What is Fascism--and Do We Need to Worry about This in the American Presidential Election?

 Introduction

In the final phase of the 2024 Presidential election in the United States of America, various Democrats in politics and media reporters have pressed the idea that the Republican candidate is a fascist.  People my age know what fascism is in particular in light of what it stood for and how it was implemented in Nazi Germany in 1920s-1945.  I'm not so sure people in their 20s know this very well.  Some may have a grasp of what it was in Italy as well.  A few of us will have lived during Apartheid under the Nationalist government in South Africa and recall how it was a milder but still very nasty version of German and Italian fascism.  All of us today withdraw in horror that fascism might be back in some form or another.  

This essay provides an answer to the question, ‘What is fascism?’, and one hopes that the reader will see that the charge of fascism against Republicans today is merely a political ruse to garner votes by today’s left-leaning and socialist Democrat Party.  In this essay, I intend to define fascism, explain it in some historical detail, and return in the conclusion to the present, political accusation in the American election.

Defining Fascism

Fascism is a national socialism grounded in eugenics.  Like Communism, it is a form of extreme socialism.  Both are also totalitarian and have proven to be brutal and genocidal.  Fascism derives its name from ‘fasci’, an Italian word for ‘bundle’ of sticks.  The image is a metaphor for social strength as opposed to individual strength—or, more accurately, individual rights.  The Italian origin of the term draws attention to the fact that the origin of the ideology was in Italy, with Benito Mussolini, following the First World War.  The German form of fascism developed as Nazism, initially termed ‘National Socialism’, under Adolf Hitler. It developed in the 1920s and 1930s, culminating in the Second World War (1939-1945).

Eugenics

Fascists advanced the notion of social Darwinism and racial hygiene politically.  The state, they believed, could and needed to help in the progressive evolution of the allegedly stronger race, dominate and enslave inferior races, and eliminate any race that undermined this progress.  While for Italian fascists, Ethiopians were the population to dominate in their brutal imperial expansion in northeast Africa, for Germans, the Jews were the race to eliminate in Europe. 

The term ‘eugenics’ (‘good stock’) was introduced in 1883 by Francis Galton, a brilliant polymath and half-cousin to Charles Darwin.  He was interested in studying of hereditary characteristics of humans in order to explore the ‘practicability of supplanting inefficient human stock by better strains’.  defined it as a system designed to advance for ‘the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable’.  His studies led him to advocate ‘eugenic marriages’.

In 1895, Alfred Ploetz wrote Grundlinien einer Rassenhygiene (Racial Hygiene Basics), introducing the language of ‘racial hygiene’. German eugenic practices were systematically implemented in the German colony of South West Africa (Namibia), with tens of thousands of Herero and Nama enslaved, incarcerated, brutalized, and executed in a genocidal programme between 1904 and 1908.  Eugenics featured in this brutality.  The German doctor, Eugen Fischer, examined traits (hair colour, skin colour, and skulls) of mixed-race individuals in Rehoboth, South West Africa.  He also conducted painful experiments on Africans in the concentration camp, measuring skulls (many being sent to Germany for further study), removing body parts, injecting them with arsenic, opium, and other substances, and sterilizing women.  With such ‘scientific’ studies as ‘proof’, Fischer promoted racial purity and opposed intermarriage among races.  Germany outlawed interracial marriage in its colonies from 1912.  (This was also a lasting policy of the Nationalist government’s Apartheid policies in South Africa.)

This concern for racial health led to the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases.  (The state’s control or heavy-handed involvement in health is still defended in varying degrees in different countries: national control of health insurance that funds abortion of children with Downs Syndrome, transgender surgeries, euthanasia, government control of the population during the Covid pandemic, etc.)  The Swiss psychiatrist, Ernst Rüdin, guided the writing of the 1933 law.  He was the director of the Psychiatric Research Institute of Munich and later, in 1935, the director of the German Society of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1935. This law permitted sterilization for:

1. congenital mental deficiency, 2. schizophrenia, 3. manic-depression, 4. hereditary epilepsy, 5. hereditary St. Vitus dance (Huntington’s chorea), 6. hereditary blindness, 7. hereditary deafness, 8. serious hereditary physical deformity. [9] ... chronic alcoholism (paragraph 2).

