a regular feature of fascism. Fascist pagans indulge in the sin as related in the Koran, that of the people to whom the prophet Lot was sent.
There were so many homosexuals in the Nazi movement that the Nazi Party has been compared to a "homosexual club." Above: SS Chief Heinrich Himmler with his officers.
However, those who engage in these practices must not forget what happened to the people of Lot. The disaster visited on them is described in the Koran in this way:
Fascism, Racism And Darwinism
We can list the principle features of fascism as such concepts as authoritarian or dictatorial state rule, and an aggressive foreign policy. But alongside all of these, its really dominant characteristic is racism. When we look at the Nazi ideology, in particular, we can see that it is racism that makes fascism what it is. The Nazis set out with the dream of establishing the hegemony of the Aryan race, which they believed to be superior, over the whole world, an idea on which all their policies and social measures were based. In the words of Wilhelm Reich, "The race theory is German fascism's theoretical axis."78
Racism was also the fundamental ideology of other fascist regimes, such as those of Mussolini and Franco, even if not to the extent it was in Nazism. Mussolini suggested that the Romans who had governed the Roman Empire were a "superior race," and that the Italians, as their descendants, also possessed this superior nature. The conquest of Ethiopia was based on this notion of the superior race, and that the black-skinned Ethiopians need submit to the Italians, in accordance to what was perceived as a natural racial hierarchy. Franco made similar claims for the Spanish.
Japanese fascism, which developed before the Second World War, and was part of the Hitler-Mussolini alliance, also possessed a "superior race" complex. In the New York Times of August 14, 1942, Otto D. Tolischus wrote about a booklet issued in Tokyo by Professor Chikao Fujisawa, one of the leading exponents of Japan's political thought and philosophy;
According to this booklet, which was made up for widest distribution, Japan, as the original motherland of the human race and world civilization, is fighting a holy war to reunite warring mankind into one universal family household in which every nation will take its proper place under the divine sovereignty of the Japenese Emperor, who is a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess in the "absolute cosmic life-center," from which the nations have strayed and to which they must return.79
The interesting thing is that the alliance of the fascist states was set up between groups who each saw themselves as the "superior race." For instance, the Nazis did not object to the Japanese superior race claims, but even encouraged them by describing them as "honorary Aryans."
But what is the root of the racism which forms the basis of all fascist regimes and movements?
We shall consider the answer to that question in this chapter.
In order to gain them as an ally, the Nazis did not oppose the Japanese's claims of being the "superior race," and even honored them as "honorary Aryans."
Racism and Darwinism
In the earlier chapters of this book we saw that racism was a part of pagan culture, and that although it had already largely been done away with through the revelation of divine religion, it returned to Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. The greatest influence behind this new development was the replacement of the Christian belief that "God created all people equal" with "Darwinism". By suggesting that man had evolved from more primitive creatures, and that some races had evolved further than others, Darwinism provided racism with a scientific mask.
In short, Darwin is the father of modern racism. His theory was taken up and commented on by such "official" founders of modern race theory as Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and this racist ideology that emerged was then put into practice by the Nazis and other fascists. James Joll, who spent many years as a professor of history at universities such as Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard, explained the relationship between Darwinism and racism in his book Europe Since 1870, which is still taught as a textbook in universities:
Charles Darwin, the English naturalist whose books On the Origin of Species, published in 1859, and The Descent of Man, which followed in 1871, launched controversies which affected many branches of European thought… The ideas of Darwin, and of some of his contemporaries such as the English philosopher Herbert Spencer, …were rapidly applied to questions far removed from the immediate scientific ones… The element of Darwinism which appeared most applicable to the development of society was the belief that the excess of population over the means of support necessitated a constant struggle for survival in which it was the strongest or the 'fittest' who won. From this it was easy for some social thinkers to give a moral content to the notion of the fittest, so that the species or races which did survive were those morally entitled to do so.The doctrine of natural selection could, therefore, very easily become associated with another train of thought developed by the French writer, Count Joseph-Arthur Gobineau, who published an Essay on the Inequality of Human Races in 1853. Gobineau insisted that the most important factor in development was race; and that those races which remained superior were those which kept their racial purity intact. Of these, according to Gobineau, it was the Aryan race which had survived best… It was... Houston Stewart Chamberlain who contributed to carrying some of these ideas a stage further… Hitler himself admired the author [Chamberlain] sufficiently to visit him on his deathbed in 1927.80
Hitler's idea of a hierarchy and conflict between the races was inspired by Darwinism.
Earlier chapters of this book described how the evolutionist German biologist Ernst Haeckel was one of the most important of Nazism's spiritual fathers. Haeckel brought Darwin's theory to Germany, and formulated it as a program ready for the Nazis. From racists such as Arthur Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hitler adopted a politically-oriented racism, and a biological approach from Haeckel. Careful examination will reveal that these racists all derived their inspiration from Darwinism.
Indeed, a deep Darwinian influence can be found among all Nazi ideologues. When we examine the Nazi theory, which was given form by Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg, we see in it concepts such as "natural selection," "selective mating," and "the struggle for survival between the races," all repeated dozens of times in Darwin's The Origin of Species. As also mentioned earlier, the name of Hitler's book Mein Kampf was inspired by Darwin's principle that life was a constant struggle for survival, and those who emerged victorious survived. In the book, Hitler talked of the struggle between the races, and maintained that "History would culminate in a new millennial empire of unparalleled splendor, based on a new racial hierarchy ordained by nature herself."81
In the Nuremberg party rally in 1933, he proclaimed that ''higher race subjects to itself a lower race …a right which we see in nature and which can be regarded as the sole conceivable right."82
That Nazism was influenced by Darwinism is accepted by almost all historians who are expert in the period. Peter Chrisp expresses it this way in his The Rise of Fascism:
Charles Darwin's theory that humans had evolved from apes was ridiculed when it was first published, but was later widely accepted. The Nazis distorted Darwin's theories, using them to justify warfare and racism.83
The historian R. Hickman expresses the influence of Darwinism on Hitler in these words:
[Hitler] was a firm believer and preacher of evolution. Whatever the deeper, profound, complexities of his psychosis, it is certain that [the concept of struggle was important because]… his book, Mein Kampf, clearly set forth a number of evolutionary ideas, particularly those emphasizing struggle, survival of the fittest and the extermination of the weak to produce a better society.84
The Nazi Theory of Race
In The Mass Psychology of Fascism Wilhelm Reich describes the Nazi theory of race thus:
The race theory proceeds from the presupposition that the exclusive mating of every animal with its own species is an "iron law" in nature. Only exceptional circumstances, such as captivity, are capable of causing a violation of this law and of leading to racial interbreeding. When this occurs, however, nature revenges itself and uses every means at its disposal to oppose such infringements, either by making the bastard sterile or by limiting the fertility of later offspring. In every crossbreeding of two living creatures of different "levels," the offspring will of necessity represent something intermediate. But nature aims at a higher breeding of life; hence bastardization is contrary to the will of nature. Natural selection also takes place in the daily struggle for survival, in which the weaker, i.e., racially inferior, perish. This is consistent with the "will of nature," for every improvement and higher breeding would cease if the weak, who are in the majority, could crowd out the strong, who are in the minority.85
Nazi racial theory maintained that, in order to maintain the so-called purity of the German races, mixed marriages had to be prevented. Little girls, brought out at the Nuremberg rallies and ordered to offer Nazi salutes, were used as symbols of the Nazi idea of the "master race."
As we have seen, this biological premise that forms the basis of the Nazis' race theory is "undiluted" Darwinism. Nonsense such as the notion that nature's aim is to "cause superior species to evolve," that it uses natural selection to do so, and that the weak are inevitably eliminated, are all typically Darwinian.
These evolutionist views, which have no scientific basis, and are just a reworking of the pagan absurdity of "ascribing consciousness to nature," finally reached their culmination in the savagery of the Nazis. The theory was put into practice in human societies, again in a manner in conformity with Darwinism. Wilhelm Reich continues:
The National Socialist went on to apply this supposed law in nature to peoples. Their line of reasoning was something as follows: Historical experience teaches that the "intermixing of Aryan blood" with "inferior" peoples always results in the degeneration of the founders of civilization. The level of the superior race is lowered, followed by physical and mental retrogression; this marks the beginning of a progressive "decline." The North American continent would remain strong, Hitler states, "as long as he [the German inhabitant] does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood," that is to say, as long as he does not interbreed with non-Germanic peoples.86
When Hitler said, "Take away the Nordic Germans and nothing remains but the dance of apes," he based the thought on the Darwinist ideas that man had evolved from apes, for which reason some humans still possessed "ape "status.87
This logic is a consequence of seeing man as a species of animal, and that there are "superior" and "inferior" races within this species of animal. That is, in any case, the thesis put forward by Darwin in The Descent of Man and The Origin of Species. All the Nazis did was to put Darwin's theory into practice.
The truth of the matter is that human superiority has nothing to do with race. No matter from what race people may be, they are still people. Each one was created and placed in the world by God. The Koran reveals this truth thus:
The above verse is perfectly clear. No matter by what criteria human beings are judged in this world, in God's eyes, superiority consists of closeness to Him, and fear of Him.
RACISM, WHICH EQUATES AFRICANS WITH "APES"
This drawing reflects the theory of Social Darwinism which developed in the 19th century. The branches of the tree contain a chimpanzee, a gorilla, an orang utang and an African. This villainous hatred of black-skinned people was one of the founding principles of Nazism.
An individual or group which chooses to see one race as superior, or tries to demonstrate it to be so, is deceiving itself. Everyone will have to appear before God at the Day of Reckoning, and will be called to account alone. Those attributes that he perceived as conferring superiority in this world will be of no use to him then. Quite the contrary, those who set up criteria outside those revealed by God, who claim that they are superior and oppress others, and who try to gain strength by crushing the weak, will definitely reap the fruit of their actions, both in this world and the next. In the holy verses of the Koran, this reality is revealed in the following manner:
Nazi Policies: The Implementation of Darwinist Theories in Society
According to the Nazi ideology, races were divided into three basic categories. The first was "civilization-creating races," the Germans and other northern peoples. "Civilization-following races" were those which had no power to push civilization forward, but which were "ordinary" races capable of imitating it. Hitler counted nations such as the Chinese and Japanese as being in this category. The third category consisted of "civilization-destroying races" such as Jews, Slavs and Africans.
Nazi ideology considered the intermingling of the German race with other "inferior" races as a "biological mistake." Hitler said: "The mixing of the higher and lower races is clearly against the intent of nature and involves the extinction of the Aryan race... Where Aryan blood has mixed with that of lower peoples the result has been the end of the bearers of culture."88
Nazi Sentiments From An Early Age
For this reason, from the moment the Nazis came to power they tried to correct this so-called "evolutionary mistake." Hitler passed a number of laws to that end in 1933, and the process of cleansing between the races began. Only those with German blood were allowed to be considered as citizens, and were given preferential treatment. In June 1933, a law was brought out weeding gypsies, Africans, Jews and the handicapped out of society. Hitler defended the policy:
Hybridism, with the resulting degradation of the biological level of the race, was the sole reason of the decadence of the old civilisations. For it is a fact that nations do not perish in consequence of lost wars, but in consequence of the loss of that force of resistance which has its only origin in the preservation of racial purity. For everything which is not racially pure is mere chaff.89
German children being reared as the SS officers of the future.
Nazism's Evil Scientists
The Nazis used medical science as a tool towards the fulfillment of their racist ideologies. Nazi scientists measured skulls in order to demonstrate racial superiority. The most horrific "service" they offered the new Germany was the killing of the sick and handicapped, in accordance with the theory of eugenics.
