12/20/2017 A Nihilist Speaks with the Devil: A Rejoinder on the 25 Theses on Fascism | Anti-Fascist News

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CREEPING FASCISM, ENTRYISM, FASCISM DEFINITION, FASCISM HISTORY, THIRD

POSITIONISM

A Nihilist Speaks with the Devil: A Rejoinder on the

25 Theses on Fascism

DECEMBER 18, 2017 | ANTIFASCISTFRONT | LEAVE A COMMENT

This article is an addendum to the recent piece wri en by Shane Burley (h ps://twi er.com/shane_burley1) for the
Institute for Anarchist Studies, Twenty-Five Theses on Fascism (h ps://anarchiststudies.org/2017/11/30/twenty-
five-theses-on-fascism-by-shane-burley/). The below article builds on that discussion, and responds directly to a
criticism published here (h ps://anarchistnews.org/content/elephant-and-blind-man-response-
burley%E2%80%99s-twenty-five-theses-fascism).

By Alexander Reid Ross

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During the late Soviet days, the bohemian dissident Alexander Dugin
(h ps://godsandradicals.org/2017/03/28/the-mystic-shaping-russias-future-and-ending-the-modern-era/)
used to stay up late with an assembled group of aesthetes in the flat of Yuri Mamleev, situated just a few
blocks from the great statue of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. The circle of friends who trudged down
Yuzhinsky Pereulok to Mamleev’s apartment building, ringing six times before gaining entrance and
climbing six flights of stairs to his flat, engaged in what they called the “mystical underground.”
Exchanging stories on ancient myths, esoteric secrets, and cosmic mysteries, the “Yuzhinsky Circle”
embraced alcohol, guitars, and occult fascism. They participated in Satanist ritual, held séances, and
hoped to reach a kind of reality-breaching mystical state through which everyday reality might break
down and the delirium of fascist worship would bring the arcane from the ether all “Seig Heils” and
“Heil Hitlers” (Clover 152-153).

A wild, freewheeling drinker, Dugin mistakenly left a collection of forbidden texts in his own apartment,
and when KGB agents found them in a search of his house, he catfished on the Yuzhinsky Circle
(h ps://books.google.com/books?
id=p42YCwAAQBAJ&pg=PA82&lpg=PA82&dq=Yuzhinsky+Circle&source=bl&ots=9sXo5jpQBf&sig=8lt
Ab7JnmTl_76pBUU3Eum_z-
2I&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwidg7L5m5TYAhVqqVQKHVqODvYQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&q=Yuzhin
sky%20Circle&f=false) to save his own hide. Joining a KGB-connected “historical restoration society”
(read: ultranationalist political organization) called Pamyat (Memory), Dugin wormed his way to the
core of nationalist leadership advancing through the waning Soviet nomenklatura before another
Russian fascist pushed him out for his ambition (Clover 161-165). Subsequently, Dugin moved to
Western Europe in 1989 and took up with the so-called “European New Right” in Belgium and France,
where he learned the networks of European fascism (h ps://antifascistnews.net/2017/12/16/refusing-the-
fascist-future-an-interview-with-shane-burley/) and the parlance of “geopolitics” (Shekhovtsov 37). Also
in France was Eduard Limonov, a Russian punk who had lived dissolute in New York City before
joining the European New Right in France in guest editing the left-right satirical periodical L’Idiot
International (Lee 317-319, 478n74). After the fall of the Soviet Union, Limonov and Dugin returned to the
Motherland, met amid red-brown circles, and designed the National Bolshevik Party while
disseminating fascist precepts through other party organizations, such as the populist Russian National
Liberal Party and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Atkins 81; Chaudet, Parmentier,
Pelopidas, 54; Clover 209-213; Sedgewick 231-232).

