The Conservative Woman, one of the last remaining Brit Disqus sites where it is possible to speak nearly honestly, published a piece this morning on the co-incidence of “the bio-security state” and fascism.  The connection was dependent on the veracity, or otherwise, of the late Umberto Eco’s undisciplined Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

There is so much nonsense written about fascism - mostly by tediously conventional minds who insist that Mussolini was a socialist so fascism was socialism - that I thought I would post a comment very generally expressing my own comprehension of the dread philosophy.  Here it is.  Naturally, it will not be understood by the tedious.

Eco was an Italian so one would have thought he might have something useful to say about fascism, but evidently not.  Perhaps it’s just not possible anymore.  So much rot is now talked about fascism, with so many people enworlded in liberalism and modernity so incapable of reaching its essence, that the thing itself is reduced to a mere hate-label.

The first and most essential point is that it was an extreme and assertive nationalism of becoming.  It sought to be historically active and nationally transformative and, therefore, it had to be Nietzschean or it was nothing.  It was not traditionalist but modernist and radically forward-looking - “Fascist Man” was newly if not freely self-confected.  He followed the party’s prescription for the rebirth of, or return to, heroism and action.  It is not, of course, traditonalist merely to recognise that liberal modernity has reduced Man to a meek and compliant instrument of the economy, or to ask if he was something more than that in the pre-modern age.  However, its modernism meant that it accepted modern capital and sought a new and inhering role for the corporation within its transformative scheme.

The second point is that it was against the massifying tendencies of the modern world, including democracy and equality.  It was not, therefore, socialist in the sense that socialism is understood within the liberal thought-world.  It did not apprehend class but nation, and not class consciousness but ethnic consciousness in an age when ethnicity was naturally and beautifully synonymous with the nation state.  Socialism in nationalism refers to the singularity and solidarity of the folk, and the natural bonds thereof.  A huge number of somewhat simple-minded folk assume for the horseshoe theory of a single universe of thought.  It’s a falsehood.  We live in an intellectual multiverse in which the politics of genetic interests never come near to the politics of the unfettered will.  They mutually seek the other’s destruction.  Within nationalist thought, fascism (with National Socialism and Judaism) stands at the imperialistic pole of the axis, in opposition to nativism.

The third point is that it was peculiarly statist.  It rejected the destining of the folk (which inhabits National Socialism and Judaism).  Instead, it encompassed everything within the vehicle of the dynamic state as the centre of a restored greatness and empire.

This is the general flavour of the thing.  If we dispense with the horseshoe, the hate-label, and so forth, do I really see it shining through modern global elitism?  No, not at all.  Most obviously, global elitism sees no precious folk but a deracinated, a-causal, coffee-coloured mass from which its own rare and perfumed subjects are uniquely different and, by that difference, may royally inflate themselves and endow themselves with all the world’s riches.  It is not a politics like fascism, or politics at all.  It is the crime of the century.