Italian fascists stressed that Mussolini had revealed to them “Eternal truths.”1 For them, Mussolini’s words expressed the reality of the age. Fascists believed that the Duce’s words allowed them to understand “the spirit of man.” His words represented reality from the towering gaze of an “inflexible will.”2 But this was not only a question of perspective. His voice was absolute. It was supposed to stand for all forms of representation, including artistic ones.3
Mussolini was the source of a new fascist world. He was “the one without an equal.” Fascist songs insisted on Mussolini’s uniqueness and transcendental meaning-making. They imagined that his “Word” was the source of mobilization. He even illuminated the dead. The path of “destiny” was in his hands. As the fascist song “The Legionary Eagle” proclaimed, Mussolini embodied “genius, faith, passion, and truth.”4
Italian fascists were confronted with the “tremendous task of creating the analytic corpus of fascist civilization by commenting on the thinking of Mussolini.” As the fascist Federico Forni put it in 1939, fascism was both the “creation and the representation of the world.” Thus, truth was not only observed but also actively constructed. In other words, truth was the result of a “revolution in the making [revoluzione in atto].” If “knowledge” from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century had been “scientific,” fascism had effectively changed the course of the history of political perception, abandoning the notion of scientific falsifiability because “fascism is immutable and eternal in its fundamental principles.” As opposed to the malleable scientific notion of truth, Forni argued, “as a mythical movement that regards its reality not as a demonstration but as a faith, fascism is a-scientific. As a believed truth it overcomes the demonstrated truth.”5
Similarly, Alfred Rosenberg maintained that “the logical part of this entire truth is the manipulation of the tools of understanding and reason, as represented by the critique of perception. The intuitive part of the whole truth is revealed in art, fairy tales, and religious mythos.” For Rosenberg, what was perceived could only be accepted if it was in “the service of organic truth.” In practice, this meant standing in the service of the racial myth. Perceptions could transition to an acceptable form of truth if they enhanced the “shape and inner values of this race-Volkhood” and cultivated it “more purposefully and shape[d] it more vitally.” As a result of what he saw as the integration of mythical intuition and perception, “the primordial conflict between knowing and believing, if not resolved, is taken back to its organic foundation and a new observation is rendered possible.” Rosenberg stated that it was “fundamentally” perverse that in mythless notions of truth “the search for the one ‘absolute eternal truth’ was grasped purely as an affair of knowing, i.e., as an affair of something which was, if not technically, then approximately, attainable.” This was wrong, he said, because “the last possible will of a race is already contained in its first religious mythos. The recognition of this fact is the last actual wisdom of man.”6
Even when fascists believed that myths and empirical observation could be organically merged, they denied that truth, by its nature sacred, could be independently derived from empirical observation. Revelation was, instead, an outcome of political mythical inquiries into the soul of the ethnōs. As Salgado, the Brazilian fascist leader, saw it, the nation was “bringing from the bottom of autochthonous energies the mysterious poem that reveals itself in the unity of the wild Theogony and even in the identity of the vocabulary roots of languages also in the nascent state.” Latin America was a “Solar continent, which brings to the breast the line of the Equator, like a strange necklace of light, and on the head the Tropic of Cancer as a diadem, and to the womb the luminous belt of the Tropic of Capricorn, in the recess of the soul it guards, ignored to itself, the worship of the Inca veils by the Sun.”7
Likewise, for Rosenberg, the racial “instinctual” submission of the people to the leader represented a new era of the spirit. It was “the triumph of the spirit over the brute force of matter.” In the world of fascism, Mussolini’s trinity “believe, obey, fight” implied the realization of justice. As the Great Council of Fascism stated in 1935 with respect to the imperial fascist war on Ethiopia, we “enthusiastically acclaim the Duce as the realizer of the supreme right of the nation.”8
In fascism, the leader’s ideology defined the truth. The antifascist Alexandre Koyré interpreted this phenomenon in 1943: “The official philosophies of the totalitarian regimes unanimously brand as nonsensical the idea that there exists a single objective truth valid for everybody.” Koyré called this phenomenon a radical activist understanding of the truth. Totalitarian theorists therefore denied the innate value of thought: “for them, thought is not a light but a weapon; its function, they say, is not to discover reality as it is but to change and transform it with the purpose of leading us toward what is not.” For Koyré, myth and affect disastrously replaced empirical forms of verification: “Such being the case, myth is better than science and rhetoric that works on the passions preferable to proof that appeals to the intellect.”9
