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Hero, Master, Demagogue, Beast:

The Classical Roots of Modern Fascism

Dr. Nathan Crick

Texas A&M

Illustration by Jean-Manuel Duvivier

FASCISM

What can we learn from Classical Greece about the nature of fascism?

What is Fascism?

"I have chosen the label 'fascism' for ultranationalism of some variety (ethnic, religious, cultural), with the nation represented in the person of an authoritarian leader who speaks on its behalf."

"A fascist is someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary--including violence--to achieve his or her goals."

FORCE

The exertion of influence in any form and through and medium that directly produces change in another object, person, or event.

Force

"Alexander the Great and Darius III of Persia at The Battle of Gaugamela" Roman Mosaic from c.100 BC of the House of the Faun in Pompeii

POWER

Power is the capacity to act in concert through communicative understanding, using available resources, technologies, and mediums, to overcome resistance in pursuit of an imagined good.

Power

Lysistrata, by Aristophanes

VIOLENCE

Violence is the instrumental use of physical force, usually magnified and made more precise by technology, that magnifies natural strength to make or unmake objects, direct events, or harm or coerce other human beings.

Violence

Tintoretto, The Rape of Helen

AUTHORITY

To possess authority is to command voluntary unquestioned obedience by those who follow without need for reason.

It is thus different from LEGITIMACY, which is a form of persuasion (ethos) based on the credibility of the process by which decisions were made as well as the stated reasons for those decisions.

Authority

Jacques Louis David (1748–1825), The Death of Socrates

RHETORIC

Rhetoric is the art of constituting and directing power through symbolic action by facilitating collective judgment in times of urgency and uncertainty.

Rhetoric is grounded primarily in "Identification," or the creation of a common identity based on a presumption of shared "substance." Identification is always prior to any instrumental reasoning and are formed in large part through "Division," or by separating us from an Other.

Rhetoric

THE AGE OF PERICLES - PAINTING BY PHILIPP VON FOLTZ

HERO

To be a hero is to confront fate with character. The function of a hero is not to win, or even to alter the course of events. It is, like Homer's Achilles, to embody the highest virtues of a particular culture and thereby perpetuate those virtues. The function of the epic is thus a "tribal encyclopedia," to tell the story of the hero and to document and celebrate every aspect of the hero's culture.

HERO

MASTER

In Classical Greece during the time of Athenian hegemony (leadership), the undisputed master was Logos (word, argument, speech, reason), which the Sophist Gorgias called a "dynastes megas," a "mighty lord" which can, through rhetoric, replace the realm of sense perception and appearances with a false reality of illusion,

MASTER

What causes human actions?

Force

Sight

(desire

/fear)

Fate / The Gods

Logos

(persuasion)

DEMAGOGUE

The historian Thucydides labeled a demagogue (demos = people, agogos = guide) those political leaders in Athens who rose to power during the Peloponnesian War with Sparta by promoting an ideology that flattered its audience that their aims and virtues were sanctioned by both god and nature while those of their enemies were self-interested, deceptive, and cruel.

DEMAGOGUE

BEAST

For Aristole, writing decades after the war, it was clear that human beings were, by nature, "political animals" who achieve their full potential living in a legitimate, participatory, civic state. Citing an episode from the Iliad, he thus warned against those who were subhuman or superhuman--beasts or gods--who acted impulsively without consideration of shared norms or laws.

BEAST

MODERN FASCISM

Arises in periods of dramatic shifts in power and authority facilitated by technological change and reflected in competing notions of justice.

The spirit of fascism is the heroic embodiment of a new mythic identity that fights to revive an eclipsed form of authority rooted in masculine virility.

Modern

Fascism

Fascism uses rhetoric to transform appearances and create the mass illusion of a superior, but currently victimized, master minority frustrated by decadent institutions.

Fascist demagogues promote an ideology that reverses the meaning of virtue and vice by celebrating the redemptive character of violence and naming mercy as weakness.

Fascism transforms its followers into beasts by encouraging them to wilfully destroy the legitimacy of all civic institutions for the sake of satisfying their impulses to act as gods.

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