Their ideology hinged on geopolitical notions of “large spaces”—a spiritual empire from Lisbon to
Kamchatka comprised of ethno-states in which cultural minorities would be Verboten (Bar-On 205). Yet
they insisted on other ideas for the spectacle—absolute power in the form of the man, whether Bakunin,
Stalin, or Hitler (Shenfield 209). Sweeping, history negating deeds that could remake the past through a
stroke of expurgatory violence. “A revolutionary has his own morality: it is the effectiveness and success
of his struggle against global despotism,” Dugin would write in Eurasian Mission (158). Insisting that
liberalism depends on techniques to the point of gu ing meaning from life, Dugin’s Fourth Political
Theory insisted, “the liberal discovers his way to [fascism] when he takes one step further and achieves
self-affirmation as the unique and ultimate instance of being” (110). The uniqueness of the individual
opens to affirmation not unlike what Heidegger discovered in Nie sche’s later works called “positive
nihilism”—the clearing and leveling process of destructive nihilism that opens to a movement toward
philosophical recreation (poesis). “Logos has expired and we all will be buried under its ruins unless we
make an appeal to chaos and its metaphysical principles, and use them as a basis for something new,”
Fourth Political Theory (h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fourth_Political_Theory) continues. “Perhaps
this is ‘the other beginning’ Heidegger spoke of.” (211)

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What stirs in the heart of these feverish words is the heart of revolutionary idealism—the deconstruction
of the reality produced by the various moving pieces of everyday life through an act of symbolic
sabotage that at once reveals the obscure meaning of life and death, the movement of the stars, the
arcane. Yet the direction of this motion toward sublime truth is contaminated with ultranationalist
presuppositions that manipulate revolution toward the ends of insidious interests. This is why it’s fatal
for revolutionaries to ignore fascism in its germ—its summoning and deployment of revolution theory,
its assessment of nihilism and usage of avant-garde constructions. Yet Paul Simons, with his captious
review of Shane Burley’s 25 Theses on Fascism (h ps://anarchiststudies.org/2017/11/30/twenty-five-theses-
on-fascism-by-shane-burley/), does exactly this while seeming to promote the old canard that “the left
are the real fascists.” We will see how a skewed reading of both Burley’s text and source texts facilitate
this strange turn in Simons’s analysis, allowing him to conclude with unfounded a acks on left
antifascists rather than carry out a concerted effort to locate and disperse fascism where it lies.

Disingenuous Reading

First, we might begin with an assessment of the more finicky claims Simons makes regarding Burley’s
points. First on Arendt, Simons faults Burley for making her subjective hatred of Eichmann’s willingness
to participate in genocide through bureaucracy into a general re-evaluation of the malaise of Germans
when faced with that genocide. Yet are the two not coterminous? Eichmann’s behind-the-scenes consent
to fascist genocide, channeled through bureaucratic punctiliousness, represented the crisis of modern
alienation from not only the means of production, but the means of mass destruction. “The logic of the
Eichmann trial,” Arendt wrote, “would have demanded exposure of the complicity of all German offices
and authorities in the Final Solution — of all civil servants in the state ministries, of the regular armed
forces, with their General Staff, of the judiciary, and of the business world.” However, Arendt contends
that the trial “carefully avoided touching upon this highly explosive ma er — upon the almost ubiquitous
complicity, which had stretched far beyond the ranks of Party membership” (my emphasis) (Arendt 13).

For Arendt, as Judith Butler observes, the crimes of Eichmann were carried out by Germans throughout
the land, largely emerging from “the degradation of thinking” and “the way in which the crime had
become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political
indignation and resistance” (Butler). Surely there is room within this larger critique of mass inaction
during the Shoah for Burley’s comment on the “malaise” of the German public and bureaucracy — an
observation similarly made by Baumann, among others (29). Why fault Burley for his interpretation, in
line with the best literature on the Holocaust, rather than investigate more deeply the questions of why
—why did the Shoah happen and do we not see a hauntingly similar degradation of thinking in modern
society from today’s Executive Branch to the general public?

Continuing a sad refusal to confront material rather than wrestle with facts, Simons faults Burley for
using Benjamin’s assessment of fascism as the “aestheticization of politics” by claiming, tendentiously,
that Benjamin’s reversal in the form of Communism (politicization of aesthetics) is a “swipe” (!) rather
than a restitution. In fact, Benjamin understood aesthetics as deeply political. Margaret Cohen’s text is
vital here: “Benjamin makes use of surrealism, then, not only for its shocklike aesthetics but also because
the movement provides a conceptual paradigm with the potential to explain why these shocklike
aesthetics work to political effect” (197). Benjamin of course took option with the vulgarity of Marxists’
focus on economics, but still actively maintained a politicalizing approach to aesthetics and an open
affinity with the left. The trouble here remains that Simons seems too quick to call foul because he wants
to score points against the left instead of engage in genuine discourse.