In their book The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code, the American historians Michael Grodin and George Annas, write of the murders committed by Nazi doctors in accordance with their belief in Social Darwinism. (Right)
Hitler believed that once the inferior races had been done away with, humanity would be grateful towards him for its development. Inspired by Darwin, Hitler described the young people of the so-called "superior race" he wanted to create in these words:
My pedagogy is strict. I want a powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth... There must be nothing weak or tender about them. The freedom and dignity of the wild beast must shine from their eyes... That is how I will root out a thousand years of human domestication.90
But how did Hitler intend to create his "powerful, masterly, cruel and fearless youth?" Propaganda methods alone would not suffice. Nazi racial theory saw man as a species of animal, and considered that he could be improved by the same methods used by farmers.
Therefore, the Nazis embraced the theory of "eugenics" and pursued its implementation. As we saw earlier in this book, eugenics is a policy that seeks the "improvement of mankind," which has its roots in the ancient Greek pagan city of Sparta, and was resurrected by Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton in the 19th century. Ernst Haeckel described how eugenics could be carried out, and defended the killing of deformed babies from the time of birth, and that unhealthy people and the weak or mentally handicapped should be sterilized.
The Nazis lost no time in implementing this inhumane policy. When they came to power in 1933 they instituted "racial hygiene" laws. According to these laws, the mentally handicapped and the sick were to be sterilized, and thus, prevented from reproducing. They were even to be weeded out of society, and for this reason, were gathered together in special centers. The Nazis set up these centers without delay, and threw large numbers of people into them, where they treated them like animals. The Nazi Hereditary Health Courts reviewed nearly 80,000 proposals to sterilize persons in their first two years of operation, and they approved the vast majority of these petitions.91
In time, German eugenic policy became steadily more perverse, eventually resulting in large scale "euthanasia" of retarded persons, the insane, and other desirables. In other words, these people were killed. Films and photographs of this period make light of the tragedy of the killing of the mentally or physically ill by being injected with poison by Nazi doctors. The elderly and little children as well were subjected to this sort of savagery.
As Nazi Germany unflinchingly executed such barbarity, it also pushed "positive eugenics," encouraging the union of Aryan women and men to produce children who Nazi public officials believed would be endowed with superior genes.92 With this in mind, select females with the necessary "superior race" traits (being blond and strong, with blue eyes) were even placed in special homes, and were impregnated by as many Nazi officers as possible.
The aim was to produce a great "Aryan race," like breeding a cow or horse. But the results were a disappointment to the Nazis, the IQs of the children that resulted being lower than that of the parents, and regressing toward the population mean.93
Hitler had defended his policies of eugenics and the purification of the race by saying:
If Germany every year would have one million children, and would eliminate 700-800,000 of the weakest, the end result would probably be an increase in [national] strength.94
Hitler argued in a 1939 speech that for the sake of the health of the social organism, the state must take responsibility, "Let us spend our efforts and our resources on the productive, not on the wastrel." In another place he exhorted, "Rid the earth of dysgenic peoples by whatever means available so that we may enjoy the prosperity of the fatherland."95
The Holocaust Savagery
Nazism's racist savagery was not just restricted to those presumed "unsuitable" within Germany's borders, but was aimed at the entire world. Hitler's dream was the foundation of a German Empire that would rule the whole world, and to speed up the so-called "evolution of man" by sterilizing all the "inferior" races on earth. This in fact was a prophecy of Darwin's. In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote "At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races of man throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous [human-like] apes … will no doubt be exterminated."96 This duty of fulfilling this prophecy fell upon Hitler.
The plan was set in motion in 1939. With a series of surprise attacks, he first occupied Poland, followed by Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Holland, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, North Africa and the Soviet Union. The peoples of the occupied countries were subjected to terrible cruelty, especially those in the category of "inferior races" such as the Jews, Slavs and Gypsies. Millions of people were sent to camps to be used as slave labor. Soon, these camps turned into extermination camps according to the "Final Solution" adapted at the notorious Wannsee Conference by Hitler and his associates. The gas chambers specially designed to kill humans first used carbon monoxide and then Zyklon B. In the gas chambers and other methods of mass extermination, a total of 5.5 million Jews, 3 million Poles, almost 1 million Gypsies and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war from various nations were brutally murdered.
One of the most appalling examples of Nazi savagery were the inhumane experiments performed by the Nazi officer Josef Mengele on prisoners at the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Selected adults and children from among the prisoners were used by Mengele as "guinea pigs" in frightful experiments to determine the resistance of the human body to extreme hot and cold. People were forced into water full of ice on bitterly cold winter days in order to see how long they could survive before freezing. It is known that Mengele carried out surgical operations on his victims without any anesthetic, and that they were cut open wide awake. His cruelest experiments were carried out on twins who arrived at the camp. Mengele kept all twins apart from the rest of the camp and measured the effect of physical factors by performing different experiments on them. The methods he employed were incredibly barbaric. He injected twins with each others' blood and measured their reaction, and most of the time one or both of the twins suffered from violent headaches and high temperatures. Also wanting to measure whether or not eye color could be changed physically, Mengele injected blue ink into twins' eyes.
Mengele's Innocent Victims
One of the most terrible examples of Nazi brutality were the inhumane experiments carried out at the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Nazi officer Josef Mengele. He carried out frightful experiments on victims he chose from among adult and child prisoners, to establish, for example, how much pain or cold the human body could stand.
All the victims suffered terribly, and many of them went blind. Small children were injected with various diseases to observe how long they could survive them. Many innocent children were tortured by the Nazi monster Mengele, and wound up either crippled or dead.
At the root of this incredible savagery lies the Darwinist-fascist theory that regards human beings as a species of animal and some human races as "harmful animals." An examination of Mengele's life reveals that he was educated in such a theory. In a study of Mengele's life and cruelties, the Social Darwinism of Dr. Ernst Rudin, the Nazi doctor's mentor, is discussed as follows:
If Mengele himself became a cold-blooded monster at the height of his Nazi career, he certainly learned at the feet of some of Germany's most diabolical minds. As a student Mengele attended the lectures of Dr. Ernst Rudin, who posited not only that there were some lives not worth living, but that doctors had a responsibility to destroy such life and remove it from the general population. His prominent views gained the attention of Hitler himself, and Rudin was drafted to assist in composing the Law for the Protection of Heredity Health, which passed in 1933, the same year that the Nazis took complete control of the German government. This unapologetic Social Darwinist contributed to the Nazi decree that called for the sterilization of those demonstrating the following flaws, lest they reproduce and further contaminate the German gene pool: feeblemindedness; schizophrenia; manic depression; epilepsy; hereditary blindness; deafness; physical deformities...97
Over and over again and at every level of Nazi brutality, Social Darwinism could be seen rearing its ugly head. The primary inspiration behind one of the foremost architects of Nazi brutality, Heinrich Himmler, were, again, none other than the Darwinist concepts of "conflict" and "the struggle for survival." Describing the so-called "scientific" logic he used to justify the oppression he carried out, he said, "the law of nature must take its course in the survival of the fittest."98
A terrible holocaust was carried out against the Jews, Gypsies, Poles and prisoners of war from other nations in the concentration camps set up by the Nazis during the war. These pictures were taken by the American troops who liberated the Buchenwald concentration camp, and are gruesome proof of the Nazi holocaust.
The Savagery Of An Ideology That Regard Human Beıngs As "Anımals"
Fascism, which is the political implementation of Social Darwinism, regards human beings as a species of animal, and believes in a ruthless "struggle for survival" between the races. That is why fascists are capable of perpetrating the cold-blooded murders, even genocide, with no exception for women and children. In order to do away with this ideology, people must understand that man is not a species of animal, but a servant of God with obligations towards Him.
Himmler saw non-Aryan peoples and peoples such as Slavs and Jews in particular, as animals, and considered it perfectly natural to perpetrate all kinds of cruelty against them. He had this to say about female Russian prisoners in a speech he made on 4 October 1943 to the SS Group Leaders in Poznan:
Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our Kultur. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests one only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany.99
Himmler would even denigrate those in occupied countries who had wanted to fight on the side of Germany:
I very soon formed a German SS in the various countries. We very soon got Germanic volunteers from them. From the beginning, I have said to them, "You can do what you like and leave what you like. I leave everything entirely to you, but you may be sure, that an SS will be set up in your country, and there is but one SS in Europe, and that is the Germanic SS led by the Reichsfuehrer-SS... I have said to the SS-men from the beginning too: We do not expect you to become German out of opportunism. But we do expect you to subordinate your national ideal to the greater racial and historical ideal, to the Germanic Reich.100
Mussolini often used Darwinist language in his speeches, and believed that peace was harmful to mankind, who could only advance with the use of violence.
The cost of the Second World War, which Hitler had initiated for the so-called "sovereignty of the superior race," was tremendous. More than 55 million people died, more than half of whom were civilians. Material losses were incalculable. The main factor that drove the Nazis to bring about this disaster was their claim of being the "master race." And, the root of that claim was Darwin's theory of evolution.
Benito Mussolini, Hitler's greatest ally, was influenced by Darwinism in much the same way. In Mussolini's view, violence was necessary for social change. He opposed all forms of pacifism and frequently used Darwinist terms in his speeches. He asserted that "the reluctance of England to engage in war only proved the evolutionary decadence of the British Empire."101
The conclusion we are forced to derive from an examination of fascist racism is clear: Darwinism is the hidden culprit behind both fascist regimes and the Second World War. Few people today perhaps are aware of the link between these catastrophic realities and Darwinism. However, it is evident that fascists have derived all their basic tenets from Darwinism. Ultimately, this ideology, which attributes the creation of life to coincidence, embodies principles such as chaos, ruthlessness, cruelty, and that might is right. And, moreover, the principle of continual conflict in Darwinism leads to a philosophy of savagery, cruelty, and bloodshed.
On the contrary, God created all races equal, and as we have already seen, has revealed that superiority consists of fearing and obeying Him. Throughout history, the cruel leaders who have defied this commandment have all come to the same terrible end. As it is revealed in Sura 40, verse 56, those who "have nothing in their breasts except for pride which they will never be able to vindicate" have never attained their desire. God says,"Those who do wrong will soon know by what a great reverse they will be overturned!" in Sura 26, verse 227, and reveals that these people will meet with a humiliating defeat in this world. And, the end that awaits them in the next world will be even more terrible:
Fascism’s Hatred of Religion
One of the common attitudes all fascist regimes have possessed is that concerning religion. At first glance, it would appear that all fascist regimes have supported the religion of their peoples. But, the fascists have not been sincere in this endeavor. Their only aim is to dupe their people and religious organizations. It makes no difference to fascists whether the religion in question is Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism or any other. It is sufficient that the religion is seen as enabling that society to bind together and to motivate people to work in the interests of fascism. When one examines the policies and practices of fascist dictators such as Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and even such contemporary fascists as Saddam Hussein, the true face of their enmity towards religion can be clearly seen.
First of all, it is impossible for fascists to genuinely defend religion, because their character and principles are the exact opposite of the ethical foundation that religion instills in people. While the religion that God has chosen for mankind is one of peace and serenity, fascism consists of war and agitation. God commands pleasant speech, forgiveness and love, whereas fascists desire hatred and continual warfare. Therefore, fascists are not genuinely interested in seeing religion flourish, nor do they wish to see the ethics that accompany religion broadly disseminated, because, if this were to happen, then they will be unable to govern society according to their fascist ideals. For this reason, they seek to give the impression that they are committed to religion, although they also try to prevent its propagation through various measures and practices.
