Italian Fascism was perhaps even more directly linked to the colonization of Africa. Fascists insisted that the conquest of Libya would empower the working class, strengthening the nation in ways socialism could only dream of. Ethiopia became the next target for Fascist conquest—a merciless onslaught that included the use of gas against civilians. Hence, historically speaking, fascism is not derogation from imperialism, but a deepening of it—perhaps even a force majeure, a consequence of the momentum of centuries of crusades, colonialism, and imperialism through which Europe began to colonize itself.
Ecology and the Organic State
Certain forms of agrarian populism and early environmentalism became crucial milieus for the beginnings of a fascist synthesis. The word “ecology” was coined by Ernst Haeckel, who combined Darwinism and nationalism under the rubric of the supremacy of the “Nordic race”: “[C]ivilization and the life of nations are governed by the same laws as prevail throughout nature and organic life,” and humanity is only a miniscule part of a huge, interconnected, cosmic web.48 With a pronounced pessimism about the future of humanity on earth, philosopher Ludwig Klages’s essay “Man and Earth” bequeathed the idea of “biocentrism” to the early ecological movement. His theory “anticipated just about all of the themes of the contemporary ecology movement…the accelerating extinction of species, disturbance of global ecosystemic balance, deforestation, destruction of aboriginal peoples and of wild habitats, urban sprawl, and the increasing alienation of people from nature.”49 Much of this destruction, however, was supposedly wrought by Jews through rationalism, urbanization, spiritual oppression, and consumerism.
Biocentrism’s sense of interconnectedness suborned human rights to a quasi-mystical natural whole, which fit well with the “race doctrine” of reactionaries like Georges Vacher de Lapouge, who believed that “there are no human rights, any more than there are rights of the armadillo…. The idea of equal rights is fiction. Nothing exists but forces.”50 Such social Darwinist theories of the nation as natural and biological, as well as romantic and antihumanist, would further inform what became known as the “organic theory of the state,” wherein each and every individual forms a cell in the state’s body and conformity produces health in body as well as state. It was this idea of the nation as an organic totality that would provide the basic theoretical foundation for Nazism.
Organic statism emerged in the influential writings of Ernst Moritz Arndt, who wrote in On the Care and Conservation of Forests, “When one sees nature in a necessary connectedness and interrelationship, then all things are equally important—shrub, worm, plant, human, stone, nothing first or last, but all one single unity.”51 Arndt’s student, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, brought the nationalism within Arndt’s position to a xenophobic pitch: “We must save the forest, not only so that our ovens do not become cold in winter, but also so that the pulse of life of the people continues to beat warm and joyfully, so that Germany remains German.”52 These ultranationalist theories of blood and soil (Blut und Boden) also made sense to imperialists like Ernst Blüher, a major influence on the later Freikorps, who adored the “conquerors and organizers” in Africa, identifying nature as a system of predator and prey, strong and weak, masculine and feminine, and who saw culture as founded solely on “male society.”53
Even today, as we will see, ecology does not stand entirely on the left. Just as when it was established in the nineteenth century, ecology, like völkisch ultranationalism, is adopted by idealistic youths of left and right persuasions, and does not manifest any specific national socialist doctrine in itself. Ideas of paganism also spread during the lead-up to the fascist synthesis, as rejections of Judeo-Christian logic spread to new incarnations of Norse mythology and interpretive systems of ancient runes said to hold mythopoetic qualities arising from blood and soil. Of course, the pagan, occult, and spiritualist movements did not produce fascism, but when fused with a völkisch, back-to-the-peasant nationalism, they did help construct the belief that Judeo-Christian ethics had corrupted what was essentially European, which could return through the careful production of a new Aryan superman. By the same token, current ecological principles are taken up by fascists who seek to identify migrants as “invasive species.”
As the ecological, spiritual, and utopian currents fused through ultranationalism into a dangerous synthesis, pan-German regionalism emerged through the ideology of viciously anti-Semitic Austrian ideologue Georg Ritter von Schönerer, who used student fraternity associations and traditional fencing clubs as the main vehicles for promoting a unification of Austria and Germany under one ethnostate.54 In the cities, Schönerer’s position was embraced by such leading politicians as Karl Lueger, a fierce anti-Semite who would become mayor of Vienna, responsible for conservative, though semi-socialist, policies that modernized the city and served as an early model for Hitler.
Nationalism and Socialism, Collectivism and Individualism
Although fascism is typically identified with collectivism, individualism also historically held an influential role in its germination. In his well-known work, The Ego and Its Own, Max Stirner expresses a deeply held racist view of world history in which the white individual acts as the apotheosis of all human evolution. The evolutionary mission of the white man for Stirner must develop through “two Caucasian ages,” requiring him to first “work out and work off our innate negroidity” and then inner “Mongoloidity (Chineseness), which must likewise be terribly made an end of.”55 The transcendence of the individual to the world spirit has only been realized through the evolution of the human history from Asia to Europe, Stirner insists. “No, my good old sir, nothing of equality. We only want to count for what we are worth, and, if you are worth more, you shall count for more right along. We only want to be worth our price, and think to show ourselves worth the price that you will pay.”56
Because he believed that the state issued a kind of equality that levels all distinction to the lowest common denominator, Stirner would proclaim, “I do not want the liberty of men, nor their equality; I want only my power over them, I want to make them my property, i.e. material for enjoyment. And, if I do not succeed in that, well, then I call even the power over life and death, which Church and State reserved to themselves—mine.”57 Stirner’s self-liberation would come at the expense of Jews, whose religion he saw as tainted and based on an attempt to haggle and smuggle one’s way into heaven.58
Although he died in middle age, Stirner became a relatively popular figure among intellectuals of the late nineteenth century, including the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ideas about the “superman” remain controversial to this day. In his later notebooks from 1899, Nietzsche declares that the superman comes about as a countermovement to the increasingly “economical use of men.” This countermovement is the expression of a “secretion of luxurious surplus” that “brings to light a stronger species, a higher type.”59 For Nietzsche, democratic society exists in a state of decay, or “passive nihilism”—a bad equality that rejects transcendence, bringing about the need for an accelerated “higher species” composed of the “strong and noble” Napoleon type who transforms passivity into activity.60
Such “active nihilism” embodied by the superman would reduce modern society to nothing and build a new world on its ruins, overcoming base legalism with the spirit of action.61 Yet such a movement cannot proceed without enforcing another tyranny, he would admit.62 Even the principles of anarchy and complete freedom become unfree, he insisted, finding their ultimate ends in nihilism as the consequence of “the political and economic way of thinking.”63 Napoleon is, then, the embodiment of two kinds of nihilism, active and passive, the cure and the disease—the superman comes as the result of the lack of a “higher species”