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Looking at these two crucial misreadings, we must observe that, after criticizing Burley for using two
thinkers very close to, if not within, the Frankfurt School (Arendt and Benjamin), Simons faults Burley
for ignoring “completely” the Frankfurt School. Clearly in a compact 25 Theses
(h ps://anarchiststudies.org/2017/11/30/twenty-five-theses-on-fascism-by-shane-burley/) Burley will not
be able to delve completely into every contention held by all manner of thinkers who have ever
considered fascism. Because Burley did not mention Poulan as or Malatesta or Simone Weil or García
Lorca, for instance, does not mean that he has ignored those writers. Yet the way Simons, himself,
ignores appropriate understandings and usage of Arendt and Benjamin speaks to a disingenuous and
insensitive reading.

Contending with Fascist Statism

Perhaps more importantly, Simons privileges the statal a ributes of fascism over its non-statal and even
anti-state processes to the point of pretending the la er don’t exist. Fascism begins, as with Dugin’s
“mystical underground,” as a kind of collection of different disenfranchised ideological formations
focused on overthrowing liberal democracy and restoring a kind of archaic, mythical sovereignty.
Simons does not recognize this and in fact references Giovanni Gentile’s famous entry in the Enciclopedia
Italiana di Scienze, Le ere ed Arti, wri en in 1932 in efforts to sum up the Fascist ideology. Early
formulations of fascism that emerged first in 1914 and then again following World War I are either
avoided or revised in that publication. Fixed within the context between Mussolini’s solidification of the
Italian Fascist state and the rise of Hitler to power in Germany, Gentile’s work presented a propaganda
piece meant to show off the intellectual grandeur of Mussolini’s power rather than a descriptive
assessment of the functional core of the movement. In point of fact, several years before Mussolini asked
Gentile to produce the Doctrine of Fascism
(h p://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm), he would insist that Fascism
could have no doctrine, because it was an impulse rather than an ideology.

According to historian David D. Roberts, “Fascism was ‘anti-intellectual’ insofar as intellectualism

suggested the need and the scope for some dogma, some finished ideology, some rational blueprint. The
Fascists agreed that there could be no such thing precisely because history was open-ended in ways only
now being fully grasped. Under the circumstances, the key was to create the instrument for ongoing
action – action that was itself open ended – as opposed to laying out some intellectualistic blueprint.
Mussolini often boasted that Fascism was modern in precisely that sense of eschewing doctrinal
baggage, the be er to keep up with the grand and mutable reality of life. And he took delight on turning
the tables on liberal critics; skeptics had said that Fascism was ephemeral because it lacked a doctrine, ‘as
if they themselves had doctrines and not instead some fragments adding up to an impossible mixture of
the most disparate elements” (289).

It is unclear what happens when one approaches fascism “teleologically,” as Simons encourages us to
do, because he has not explained what he means; however, if one approaches it historically, with Roberts
or Paxton, for instance, one finds that fascism tends to undergo metamorphosis as it rises to power. First
as a revolutionary phenomenon linking left and right through an aesthetic glorification of violence and
destruction often associated by fascists, themselves, with nihilism, fascism gains the fidelity of a
hardcore group of idealists in the middle classes, reactionaries among the ruling class, and military men
hoping to use their skills for the nationalist cause. Gradually, as fascists organize and assemble larger
bodies, their ideology is more firmly established in communication with other contending political
powers in order to absorb them, compromise with them, or destroy them. Once fascists a ain power,
their ideology is concretized into a dogma that can interpellate subjects into a functioning economic and
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political system. These systems can vary depending on the place, as the Romanian Iron Guard
(h ps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Guard) state differed significantly from Italian or German fascism.
However, this very concretization leads to a kind of inertia through which fascists abandon their
revolutionary precepts and either effectively become conservatives or simply lose power (Paxton 23).

