“I was not actually a fascist,” wrote Taki in the January issue of Chronicles in connection with a decades-old jibe by Norman Mailer. “As a child in Greece, however, I was a Falangist, a General Franco-inspired movement for Greek youth that ended with the German occupation in 1941.”
Like the rest of our writers and editors, Taki is right on most issues all of the time and on all issues most of the time, but on this occasion a correction is needed. The Falangist movement was not “inspired” by General Franco, in Spain or anywhere else where it was emulated (most notably Romania). It was founded over three years before Franco gained prominence by leading the uprising against the Republic, as it slid into the Popular Front’s Stalinist nightmare.
The Falange was founded in 1933 by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the charismatic eldest son of the former dictator, General Miguel Primo de Rivera. Handsome and eloquent, at 33 he was to become an early martyr for the Nationalist cause.
His was a dynamic movement, fascist in the Italian sense, radical in temperament, anticapitalist and antimonarchist in outlook. While accepting that the Catholic Church was a pillar of stability, José Antonio wanted to limit its clout in the future Falangist state. That state was to be based on the centralization of political power and all key nodes of cultural and economic activity.
Franco was the Falange’s direct opposite by temperament and conviction. A conservative, ultra-clerical monarchist, he evolved, during the war, into an old-school autocrat instinctively adverse to all forms of ideological radicalism and to any group or movement independent of his control. His only significant common ground with the Falange was his abiding anticommunism.
The Falange was ostensibly weak, failing to gain any seats in the February 1936 election. It was not defeated, however. The result proved to be beneficial to its cohesion by demonstrating that its goals could not be reached by electoral means. Far from being over the fight was just starting.
The Spanish Civil War broke out half a year later, providing the Falange with ample evidence for its claim that old conservative forces could not check “the invasion of the barbarians,” as José Antonio called the Popular Front. The only means to save Spain, therefore, entailed what the Falange had been preaching all along: a long, bloody armed struggle. In the months leading up to the Civil War, party membership doubled to almost 25,000—many of them devout youths.
In the early stages of the war the Falangist militia fought bravely on the nationalist side. It often occupied large sections of the still poorly defined front and suffered enormous casualties. The conservative generals, led by Franco, nevertheless oversaw the war’s political course.
By April 1937, the Falange was contributing at least 126,000 fighters and made up over one-half of the Nationalist militia forces. This prompted Franco, in that same month, effectively to liquidate the Falange as an autonomous entity though its forced merger with the conservative-monarchist Carlists. The Unification Decree ensured Franco’s total political dominance.
By forming the awkwardly named Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (FTE y de las JONS), and by merging their respective militias into a single force commanded by professional officers, Franco turned those two mutually antagonistic groups into his docile tools. Henceforth no radicalism of the old Falange, and certainly no ideologically inspired experimentation, would be allowed.
The Unification Decree (April 19, 1937) established the Falange as the official state party, the only one legally allowed to exist, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for the followers of José Antonio. It permanently affixed Franco, their ideological nemesis, as the tamed party’s national leader for life. By the war’s end in March 1939, the Falange had morphed into the pliant bureaucratic backbone of Franco’s authoritarian-conservative, rather than “fascist,” regime.
The Caudillo was intent on creating a rapidly modernized yet paternalistically guided, state-capitalist Estado Español. For the ensuing 36 years he was in overall charge of everything, with the Army at his beck and call at all times. The cadre of trusted Opus Dei technocrats were given a free hand to devise and develop the Spanish economic miracle.
In all his endeavors, as is obvious almost five decades after his death, Franco was stunningly successful. He is arguably the towering statesman of the 20th century—in Europe certainly, perhaps the world—equal to Bismarck in the 19th century, and Frederick in the 18th.
In Greece in the late 1930s no political movement was “inspired” by General Franco. The Caudillo did impress an important individual, however. General Ioannis Metaxas headed the “Fourth of August” regime from the summer of 1936 until the German occupation in the spring of 1941. His rule was authoritarian, conservative, and nationalist (albeit in a defensive, rather than expansionist sense). It was not “fascist” in any meaningful sense.
Metaxas lacked the popular base of an organized political party, or an ideological framework articulated by eloquent intellectuals, or even personal charisma. Franco faced similar problems, and the Greek leader was impressed by the way Metaxas resolved them. With his notion of the “Resurgent State” Metaxas also resorted to what vaguely sounded like a “fascist” discourse.
In reality, the Metaxist “Third Greek Civilization,” imposed from above on an indifferent public, was a flop. It was based on an unoriginal mix of “traditional values” and the celebration of three key institutions: the Orthodox Church, the monarchy, and the family. It was nothing creative, bold, or original. All along Metaxas remained Franco’s pale shadow—a conservative nationalist who occasionally acted like a pseudo-fascist before an overwhelmingly unmoved Greek public.
