Interwar Fascism Research Articles

Anti-Colonialism and the Crisis of Interwar Fascism by Michael Ortiz (review)

Anti-Colonialism and the Crisis of Interwar Fascism by Michael Ortiz (review)

The Intellectual as Culture Warrior

Abstract A major development on the European far right since 1945 is the turn to a ‘metapolitics’ supposedly influenced by the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci. Metapolitics, in this sense, deemphasizes electoral politics in favor of intellectual activism and the pursuit of ‘cultural hegemony’ as a prelude to seizing political power. This article examines the metapolitics of the European New Right (ENR) from a new theoretical and historical perspective. It argues that the literature of the US ‘culture wars’ better explains the ENR’s practice than any reception of Gramsci. And it presents ENR metapolitics not as the strategic reformulation of interwar fascism but as part of a broad transatlantic backlash against the leftist successes of the 1960s. This approach better accounts for ENR intellectuals’ function as ‘culture warriors’ specializing in demonization and mastery of the tools of public discourse.

Instrumentalizing gender: from interwar fascism to the Alt Right in Greece

ABSTRACT This article examines the far-right discourses on gender in Greece focusing on two historical moments, namely the period between 1936 and 1941 when Greece was governed by the authoritarian regime of general Ioannis Metaxas, and the period between 2010 and 2022 which was defined by the Greek-government debt crisis, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2021-2022 global energy crisis. It aims to demonstrate the instrumental logic lurking behind the gender rhetoric employed by the Far Right and bring to the fore both points of convergence and divergence. With regards to the Metaxas regime the article discusses the contradictions marking the official propaganda on women which seems to oscillate between deeply rooted conservative ideas on women’s role on the one hand, and the promotion of new ideals of femininity on the other hand. Fast-forward to today, the article examines the ways gender issues are manipulated by the emerging Alt Right in Greece. Via the theoretical lens of femonationalism and homonationalism, the article brings to the fore the contradictions between the breakthroughs with regards to feminist and LGBTQI demands on the one hand, and the systematic attempts to reintroduce an ultra-conservative agenda with regards to gender issues in Greece on the other hand.

Libido, Psychic Eugenics and Abnormality

Abstract This article attempts to resituate the Greek regime of 4th of August 1936 within the wider context of interwar fascism in Europe and address it as fascist ideology and practice. It does so by pointing to the ways in which the biomedical discourse on gender and sexuality was pivotal in Ioannis Metaxas’s project in terms of playing a crucial role in normalising ideas of racial, class, sexual and gender hierarchy. The article has two areas of focus. The first approaches the eugenic discourse developed in Greece and Europe under liberal governments. This relied on the premise that the mental or psychic disorders it accounted for, identified mainly among the lower classes, were diagnosed as diseases of the ‘libidinous libido’ when it came to criminality, poverty, strikes, psychic diseases and brutal deaths. The second area of focus reveals how, once trained to detect biological and psychical anomalies, Metaxas’s regime managed to perform something that now gives the impression of a magic trick: by waving the wand of psychiatric technocracy over a scene of profound economic inequality, it cultivated an authoritarian, patriarchal, biomedical discourse on psychic normality.

“Everything Is Revealed in Maps”: The European Far Right and the Legacy of Classical Geopolitics during the Cold War

ABSTRACT This essay examines the engagement of the European Far Right during the Cold War with the legacy of classical geopolitics, above all the work of Mackinder, Spykman, Haushofer and Schmitt. The concerns of geopolitics with immanent spatial “realities” gave it an instrumental utility for the EFR as the latter sought to move beyond the obsessive preoccupation of interwar fascism (in its dominant German version) with factors of genetics and race. Beyond this, classical geopolitics provided conceptual and theoretical support for the EFR as it elaborated new ideological principles and political projects. On the one hand this involved a novel vision of pan-European unity that rested on the principle of continentalist autarky. On the other, with key concepts such as Heartland and Rimland, classical geopolitics offered a sophisticated but strategically flexible meta-geography of Eurasian space that was of immense value, for it could accommodate the EFR’s ambivalence regarding the geographical limits of its envisioned pan-Europe and the nature of its relationship to its Eurasian neighbour, the USSR. The essay argues that while the conceptual continuities with the interwar period were vital, the deployment of classical geopolitical theory by the EFR after 1945 was driven by a logic of its own, one that was directly connected to the historical context and political realities of the Cold War. EFR ideologues used classical geopolitics essentially in order to negotiate the particular challenges of their day and to sustain and develop their own political agendas.

