Fascism is Heroarchy

The problem with Umberto Eco’s attempt to reconstruct a hypothetical Ur Fascism is that the actual Ur Texts of Fascism were never lost but were in fact preserved and celebrated, and Eco’s guess about what shared traits of the many 20s and 30s movements called Fascist were key to identifying it were in fact wrong.

The actual Ur Text of Fascism was the Heroarchy philosophy of Thomas Carlyle, I’m not the first to suggest this by any means, many Nazis during the 30s in both Germany and Britain saw the connection at the time.  But I feel there are lessons to be learned from this connection.

Now I have in the past made a big deal out of distinguishing Nazism from Fascism, and I still believe the differences do matter, but learning to understand how much Carlyle is the key has helped me to accept that they are sibling or cousin ideologies and Carlyle is their Grandfather.

Thomas Carlyle is most famous for being the author of the Great Man Theory of History.  A theory of history generally discredited today even though its influence on pop history and historical fiction still persists.  That theory is itself part of Fascist ideology, Fascism at its core is about trying to identify the right Great Men of the present to put in power and then blindly follow.  But Carlyle didn’t talk about only that subject, his political philosophy he literally called Heroarchy, essentially a type of Monarchism but that favored Meritocracy rather than the standard familial inheritance of traditional Feudalism.  And he was openly Racist and Antisemitic with even hints of Marcionism. 

During his own lifetime his writings and ideas were very popular not just within his own country of England but also in Germany and across the Atlantic in the former colonies, especially in The South.  Mussolini and the other founders of Italian Fascism may have been less inclined to explicitly cite Carlyle than their cousins in countries speaking Germanic languages.  Georges Sorel’s philosophy is an important middle man in understanding how Hero Worship gave birth to Fascist movements in Romance Language countries, alongside Integralism, and a key middle man between him and Carlyle is William James. Ironically Sorel himself ultimately disapproved of Fascism and praised the Bolsheviks instead.

Fascism and Liberalism both value Meritocracy but with different ideas on how that Merit ought to be determined and measured, the Left needs to reject Meritocracy altogether.  Understanding the role of Heroarchy in Fascist ideology also helps us understand why there is disagreement about if Fascism is Individualist or Collectivist.  You see while Fascism represents the Far Right on most specific policy issues relevant to the modern world, when it comes to the broad philosophical Individualism vs Collectivism dichotomy Fascism places itself in the center as the compromise, they believe the State needs all the people to be a single Body Politic, but they also believe those Great Men need to rise up to be the Heads of that Body. Modern critiques of the Great Man Theory often treat it is an individualist error but Carlyle himself was no fan individualism, not any Liberal understanding of it anyway.

CulturedThug is the name of a former YouTuber who was somewhat prominent in the AltRight as a self described Fascist, and unlike a lot of other self described Fascists who I don’t think actually understand the word any better than those using it as a generic insult, CulturedThug is very well read, if I had to give anyone the dubious distinction of being the contemporary Philosopher of Fascism it would be him.  I bring him up here mainly because I watched a video once where he lists his favorite movies, now most of them he did not explicitly claim to like because he saw them as Fascist movies that spoke to him as a Fascist, but the top 3 he did, and they were (I may be misremembering the exact order) the 2002 film Hero starring Jet Li, Conan The Barbarian starring Arnold Swarzenegger, and John Boorman’s Excalibur.  All three definitely are in different ways modern manifestations of the kind of Great Man Hero Myths that Thomas Carylyle fixated on, and so them being the kinds of movies to speak to modern Fascists shows fetishization of that kind of Hero Myth is still at the heart of Fascist identity.

This is not to say that all stories about Heroes are inherently Fascist whether they were intended to be or not, a lot of this is tied to specific ideas about what makes a Hero that overlap a lot with Toxic Masculinity and fetishization of the Heroic Sacrifice.  But they are amorphous enough that you can create a fairly Fascist compatible Hero Myth even while trying to be Leftist or succeeding in getting lots of Leftists to praise the story you wrote. The etymology of the word Hero simply means Defender or Protector, that obviously is objectively good, it's the stuff people like Carlyle wrapped up into the concept that is the problem.

