Bannon’s Fascist Worldview

At Mauthausen Concentration Camp, where he could easily have been a Commandant, everyone was motivated to act against everyone else. It got so bad that one inmate said: “Every act of human kindness was an act of resistance.” American Journalist Dorothy Thompson wrote in 1939 (Let the Record Speak) as the world slid into global war against fascism, “This it seems to me, is the lesson of the news in the last three years, National Socialism, or Nazism in Germany, will become the most world-disturbing event of the century, though Nazism is not, in its nature, only a German phenomenon. Nazism is a fusion of elements that are present in the minds of men and women everywhere, and it does offer one answer to political, social, and economic problems that everywhere press for solutions.” She argued, “Americans must understand there is a fundamental incompatibility between any form of social order based on political and economic freedom, and the dynamic aggrandizing of Fascism, or National Socialism. Nazism is a total Revolution.” Himmler in Germany was calling Nazism “Counter-Revolutionary” in that it aimed to reverse all the changes, including the American Revolution, that happened since the European Enlightenment.” Thompson described Nazism as a break with Reason, with Humanism, and with the Christian ethics that are at the base of America’s Liberal Democracy. She saw Nationalism as similar to Communism in that they both broke with the ethic or science that elevates the search for truth into the noblest of human passions. She thought Nationalism was worse than Communism, because it denies the concept of the inviolability of the human being. She saw Nazism, unlike Communism, as treating all of life as the un remitting struggle of tribal groups for biological survival. “In this struggle telling lies is openly accepted as a useful means to an end, which is dealing with what the Nazis believe to be naive and decadent democracies.” Since Nazis subjugate and destroy the common sense that grows out of human experience, the columnist wrote, “National Socialism is the enemy of whatever is sunny, life-affirming, form-seeking, and conscious of tradition.” She wrote, “It’s too late to answer the slogans of Fascism with the slogans of Democracy. It’s too late to hope we shall preserve Democracy without, effort, intelligence, responsibility, character and great sacrifice. In the next decade there will be no free rides to freedom.; it will not be preserved by geography or by the insistent chant, that no matter where else it is raining, it is bound to be sunny here, if not today, then tomorrow.” As her book hit the streets, Montana’s National Guard, the 163rd Infantry Regiment, received federal orders and was mobilized for WWII. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/01/opinion/steve-bannon-trump.html?pvid=SYRHkrQsloHnZVlUKUXgHQIE&smid=url-share