Citizens as Militant Democrats, Or: Just How Intolerant Should the People Be?

ABSTRACT Militant democracy calls for pre-emptive measures against political actors who use democratic institutions to undermine or outright abolish a democratic political system. Born in the context of interwar fascism, militant democracy has recently been revived by political and legal theorists concerned about the rise of authoritarian right-wing populists. A long-standing charge against militant democracy—also articulated with renewed force in our era—is that, as a top-down way to deal with the intolerant, militant democracy is inherently elitist and bears uncomfortable similarities with technocracy (also understood as an intolerant form of governance). But while it is true that militant democracy relies on state institutions to preserve democracy, it by no means excludes citizen engagement: “courts or the people” is a false choice. On the other hand, citizens engaged in militant democracy must take on the difficult task of distinguishing very clearly between democratic essentials under threat and political questions about which citizens might reasonably disagree. While citizen assemblies are not the answer to all of contemporary democracies’ travails, they might be very helpful in clarifying such distinctions for wide audiences.

Inciting Military Disaffection in Interwar Britain and Fascist Italy: Security, Crime and Authoritarian Law

Abstract During the interwar period, two apparently different states, liberal democratic Britain and Fascist Italy, passed similar legislation establishing inchoate offences against military loyalty and obedience. These laws, the Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934 and article 266 of the 1930 Italian Penal Code, were intended to protect state security and the monopoly of force against political threats. This article compares these laws’ scope, rationales and purposes, and traces their longer-term origins in the consolidation of the modern state. It argues that this comparative historical analysis evidences important intersections in these systems’ uses of criminal law, and provides insights into the forms and extent of authoritarian tendencies and techniques in states’ legal practices, specifically in the security context and more generally within criminal law as a vector of state power across the political spectrum.

Post‐Fascists: Putting the So‐Called “Populist Right” into Historical Perspective

AbstractAuthoritarians are back: Demanding the restoration of community against formalized society and of tradition against the stranger; asking for strong states enforcing law and order, closing borders, preventing dark men from threatening white women; defending traditional family models against individualism and gender‐pluralism; claiming to represent “the people.” Today many denounce them as “Fascists!”. This article tries to conceptually capture the recent developments in two countries, France and Germany. In both cases, a diachronic comparison seems tempting. Are the '30s ahead of us? What is the extent and what is the impact of the fascist legacy today? The comparison in this article is based on Mann's book “Fascists” (2004). The paper argues that while the current far‐right cannot be considered fascist anymore and resembles interwar fascism only remotely, we have to consider it post‐fascist. If interwar fascism is largely explicable out of a context of multilevel crises to which it provided answers that many found convincing, I conclude that the current strength of the German and French far‐right does happen in a rather moderate crisis context to which it provides some answers.

The Transnational Co-production of Interwar ‘Fascism’: On the Dynamics of Ideational Mobility and Localization

Interwar fascism achieved sensational international reach through the appeal and circulation of a set of generic ideological norms and political practices. Therefore, models of analysis must accommodate alternative local interpretations, adaptations, and a wide range of varied outcomes in the process of its diverse local translations. In this article, I propose the new trans-disciplinary mobility paradigm as a productive methodological extension of the transnational approach in fascism studies. I focus on the fluid dynamics of transnational circulation of ‘fascist’ ideas and political innovations, as well as on how these were perceived, (re-)interpreted, adopted/adapted by a wide set of local agents in interwar Europe. I employ a decentred, anti-literalist, and multi-directional mobility approach that analyses the history of interwar ‘fascism’ as the messy net force of diverse, multivalent agencies, of interactions and frictions, in the end of creative translation and trial-and-error. I argue that a focus on this mobility dynamic offers three advantages: first, it promotes the re-integration of diverse fragmented histories of interwar fascism; second, it is capable of exposing the dynamic co-production of the political history of ‘fascist’ over time and space; and third, it fosters a far better understanding of the reasons for the ideological travel and political traction of radical ideas and politics in interwar years.