The individual, a legal representative, the state physician, or heads of hospitals, nursing homes, and penal institutions could apply to the eugenics court for the sterilization in these cases.  The state physician and police were required to proceed with the court’s decision of sterilization, even against the individual’s will, and were allowed to use force (paragraph 12).  The law was signed by Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Nazi dictator.  Its initial purpose was to sterilize 50,000 Germans per year.  In 1939, Hitler signed permission for a programme that came to be called Aktion T4, which lasted through 1945 (the end of World War II).  T4 authorised the killing of asylum inmates with mental or physical abnormalities.

The concern for racial purity was particularly directed against the Jews in Europe’s political and social turmoil after World War I.  The Nuremburg Laws of 1935 forbade sex and marriage between Jews and Germans and employment of Jewish women under the age of 45 (the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour) and restricted citizenship to Germans and those of related blood (the Reich Citizenship Law). Dr. Gerhard Wagner proposed sterilization of the Jews.  In a short time, the Nazi regime adopted the ‘final solution’ policy of the Holocaust, the genocide against the Jews.  The work of eugenicists went hand in hand with that of the Nazi’s military, paramilitary, and police forces.  Dr. Otmar von Verschauer, head of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem, and Dr. Josef Mengele (the ‘butcher of Auschwitz) collaborated in the study of race, and the latter experimented on, maimed, and killed prisoners in the Auschwitz concentration camp.  Mengele sent eyeballs, heads, and blood samples to von Verschauer.  Dr. Sigmund Rascher performed is own experiments prisoners at the Daschau concentration camp.  He would expose prisoners to freezing temperatures and then try to revive them.

Adolf Hitler makes his argument for national socialism in his autobiographical manifesto, Mein Kampf, published in two volumes in 1925 and 1926.  In his chapter on ‘People and Race’, his argument begins with the assumed science of eugenics advocated by academics, researchers, and institutes.  Importantly, his argument appeals to ‘Nature’ instead of Communism’s utopian ideals, even though his national socialism is, in fact, a eugenically defined utopia, an Aryan state.

First, he notes, animals mate with their own species.  Any cross-breeding results in an inferior animal.  Second, Nature allows struggle so that the species improves, as the weaker specimens do not survive.  If this did not happen, the worst would outnumber the best.  Moreover, Nature opposes the mating of a higher with a lower race.  Whereas Hitler initially had different species in mind, his thoughts have by this time migrated to consideration of different human races.  This was part of the eugenics research, as we have noted, from the beginning.  He says that any mingling of the superior, Aryan race with others results in the end or inferiority of the civilization.  The superior races’ level of evolution is depressed; it retrogresses physically and intellectually.  He rejects any idea that man or ideas can conquer Nature.  He attributes the erroneous view, which he calls pacifist, to the Jews.  Rather, everything admirable (‘science and art, industry and invention) is the result of ‘a few peoples, and perhaps originally of one race’.  He says, ‘The great civilizations of the past have all been destroyed simply because the originally creative race died out through blood-poisoning.’  He realizes that Japan appears to be an exception, but he claims what is Japanese is only the outward dress of European scientific and technological achievement.  Hitler takes a further step: the superior, Aryan race needed to use lower races to advance; it required the subjugation of other races.  This was also for the good of the conquered, since the superior masters preserved and encouraged civilization.

National Socialism

To implement a eugenics programme for society, the government needs to assume powers associated with socialism.  Just as communism requires a strong, militaristic, centralized, one party, dictatorial, and totalitarian government to implement its economic reforms, fascism requires the same for its goal of racial health.  Ideology of either sort justifies centralized power and the use of brutal force.  Freedom of speech is rejected and replaced with ideological propaganda.  The government uses military and police force to enforce its will on the people.  Over against liberal democracy, government’s purpose not to defend the individual against the group, including the government, in matters of speech, ideas, private property.  It is to implement policies of social reengineering.  In the case of national socialism, these policies are formed for the protection of the nation, and in a eugenic national socialism, the state is identified with the superior race.  In the case of the Nazis, this was the so-called Aryan race.