The history of the 20th century is full of such examples.
The Nazis' Hatred of Religion
We have already examined the roots of Nazi ideology and its attitude to religion. As is shown in the examples we have considered, the Nazi ideology was perverse and opposed to all divine religions. The foundations of this ideology rest on Nietzsche's anti-religious philosophy, and Darwin's atheist theory of evolution which denies the fact of creation. The Nazis' perspective of ethics was in imitation of the pagan culture of ancient Greece and pre-Christian barbarian German tribes: Nazism was a pagan, idolatrous ideology.
This fact has been expressed by many commentators on the subject. In an article titled "Darwinism and the Nazi Race Holocaust," the American researcher Jerry Bergman describes the Nazis' view of religion as such,
Expunging of the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the divine origin of humans from mainline German (liberal) theology and its schools, and replacing it with Darwinism, openly contributed to the acceptance of Social Darwinism that culminated in the tragedy of the holocaust.102
Daniel Gasman, the author of The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, agrees:
[Hitler] stressed and singled out the idea of biological evolution as the most forceful weapon against traditional religion and he repeatedly condemned Christianity for its opposition to the teachings of evolution. For Hitler evolution was the hallmark of modern science and culture, and he defended its veracity as tenaciously as Haeckel.103
Hitler once revealed his hatred of religion when he bluntly stated that religion is an:
…organized lie [that] must be smashed. The State must remain the absolute master. When I was younger, I thought it was necessary to set about [destroying religion] …with dynamite. I've since realized there's room for a little subtlety... The final state must be… in St. Peter's Chair, a senile officiant; facing him a few sinister old women… The young and healthy are on our side… Our peoples had previously succeeded in living all right without this religion. I have six divisions of SS men absolutely indifferent in matters of religion. It doesn't prevent them from going to their death with serenity in their souls.104
As we have seen, the only notion Hitler considered necessary, on a spiritual level, was the understanding which leads people to "go to their death with serenity in their souls." This ideal was found in such pagan concepts as "the German soul," and "martial honor." He looked on divine religions, on the other hand, as beliefs that need to be "destroyed with dynamite."
Hitler summed up his views on religion to his staff at a meeting at his house in Oberzalsberg:
You see it's been our misfortune to have the wrong religion. Why didn't we have the religion of the Japanese, who regard sacrifice for the Fatherland as the highest good?105
SS Chief Himmler making a speech in a cathedral. This and other contrived "religious spectacles" were part of the effort by the Nazis, actual enemies of religion, to exploit it for their own political agendas.
The Facade Of Religion
While Nazis were actually out to destroy Christianity, they had decided to manipulate it for their political ends. As the Church submitted to Nazi ideology, the Nazis donned false masks of religion.
This was Hitler's true opinion of religion. If religion had commanded war, as with that of the Japanese, then it could be accepted in order to be used for his own ends. But Christianity taught peace, not war, and personal sacrifice instead of selfishness and rivalry. For this reason, the Nazi Party waged a continuous war against the Catholic Church.
But it also tried to establish a "Christianity appropriate to Nazism."
The "Racist Christianity" of the Nazis
Although ultimately opposed to religion, in practice, the Nazis behaved diplomatically towards it. Their real aim was to use religious organizations as a tool to achieve their ends. Hitler was a particular enemy of the Catholic Church, which looked on all Christians as a supranational community. In its place, he intended to establish a church for Germans only, and by stages, to develop religion as a tool of German fascism. In a report entitled "The Nazi Party's Program and World View," the Nazi ideologist Gottfried Feder wrote:
Surely, some day the German people also will find a form for its perception and experience of God, a form dictated by its Nordic blood. Surely, only then will the trinity of blood, faith and state be complete.106
According to this perspective, it is necessary for religion to be in harmony with the ideals of "blood and state,' in other words with the Nazis' racist ideology. In Mein Kampf, Hitler summed up how religion was to be manipulated, "Anyone who wants to win the broad masses must know the key that opens the door to their heart."107
In order to appeal to various communities, Hitler used religious terms as this "key," and sought to portray racism as a sacred ideal. Though he was a Darwinist, that is, one who denies creation by a divine being, when formulating his racist propaganda, Hitler made reference to creation, although distorting the idea, to use it as a justification for racism. For example, in Mein Kampf, he said:
The result of all racial crossing is therefore in brief always the following: (a) Lowering of the level of higher race; (b) Physical and intellectual regression and hence the beginning of a slowly but surely progressing sickness. To bring about such a development is, then, nothing else but to sin against the will of the eternal creator.108Peoples who bastardise themselves or let themselves be bastardised, sin against the will of eternal Providence, and when their ruin is encompassed by a stronger enemy it is not an injustice done to them, but only the restoration of justice.109
Nazism's distortion of religious ideas in this manner, and its use of them to serve its own racist ideology, were to some extent effective, with the opportunistic administrators of a number of German churches playing an important role in the strategy. These hypocritical men of religion, collaborating with Hitler, helped to disseminate Nazi propaganda in several ways. In 1933, when Hitler had only recently come to power, the president of the Union of Catholic Germans, Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen, said in a speech on November 2, 1933, "The kind Lord has blessed Germany by giving it in times of deep distress a leader who will lead it, through all distresses and weaknesses, through all crisis and moment of danger, with the sure instinct of the statesman into a happy future."110 Some others had also praised Hitler as someone who was specially chosen to rescue Germany from its historical misfortune and lead it to a bright future.
While the Nazis were duping some churches to collaborate with them, they tried to intimidate others through pressure and fear. In 1932, the Protestant clergyman Dietrich Bonhoeffer gave a sermon in Berlin on the subject of "the truth." He praised the importance of love as opposed to a racist system based on hatred. He was condemned to death by the Nazis because of this subversive attitude.
Between 1933 and 1939, a large number of Catholic priests were arrested. Erich Klausener, the leader of German Catholic Action, was killed in the purge of 1934. Catholic publications were banned. The Nazis also attacked a number of Protestant churches.
However, those among the clergy who abetted the Nazi ideology were rewarded. One of these was Dr. Hans Kerrl, Hitler's Minister for Church Affairs. In an address he gave to church leaders on February 13, 1937, Dr. Kerrl openly declared Christianity a tool of Nazi ideology, "The party stands on the basis of Positive Christianity, and Positive Christianity is National Socialism... National Socialism is the doing of God's will."111
At the end of 1937 and the beginning of 1938, Protestant clergymen, submitting to Nazi terrorism, took an oath of loyalty to Hitler, and thus sealed the surrender of the religious establishment. Hitler thereby enforced his domination over all spheres of life. Even the church was in his hands. But his real goal was to do away with all divine religions, and take Germany fully into paganism. In a secret decree dated June 1941, Nazis' aim of destroying religion was described in this way:
More and more the people must be separated from the churches and their organs, the pastors... Never again must an influence on leadership of the people be yielded to the churches. This influence must be broken completely and finally. Only the Reich government, and by its direction the Party, its components, and attached units, have a right to leadership of the people.112
The True Meaning of the Nazis' Anti-Semitism
In order to understand the Nazis' religious ideas and policies, we must examine their fanatical hostility to the Jews and Judaism.
The Nazis' anti-Semitism was a part of their hatred of religion. Because, according to Nazi logic, the Germans had first been a warrior-pagan society, until they had abandoned that culture with the spread of Christianity, a continuation of Judaism. The Nazis' hatred of Christianity stemmed from the fact they saw it as a "Jewish conspiracy." That the Prophet Jesus, himself of Jewish origins, should be loved and respected by the Germans, whom they considered the "master race," was an idea the Nazis found unacceptable. In the Nazis' opinion, it was not prophets of Jewish origin who should light the way for the German people, but the cruel and barbaric warriors of pagan German culture.
According to the Nazi ideology, the history of the world was seen as a conflict between the "Aryan race" and the "Semites." To the Nazis, the Aryan race was the leader of Indo-European culture, and the Semites (the Jews and Arabs) the leaders of Middle Eastern culture. The fundamental characteristic of Indo-European culture was its pagan belief system. It was for this reason that the Nazis saw themselves as the inheritors of paganism. They looked on the Jews as a hostile race who had abandoned paganism and spread monotheistic belief to the rest of the world.
The Pink Swastika, which discusses the Nazis' pagan ideologies, summarizes:
The reason why the Nazis first attacked the Jewish people and swore to exterminate them physically and spiritually is because the teachings of the Bible, both the Torah and the New Testament, represent the foundations on which the whole system of Christian ethics rests.113
This errant belief of the Nazis can be discerned in many other fascist movements as well. Many neo-fascist groups today hold pagan beliefs which they consider "the religion of the Aryan race," and bear a particular hatred of the revealed religions of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, which they describe as "Semitic myth." Similarly, based on such deviant logic, fascist groups have emerged in the Islamic world and have tried to develop a new type of anti-Semitism in the form of "anti-Arabism."
However, the divine religion was not addressed solely to the Semitic races, but to everyone. Fascism, which denies the religion that God has revealed to mankind, and reveres the perverse paganism of its ancestors,is actually a great error. God mentions these errant people who turn to the "religion of their ancestors"in the Koran:
Fascism's Hypocritical Policy on Religion
Hitler's hypocritical policy towards religion was not a method restricted to Nazism, but is a general characteristic of fascist regimes. Religion is merely used as a tool by fascist ideologues, because they realize that they will be faced with a fierce reaction from people as a result of their cruelty and racist policies unless they disguise them in religious rhetoric. So, they distort religion to suit their own ends. They use the language and ideals of their society's religion, but when it comes to its implementation, a system very far removed from religion becomes recognizable.
The strategy is merely a policy designed by fascist leaders in order to unite their people under them, because they realize that people will be prepared to make all sorts of sacrifices in the name of religion, and are willing to endure a great deal for the sake of these lofty beliefs. So, they present themselves as acting in the name of God and religion. They seek to portray a religious image of themselves by exploiting the language and symbols of faith in their slogans, and propaganda. Hypocritically though, fascists carry out the great cruelties and inhumane acts which they believe to be necessary. In essence, what fascists practice and what they preach are totally opposed. The fascists' deceptive use of religion in this way and for their own power is merely another example of the extent of their malevolence.
God has this to say about those who use lies against Him:
On the other hand, those who are deceived by fascist slogans and influenced by their tactics are not to be perceived as sincere either. These people are rude and ignorant, with a poorly developed reasoning ability, who see religion merely as a legacy inherited from their ancestors. For this reason, they either fail to see or ignore the falsehood, depravity and lack of coherence by which the fascists employ religion.
As we have seen in the previous pages, fascists have used religion to effect in people the belief that racism and a Darwinist outlook on the world are proper and correct. But, this strategy merely again reveals the fascists' lack of intelligence. Because, it is obvious that religion does not support racism, nor competition or a struggle for survival among people. God has revealed that the only superiority between people lies in godliness, which is dependant on devotion, love and co-operation between people, and not on competition. However, fascists are only able to deceive the most ignorant sections of society with this false appearance of religion.
The Two Faces of Mussolini
In order to analyze the fascist character, the second example that must be considered after Nazis, is the Italian dictator Mussolini, the true originator of the concept of "fascism." When we consider his career, we see in it a prime example of a hypocrite who bore a great hatred of religion, but who wore a mask of religion to suit his political ends.
