[Political Interest]

Is fascism supportive of tradition or against it? Form what I know I have heard fascism is modernist and against conservatism. Franco has been criticised on this website by fascists for being too conservative and not revolutionary enough. So can we say fascism is for or against tradition? It stood against the Catholic church and more or less had an anti-Christian agenda in general except in those regimes specifically based on clerical fascism. However I have seen that fascists like to romanticise the classical expression of their civilisation. However is this so much a romanticisation or is it a desire to revive such traditions? I have heard the traditionalist Julius Evola criticised fascism but I am not so familiar with his work.

Please explain.

[Rainbow Crow]

As I understand it, European fascism has been fiercly traditionalist and socially conservative, but new-age fascists are counter-culture and claim that Hitler and Mussolini were secretly anti-traditionalist.

[Rei Murasame]

Anglo-American conservatives such as G.K. Chesterton also claimed the same thing that 'new-age fascists' - as you call them - now claim, just they said it in an unhappy tone of voice, rather than a happy tone of voice. Coincidence?

[michael3]

Is fascism supportive of tradition or against it? Form what I know I have heard fascism is modernist and against conservatism. Franco has been criticised on this website by fascists for being too conservative and not revolutionary enough. So can we say fascism is for or against tradition? It stood against the Catholic church and more or less had an anti-Christian agenda in general except in those regimes specifically based on clerical fascism. However I have seen that fascists like to romanticise the classical expression of their civilisation. However is this so much a romanticisation or is it a desire to revive such traditions? I have heard the traditionalist Julius Evola criticised fascism but I am not so familiar with his work.

Please explain.

Well, 'tradition' is something which bears scrutiny for meaning also. Joseph de Maistre, who as the foremost philosopher of counter-revolution is considered a catholic traditionalist, imagined an absolutely sovereign Papacy and absolutely sovereign Monarchy in terms which the genuine royalists and ultramontanes of his post-1789 day scarcely claimed or imagined for themselves. Yet, it is precisely in his rejection of enlightenment 'Reason', his very irrationality, that he is frequently placed among the proto-fascists by commentators like Berlin and Popper.

It was only latter on with thinkers like Hippolyte Taine and Juan Donoso y Cortes that you began to have a divorce between the partisans of a return to the 'Ancien Regime' and some who sought some kind of reconciliation with facts on the ground....A support for elites in general. As time progressed, the effects of democritization and the 'Mass-Man' began to be felt, and even the reactionaries began to change, most of them. Keeping pace with this was a mass de-christianization of Europe in which these same forces opposed to the leveling tendancies of Marxism and the age itself adopted the insights of secular philosophies like social darwinism, or to pre-christian paganism like Evola.

I happen to enjoy Evola, Neitzsche is one of my favorite thinkers, and I'm becoming more and more pleased with Fascist philosophers like Giovanni Gentile, but I take some of what they say about 'Tradition', particularly with regards to Christianity, with a grain of salt. Grounded as I am in 'Unreason' (not 'antireason') in my Christianity, I am well placed to weather their critique. Other 'Christianities', based more on Greek Philosophy than Jesus, will not.