Fascists and antifascists shared categories and even vocabularies but sharply differed on their political meanings and legitimacy. Thus, on the other side of the political spectrum, the Argentine fascist poet Leopoldo Lugones argued that “demonstrable truth” did not reveal the ultimate truth. The latter he equated with heroism, nationalism, and beauty. If liberalism had a phenomenological sense of truth, this was a half-truth. For Lugones, fascism represented a truth that was both in and outside of history. Its roots were in the Greco-Latin classical world, Christianity, and the Spanish conquest of America, and it represented a patriotic rebellion against liberalism. But it also was a transhistorical sacred trend. In Lugones’s version of Argentine clerico-fascism, truth was equally an aspect of power and the divine.10
Like Lugones, de Maeztu posited the existence of an “eternal truth.” It was in the search for right and truth “as transcendental essences” that reality emerged.11 Similarly, Gustavo Barroso, the most important fascist intellectual of Brazil, argued that Brazilian fascism was the best political formation on earth because it represented “eternal truths.” These promised a transcendental change, the “new times” when the “unity” of the spirit, the cross, and the nation would rule.12 Like Lugones and de Maeztu, Barroso identified the rise of a new era with the aesthetic and political primacy of absolute truth.13 The leader of the Brazilian fascist integralistas, Salgado, was more explicit. Historical times were replaced with mythical times: “Today Latin America is the great region of the world because of a fatality that finds its explanation at the dawn of time.” The “disappearance of Atlantis” had a clear relationship to the Latin American present. It was the epic moment that signaled “the dawn of a civilization that will have nothing in common with all the others.”14 Understanding fatality through mythical introspection would lead to the truth about the past and the present.
Fascism was the revelation of a new world: “The work of Brazilian Integralism today represents the fatality of that feeling, of the instincts of the earth, the revelation of the muted voices of the human mass of the Continent.” Brazil and Latin America were the ultima thule, a mythically distant unknown region at the end of the world. “We are the Last West,” Salgado claimed. “And because we are the Last West, we are the First East [Primeiro Oriente]. We are a New World. We are the Fourth Humanity. We are the Aurora of the Future Times. We are the force of the Earth. We are again what were, in the remotest of ages, those who wrote in the heavenly history of their march that began in the luminous gate of Aries by the zodiacal script.”15
The reality of the present, the true form of the “explanation,” was that of revelation. Lugones, de Maeztu, Barroso, and Salgado were not alone among transatlantic fascists in representing truth as the fusion of a mythical version of history, the idea of politics as the vehicle for the sacred, the equation of beauty and right politics, and the notion that justice was fully subordinated to power. In fascism, truth was considered real because it was rooted in emotional emanations of the soul, images and actions that fascists identified with political ideology. Action, soul searching, and faith displaced programmatic considerations.
As the Romanian fascist Corneliu Codreanu warned, developing a complete and explicit program was against the interests of the fascist movement. Faith, and a renewal of souls, was more important than a program. Romanian fascists “have a doctrine,” he wrote, “they have a religion. This is something of higher order that mysteriously unites thousands of men determined to forge another destiny. While men serve their program or doctrine with some interest, the legionaries are men of great faith and at any moment they are ready to sacrifice themselves for this faith. They deeply serve this faith.” Codreanu concluded that faith was better than a program, because while nobody would die for a program, fascists were willing to die for their faith. Fascism was a “great spiritual school.” It created a devotion that would be a “revolution of the soul.” The main political aim of Romanian fascism was to change the “soul of the individual and the soul of the people.” This was a politics of truth that stood against the enemy’s lies, or as Codreanu put it, a matter of fighting the corruption of the self that the enemy promoted. “The new programs and the social systems lavishly flaunted before the people are a lie if an evil soul hides in their shadow.” Lies were not empirically falsifiable statements; for Codreanu, rather, they were the expression of a “lack of consciousness towards the fulfillment of duty, the same spirit of betrayal to everything that is Romanian.”16
Action was needed against these lies. As the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley argued, fascist action was antithetical to democratic dialogue. Action was at the center of “the true patriotism of fascism.”17 Conversely, while both Arendt and Koyré saw fascism as simply opposed to truth, more interestingly, both also noted the centrality of images in the fascist understanding of truth.18 As I have argued elsewhere, Sigmund Freud and Jorge Luis Borges, two very different contemporary authors, both addressed this particular dimension. For Borges, as he wrote in the journal Nosotros in 1925, fascism and “Lugoneria” (that is, the fascism of Lugones made famous through his proclamation of the “hour of the sword”) implied an “exaltation” of the senses that did not help thought. Borges equated fascism with “intellectual slippery slopes [tropezones intelectuales].” For Freud, fascism inhabited a world of fantasy where myths and leaders ruled over the reality principle.19 For both, the problem of fascism was that it applied a lie—and a violent, barbaric ideology—to the structural truth of the classical mythical world. It represented not only the return of the repressed gods, their homecoming to the world overcome by reason, but also their totalitarian political adoption.