Another truth revealed by Mussolini's career is that the line that divides communism from fascism is a very fine one, even though they might appear to be totally opposed ideologies. However, they are quite similar to each other, both being cruel, oppressive, totalitarian, oligarchic (based on minority rule) systems, exhibiting enmity towards religion, and espousing a Darwinian perspective of reality. (See Communism in Ambush by Harun Yahya, March 2001) So there is actually very little difference between a communist and a fascist, for one can very easily turn from one into the other. A communist who spills blood dreaming of a proletarian revolution can later begin to exhibit the same behavior for fascist ideals. Because violence is an indispensable element of both ideologies.
In his youth, Mussolini was a communist, who longed for the "proletarian revolution," as well as an atheist who hated religion. He later changed his political leanings, eventually accepting "fascism." Under this new guise, and for political ends, he concealed his hatred of religion.
Mussolini spent years as an atheist communist, an enemy of religion and a fanatical Darwinist, trying to make a place for himself in Italian politics. When by these means he was not able to achieve his aims, he became a fascist.
Mussolini's Communist Years
Mussolini was born in a small village in 1883. His father was an avowed Marxist, an ideology he passed on to his son. According to the Oxford historian Denis Mack Smith, in his book Mussolini, "his father used to read parts of Das Kapital to the family."114
Mussolini received a communist education from his father, and was known at school as a difficult and aggressive boy, and a smart-aleck. He had almost no friends.
In his 20s Mussolini became a fanatical communist, supporting anarchism, an even more radical and fanatical revolutionary ideology than communism. Denis Mack Smith writes:
By 1903 he was calling himself an 'authoritarian communist'. From his father he had learnt to have little patience with sentimental, reformist socialism or with democratic and parliamentary methods; instead he preached revolution to expropriate a ruling class that would never voluntarily renounce power and possessions. Parliament should be abolished; class struggle must replace class collaboration; private property should disappear altogether. Socialists should never collaborate with bourgeois governments and never pursue a policy of strikes merely to get better wages, but should be ready to use terrorism and mob violence to affect a wholesale social revolution.115
Aggression That Began With Communism and Ended With Fascism
The young Mussolini was editor of the communist weekly La Lotta di Classe (Class struggle). He placed pictures of Marx and Darwin on the cover, and frequently stressed his admiration of Lenin. When he became a fascist, however, he had all copies of the magazines assembled from libraries and destroyed. Nevertheless, Mussolini's character (aggressive, arrogant and paranoid) was always the same.
As we have seen, in his youth Mussolini was a fanatical communist. The model of "revolution by violence and terror" closely resembled the terrorist methods of Lenin, which he would put into practice in Russia later on. Actually, Mussolini had established a relationship with Lenin during those years. According to his own later account, he met Lenin, who was in Switzerland at that time, and even won his approval.116 Mussolini emphasized his loyalty to Marxism by saying, "Marx was the greatest of all theorists of socialism" and frequently quoted from Marx in his writings.117
One of the defining characteristics of the communist Mussolini was a fanatical hatred of religion. Denis Mack Smith has this to say on the subject:
From his father he had learnt to be a thoroughgoing anti-clerical. He proclaimed himself to be an atheist...He forcibly denounced those socialists who thought religion a matter for individual conscience... Christianity in particular [he said] was vitiated by preaching the senseless virtues of resignation and cowardice, whereas the new socialist morality should celebrate violence and rebellion.118
It is important to make a careful estimation of Mussolini's state of mind as set out here. As we have seen, he revealed his hatred of and total lack of belief in God with open declaration of untruth about Him. As we shall soon see, Mussolini felt the need to support the Church the entire time he was in power, and so, sometimes portrayed himself as a religious man.
Furthermore, even during the years of his fanatical communism, he tried to wear a mask of religion. While he produced fanatically anti-religious writings and speeches in his own country, he invented a story about the depth and firmness of his religious beliefs when writing for an Anglo-Saxon audience.119
Mussolini's hatred of religion and his communist militancy lasted throughout the 1910s. In 1908, he wrote for the communist magazine La Lima under a false name, and thus clashed with the weekly Il Giornale Ligure, the publishing organ of the Catholics of Oneglia. The interesting thing is that after Mussolini came to power, the collection of La Lima in the local library disappeared mysteriously, because, after he came to power, he decided to use religion for political ends, and concealed his true face, his hatred of religion.120
The Men Who Inspired Mussolini: Nietzsche and Darwin
Mussolini's devotion to communism was rooted in both his tendency to violence and personal psychological problems. Denis Mack Smith describes Mussolini's personality in these words:
Despite his continuing allegiance to Marx, there was little precise doctrine in his eclectic brand of socialism. He sometimes called himself a syndicalist, but in private spoke unkindly about most other socialists and to some acquaintances seemed above all an anarchist.121
Another historian who has studied Mussolini's life, Angelica Balabanoff, thought his views were "more the reflection of his early environment and his own rebellious egoism than the product of understanding and conviction; his hatred of oppression was not that impersonal hatred of a system shared by all revolutionaries; it sprang rather from his own sense of indignity and frustration, from a passion to assert his own ego and from a determination for personal revenge.''122
Mussolini's Mentors
Mussolini believed that war and conflict were indispensable to the development of a nation. Two figures instilled that idea in him, Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Actually, Mussolini's only definite beliefs were the principles of "conflict" and "war." These he had learned from the ideological founder of fascism, in other words, from Friedrich Nietzsche, and his mentor, Charles Darwin.
There is considerable evidence for the admiration Mussolini felt for them both. He admitted to his admiration for Nietzsche, whom he said filled him with a "spiritual eroticism."123 Denis Mack Smith writes:
In Nietzsche he found justification for his crusade against the Christian virtues of humility, resignation, charity, and goodness and it was also in Nietzsche that he found some of his favourite phrases including 'live dangerously', and 'the will to power'. Here, too, was the splendid concept of the superman, the supreme egoist who defied both God and the masses, who despised egalitarianism and democracy, who believed in the weakest going to the wall and pushing them if they did not go fast enough.124
Mussolini clearly referred to his ideological link with Darwinism in the pages of the communist weekly magazine La Lotta di Classe (Class Struggle), of which he was editor for a time. Pictures of Marx and Darwin were on the cover of the very first edition. The first issue of La Lotta di Classe referred to these two materialist ideologues as "The greatest thinkers of the past century," and was full of praise for Darwin's theory of evolution.125 Mussolini wrote a great deal for La Lotta di Classe on Darwinist, communist and anti-religious themes, but after 1922, in other words, after he came to power, all copies of this paper suddenly disappeared from local libraries.126
Mussolini's False Piety
Mussolini underwent a sudden personal change at the end of the 1910s. After having been a radical communist for so long, he then emerged as the leader of the ideology known as "fascism" as it set out on its way to power. This movement took the "axe" of ancient Roman paganism as its symbol. However, Mussolini did not himself discover "fascism," but rather developed it from the racist trends which had been escalating in Italy during that period. But, even though he did not invent the ideology, he soon made it his own and turned it into a political movement. Just like Hitler, he gathered ignorant people around him, street thugs, adventurers, and instigators of violence. He grouped them together in a quasi-military organization known as the "Black Shirts," which he employed as a weapon of terror against his rivals. By these methods, he was able to seize power a few years later. By 1922 he was Italy's prime minister. Shortly afterwards, he began to be known by the term "Il Duce," or leader, and became an outright dictator.
THE ATHEIST DUCE'S RELIGIOUS MASK
Although Mussolini had born a great hatred of God and religion since his childhood, after coming to power, he adopted a false mask of religion. His aim was to use religion to help bring about his dictatorship. Shortly thereafter,propaganda portraying him as the "sacred leader" began to appear. The above picture of Mussolini, "sanctified by the Pope," is such an example.
As Mussolini was emerging as the leader of fascism, he decided first to conceal his enmity towards religion, and even to appear as a devout Catholic. He made great efforts to create the image, particularly in the early years of his rule. On the one hand, he had all magazines in which he had written against religion collected and destroyed, while on the other, he made divinity lessons compulsory again after an absence of half a century, and decreed that pictures of the cross and the Virgin Mary should be hung in schools.127 He took great pains in all his speeches to come across as a religious, conservative figure, who was devoted to national customs and traditions. In Mussolini's new view, religion was an institution that owed the state its assistance in order that it should grow stronger.
Mussolini's hypocritical piety was effective, in as much as he won the support of the Church. His "conquest of the heart of the Church" was described in theEncyclopedia of Modern Leaders:
The Church's support for the fascists began with the election of the former Cardinal of Milan as Pope. In Pius XI's view, it was Mussolini who would rescue Italy from anarchy. Relations with Mussolini, who had once waged war against the Church in articles which he signed "A true atheist," and the pro-fascist Pope were always directed towards cooperation. The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano wrote in February 1923, "Mussolini has been applauded as the man who will restore the fortunes of Italy. This is a victory for religious traditions and national civilization." Cardinal Vicaire called upon the public to support the fascists in the same year. The Vatican withheld its approval of the Catholic Partito Popolare's [People's Party] anti-fascist attitude and had Don Sturzo removed from his post as party leader. In return for this, Mussolini demonstrated his respect for the Church at every available opportunity, staging a religious wedding ceremony for him and his wife, whom he had married 12 years before, and having his children baptized… In February 1929, he restored the Church's rights which had been taken away in 1870 by signing the "Lateran Pact" in the name of the King, with Cardinal Gaspari signing in the name of the Church. Under this agreement, the Church won complete freedom of belief and worship, and Catholicism became the official religion of the state. The Vatican was officially recognized and awarded considerable benefits, the Pope was recognized as head of the state and granted such rights as compensation payments to the papacy, the recognition of Church marriages, and religious lessons in primary schools. In return for these, the Pope awarded Mussolini the order of the "Golden Spur" in 1932, and described him as the "incomparable prime minister."128
But, despite these theatrics, Mussolini was nevertheless an atheist. Once having rallied Italian society behind him, he began to show his real aim, that of completely doing away with religion. In the 1930s, religious doctrines were slowly eliminated, and in their place a form of paganism that revered Mussolini as a divine being was put in place. Mussolini's only true religion was his egotism, which he tried little by little to make the Italians accept.
The slogan mentioned below, during this period, is a testament of the "cult dedicated to Mussolini": "Do not delay for an instant in loving God. But remember that the god of Italy is the Duce." 129
Mussolini belittled religious notions and re-interpreted them according to his own pagan belief system. The fact that he called the decrees and pronouncements he issued the "Fascist Decalogue," reveals the scale of his arrogance and hypocrisy.
Fascists hand in hand: Hitler and Mussolini
However, Mussolini's arrogance did not endure long. Italy entered the Second World War on the side of Germany, but was defeated, collapsing much earlier than Germany. In 1943, Mussolini was arrested by his own countrymen and imprisoned. He was rescued with Hitler's support, and held out against the opposition in the North for some time longer. Towards the end of the war, he was once again arrested as he tried to cross the border in a German uniform, and was shot with his mistress at his side. His corpse was suspended by one foot in a square in Milan. Such was the dreadful end of a psychopath who claimed he was a "divine being."
How Spanish Fascism Used Religion
As we have seen, fascism is an ideology fanatically opposed to religion, but which may sometimes conceal its hatred for political reasons, and even present itself as actually committed to religion. The aim behind fascists' wish to appear God-fearing is to pervert religious concepts from their true meaning, and employ them as tools for their political goals.
The degree of fascism's commitment to religion fluctuates according to the nature of the society it finds itself in. Nazism felt little need to put up such a front, because it had developed itself within German society, which had already been distanced far from religion. But, in Italy, Mussolini attempted to control a far more religious society, and thus felt a greater need to play such a hypocritical role. When we consider the example of Spain, we once again see a religious society and a fascism with a religious face. The leader of this brand of fascism was Francisco Franco.
