The fall semester of 2002 I was a greenhorn grad student and I shared full responsibility with another grad  for a service-learning course on American multiculturalism called UNITAS — the twist was all the enrolled students lived together in a themed dorm. So this was at the peak of post-9/11 hysteria. Good times. Required reading included this essay that by its date, November 1995, must have first caught my eye as a freshman in college. It’s still a keeper, so I thought I’d share it with you. Here it is in precis.

Eco, Umberto. 1995. “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.” Utne Reader, No. 72. Nov-Dec 95. Reprinted from The New York Review of Books (June 22, 1995).

Eco acknowledges that many of these traits are contradictory and representative of other kinds of despotism, nevertheless he feels it is possible to outline the qualities of an “Ur-Fascism”. I especially keep my eye out for #8.

1. The cult of tradition. “There can be no advancement in learning. Truth already has been spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.”

2. Rejection of modernism. “Even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements… The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”

3. Action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
   

4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.”

5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”

6. Appeal to a frustrated middle class. “In our time, when the old proletarians are becoming petty bourgeois and the lumpen are largely excluded from the political scene, the fascism of tomorrow will find its audience in this new majority.”

7. Obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged.”

8. Followers feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. “However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

9. Life is permanent warfare. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.”

10. Contempt for the weak. “The Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.”

11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “The Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die.”

12. The Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. “Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.”

13. Selective populism. “Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against rotten parliamentary governments. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.”

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Would you like to know more?
 
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