In general I feel Anime Culture has very different ideas about what makes a Hero that I feel allows most Anime to be safer from these issues, especially when I look at how many of my favorites place so much emphasis on rejecting the necessity of Sacrifice.  And yet there are exceptions, everything I’ve said above in this post only adds to the reasons to be concerned about shows like Attack on Titan and Gate.  But actually digging into this Carlyle as the root of Fascism thesis has caused me to become self reflective about some characters and sequences I’ve liked in shows not usually thought of as being part of the Fascism in Anime discussion.

First is the infamous Grail Dialogue which is episode 11 of Fate/Zero. Iskandar is a very popular character in the fandom, you’ll be hard pressed to find a YT video essay on this Dialogue that doesn’t take the position that he “won” the debate, that his argument on what makes a good King is vindicated as the correct one.  Now my personal view is that the most correct position is the hypothetical fourth left unrepresented.  But my point here is that Iskandar’s position when you really break it down is Heroarchy, it is essentially Fascist ideology boiled down to its simplest expression, but because he doesn’t preach it in a German accent wearing an SS Uniform most viewers don't notice and many were actually swayed by it.

And the sad thing is even my favorite Anime Genre to refer to as Antithetical to everything wrong with western ideas of Heroism is not immune.  Yuki Yuna Is A Hero I have referred to as my favorite Magical Girl Anime in the past, and I still love the show.  But I’ve come to realize a lot of what happens in this saga is essentially the Stab-in-the-Back-Myth applied to Mahou Shoujo.  Any story so built around your Heroes Sacrificing everything for society yet being constantly betrayed by that society should always raise a red flag.  Now there are certain Anti-Fascist ways to read the story even when you're aware of this connection, but I felt it was important to bring up.

However the real reason I think it’s important to talk about this relationship between Fascism and Hero Myth is because it helps explain how a story can knowingly or not teach or reinforce Fascistic ideas in the story it tells with it’s Heroes even while draping it’s Villains in the cosmetic iconography of certain past specific Fascist regimes, or even explicitly identifying them with one.  You see in modern popular fiction the Nazis have been semi-disconnected from the original political project of the NSDAP.  Both actual Nazis and Space Nazis are in the popular imagination now just new Dragons to be slain by modern Heroes in making modern Hero Myths.  Sometimes they are even literally hoarding Gold just like Fafnir.

That’s my issue with the discourse surrounding the song Be Prepared in The Lion King, that film gets to be considered Anti-Fascist by default because Triumph of The Will is referenced during the villain song.  But the problem is this is a film where the villain is a queer coded “degenerate” member of the ruling class colluding with the foreigners who don’t belong in the kingdom, it’s a story where the villains upset the natural order of things but putting the rightful King back on the throne magically restores everything.  It is exactly the kind of Hero Myth that Fascists love. Basically if you're gonna have the main villain be a different "race" from most of their minions, it's really messed up to then call them Nazis since you're the one who just did a Nazi propaganda trope.

Even Casablanca I think needs to be criticized more, this is a movie where the actual reasons people today consider the Nazis uniquely Evil aren’t relevant at all.  As far as this film is concerned the Nazis main sin was invading and taking over other countries, where the principal Refugee in the story isn’t depicted as any kind of marginalized person but a White Man who simply opposes them because of what he believes in, those beliefs themselves are not explored in depth either.  But if that’s why the Nazis are bad then the very setting of the film undermines any notion that the French have moral superiority, Casablanca was a French colony the actual indigenous people of which are not represented in the film.  There’s actually something deeply wrong with lionizing a defiant display of Patriotic French Resistance on soil the French themselves stole.

And yes all this also applies to Star Wars as well, after all Star Wars has become so married to the Monomyth thesis of Joseph Campbell, and modern criticism of Campbell has its roots in how much Campbell’s ideas also derived from Carlyle. Modern Internet Neoreactionaries have always seen themselves in the Rebels and their bad understanding of Socialism in The Empire, and I’ve already talked about why they aren't without good reason to do so.