Franco's ideology is known as "Falangism." The term comes from the word "Falange," (or the Falange Espanola Tradicionalista Y De Las Juntas De Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista, to give it its full name) which was founded in 1933. The party was established by a fascist ideologue called Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, in imitation of Italian fascism, and was opposed to democracy, the Constitution, leftist movements and the Church. In fact, the word "Falange" (Phalanx in Spanish) was a martial concept taken from pagan cultures. The name referred to the arrangement of a regiment of soldiers, as practiced first in ancient Sumeria, and then in ancient Greece and Rome. General Franco, the commander-in-chief of the Spanish army at the time, took over control of the Falange party in 1936, when the civil war erupted as a result of fighting between right and left in the country. However, he softened the party's anti-religious stance, in an attempt to make his brand of fascism appear compatible with religion.
Terrorism In Francos's Civil War
During the three-year bloody civil war waged in Spain by General Franco, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. Franco used all possible methods of terror against his opponents. Villages that did not assist his troops were bombed, mercilessly killing innocent people who had no interest in the war, and leaving tens of thousands of villagers homeless.
Spanish refugees fleeing to France..
A picture of the front in the Spanish Civil War A fighter in the Spanish Civil War being hit as he emerges from cover.
Franco waged a particularly bloody civil war, not hesitating even to bomb civilians when he thought it necessary. He won the three-year war in 1939, and the dictatorship he set up afterwards lasted until the 1970s. In order to maintain the regime, he pursued policies to ensure the support of the Catholic Church. At the same time, the Church was given a capitalistic role in the economic life of the country. Franco's approach was always to defend the Church, and to use it for his own ends. On the other hand, all religious movements that emerged and that were outside fascist principles were ruthlessly suppressed by the government.
The book Who is Franco? What is Falangism? explains how Spanish fascism used religion in order to succeed:
Fascism needs the masses in order to attain its ends… It is sufficient to use words such as religious truths and monarchy to motivate the masses… Catholics were always powerful in Spain: Most priests are outspoken supporters of fascism… So it was necessary to find and publicize a theory of Spanish fascism. This was done by Gil Robles. Robles has close connections to Spain's greatest landowners. He was educated in Catholic Jesuit schools, and began his first political activities in these same organizations… When fascism came to power in Germany, Robles rushed there at once. His aim was to learn German working methods. Robles tried to imitate German fascism in a number of areas, but he was unable to put forward the "superior" and "Aryan race" theory. So what was Robles to do? He resorted to an extreme chauvinism, which he harmonized with Catholicism. "Spain comes before everything. God is above Spain. You are as Catholic as you feel yourself to be Spanish!" This Catholic chauvinism of Roble's came from various characteristics of Spain itself… Robles used Catholic bodies and cooperatives and Catholic youth groups. The Catholic press also entered the service of fascism. Robles also ran the newspaper El Debate, which was well-known among conservative circles.130
Throughout his time in power, Franco forbade the development of any religious sentiments he may have considered at odds with the principles of the fascist state. He turned the Church away from its true principles, and made it a supporter of his fascist regime.
The Destruction Wreaked By The Spanish Civil War
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Fascism regards "glory of victory" as a noble aim, one which justifies any cost. Between 1936 and 1939, Spain fell victim to this delusion. For the sake of winning the war, the head of the Spanish Army, Generalissimo Franco felt no qualms about devastating his country. (above) Large cities, such as Madrid and Barcelona, were bombed by Franco's forces. When celebrating his victory with his troops, Franco (right) felt no concern for all the innocent people he had killed in the process.
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The Church also served the fascists in other ways. Spaniards in Latin America and other fascist groups set up their own versions of the Falange, so these countries could be brought under Spanish control. The Catholic Church in these countries was a primary motivating force in this scheme.131
The story of how various fascist regimes came to power is generally very much the same. For fascists, religion is an important tool to help them achieve their ends. As a result of tactics similar to those employed in other fascist countries, the Church in Spain supported Franco. However, as we have already seen, fascists only maintain this positive attitude towards religion until they are in power, after which they generally lose no time waging war against it. The same happened in Spain.
George Orwell describes the situation in revolutionary Barcelona six months after the revolution:
Almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman.132
When we examine Franco as an example of how fascists openly use religion, we find ourselves once again face to face with one of the truths mentioned earlier in this book. Fascism is an ideology that seeks to turn European societies back to the pagan religions of pre-Christian Europe. And not just in Europe. Everywhere in the world the true religion of fascists has been paganism. Every fascist movement takes its own society's pagan beliefs as a model. Their slogans, symbols and the like, all bear the features of a particular society's pagan past. Fascists try to generate an emotional fervor in their peoples by referring to their ancestors and traditions, contributing to a kind of mass hypnosis. They continually promise a return to the "glorious days" of the peoples' past. Essentially, they turn fascism into a religion, employing religious terms and symbols from their societies' pasts. No matter how much they may give the impression of being religious, they are nothing more than pagans.
Fascist Morals Are the Opposite of Koranic Morals
It is perfectly obvious that fascism has only ever led to bloodshed and suffering for mankind. The history of the 20th century is proof of this. But, despite this fact, there are still people in many parts of the world who are sympathetic to fascism. Fascist movements in our own time are spreading rapidly, under the name of neo-Nazis and hooligans. Legal measures taken against these fascist gangs are ineffective, where such powerful countries as Great Britain and Germany are unable to suppress them. This reason being that they use ineffective methods. It is impossible to restrain and bring into line people who have been brought up with no knowledge of religion, leading them to become utterly irresponsible, uncontrollable and aggressive. The only way to stop this aggression and terrorism that persists in many countries today, is to inoculate people with the morality taught by religion instead of the pagan or atheistic ideologies that are at the root of fascism.
As will be clear from the content of this book, fascism opposes peace, friendship, brotherhood, compromise and tolerance. The essence of religion, however, is good morality. So fascism is an ideology completely at variance with religion.
* For instance, fascism approves of racism. Fascists have always claimed that their own race or nation are superior to others, and have used the claim as an excuse to seize their lands and property. This racist claim results in countless wars, killings, and "ethnic cleansing." However, as we have seen, the Koran teaches that superiority is not subject to race, color or any other feature, but is founded in closeness to God and living by faith and proper morals. The Koran makes light of this truth:
In another verse, God describes racism as the "fanatical rage of the time of ignorance", and reveals to believers that He will protect them against this provocative ideology:
As the above verse makes clear, God has divided people into different races and ethnic groups so that they may interact with one another and live in peace, brotherhood and tolerance. In other words, contrary to what fascists think, different races and ethnic groups are not a tool for Social Darwinist conflict and a "struggle for survival." There can be no question of biological superiority among different races and ethnic groups. God ascribes the only superiority among human beings to closeness to Him, and living according to faith and morality. In a situation where people adhere to the Koran, therefore, there will be no conflict of race, color or tribe, nor will such claims of superiority ever be able to find fertile ground in which to grow.
* History reveals that "fanatical rage" is a sickness that originated in pagan or atheist societies, where claims based on the superiority of a race, ethnic origin or tribe, and the conflict that results from them, have always existed. These people have always sought to determine their superiority in such physical features. The Koran however says, "All might belongs to God." (Koran, 10:65) Human beings are created by God with no distinction between race or skin color, but as helpless creatures utterly dependent on God. They will all someday die. So, no individual or society has the right to claim superiority over another. In death, these claims will be proven unfounded. A holy verse on the subject of the Day of Judgment reveals this fact:
A TERRIBLE END
Mussolini and his mistress were first lynched by the people, and then hung up by their feet in a square in Milan.
Their corpses were left on public display for several days. No matter how quietly Franco may lie in his coffin, he was buried with all the cruelties he committed.
Their corpses were left on public display for several days. No matter how quietly Franco may lie in his coffin, he was buried with all the cruelties he committed.
As the verse makes clear, at the moment of death, the Day of Judgment or in the hereafter, concepts such as race, color and ethnic origin will be unimportant. The only thing of any importance then will be closeness to God and whether a person has won His mercy. On that day, nobody will be in a position to ask anyone about his race or ethnicity. Those people who are now passionate about their ethnicity, who kill others for it and even burn them alive, will understand how helpless and dependant they are, no matter what their race.
* Another distinguishing feature of fascism is its tendency to violence. Fascists regard violence, the use of brute force, war and conflict as sacred concepts. That is not possible for someone who lives by the Koran. God wants the faithful to live by good morals, which he describes in the Koran. For instance, a Muslim is charged with returning good for evil. God says this in one of the holy verses on the subject:
It is out of the question for a person who behaves in accordance with the above verse to feel any sympathy for fascist logic and methods, or to show even the slightest tendency towards fascism.
* Another feature of fascist morality is that it is quite capable of sacrificing thousands of innocent people without hesitation for the sake of those aims that it perceives to be sacred. Fascists, who think that "the end justifies the means," carry out all kinds of brutality for an end that is in itself utterly unjustifiable. However, the Koran says that attacking people unjustly and killing the innocent is a great crime. According to fascism, human life is worth nothing, whereas religion sees the life of even one person as being of the utmost importance. God commands:
Bearing in mind that killing an innocent person is like murdering all mankind, it is clear what a great sin all the killings, murders and genocide carried out by fascists has been. God reveals what awaits the cruel fascists in the hereafter:
* We also mentioned that fascists are excessively impassioned, for which reason they can easily be provoked, angered and incited to violence. Fascist groups tend to operate in the form of street gangs, become consumed with anger at even the slightest incident, and immediately resort to fighting at the slightest provocation. Naturally, this emotionally fuelled violence is completely contrary to what the Koran commands. The Koran speaks of intelligent, mild and moderate people who can restrain themselves when they become angry. Nothing that happens can make them aggressive or angry:
* Another tendency possessed by fascists is a group-mentality. Many poorly educated and ignorant young people in fascist groups, who do not even know why they do what they do, get carried away by a kind of hysterical emotion under the effect of crowds, slogans and martial songs. They get carried away by the herd mentality and involved in group crimes that they would never carry out of their own free will. They can attack a foreigner for no reason, or pillage a workplace. Most people who engage in such actions do so because they have become part of the "herd," just one part of the psychology of the group, because their wills and consciences are weak. But God warns people against the deviance of the majority:
For this reason, instead of going along with the majority, the faithful act intelligently and according to their better conscience. This is only possible by living in accordance with the Koran.
* Another point of disparity between religion and fascism is the Koran's requirement of peace and compromise. These concepts are the exact opposite of fascism, which promotes aggression, conquest, war, brute force and oppression. God disapproves of all of these, presented in the Koran as cruelties. On the contrary, God commands people to live according to what is good and to establish good relations between each other:
Conclusion
In conclusion, when we examine the basis of fascism, we come to see a system of ethics that is the exact opposite of those virtues that are inherent in religion, such as love, affection, compassion, humility, co-operation, and being content with what one has. However, fascism is a school of thought that systematizes the very opposite, and, under the influence of Darwinism, portrays itself as a "scientific" and rational approach. "Cruelty," which has always been condemned by religion, is praised and sanctified systematically in fascism.
This cruel and ruthless ideology has been the root of the genocidal acts carried out by Hitler, Mussolini's ruthless conquests, the bloody civil war waged by Franco, Pinochet's brutalities, Saddam Hussein's killing of 5,000 civilians by nerve gas, the inhumane savagery meted out to the Bosnians and Albanians by Milosevic, and many other current atrocities. The fascist ideology plays a role, not only in state-sponsored violence, such as mentioned above, but also in every-day instances. The stabbing, beating or killing of people because of a simple misunderstanding is the product of a culture that sees and portrays violence as a kind of heroism. The source this mentality is the influence of the idea of a "struggle for survival," once professed by such ideologues as Darwin and Nietzsche.