For Borges and Freud alike, fascism’s lack of truth was related to its unreason, its unwarrented transformation of old plural myths into unitary political mythology. Freud conceptualized fascism as a pathological take on truth. For Borges, Nazi anti-Semitism was rooted in a “learned hallucination.” For both, fascism represented the denial of contextual truths (that is, history). Both stressed the relationship in fascism between violence, racism, and faith. For Borges, fascism was utterly destructive; men could only lie, kill, and spill blood for Nazism, which was incapable of promoting any positive outcome. Fascist violence was “the faith of the sword,” a transcendental form rooted in an “ethics of infamy.” Borges signaled this ideological dimension in a comment he made during World War II: that Germans had to be indoctrinated, taking “seminars of abnegation” in this ethics of violence. But Nazi ethics was a contradiction in terms, a “non-ethics [la ninguna ética del nazismo].”
This was not a rational ethical education that emanated from books; it was drawn, rather, from images and emotions. It was, in short, the return of superstition. As such, Borges identified fascism as antithetical to reading. In 1944, he warned that fascism would eventually lead to the destruction of knowledge. It would open the way to the “death of all books on earth.” Ironically, since he did not have Borges’s 1944 knowledge of the then-ongoing extermination of the Jews, Freud also ironically argued that book burning was better than body burning. For Freud, the Nazi burning of his books represented the fascist rejection of learned culture: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me; nowadays they are content with burning my books.”20
In this context, the epistemological excesses of some fascists did go so far as to deny the value of reading as a source of political knowledge.21 But for most fascists, thought needed to be fused with action. As Mussolini put it, the book and the musket make the perfect fascist: “Libro e moschetto, fascista perfetto.”22 Fascists had a very ambivalent relation to books and culture. To be sure, fascism was underpinned by strong intellectual currents, including futurism and other forms of the modern in literature and the arts. But fascism also embraced anti-intellectualism as a key source of political motivation. As the Peruvian Marxist intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui argued, for the authentic fascist, fascism “is not a concept.” Fascism opposed art in the name of violence. Mussolini’s ideological stances were “motorized by sentiment.”
Mariátegui had analyzed basic dimensions of fascism in the 1920s, especially its constitutive anti-Enlightenment dimensions. The movement was against “freedom and democracy but also against grammar.”23 It made the ideological decision to reject culture. Similarly, for Adorno, fascist sentimentalism did not imply a simple “primitive, unreflecting emotion” but rather a clear decision to simulate or imitate what was supposed to be the world of the unconscious. Fascists consciously sought this “collective retrogression.” Fascism offered its followers a fiction of real feelings and not a simple form of irrationalism.24
For fascists, abstractions and problematic symbolism potentially and fatally implied liberalism and democracy. The textual was potentially dangerous for the fascist plan to return to the world of emotions and images. The text as a necessary conceptualization was dangerously distanced from a sensorial state. Concepts and principles were regarded as mirages of reason that fascism needed to correct. Ironically, for fascists, “consciousness” was the result of a violent externalization of truth, moving from violent performative acts that subverted the symbolic and analogical order of things to actual, explicit violence and conquest. Consciousness and instincts were mutually organic to the fascist totalitarian state.25 In short, the quest to unearth the mythical forces of the unconscious defined the fascist idea of consciousness.