Nationalism and socialism arose in Europe as a rejection of monarchies by the population.  With the American and French Revolutions in hindsight, Europe experienced numerous revolutions in 1848-1849.  Nationalism identified the nation with the state government, and so a nation might be made up of various ethnicities and languages—as empires had been—but what held them together were their borders, citizenship, and laws.  Linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic identities could be part of a nation’s identity as well, but this was and is not an essential definition of nationalism.  Initial rebellion by the people was in the interest of greater freedom, better living conditions, economic improvements, and so forth.

Toward the end of the 1800s, German nationalism developed under the guidance of Otto von Bismarck, who wanted to unite the various Germany kingdoms.  This strengthened the ‘nation’ and tended toward an ethnic and cultural national identity.  The political effort toward this end required a stronger, national government.  An alternative to such nationalism lay in the development of communism.  While both nationalism and communism emphasised a strong government to attain social engineering, the latter envisioned this in terms of a Marxist, economic reform.  German nationalism took its next step in the wake of the failures of Germany in the First World War.  It moved step-by-step in the 1920s and 1930s toward fascism, a eugenic national socialism.  In each aspect of this, it was fully opposed to Christianity, replacing devotion to God with devotion to the state.

In his ‘People and Race’ chapter in Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that the Aryan’s greatest quality is not in intellect as such but in ‘his readiness to devote all his abilities to the service of the community’.  We have here the combined notions of a superior race and its superior social qualities.  Labour for the community, even at the expense of one’s own happiness, is the first step toward building a truly human culture.  The murderous concentration camps were presented as labour camps; over the entrance to Auschwitz were the words, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Labour Makes Free).

An even higher ideal, Hitler claimed, is sacrificing one’s life for the community.  This ideal is called Pfichterfellung, the performance of duty in service of the community over against self-satisfaction.  While we might think that this is unnatural—is not self-preservation a basic instinct?—Hitler relates this back to Nature.  Nature ‘recognizes the primacy of power and strength’.  Applied to the evolution or development of a great culture, the individual sacrifices his work and his life for the community.  The pacifist’s idealism—and he has in mind particularly the Jews—is unnatural.  Hitler then enters on a lengthy tirade against the Jew as the opposite of the Aryan in this chapter.  Among his many assertions, the Jew is accused of supporting Marxism.  (It is true that Marxists attempts at governing in European countries after World War I included a notable element of Jews.  Hitler was reflecting on recent political turmoil in Europe that, in the minds of some, supported anti-Semitism.)  One might note in Hitler’s argument, then, that, while fascism claims to follow a naturalistic form of idealism (resulting in ethnic nationalism), Marxism follows an unnatural (manmade) idealism (resulting in an economic, international movement).  His rant against the Jews included the fanciful notion that there was a Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.

Conclusion

The Republican Party, and its presidential candidate, Donald Trump, are clearly not proponents of national socialism, let alone a racially defined citizenship based on some faulty science from over a century ago.  America is the land of immigrants, freedom, and—historically—devotion to God.  The Republican Party is hardly fascist for

·       affirming a nation under God,

·       wanting law and order,

·       wanting legal and orderly immigration,

·       protecting citizens’ rights over non-citizens,

·       protecting individual rights over group identities,

·       protecting the weak and vulnerable (whether the unborn from abortion, the elderly and the sick from euthanasia, and women in sports and locker rooms from confused or predatory males),

·       protecting religious rights over state authority, promoting small government and states’ rights from a big, centralised government,

·       insisting that government is of and by the people and serves the people rather than the people serving it,

·       understanding government’s purpose as to protect freedom rather than control citizens,

·       believing that the courts must not be used to impoverish or harass citizens but protect them,

·       wanting free speech,

·       breaking the back of state funded education used to indoctrinate children,

·       undermining a media that proliferates propaganda and supports a political party instead of reporting the news,

·       valuing the family and its independence from the state,

·       wanting a strong military for national defense rather than for engagement in foreign wars, imperialism (fascist Italy), or ethnic solidarity (fascist Germany),

·       wanting to strengthen the nation’s economy—

All of these policies (as policies or in their definitions) oppose socialist ideologies, whether fascist or communist.  Instead, they reach back to the aims of America’s founding fathers and intend to protect the Constitution and laws of the land.  As Christians, we have reasons to criticize the Republican Party of today and its presidential candidate, but of one thing we can be sure: this is not an anti-Christian, socialist political party, whether the eugenic, national socialism of the fascists or, for that matter, of the atheistic, socialist party that has emerged in the Democrat Party.