The cause of this sickness is the lack of religion in these people. They may perhaps claim to be religious if asked, but they have not the slightest inkling of the true beauty and nobility that religion bestows on people. And for the same reason, the cure for this sickness is for people to learn the true meaning of, as well as understand and live by, Koranic morality.
Pharaoh: A Fascist Character Related In The Koran
The defining characteristic of fascist leaders is their tendency to construct regimes founded on fear and oppression. They tend to intimidate their citizenry through threats, repression and torture, and thus control them as they wish. This is the case in almost all fascist regimes. Those who go along with them are those who generally support might instead of right, easily bow their heads in the face of brutality, and are the kind of weak souls that can easily be led in any direction the authorities want. Ignorance here plays an important role.
In the Koran, God provides an example of a cruel dictator and the kind of society those loyal to him consist of: Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs.
The Pharaoh who ruled Egypt at the time of the prophet Moses established a system based entirely on the use of oppression. He did not hesitate using force and brutality, as all fascist leaders have done in order to fortify their authority.
When we examine what the Koran has to say about Pharaoh, we see a striking resemblance to modern fascist leaders. Like fascist leaders in our own time, Pharaoh divided the people in his country into classes, massacring some of them:
Another striking feature of Pharaoh's regime is the use of military power against his own people, in the very same way as the modern fascists. For instance, he sent his army to prevent the flight of the children of Israel and the Prophet Moses. The Koran repeatedly uses the expression "Pharaoh and his troops" when speaking about his government, which indicates that it was a militarist one.
Rameses II: The Fascist Pharaoh Of Ancient Egypt
Rameses II, who ruled Egypt in the time of the prophet Moses, governed a regime founded on oppression and violence, enslaving minorities in his country (the Israelites), and portraying himself as a divine being: Just as modern fascists have done.
Another similarity between Pharaoh and contemporary fascists is the way they portray themselves as divine. The "deification of the leader" employed in Hitler and Mussolini's regimes were also openly employed by Pharaoh:
The verse also indicates that Pharaoh gave virulent speeches and hectored his people, a most distinctive feature of the propaganda methods employed by fascist dictators such as Hitler and Mussolini.
At a time when Pharaoh was pressuring his people to follow wherever he led them, a true prophet, the Prophet Moses, came to tell the people of Egypt the truth and lead them onto the correct path. But they were afraid to follow Moses, and stuck with Pharaoh, who appeared to them more powerful:
As we have seen, some of those who might have believed in the Prophet Moses failed to do so out of fear of incurring the wrath of Pharaoh and those around him. This shows that Pharaoh's regime was one that oppressed people solely because of their beliefs, a fundamental characteristic of fascism.
Another similarity between Pharaoh and contemporary fascist leaders is their discriminatory and racist treatment of people. The racist views of modern fascists can also be seen in Pharaoh. Like the "anti-Semitic" leaders of our own time, Pharaoh also saw the people of Israel as a so-called inferior race, and belittled the prophets Moses and Aaron before their own people, the People of Israel. Here is an example of the words of Pharaoh and those around him:
As is clear from the examples given so far, there were important resemblances between Pharaoh's system and that of fascist regimes in our own time. These similarities are not just limited to administrative systems, but also apply to the peoples administered under those systems. Certainly, most people who abided by Pharaoh and followed his rule knew that they were doing the wrong thing, and that the Prophet Moses was in the right. But, because they saw Pharaoh as powerful, and as their ruler, they thought that they had no other alternative. They fell under the influence of brute force and power. They believed in the principle that "might is right," though the only true possessor of might and dominion is God. Because they could not comprehend this, they and Pharaoh ultimately suffered great humiliation, both in this world and in the hereafter. The Koran describes the end that awaited these people:
The end met by fascist leaders is just as unhappy as that of Pharaoh. Hitler committed suicide, and Mussolini was condemned to death by his own people. The cruelties they committed in an attempt to elevate themselves only led to their humiliation. They became people who were remembered with disgust by those who came after. Furthermore, their humiliation in the hereafter will be much greater than that in this world. But it must be remembered that the suffering in the hereafter is not just restricted to them, it also includes their followers. This truth is again revealed in the Koran:
Many dictators have established despotic regimes in this world, with their people bowing their heads to them, taken by the spell of brute force, violence, fear and domination, or as the Koran puts it "…followed the command of every obdurate tyrant" (Koran, 11:59). God reveals the great error these leaders and their societies have made:
The use of modern fascist symbols in Rameses II's royal bearings (above) is particularly interesting, symbols of aggressive, wild animals, and figures reflecting pagan beliefs, meant to inspire violence and fear.
Saddam's Massacre at Halabja
Third World Fascists
Fascism was defeated in the Second World War. The alliance between Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and Japan was beaten, and the fascist regimes dismantled. Hitler committed suicide, Mussolini was strung up by his own people, and the Japanese government dissolved itself. Fascism, rising during the first half of the 20th century, collapsed before it could see the second half.
However, the collapse of fascism did not mean that as a problem it had been wiped off the face of the earth. After the Second World War, and in the Third World, fascism actually increased. The dictators and juntas which came to power in Latin America and Africa were also basically committed to fascism.
The Savagery of Fascism in Latin America
Third World fascists did not hesitate to commit atrocities recalling the Nazi massacres. For instance, the Chilean dictator General Pinochet, who came to power with a military coup against President Allende in 1973, turned his country into a river of blood. Pinochet had Allende killed with tank and jet attacks on the Presidential Palace. However, the Chilean people were told that Allende had committed suicide because he refused to surrender. Following that, a ruthless policy to eliminate Allende's supporters and the opposition was implemented. The junta killed thousands of people in its first year in power, and approximately 90,000 Chileans out of a population of 9 million were arrested. The terrorizing of the population, corpses piled up in morgues, or shot and thrown into the Mapocho River, the detention of suspects in the Santiago Stadium, hostage-takings, frequent search operations and lootings, were just a few of the crimes of the Pinochet regime. Academic institutions were "cleansed," and history and geography courses in universities were subjected to censorship by the fascist authorities.
Fascist dictatorships similar to that of Pinochet came to power in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras and Paraguay, and also carried out appalling cruelties. Thousands of opponents of the junta in Argentina "disappeared." According to the evidence that emerged after the fact, more than 2,000 political detainees were put onto planes and thrown out over the sea from thousands of feet in the air. A former gendarme, Federico Talavera, who appeared on Argentine television on April 27, 1995, admitted the tortures carried out during the time, saying among other things that pregnant women were thrown into the sea and that dogs were specially trained to bite peoples' sexual organs. According to his confession, the dogs would take political detainees' sexual organs in their mouths and wait for an order. If the detainee refused to talk, then the dog was told to bite.
On April 27, 1995, a former gendarme confessed to the torture carried out during the junta regime. The people then poured onto the streets to protest against Pinochet.
The brutality in Guatemala was also horrifying. In the 1960s and 1970s, the fascist regime which overthrew the country's first and only elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954, turned the country into killing-fields. Among the fascists' targets, in conformity with fascism's general hatred of religion, were men of religion. Amnesty International announced that between October 1966 and March 1968, some 8,000 Guatemalans, including many priests, were killed by "death squads." In 1972, the number of death squad victims went up to 12,000, and to 20,000 four years later.
The Roman Catholic Bishops Conference described the government's policy as "genocide." In Killing Hope:US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, the American writer William Blum explained the torture methods used by the Guatemala regime:
Anyone attempting to organize a union or other undertaking to improve the lot of the peasants, or simply suspected of being in support of the guerrillas, was subject ... unknown armed men broke into their homes and dragged them away to unknown places ... their tortured or mutilated or burned bodies found buried in a mass grave, or floating in plastic bags in a lake or river, or lying beside the road, hands tied behind the back ... bodies dropped into the Pacific from airplanes. In the Gual area, it was said, no one fished any more; too many corpses were caught in the nets ... decapitated corpses, or castrated, or pins stuck in the eyes ... a village rounded up, suspected of supplying the guerrillas with men or food or information, all adult males taken away in front of their families, never to be seen again ... or everyone massacred, the village bulldozed over to cover the traces ... seldom were the victims actual members of a guerrilla band. One method of torture consisted of putting a hood filled with insecticide over the head of the victim; there was also electric shock — to the genital area is the most effective.133
The Brutal Dictator Pinochet
PINOCHET'S RIVERS OF BLOOD: Pinochet brought only blood and death to Chile. His regime will be remembered in history for its torture, killings, and "the disappeared." Left. Pinochet at a press conference after his 1973 coup. Right. The Chilean dictator shortly before relinquishing power.
In 1984, 3,000 "suspects" were locked in the Santiago Stadium for interrogation. In the first years of the regime, thousands of people were killed, and 90,000 people out Chile's population of 9 million were detained, many of whom were tortured. Such was the manner in which Pinochet introduced fascism to the people of Chile.
William Blum quotes a statement by a female native Guatemalan. Taken for questioning, along with her family, on charges of being an "opponent of the regime," Rigoberta Menchú Tum described what happened to her on December 9, 1979:
On 9 December 1979, my 16-year-old brother Patrocino was captured and tortured for several days and then taken with twenty other young men to the square in Chajul ... An officer of [President] Lucas Garcia's army of murderers ordered the prisoners to be paraded in a line.... I was with my mother, and we saw Patrocino; he had had his tongue cut out and his toes cut off. The officer jackal made a speech. Every time he paused the soldiers beat the Indian prisoners. When he finished his ranting, the bodies of my brother and the other prisoners were swollen, bloody, unrecognizable. It was monstrous, but they were still alive. They were thrown on the ground and drenched with gasoline. The soldiers set fire to the wretched bodies with torches and the captain laughed like a hyena and forced the inhabitants of Chajul to watch.134
These are but a few examples. The fascist regime in Guatemala, run first by General Romeo Lucas Garcia, and then by General Efrain Rios Montt, by similar methods, killed more than 100,000 people. William Blum speaks of victims "having their eyes put out, their testicles cut off and stuffed in their mouths, and their hands and feet cut off" by the security forces, as well as women "having their breasts cut off."
South African Fascism
The "apartheid" regime in South Africa followed a racist policy as harsh as that found in Nazi Germany. The native black population, which made up the majority, was oppressed and brutalized for years by the white minority.
Similar fascist regimes held power in African countries, such as Zaire, Uganda and South Africa, for long periods of time. The regime of South Africa adopted a fiercely racist ideology, reminiscent of Nazi Germany. The black majority in South Africa, the original inhabitants of the land, were exploited by the white minority for years.
In short, the second half of the 20th century was as much the brunt of fascist violence as the first. Fascist regimes, similar to those overthrown in Europe, emerged in Latin America and Africa, who again led to the world becoming'a battlefield where "the strong survive and the weak are eliminated."
A Middle Eastern Fascist: Saddam Hussein
At this point in time, being the beginning of the 21st century, many of the fascist dictators of the 1960s and 70s have disappeared. However, fascism may rear its head at any time, in various places and under different conditions. The Middle East in particular has suffered from the violence of fascist regimes and organizations. One such fascist dictator is at this very moment threatening the region: Saddam Hussein.
It will be useful to examine Saddam Hussein's past in order to better recognize his fascist character.