When Race Was Removed from Racism: Per Engdahl, the Networks that Saved Fascism and the Making of the Concept of Ethnopluralism.

When Race Was Removed from Racism:Per Engdahl, the Networks that Saved Fascism and the Making of the Concept of Ethnopluralism Elisabeth Åsbrink However false, the idea that victory over Germany in 1945 was synonymous with victory over the ideologies behind the war—Nazism and Jew-hatred—has lingered on in media narratives and the collective consciousness. Alongside new moral codes that emerged in the years following the peace—such as the legitimation of democracy, the Nuremberg Code on medical experimentation, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the prevalent slogan "Never Again"—ideologies of hatred developed across complex international networks. With particular attention to Sweden, in this article I will trace how personal and intellectual networks revived Nazi ideas using new words, such as culture, identity, and enthnopluralism. "Swedish Fascism—Why Bother?" asked historian Lena Berggren in 2002, noting that the influence of interwar fascism had been ignored by scholars because the political ideology had indisputably failed in Swedish elections.1 In a notable 1980 article, Bernt Hagtvet focused on various groups (not the ideas) and their fracturing,2 but despite the historian Heléne [End Page 133] Lööw's groundbreaking 1990 dissertation, "Hakkorset och Wasakärven,"3 academic disinterest prevailed for another decade. Still, while it never became a political force within the Swedish party system, nor did it draw crowds of people to the streets, Swedish fascism played a major international role as postwar mediator. One man was particularly instrumental in the survival of Nazi and antisemitic ideologies: the Swedish fascist leader Per Engdahl, originally the leader of Sveriges Fascistiska Kamporganisation, SFKO (Sweden's Fascist Combat Organization), during the 1930s. Engdahl was long gone from public consciousness when my nonfiction book And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain was published in 2011.4 The book offers the account of a Viennese Jewish boy, Otto Ullmann, who was sent to Sweden at age thirteen in February 1939 to escape Nazi persecution and, in 1944, applied for work at the farm estate Elmtaryd in Småland. The farm's owners were the Kamprad family and Otto soon became close friends with the son, Ingvar, who would go on to become the founder of the company Ikea. The Kamprad family was partially Nazi. Ingvar's German grandmother had immigrated from the Sudetenland and rejoiced in its annexation by Hitler in March 1939. His father was "a Nazi in his heart and soul."5 Born in 1926, Ingvar became a member of the Swedish fascist movement before the war and was a great admirer of its leader, Engdahl. In spite of this, Ullmann was hired as a farmhand and friendships were built. When Ingvar started developing Ikea after the war, his best friend Otto was right by his side, working on marketing.6 In an interview published in And in the Vienna Woods the Trees Remain, Kamprad found it hard to answer the core questions concerning the anomaly of these relationships: How could the Ikea founder remain loyal to the fascist leader and Holocaust denier Engdahl, and, at the same time, be close to his Jewish friend, Otto Ullman? Otto, whose parents were murdered at Auschwitz? Kamprad finally replied: "There's no contradiction as [End Page 134] far as I'm concerned. Per Engdahl was a great man, and I will maintain that as long as I live."7 When I investigated the matter further, I discovered a file on Ingvar Kamprad from 1943 in the Swedish Security Service archive, labeled "Memorandum concerning: Nazi" and stamped "secret" in red ink.8 It states that Kamprad, then seventeen, was Member No. 4014 of Svensk Socialistisk Samling (the Socialist Unity), the leading Swedish Nazi party before and during the war. The Swedish secret police had kept him under surveillance for over eight months, confiscating and reading correspondence in which he wrote that he had recruited "quite a few comrades" and missed no opportunity to work for the movement. The memorandum about his correspondence reached the Sixth Division of the Stockholm police on July 6, 1943. (Six days later, Kamprad sent an application to the county administrative office in Vaxjo to register Ikea.) When the information about Kamprad's membership in Socialist...