Most unse ling of all is Simons’s claim that fascism cannot exist without a nation-state. Firstly, fascism
repudiates the Westphalian nation-state, searching for more mythical understandings of sovereignty
than Althussian federalism and its like could offer. In the words of scholar Stephen Shenfield, “fascism
has never been commi ed to the principle of the nation-state. Its ideal has been rather that of the
multiethnic empire, within which to be sure one particular nation was to occupy the dominant position”
(16). For this reason, Hitler looked down on the parliamentary system underpinning the Kaisership
when compared to, say, Frederick Barbarossa or Frederick the Great (Kershaw 13-14); and similarly,
Mussolini could not appreciate an messy Italian nation-state forged through the Risorgimento more than
the glamour of Scipio Africanus (Quartermaine 210).

The point is that this sort of Imperium is the desiderata of fascists from Francis Parker Yockey to Troy
Southgate (h ps://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Troy_Southgate) to Dugin, all of whom demand a spiritual
empire of federated ethnic territories constructed through a kind of traditionalist unity implied by the
“daily plebiscite” assumed under patriarchal control. Denying the “anarcho-fascist” tendencies of
Michael Moynihan and male-tribalist Jack Donovan (h ps://antifascistnews.net/2015/11/06/queer-
fascism-why-white-nationalists-are-trying-to-drop-homophobia/), or the “national anarchist” tendency
of Southgate, opens the door for the kind of entryism that has plagued radical milieux associated,
unfortunately, with Anarchist News and Anarkismo. Given the fact that fascism, in its earliest phases,
relies on insinuating itself within subcultures and left-wing factions to grow, those tendencies must
remain actively aware of these basics, or else fall prey to its machinations. We have seen radicals’
susceptibility to incidental cooperation with fascists time and time again—whether it is La Vielle Taupe
in Paris moving from ultra-left revolutionary center to a hub for Holocaust denial or, more recently,
egoist Wolfi Landstreicher (h p://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/wolfi-landstreicher)
publishing his translation of Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (Now called The Unique and His Property)
through a press run by a fascist (h ps://anarchistnews.org/content/wolfi-and-white-supremacy-what-
happened-and-what-it-means) who a ends fascist meet-ups like the National Policy Institute
(h ps://antifascistnews.net/2015/11/05/nationalists-on-samhain-the-national-policy-institutes-2015-and-
the-identitarian-lie/), asserts eugenicist positions, and does art for books by Donovan and white
nationalist leader Greg Johnson.

Simons’s ongoing denial is why his insistence that all a empts at mass organizing enlist the tactics of
fascism (in fact, the fascists explicitly enlisted the tactics of leftists who came before them) appears so
scurrilous and baseless. One might hope that a bit of clarity would be granted to the conversation by
identifying tactics, themselves, as less the purchase and property of a given political organization than
operationally useful for different reasons. From that point, we might begin a meaningful discourse on
our successes and failures as antifascists (h ps://antifascistnews.net/2017/02/13/antifa-worldwide-a-
brief-history-of-international-antifascism/). Otherwise, taking pot shots at the antifascist left is a lousy
substitute for adept analysis.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. 1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking Compass Books.

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Atkins, Stephen E. 2004. Encyclopedia of Modern Worldwide Extremists and Extremist Groups.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.
Bar-On, Tamir. Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Baumann, Z. 1989. Modernity and the Holocaust. Maldon, MA: Polity Press.
Butler, Judith. “Hannah Arendt’s challenge to Adolf Eichmann.” The Guardian. 29 August 2011.
h ps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/hannah-arendt-adolf-eichmann-banality-
of-evil (h ps://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/hannah-arendt-adolf-eichmann-
banality-of-evil), retrieved December 17, 2017.
Chaudet, Didier, Florent Parmentier, and Benôit Pélopidas. When Empire Meets Nationalism: Power
Politics in the US and Russia. New York, NY: Routledge.
Clover, Charles. 2016. Black Wind, White Snow. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Cohen, Margaret. 1995. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution.
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Dugin, Alexander. 2012. The Fourth Political Theory. Translated by Mark Sleboda and Michael
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Dugin, Alexander. 2014. Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism. Edited by John B.
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Gregor, A. James. 2004. Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher Of Fascism. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction
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Kershaw, Ian. 2013. Hitler. New York, NY: Routledge.
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Paxton, Robert O. 2007. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York, NY: Random House.
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ALEXANDER DUGIN ALEXANDER REID ROSS ANARCHIST

NEWS EGOISM FASCISM DEFINITION JACK DONOVAN RUSSIAN
FASCISM SHANE BURLEY STATISM WALTER BENJAMIN

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