The events that brought him to power in Iraq began with a military coup. In February 1963, a group of officers and street militants, calling themselves the Baath (Resurgence) Party, overthrew General Kassem who was then in power. Among these militants was one young member of the six-man team charged with killing Kassem: Saddam Hussein al-Takriti, or Saddam Hussein from Takrit. Although he was not a soldier, Saddam usually wore a military uniform, and after the coup, he was brought in by the Baath administration to head a group responsible for terrorism and murder. The first thing he did was to develop new and effective methods of torture with which to interrogate opponents of the coup. When the administration that followed the Baath's palace coup collapsed, in November of that same year, Saddam's torture facility was exposed, which was equipped with various implements of torture that Saddam had invented himself.
The Baath government lasted less than ten months, and was brought down by another coup. But the party carried out a second coup on July 17, 1968. This time the plotters remained in power.
The leader of this second Baath coup was "torture expert" Saddam Hussein. He brought in his personal relatives into key positions in the regime, and eventually gathered complete power by eliminating his rivals. The merciless torturer had become the dictator of Iraq.
After coming to power, Saddam pursued war and conflict constantly. In 1988 he engaged in a surprise and totally unjustified attack on Iran, occupying part of the country. The war lasted for eight years and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Iranians. Two years after the war had ended, he invaded Kuwait, again without justification, leading to the Gulf War. Like Hitler, who carried out savage attacks for four years to enlarge German territory, Saddam terrorized those around him.
Furthermore, he had no qualms about using the most oppressive methods against his own people. Throughout his rule, those regarded as opponents of the regime, and various political and ethnic groups, have suffered all kinds of repression. An edition of Newsweek described Saddam's fascistic character in the following manner:
His detractors call him a bloodthirsty tyrant—the Butcher of Baghdad. Saddam Hussein rules Iraq with an iron hand inside a steel glove, backed by a million-man Army and a legion of informers, assasins and torturers. Saddam, as he is known throughout the Middle East, is utterly ruthless in the pursuit of glory for himself and his country. He has not hesitated to use poison gas on enemies both foreign and domestic.135
Saddam has spilt the blood of numberless Iraqis. At the end of the war against Iran, 1 million out of Iraq's population of 17 million had either been killed or injured. More than 1 million people left the country for political and economic reasons. The human rights organization Middle East Watch states that many people were relocated or deported, arrested and punished for no reason, and that the use of torture was widespread, together with political executions and unsolved killings in Iraq. According to Amnesty International, torture, even of children, includes such methods as roasting victims over flames, amputating noses, limbs, breasts and sexual organs, and hammering nails into bodies.136
Saddam's Massacre At Halabja
Saddam Hussein attacked the village of Halabja in northern Iraq with chemical weapons in 1988, because it would not submit to his authority. Some 5,000 Kurdish civilians in the village died horribly from the burning effects of these weapons. Dead mothers clutching their babies, the corpses of small children in the middle of the streets, demonstrated that the Iraqi dictator was a cruel fascist sharing the same philosophy as Hitler and Mussolini.
The atrocities carried out by Saddam at Halabja in 1988 demonstrate his fascistic treatment of people of different ethnic origins. Nerve gas was used against the Kurdish settlers, causing the death of many innocent men and women, including babies and the elderly. Amnesty International reported that 5,000 Kurds were killed in a single Iraqi gas attack on the village of Halabja, and many more thousands perished in similar attacks elsewhere in the country. 137
The torture inflicted on the political opponents of fascist Saddam was still worse. A doctor who fled from Iraq described: "I was an intern in a hospital in the South. Only doctors were allowed to see the people brought from prison. Most of them were no more than lumps of meat, and most of them died. No political detainee lived through the torture. I fled when I realised that I was about to be detained."138
Even Saddam's own family and closest associates were victims of his cruelty. His step-brother Barzan Takriti fled to the United Arab Emirates out of fear that Saddam and his son Uday were going to kill him. Two of Saddam's son-in-laws, Hussein and Saddam Kamel fled to Jordan out of fear of him. Saddam then guaranteed them that their lives would not be in danger, but as soon as the brothers returned to Baghdad, they and their father were killed. Later, their mother's body was found cut to pieces, all which happened before the eyes of the world.
The Iraqi leader also uses cruel methods as well to intimidate opponents who have fled the country. For instance, General Najib Salihi, who escaped to Jordan in 1995, reported that his close family were raped and that tapes of the act were sent to him. He also said that the same has been done to many other opponents of the regime.
As we can see from these numerous examples, Saddam's authority in Iraq is entirely based on intimidation, terror and torture, while the people within his fascist regime are hungry, unemployed and living in poverty. Little children are dying of hunger and lack of medicine, while the rest of the nation is doomed for either death or extinction. Despite all of this, the people will say nothing against Saddam, whether out of fear or from the effects of mass-hypnosis, but instead blame "them," Saddam's enemies, for the poverty they are suffering.
In Saddam, we can also discern several other fascist characteristics. Of these is the way he compares himself to pagan dictators of the past, just as the Nazis and other fascists had done. The "Sparta" that Saddam selected was Babylon, a pagan empire of the ancient Middle East. He sees and portrays himself as heir to the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, who had "no opponents from horizon to sky."139 In Iraq, ceremonies are held symbolizing the resurrection of the Babylonian Empire, in a manner that recalls the pagan ceremonies of the Nazis. Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed the temple of Solomon and carried the People of Israel to captivity in Babylon, is known to history for two characteristics, that of a ruthless commander, and a great architect. He was also filled with a pride bordering on the psychopathic. He had his name written on every one of the bricks used in the construction of the buildings he had erected. In direct imitation, and despite all the poverty and misery he inflicts on his people, Saddam has his name written on the bricks used to build the palaces he constructs so ostentatiously.
A great portion of the Iraqi people, however, have been so psychologically deformed by Saddam's fascism, that they do not see the construction of such palaces as a wrong or as an injustice to them. On the contrary, they regard these palaces, where Saddam lives in great luxury, as a matter of national honor, and something Iraq can display proudly to foreigners.
Another example of Saddam's fascist character is that, although he has no religious belief, he sometimes puts on a false facade of religion to use religion for his own political ends.
However, it is clear that the use of religious symbols for improper ends (such as to keep Saddam in power and spreading evil) is tremendous hypocrisy. The duty of the Iraqi people, and indeed of everyone, when faced with fascism, is not to be deceived by its propaganda methods, but to distinguish between the truly devout and the fascists who just pretend to be so, and to then act accordingly. It is not difficult to make out the difference between the two, because a fascist can never be truly devout.
In the Koran, God has this to say about these two-faced leaders who, through their power and ill-earned respect, deceive their people into complacency:
Serbian Violence: Albanian civilians killed by Serbian forces in Kosovo on Jan. 15, 1999.
The Silent Rise of Fascism
The defeat and collapse of fascism during the Second World War led most people to believe that "fascism was eliminated completely." However, that has by no means been the case. It is true that the foremost representatives of fascism have been removed from power, but the foundations of their ideology (Darwinism, the love of violence and racism) still survive. For that reason, the death of Hitler or Mussolini did not mean the death of fascism. On the contrary, the widespread belief that "fascism had ceased to exist" only prepared the ground for the development of new fascist groups. Fascism survived, sometimes under its original name, other times by disguising itself. In fact, it enjoyed a particular rise in prominence during the 1990s.
This chapter will examine this new upsurge of fascism and the threat it poses to the world. We shall first see how racism is alive and well in Europe, and then consider the proliferation of neo-Nazi organizations. Finally, we shall identify the ideology behind this phenomenon, the hidden face behind the growing trends in racism.
The Neo-Nazis
According to official German figures, there were 10,037 incidents of a racist or xenophobic nature in 1999. Racist incidents in 2000 numbered more than 10,000. The number of such incidents in Great Britain was 10,982 between April and September alone. Half of these crimes consisted of threats or intimidation. Many of them, however, ended in death, injury, burning or destruction of property. Those responsible were fascist gangs known as neo-Nazis.
The neo-Nazi movement became effectively organized in the 1990s. Before that, there were the skinheads of Britain in the 1970s. The defining characteristic of the skinhead movement were attacks on people in impoverished areas inhabited by refugees and foreigners. Only some of these incidents were racist. But in the 1990s, most of the skinheads took to racism and began carrying out racist and fascist attacks as supporters of Nazism.
At present, the neo-Nazi movement is growing stronger and spreading. They are active today in 33 countries and on six continents. They number some 70,000. The members of these street gangs are generally aged between 13 and 25 and use the Internet to communicate.
Neo-Nazis have different targets in different countries. According to one piece of research, they organize against the Turks in Germany, against the gypsies in Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, against the Asians in Britain, North Africans in France, people from the Northeast in Brazil, and against all minorities and refugees in America. In some countries, the unemployed and those living in poor areas can be chosen as targets.
These Nazi-imitating young people are mainly drug addicts, and unemployed street ruffians. They can be easily recognized by the Nazi symbols on their clothes, their shaven heads, and their tattoos, generally referring to their hatred of other races. In their slogans, language, and songs, they praise Hitler and vow to make his dreams come true: A world ruled by the Aryan race.
The kind of people who join these gangs are young, from dysfunctional families, badly educated, unsupervised, and with little self-confidence. By despising others, using violence and fear, they help deceive themselves into believing that they belong to a group that is superior to others.
Fascists In Our Day: The Neo-Nazis
Since the 1990s, racist attacks by groups known as Skinheads have been increasing. These gangs generally consist of poorlyeducated young people, who were brought up in dysfunctional environments, have little selfconfidence, and tend towards all types of crime and violence.
Among their characteristics, we can list hatred, intimidation, threatening behavior, destructiveness, and harmfulness. The greatest perpetrators of these are regarded among them as heroes.
Neo-Nazis also have their own particular style of music. These circles regard music as a propaganda tool. The lyrics of their songs reveal their racist, paranoid and aggressive attitudes. The names of their songs and groups also carry the same message: with names such as "Vampire," "White Noise," "Battleground," "Razor Edge," and "White Warriors."
Fascism By Way Of Music
The neo-Nazi movement is developing as a subculture that is beginning to have an increasing influence on ignorant and problematic segments of the population. Music is a factor in the rise of this new fascism. Typical ideals of fascism, such as love of violence, racism and aggression, are inspired in these groups by rock and heavy metal bands, who are themselves influenced by neo-Nazi ideology
These groups are able to give concerts wherever they wish in European countries, such as Germany, Belgium and the United Kingdom, attended by thousands of young people, and accompanied by Nazi salutes.
Neo-Nazis also have their own fans outside of their organizations. Football hooligans head the list here. Skinheads and various other hooligans have attended sporting events and shouted chants against players of other ethic groups or nationalities, even attacked opposing fans, and initiated fist-fights in the stands, that at times have ended in death. These gangs, even though they are not actually neo-Nazis, can also easily be aroused for neo-Nazi actions. By neo-Nazi organizers, they are seen as people who can be easily manipulated, because they also enjoy neo-Nazi music, and therefore, under the right mix of Nazi propaganda, can be rallied and called to action at any time. It is in this way that racist movements continue to poison the younger generation and win new adherents.
Hooligan Savagery
The hooligans are another reflection of the developing fascist mentality. These groups have been responsible for attacks that have at times resulted in death. 39 Italian fans were killed in a fight as they were leaving a match in Brussels. In the quarterfinals of the World Cup in Switzerland in 1954, when Hungary beat Brazil, the changing rooms became a battlefield. The match is still remembered as the "Battle of Berne."
The reason why neo-Nazi movements in Europe have been able to become so powerful is the secret support they enjoy from the rest of society and from politicians. Many parties active in Europe today and under various names actually exercise fascist tendencies and actively support the neo-Nazis. Beyond this politicization, neo-Nazis think that they can achieve their ends by violence and street actions.