The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 ed. by Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford

Reviewed by: The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947 ed. by Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford S. Brennan Kettelle Britain, Scotland, Ireland, occult, magic, imagination, Golden Dawn, Celtic revival, Theosophy christine ferguson and andrew radford, eds. The Occult Imagination in Britain, 1875–1947. London, New York: Routledge, 2018. Pp. 278. In the instructional paper "Flying Roll No. V," one V. H. Frater Resurgam of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn writes, "to practice magic, both the Imagination and the Will must be called into action."1 The imagination has consistently featured as a central component of esoteric practices and traditions, so much so that arguing its importance within esotericism is practically moot. Instead, Christine Ferguson and Andrew Radford's collection Occult Imagination studies how the imagination functioned within Britain's Occult Revival. The twelve chapters of the edited volume are [End Page 261] organized into four subcategories, investigating the 'occult imagination': 1) beyond the metropole, 2) within the public sphere, 3) in regard to gender, and 4) within art and fiction. In total, these four categories provide nuanced insight into the numerous entanglements of Britain's 'occult imagination' during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the first chapter, Michael Shaw argues that most scholarship concerning Britain's Occult Revival focuses on urban centers, overlooking the occult currents within other regions of the United Kingdom. Focusing on Scotland, Shaw expands Britain's occult geography, highlighting Scotland's prominent and unique role in movements such as the Celtic Revival. In the second chapter, Nicholas Daly studies esoteric themes of magic and ritual within the plays of the Anglo-Irish playwright Lord Dunsany. The wide-reaching popularity of Dunsany's plays exemplifies an intriguing case of public enchantment with the strange and magical. In the third chapter, Claire Button discusses the folk dance practices of Rolf Gardiner, calling for an expansive approach to studying this occult figure beyond political contexts. It would seem, however, that Gardiner's politics affected his esoteric practices; for instance, his involvement in interwar fascist youth organizations bled into his views of nature, power, and folk dance. In fact, Gardiner used a "blood and soil" argument to refute modernizing or reinterpreting folk dance rituals (62). While Button does note that these influences likely impacted Gardiner's amalgam of ecstatic dance with discipline and purity, the study would have benefited from further engagement with Gardiner's proto-Nazi sympathies, elitism, and eugenic beliefs. Gardiner offers an intriguing study of the intersections of right-wing politics and occultism—a subject of increasing importance today. Exploring the weaponization of the imagination, Jake Poller discusses how critics of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater's neo-Theosophy accused the pair of being 'under a glamour,' effectively dismissing Besant and Lead-beater's heterodox doctrines and claims of occult powers as figments of the imagination. In the sixth chapter, Elsa Richardson also polemicizes the imagination, and who may lay claim over it, by investigating occult rebuttals against psychoanalysis' aims of occult delegitimization. Occult journals such as The Occult Review disputed Freud's authority, labeling him as an "ill-equipped charlatan," while other periodicals challenged psychoanalysis's encroachment upon dream analysis—a territory previously under the "jurisdiction of spiritual and magical authorities" (119). While Freud attempted to guard psychoanalysis from occultism, occult periodicals would not be so easily dismissed. [End Page 262] Nick Freeman's chapter presents an especially intriguing study of the enmeshment of the 'occult imagination' with the general public. Freeman discusses the cultural appetite for 'black magic' tales of tantalizing villains who expose the consequences of seeking occult knowledge, which journalists and fiction writers obliged. The 1901 trial of Theo and Laura Horos—accused of drugging and hypnotizing young women in order to assault or perform magical rituals upon them—embodied this black magic villain, satiating the public and establishing a link between sex, crime, and magic. Decades later, the public's occult fascinations pivoted to the 'wickedest man in the world'—Aleister Crowley's transgressive sexual and occult practices further solidified associations between magic and perversion. Public consumption of Crowley's reviled image sensationalized and vilified his persona, creating the ultimate occult 'bogeyman.' Next, the collection shifts attention to...

