A Brief History of Fascist Lies by Federico Finchelstein

Author:Federico Finchelstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520346710
Publisher: University of California Press

9

Democracy and Dictatorship

A key fascist lie was the idea that dictatorship was the truest form of democracy. As with other fascist lies, this fabrication of “truth” replaced empirical truth. From the perspective of reality, the result of this kind of ideology could never be true. It was simply false. Nonetheless, fascists believed that their lies were evidence of deeper truths. They rejected real evidence and substituted it with a deep, almost religious faith in their leaders and the totalitarian ideology they defended. The leader and the ideology were, for them, the evidence that what they stood for represented an absolute truth. Fascists were not simply cynical about their lies. They wanted to believe in them, and they did.

Democracy was not an exception to this fascist pattern of combining lies with a deep belief in them. Inverting the terms of the equation, fascists identified existing democracy as a lie because they believed that electoral representation did not truly express the desires of the people. Only the leader could represent the people forever. For Hitler, as we might expect, the Jews were also behind this inherently false idea of a pluralistic democracy (i.e., a system that lacked a single will). Ironically, given this complaint, his rhetoric compressed all Jews into a unified willpower. Hitler spoke of the Jews’ supposed plan as that of a singular figure: “His ultimate goal in this stage is the victory of ‘democracy’, or as he understands it: the rule of parliamentarianism.” In doing this Jews would replace “personality” with “the majority characterized by stupidity.” Projecting his own intentions and desires, Hitler not only saw Jews as having a single evil plan; he actually said that they did not believe in democracy and wanted to establish a dictatorship. “Now begins the great last revolution,” he wrote, forecasting the results of a radical Jewish plot. “In gaining political power the Jew casts off the few cloaks that he still wears. The ‘democratic peoples’ Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over peoples. In a few years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the peoples of their natural intellectual leadership makes them ripe for the slave’s lot of permanent subjugation.”1

In truth, of course, the fascists rejected liberal democracy and replaced it with dictatorship. The fascists also planned to exterminate their enemies, and, in time, they did. This displacement was practical as well as theoretical. As fascists argued, fascism was ontologically opposed to existing democratic life.2 Fascism reified violent drives, presenting them as naked emanations of the true self. It was opaque, insofar as it represented something that could not be shared through either straightforward language or analogies. Instincts could only be expressed through acts of submission to the leader, who owned the truth.

From the United States to India, from Argentina to Japan, fascists argued that a real democracy never existed. They denounced parliamentarianism or maintained that it was old, or that it had been corrupted by communism, or that it was a Jewish plot. Nonetheless, they invented

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