As we have seen throughout this book, this is a typical characteristic of fascism. Fascists think that they will not be able to win the battle of ideas in a democratic environment. They believe instead in the law of the jungle, and that right belongs to the strong, not to the conscientious. In their opinion, aggression and oppression are the greatest factors.
Racist Threat in Modern Europe
The neo-Nazis are representatives of a broader radical racist movement in Europe. They are the "sharp edge" of the fascist axe, to coin a phrase. But this axe also has its roots, and these represent a wider social and political constituency than the neo-Nazis themselves. The racism of the neo-Nazis is a reflection of growing racist tendencies in Europe.
Most interestingly, racism is still an insidious problem in the Europe culture, which places great importance on democracy and human rights. According to research carried out in 1997, racists comprise some 33 percent of Europe's general population. This figure is higher in Belgium, France and Austria. 55 percent of Belgians describe themselves as "quite" or "very racist" and the figures are 48 percent in France and 42 percent in Austria. In Germany the number of racists is about 34 percent. So when neo-Nazis throw Molotov cocktails and chant "Foreigners out!" they are actually carrying out the thoughts of 35 percent of the population.140
The "Pasqua law" of 1993, named after French interior minister Charles Pasqua, greatly alarmed foreigners living in France with the extended powers of search it granted to the police. Even the houses of French citizens of foreign origin were subjected to dawn raids and their inhabitants taken into custody, including men, women and children. These foreigners were treated like war criminals: questioned for days, and some had their arms or legs broken under torture.141
The 17-year-old Zairois Nikomé was shot in a Paris police station having been detained on suspicion of theft. A protest march was held the next day (April 7, 1993), and two Blacks who took part were beaten and killed by the French police. Those workers and students in France legally, and with residence permits, began to live in even greater fear and distress, when it came to light that a French citizen of Moroccan origin was tortured and left for dead by three French police officers.
Such events show that racism is still an important threat in Europe.
Ilya Ehrenburg, the author of the book Europe After Fascism, sets out the current form of racism that still persists in Europe:
Above everything fascism means national hatred, the opposite of national pride. People infected with fascism have no concept of feeling pride in other peoples' cultures, and only feel pride in their own roots…142
This national hatred is a deviant moral tendency described by God as "fanatical rage of the time of ignorance" (Koran, 48:26) God reveals in the Koran that this "fanatical rage" is a characteristic of paganism, one that Islam is protected from. This makes evident to us once again that fascist racism is born of the abandonment of religion, and its replacement with paganism.
It appears that the increasing prevalence of racist tendencies in Europe must be related to neo-Nazi movements, who are gaining further ground every day, as well as to paganism.
And so it is.
"White Supremacy" and the New Fascist Ideology
When the words "fascist organizations" are mentioned in our time, most people first think of the German neo-Nazis. But there are in actuality many more such organizations. There are several active groups in the United States which are given more "theoretical" weight than the German neo-Nazis. These groups generally go by the slogan of "White Supremacy." And, most important of all, theirs is not a "hatred of foreigners" resulting from economic difficulties, but is put forward rather as a philosophical and scientific doctrine.
Various fascist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, the Aryan Nation movement, and the National Alliance all come under the umbrella of "White Supremacy." The aim of these groups, who disseminate extensive propaganda over the Internet, is to defend racism as a doctrine and worldview, and to facilitate its spread.
The basis of such a doctrine is clearly set out in the manifesto of one of these groups, the National Alliance. The truly interesting thing is that this manifesto is a corroboration of what we have investigated throughout this book, that fascism is fundamentally a pagan and Darwinist ideology.
The fascist National Alliance stresses the difference between themselves and "Semitic beliefs" (Islam, Christianity and Judaism), and states that they believe only in nature, that they are evolutionists, whereas "Semitic beliefs" are based on faith in God:
We see ourselves as integral with a unitary world around us, which evolves according to natural law. In the simplest words: There is only one reality, which we call Nature... We are a part of Nature and subject to Nature's laws. Within the scope of these laws we are able to determine our own destiny... In other words, we ourselves are responsible for everything over which we have the power of choice: in particular, for the state of our environment and for the destiny of our race. This view may be contrasted with the Semitic view... They believe that it is not necessary for men to concern themselves with the future, beyond planning for their own needs, because their god has everything under control.143
Religion is clearly opposed to fascism. The latter considers man to be "a product of nature," whereas religion teaches that man was created by God, and that God determines his destiny.
Fascist Organizations In The USA
From left to right. Symbols and slogans of American racist and fascist organizations.
The Ku Klux Klan And American Nazis:
Racist and fascist organizations are spreading rapidly in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan (above and below right) which hates Blacks, the Aryan Nation, and the American Nazi Party, are active fascistic groups. Below left. The American neo-Nazi Gary Lauck with a book supporting the German neo-Nazis. Below middle. Richard Butler, the founder of The Aryan Nation, with members of his fascist organization (right).
In the fascist National Alliance manifesto, the evolutionist logic behind its racist ideology is described in the following terms:
Our world is hierarchical. Each of us is a member of the Aryan (or European) race, which, like the other races, developed its special characteristics over many thousands of years during which natural selection not only adapted it to its environment but also advanced it along its evolutionary path. Those races which evolved in the more demanding environment of the North, where surviving a winter required planning and self-discipline, advanced more rapidly in the development of the higher mental faculties...144
In other words, it is claimed that the Aryan race is superior to others because it has "evolved further." The National Alliance goes even further, claiming that racism is a "duty to nature," and bases this assertion on an appeal to Nietzsche's philosophy:
First, we have an obligation to the Nature of which we are a part to participate as effectively as we can in its eternal quest for higher levels of development, higher forms of life. This obligation has been recognized and expressed by our poets and philosophers throughout our history. Friedrich Nietzsche told us that our first responsibility is to help prepare the world for the coming of a higher type of man. Nature has refined and honed the special qualities embodied in the Aryan race so we would be better able to fulfill the mission allotted to us. Even though Nature also has developed other forms of life, including other races of man, we have a special obligation to our own race: to ensure its survival, to safeguard its unique characteristics, to improve its quality.145
The National Alliance, based in the United States, produces books and magazines in Swedish, French, German, Portuguese and Russian, and is rapidly spreading its Darwinist, pagan ideology. The cover of the organization's fascist National Vanguard magazine is decorated with statues of ancient Greek gods. Its articles frequently quote from the works of Darwin, and presents, based on Darwin's evolutionary national selection mechanism, such claims as, "a race eternally at war with the rest of the world has a distinct survival advantage over those races with an attitude of live and let live."146
One can find similar statements, and Darwinist opinions, as well as propaganda defending the errant culture of paganism against the divine religions, in the publications and web sites of other fascist organizations.
Fascistic racism, whose birth coincided with the re-awakening of paganism and the theory of evolution in the 19th century, continues to grow in the 21st century, based on these same fundamental delusions.
Fascism in Daily Life
As we have seen, racism, one of the fundamental characteristics of fascism, is on the rise in Europe, and behind it lies the spread of the Darwinist-paganism. But has pagan morality, which justifies the love of violence, bloodshed and mercilessness, other core fundamentals of fascism, also survived?
Yes, it is alive, and thriving.
In his book, titled Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview, the American historian Gene Edward Veith explains how fascist culture is still alive and kicking:
In the 1930s, avant-garde artists shocked the bourgeoisie with their aesthetic theories that glorified violence and the release of primitive emotions. Today, if you like examples of early fascist aesthetics, simply go to the latest Hollywood blockbuster, turn on MTV, or go to a Heavy Metal concert. Here you will see realized the fascists' artistic ideals: pleasure from violence; the thrill of moral rebellion; the cult of the Aryan body. The grisly blood-letting of a slasher movie; the body-builder who takes the law into his own hands by machine-gunning his enemies; the masses of teenagers slam-dancing as Metallica sings 'Scream, as I'm killing you!'—such art is the quintessence of the fascist aesthetic.147
There is a fascistic influence hidden in the "popular culture" of our daily lives. This culture, with its passion for violence which we see in films, cartoons, rock concerts and music clips, is the result of the Darwinist-fascist ideology. This point of view, which regards man as a species of animal, and maintains that the only law of nature consists of "killing, fighting and destruction," all which it portrays as justified, intelligent and scientific, is inciting people in our own time towards acts of violence and an aggressive, crude, savage and bloodthirsty attitude, just as it had incited people to Nazi barbarity in 1930s Germany.
It is sufficient to consider the media to recognize the place of fascism in our daily lives. Family members stabbing each other over trivial matters, fanatical fans beating each other to death after a football match, children wickedly killing their father to lay their hands on an inheritance, psychopaths who kidnap a small child and torture him or her to death, only to say that they did it "for fun"…
There are so many examples like these that most people have begun to regard them as "normal" and "inevitable." In actual fact, they are merely the end-product of a "mentality" that is becoming increasingly widespread. Entire nations are being brainwashed from early on, brought up with such false notions as "Life is a struggle, only the strong win," or "Get them, before they get you," and who consistently see such messages in the films they watch, the songs they listen to, and the news stories prevalent in the media.
The perpetrators reported in these stories usually come from the ranks of the uneducated in society. The "elite" of society, provoked by this same mentality, also carry out the similar crimes, but do so in a more hidden fashion, or in a manner that comes within their line of occupation, and are therefore less easily identifiable.
This disturbing tendency towards violence in modern societies is well-known, but no solution can yet be found for it. One important impediment is the fact that this violence is regarded as "normal." A second reason is that most people do not realize its true source. They think that the problem can be resolved by resorting to legal and security measures. But they are wrong. Of course, such "technical" measures are necessary, but the true solution lies in determining the source of this degeneration in society, and to cure the sickness ideologically.
The source of this degeneration, as this book has tried to make evident, is Darwinism. Ideas such as "Life is a struggle, and only the strong can win," and "If you don't get them, they will get you," have their roots in Darwinism, are all ultimately responsible for the current increase in "fascism in daily life" throughout the world.
Some people might object to this diagnosis, and say that "most people who carry out violent actions have never heard of Darwinism." And this is partly true. Those who commit these increasing acts of violence may well never have heard of Darwinism. But those who govern that section of society and shape their perspective do draw their inspiration from Darwinism. This group is powerful and dominant in universities, the media, many scientific institutions, in the arts and literature, in cinema and television, and in many areas which influence the way people think. And it is they who disseminate the idea that "Life is a struggle, and only the strong can win."
This community, which guides society in its direction, believes blindly in Darwinism, and regard themselves, not as created by God and as His servants with obligations towards Him, but as developed animals that have evolved from apes, and whose only purpose is "conflict." This Darwinist ideology is regularly presented in newspapers, magazines and on the television.
However, all such people, that is, the community which produces such so-called news stories, the "elite" which helps to create this world-view, are utterly mistaken. Contrary to the claims of Darwinism, man is not an animal which came about by chance and whose only purpose in life is to fight. Man was created by God, and is responsible for living by the morals He has revealed. And, again contrary to Darwinist propaganda, science confirms the truth that the universe was divinely created, or creationism, not Darwinism. As revealed in the Koran:
In order to escape the fascist influenced culture which denies creation by God, this so-called philosophy of Darwinism must be eradicated, and people freed from its deception. The important thing is, to silence those voices who whisper to others to believe: "Be ruthless, shed blood, kill, this is your instinct, you are only an animal, and when you die your life will be over." When this voice is silenced, those it has hypnotized will be allowed to see the truth, and will understand their purpose.