Staging Death: Christofascist Necropolitics during the National Legionary State in Romania, 1940–1941

AbstractThe cult of death and the celebration of martyrdom lay at the core of interwar fascist movements across the European continent. However, it was in the Romanian Legionary Movement (also known as the Iron Guard) that these were articulated into a full-fledged ideology of thanatic ultranationalism. In this article, I examine the spectacular fascist necropolitics staged as state-sponsored funeral performances during the short-lived National Legionary State (September 14, 1940–February 14, 1941). A detailed description of the massive campaign of exhumations and reburials of the so-called “legionary martyrs” carried out during this short time span, culminating with the grandiose ceremony organized for the reburial of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu on November 30, 1940, provides insight into the legionary thanatic worldview and ritual praxis. It also sheds light on the movement’s politics of commemoration, death, and afterlife and shows how these were embedded into a religious framework underpinned by theological concepts such as heroic martyrdom, vicarious atonement, and collective redemption.

“No State Apparatus Goes to Bed Genocidal Then Wakes Up Democratic”

Abstract This article forms part of an emerging body of scholarship on the sex/gender politics of authoritarian regimes in Latin America, turning specific attention to Argentine trans and travesti politics and rights claims as these articulate with legacies of authoritarianism. On March 24, 1976, the Argentine military staged a coup d’état and established a dictatorship, perpetrating mass civilian murder until democratic transition in 1983. Drawing on state intelligence archive surveillance documents, the artist-activist intervention Campaña DESAPARECER, and travesti and transgender testimony, this article argues that the enduring social and political legacies of interwar fascism not only persisted into the years of dictatorship, but that they also continue to animate and mediate post-dictatorship transgender politics. That is, in democracy, the enduring afterlife of fascism creates conditions of possibility for activists to mobilize the language of anti-fascism and shared memories of fascist state violence in the service of contemporary transgender rights claims. Such rights claims reveal illiberal state violence’s deadly imbrications with the politics of sex and gender during dictatorship and, at the same time, challenge present-day liberal narratives that relegate state violence to a distant illiberal past.

Black Neofascism? The Economic Freedom Fighters in South Africa.

This article argues that twenty-first century fascism is variegated and shaped by complex socioecological conditions. While enabled by the specific conditions of contemporary capitalist crisis, it is actually different from its antecedents. This requires actual in situ case studies. Hence, this article focuses on the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) in South Africa and explores its emergence in the conjuncture of hegemonic crisis faced by the ruling African National Congress. Moreover, the article challenges current liberal classificatory discourses that seek to define the EFF in South Africa's democratic order and also revisits the history of fascism from a decolonial perspective. It is argued there where two moments of fascism in the twentieth century, interwar fascism, and militarized fascism in the peripheries supported by U.S. imperialism. The EFF does not share anything in common with these twentieth century fascisms and therefore has to be analyzed and explained on its own terms.

Post-WWI military disarmament and interwar fascism in Sweden

The emergence of anti-democratic movements is a central puzzle to social science. We study a novel and rich historical dataset covering Swedish municipalities during the interwar years and find a strong link between the presence of a military garrison and the emergence of fascist parties. We interpret these results as suggesting that fascist mobilization in Sweden was driven by discontent with the process of disarmament brought about by democratization. In contrast, poor economic conditions, as captured both by levels of and changes in the local poverty rate and tax base, do not explain the strong link between the fascists and military garrisons. We relate these results to influential theories of democratization.