The question remains, who is a “fascist”? (Yes, I’ve dealt with this before.) This is a trick question par excellence which has vexed four generations of political scientists, historians, and philosophers at least since 1945. The irreducible common minimum, I dare suggest, is that a “fascist” is a patriotic man of European stock who is strongly driven by four convictions:
(1) by the recognition that his nation—defined in biological, cultural and historical terms—is in peril of internal discord and disintegration, or in a state of demographic or spiritual decadence, caused by the pernicious impact of the Enemy (Marxism, liberalism, democracy, etc);
(2) by the acceptance that the nation’s decrepitude can be reversed only by direct action, violence in particular, and by total mobilization of the national community, leading to the establishment of a non-democratic political and legal order in which the rebirth of the nation’s core moral and spiritual values and principles, as well as its biological renewal, will be possible;
(3) by the veneration of the charismatic leader or his sanctified memory (the latter e.g. by the Falange after the execution of Primo de Rivera, or by the Iron Guard in Romania following the murder of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and his associates in 1938); and finally,
(4) by the celebration of soldierly, manly virtues, the imperative of struggle and the associated cult of willing sacrifice, the notion that giving one’s life for the Cause is dulce et decorum.
To understand why our illustrious Greek friend and colleague is quintessentially a fascist we need to revisit the father of the Neue Rechte, the late Armin Mohler. The Swiss-born philosopher saw fascism as a distinct style, not reduced to uniforms and spectacles; a discrete world outlook characterized by “vitality and lightness.”
When asked in 1995 whether he was a fascist, Mohler duly answered in the affirmative, adding “in the sense of José Antonio Primo de Rivera.” He derided Nazism, rightly noting that “there is no ‘fascism’ responsible for mass murder” and that “Hitler and his National Socialism had no idea about fascism.”
(Interestingly, let us note en passant, Mohler described Charles De Gaulle’s rule as “a kind of mild neo-fascism.” This was not meant as a slight since he had previously shown sympathy for the General in the context of the tradition of French nationalism. Until the end of his life Mohler remained close to the French Nouvelle Droite and a friend of its key figure, Alain de Benoist.)
Mohler’s essay “The Fascist Style” (Der faschistische Stil) was originally published in 1973. (The title clearly alludes to “The Prussian Style,” Der preussische Stil, by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a key figure of the “Conservative Revolution” in the Weimar Republic.) Mohler’s main target is the leftist tendency to use the term “fascist” as an all-embracing label to delegitimize opponents and to separate fascism from its historical identity. To him, anti-fascism is but an excuse to use heavy artillery, indiscriminately, against all conservatives and rightists.
As a former student of art history and a follower of Spengler, Mohler opts for a “physiognomic approach” which focuses on the fascist “form,” but without compressing it into molds. He simply pushed aside the vast literature on fascism, which he otherwise knew inside out. He had neither the time nor the interest to add another to the existing pile of books on fascism. He opted for a novel approach which freed the phenomenon of “fascism” from the wasteland of footnotes.
Inevitably perhaps, Mohler’s approach implied a certain sympathy for his subject. It is not far-fetched to say that the essay itself is written in a “fascist style.” Contrary to Nolte, Mohler believes that fascism is not primarily a doctrine or an ideology, but a form of life, a style.
This brings us back to Taki. Mohler finds representatives of the fascist style in Ernst Jünger, Gottfried Benn, and Tommaso Marinetti—and I recognize Mr. Theodoracopulos lurking in each and every one of them. What is meant by “style” Mohler demonstrates with Benn’s oration in honor of Marinetti. Benn does not speak of any community of ideas between Italy and Germany, but of the task of cooperating in a “non-theatrical, cold style into which Europe is growing.”
That style is “rapid, sparkling, magnificent,” infused with “love of danger,” full of energy and daring, fearless and rebellious, infused with “beautiful ideas for which one dies.” It has its roots in war, but it is not war in the Nazi sense, the voelkisch Vernichtungskrieg for the Lebensraum; it is struggle per se.
It is unimportant to Benn that in the Great War Italy and Germany were on opposite sides: War creates a special brotherhood between opposing warriors. They have much more in common with each other than with any petty bourgeois citizen on their own side of the line. I am confident that someone who once called his yacht “Bushido” agrees with this assessment.
When Benn speaks of the “three values of fascism” (the black shirt; the slogan “A noi!”; the Giovinezza), he does not mean general ideas, and even less ethical imperatives. These are three artistic forms, the fascist style. That style is identified with a moral decision against materiality, chaos, and the Indeterminate. Style is superior to conviction, and form is above any ideology.
Fascism is an aesthetic phenomenon opposed to the Enlightenment. It cares not a hoot about “programs” or empirical analysis, but it knows what is good and beautiful. Like that 1936 telephone conversation between Colonel Moscardo, the commander of the besieged Alcazar in Toledo, and his son Luis, who was to be shot at dawn by the Reds.
That may be a typically fascist scene, but it is known to any Serb as a modern reenactment of the Kosovo vow: Honorable death is preferable to miserable life, the Kingdom of Heaven is forever.
Meglio vivere un giorno da leone che cent’anni da pecora. Mussolini was right, of course: It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep. To his everlasting shame he thought he could pretend to be a lion by sneaking onto the corpse of France in June 1940.
In the end the fascist style is all about attitude, about stoic service, about a form of existence and action, and not about worldviews or grand schemes. It is about the primacy of instinctive posture over “ideas.”
In Taki all elements of the fascist style come together. His articles give us mercilessly outlined characters, the first-person detached style tinged with irony, and also an oversized ego necessary to play the role so well. His aesthetic credo, thank God, reflects an instinctive refusal to approach reality from the abstractions of systemic thought and belief.
Taki’s aesthetics, as revealed in the pages of Chronicles, is not accidental. It is neither deliberately outrageous nor frivolously amusing, as a casual normie reader of Chronicles may conclude. It is a proper response to our horrid reality by a good man. It is eminently fascist, manly, and beautiful.
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