Books by Roger Griffin on Fascism, Modernism, Totalitarianism and Nationalism—available at special, discounted rates. ROGER GRIFFIN, Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on Fascism. Read about him in Wikipedia. A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin For information on how to order, PLEASE CLICK HERE. Fascism (Oxford Readers) From Oxford University Press, USA For information on how to order, PLEASE CLICK HERE. Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion From Routledge For information on how to order, PLEASE CLICK HERE. The Sacred in Twentieth-Century Politics: Essays in Honour of Professor Stanley G. Payne From Palgrave Macmillan For information on how to order, PLEASE CLICK HERE. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler By Roger Griffin For information on how to order, PLEASE CLICK HERE.

The First World War revolved around the search for a “transcendental nomos and sense of belonging.” This is the “quest for rebirth” that Griffin identifies at the core of fascism. The myth of rebirth or dream of fascism is “projected into the nation.” In order to overcome anomie or isolation, fascism seeks to bind each individual one to another in order to create a “cohesive national state.”

Griffin’s research revolves around identifying the “ideological driving force” of fascism: the core myth that animates each instantiation. He proceeds empirically—building his theory on case studies and analysis of texts that convey Fascist ideology. He concludes that Fascism seeks “total symbiosis” by asking each individual to “subsume his or her personality unquestionably but willingly within the greater whole of the national community.”

Hitler explained to his countrymen: “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” Nazism represented a form of nationalism seeking to turn one’s country into “everything.” In order to comprehend fascism—as well as totalitarianism—we need to investigate the source of this desire to turn one’s nation into “everything.”

Griffin cites a speech by Mussolini on the eve of the March on Rome that brought him to power:

We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. Our myth is the nation; our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into total reality, that we subordinate everything else.

Tens of millions of words have been written about Hitler, Mussolini and Fascism. However, if one fails to interrogate the myth that was the source of the historical events—one knows nothing. At the root of what occurred—the realities that came into being—was the myth of the greatness of one’s own nation.

Everything Hitler did, he did in the name of Germany. It wasn’t as if he conceived of himself as existing separately from the German nation (“Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler” is how people like Rudolph Hess put it). The projects Hitler undertook—from erecting massive buildings to waging war—revolved around his desire to make manifest—prove—the greatness of Germany.

The problem with deconstructing this myth is that we still live within the heart of it. The idea of one’s nation and its greatness continues to pervade—saturate—the reality in which we exist. Nazism was an extreme manifestation of the fantasy of the greatness of one’s nation: only quantitatively different from ordinary nationalism.

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Griffin observes that one of the most important consequences of the fascist dream of creating a cohesive national State was the “constant intervention of public ceremonies and rituals imbued with symbolic significance.” Indeed, Hitler was deeply attached to—enthralled by—such spectacles. At Nuremberg, for example, hundreds of thousands of Germans came together—united—as if to create a single enormous body (with Hitler as its head).

Mass rallies functioned as rituals that allowed the German people—and Hitler himself—to overcome the experience of loneliness or anomie. For Hitler, the “imagined community” was puerile; lacking in substance or reality. He wanted to see the national community: experience it as a concrete entity.

Hitler described his understanding of the mass-rallies. The individual, he wrote, who easily succumbs to the fear of being alone, arrives at a mass rally and for the first time gets the picture of a “larger community, which has a strengthening, encouraging effect.” Hitler explained that men need “that strengthening that lies at the conviction of being a member and fighter in a great, comprehensive body.” The individual obtained an impression of the national body “for the first time in the mass demonstrations.”

People came to his rallies, Hitler wrote, as his enemies, but it gradually transpired that after one of his speeches lasting three hours “adherents and adversaries fused into a single, enthusiastic mass.” Herein lay the thrill of Nazism: actualization of the fantasy that was its source. At these moments, anomie was overcome.

Speaking to his youth, Hitler declared: “You are flesh of our flesh, blood of our blood. You are all one, belonging to me.” This was the foundational myth of Nazism: the idea of the union of each and every German body with Hitler’s body to create a single omnipotent body. Nazism built upon the fantasy of the nation as an actual body (politic) that consisted of many bodies fused together to create a single, gigantic body.

In Hitler’s imagination, the idea of the body politic is not simply a metaphor. He conceives of Germany as an actual body with which his own body is fused. What’s more, he expects each and every other German to fuse his or her individual body with the Germany body politic—to create a larger, more substantial body. Nazism sought to fuse each and every German into one body to create an indestructible body that would never shatter or disintegrate.

As an antidote to the experience of anomie, fascism declares: “Individuals shall not be separate or separated from their nation. They shall not be isolated or individuated or alone. Rather, each individual within the nation will bind his own body to the body politic.” Nazism revolved around denial of separation or separateness. The myth of Nazism was that the nation is a single body—and that no individual is separate from this body.

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Griffin writes of a “profound confusion within the fascist mentality of the inner world of Utopian longings with the outer world of politics and history. For Hitler, at least, there was no such confusion. Or rather: Hitler did not draw a distinction between the inner world of Utopian longings and the outer world of politics and history. Hitler entered into politics and sought to create history precisely in order to actualize his utopian longings. Why else would he enter the arduous world of politics and seek to pursue the path that he did?