Senfascismens æstetisering af (den hvide) arbejderklasse

Late Fascism’s Aestheticization of the (White) Working Class: Notes for a Communist Art Theory
 The article presents a double take on what I propose to call late fascism in order to distinguish between the inter-war fascist movements and contemporary fascist parties and politicians. Firstly, I follow Walter Benjamin’s analysis of fascism as a question of aestheticization. Fascism is just as much a question of culture and ideology as a question of politics, and we need to map the specific fascist culture that contemporary fascist politicians produce. Secondly, I connect this analysis of fascist culture to an analysis of the specific class composition of late fascism, arguing that late fascism operates through a process of reverse victimization where a privileged white working class comes to see itself as threatened.

Building a Fascist Romania: Voluntary Work Camps as Mobilisation Strategies of the Legionary Movement in Interwar Romania

This paper addresses the importance of work camps as mobilisation strategies employed by the ‘Legion of the Archangel Michael’, Romania’s interwar fascist movement. It argues that the success of the legionary constructive work projects, practically taking the form of voluntary work camps and smaller ‘construction sites’ (şantiere) – the latter developed according to similar principles, yet more limited in size – contributed significantly to the increase in popularity of the movement, in spite of (and perhaps even aided by) sustained opposition from the state authorities. As such, the case study of the legionary work camps is employed in an attempt to show how grassroots mobilisation strategies, emphasising activism and voluntarism, as well as cross-class solidarity among members of the movement, added considerable credibility to a populist palingenetic project, circumventing a shortage of material resources that prevented the use of more elaborate propaganda methods. Such strategies rendered the legionary movement distinct from all the other political parties in interwar Romania, and their positive reception, especially among the rural population, gave credence to the legionary criticism of the democratic parties and, implicitly, to the movement’s challenge to parliamentary democracy.

Autocratic diffusion and cooperation: the impact of interests vs. ideology

ABSTRACTThis introductory essay argues that patterns of diffusion and cooperation among non-democratic regimes differ significantly in goal, mode, impulse, and scope. Autocracies that are guided by a dynamic, missionary ideology, such as interwar fascism and, less fervently, the Bolivarianism of Hugo Chávez, actively promote their new credo in a wide range of countries. Moreover, these messianic belief systems stimulate diffusion processes across the globe. A wide range of political leaders take inspiration from these missionary ideologies and emulate their values and ideas to a greater or lesser extent. By contrast, most authoritarian regimes in the contemporary era lack an expansive ideology and are driven mostly by political interests. International diffusion and cooperation among these regimes reflects mainly the defensive goal of immunization against Western efforts at democracy promotion. To guarantee regime survival, authoritarian great powers in the post-Cold War world, such as Russia and China, concentrate on fortifying their regional sphere of influence. Thus, targeted, calculated collaboration and instrumental learning prevail.

Progress, fascism and the Last Humans

This paper re-evaluates the notion of progress in light of the trauma represented by interwar European fascism. It critically examines the widespread assumption that interwar European fascism demonstrates the illusory, or even pernicious, nature of progress. Seeing fascists as enraged crusaders against the march of history, whose aim was to impede the further rise of what Nietzsche contemptuously referred to as ‘the Last Humans,’ affords a perspective from which progress, at least in its main current, no longer appears invalidated by fascism. The criterion of democratic mass empowerment, furthermore, can usefully distinguish between two mutually exclusive notions of progress: the first, of largely Hegelian provenance, was committed to mass empowerment; the second, while intractably opposing progress as a democratic enterprise, also appropriated it for radically anti-democratic purposes, transmuting its meaning so that the Last Humans are no longer conceived as its beneficiaries but, at most, as its tools.

Piercing the Present with the Past

This response to Tomba’sMarx’s Temporalitieshomes in on its critical interrogation of linear conceptions of development which have distorted Marxism’s capacity to seize the present. The article foregrounds the resources on which Tomba draws, from Walter Benjamin’s theses on history to Marx’s account of the struggles over the working day, and enlists them in an encounter with the questions of unevenness, archaism and pre-capitalism in Postcolonial theory, as well as in the attempts to ‘overcome modernity’ that marked the thought and practice of interwar fascism in Europe and Japan.