Even in Andor which so many Breadtubers now think is so special, so good even compared to other Star Wars at being Anti-Fascist and Anti-Capitalist.  In episode 10 Luthen the character played by Stellen Skarsgard gives a speech to his informant that everyone has been simping for as one of the best Anti-Fascist Speeches of all time.  But to me it’s exactly that kind of monologue that should raise a red flag. It is a part of the understanding of the Heroic Sacrifice in the minds of people like CulturedThug that it’s sometimes your conscience, your very morality that has to be sacrificed.  And no I’m not against acknowledging that a resistance movement may have to do some morally gray things, that you can’t change the world without getting your hands dirty, but justify it with normal utilitarian arguments rather then preaching a Sermon about how you’re sacrificing your soul for the salvation of the future.

It has always been my position that Star Wars stories set after ROTJ are more interesting when they deal with the political difficulties of building a New Republic in the aftermath of the War.  But as I look at where Disney SW has been going in it's post ROTJ stories, it seems like it's usually the Soldiers of the Rebellion who are the ones who are right and the Politicians should have listened to them.  And that demilitarizing so soon was one of the big mistakes.  And maybe the old EU timeline was no different, I'm no expert on it.

The current backlash to Harry Potter has helped open people’s eyes on this, the Slytherin/Voldemort ideology is coded as being Nazi like, yet the text literally contains Nazi propaganda in its depiction of the Goblins.

But before that and even still to an extent Breadtubers are only prepared to process the idea that a story could have Nazi villains but be counterproductive to actually opposing Fascist ideology when the problem was the villains being too cool.  And that was the basis of the freak out a lot of Leftists in the Anime Community had over Dies Irae in 2017, that yeah the Nazis may be villains but they’re cool sexy Bishonen villains who the Fujoshi are gonna turn into Ernst Rohms in their Doujins.

I’m not sure what I think about Dies Irae, I didn’t feel like I understood what it was trying to say when I watched it and now I don’t properly remember all of it, and fans of the VN hated the Anime as an adaptation to begin with, I’m not gonna play the VN I don’t even play the VNs of Anime I actually liked a lot more than this.  But there were moments in there that as I recall them now make me wonder if maybe it was trying to be self aware about the very issue I’ve been talking about, acknowledging that these Nazis fetishize that very kind of story this genre of fiction has its roots in and was perhaps trying to say something about that.  Or maybe it was just pretentious lampshade hanging, IDK someone who understands the original VN will have to answer that.

Update April 2nd: I've continued this train of thought a bit on my other Blog.

https://solascripturachristianliberty.blogspot.com/2023/04/plato-and-fascism.html

Update April 5th: I started a Thread about this on a Message board where you can see me discus the matter further.

https://sfdebris.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=7352

Update May 27th: Thing about this post is that it was never meant to stand alone, I'm hoping people will look into the already existing arguments for the connection between Carlyle and Fascism as well as knowing something about the Caligari to Hitler thesis and Starship Troopers discourse and criticism of Joseph Campbell.  I simply wanted to add my two cents to that already existing conversion and then use it to talk about a few Anime and some Star Wars.

I definitely made a mistake in the Yuki Yuna section.  Citing the stab-in-the-back myth specifically doesn't hold up because that whole thing is about who to blame for losing a war when the Heroes in YuYuYu didn't lose, they Won pretty unambiguously.  So the situation is more like Italy who was on the winning side of WWI but didn't get what they were promised by the Allies so felt rather screwed over, especially the Veterans.

My prior post on Gate ultimately doesn't talk about the scene that is most actually what I'm talking about in this post.  The most Fascist scene in Gate is the Diet scene, where that whole storyline is about demonizing the Civilian Government for daring to question the Military.

Update August: I recently rewatched a bunch of the Anime Tanya The Evil and it certainly reminds me of aspects of this.  As does my recent looking into the Openly Fascist sympathies of The American Legion during the 1920s.

I originally didn't want to actually link to the video of CulturedThug talking about his favorite movies, but the truth is the context of exactly what he says in it is important, that's my point more so then the films themselves.  So here it is.  Again only the top three does he explicitly say are Fascist movies in his view, but what he says about one or two others also speaks to the Heroarchy mindset.  The list also includes some of the usual suspects of movies Fascists like that Leftists say the Fascists don't understand.

However I don't think the "the movie actually condemning the very thing Reactionaries like about it" thesis works for those top 3.  Hero was literally State Sponsored by a very authoritarian State and Excalibur is Arthurian Legend taken at face value.  With Conan an Anti-Fascist fan could try to say it's villain is who actually represents Fascism, but that just brings us back to Nazi Villain problem.