Fascist Honor
Extreme right-wing groups in Latin America have found a wellspring that draws from historical revisionism and political incorrectness.
By Rafael Rojas (Confidencial)
HAVANA TIMES – The new currents of the far right that we’re watching take shape in Europe, the US, Latin America and the Caribbean holds the weight of immense cemeteries populated by dictators. In their reading of Twentieth Century history, those right-wing groups – like their twins on the extreme left – have clear preferences and are offended by any historic judgement that establishes parallels between Hitler and Stalin, or between one totalitarianism and the other.
We’re accustomed to such protests against false equivalencies on the part of Marxist leftists; to the facile criticism of Hannah Arendt, Carl J. Friedrich and all the liberal theory of the first Cold War, that maintained that both fascists and communists flowed together into the river of totalitarianism in the mid twentieth century. But there’s been less examination of those symbolic hierarchies of the new right that end up favorable to fascism, in large part because they’re dangerously underestimated.
Some years ago, the Italian press reacted somewhere between mockery and scandal to the assertions of Benito Mussolini, and of Matteo Salvini. The Interior Minister and president of the Northern League at the time chose July 29, the fascist dictator’s birthday, to reiterate the maxim Tanti nemici, tanto onore (“The more enemies, the more honor”) against his leftist enemies who deplored his constant nativist and xenophobic expressions.
Salvini’s declarations were merely the surface of a deeper tendency: no longer just justification, but admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and the fascism of Italy and Europe. When the Eurispes data center published its annual surveys, one in five Italians believed that the Duce was a great leader who built highways, schools, hospitals and all kinds of public buildings; that he extended social rights and returned greatness to Italy amid the imperial decadence of the West.
The reaction to Mussolini’s return to popularity was the generation of a new academic historiography, in which the works of Emilio Gentile stands out. There hasn’t been sufficient attention paid in the US and Latin America to Gentile’s emphasis on the weight of nationalism and racism on the right as much as on the intellectual left after World War Two. There are entire passages in his works dealing with the symbolic exploitation of nationalism’s foundational myths, which would be perfectly valid for understanding Trumpism in the US or Obrador-ism in Mexico.
A central value in that affective reinvention of the right-wings is the concept of honor, that Salvini invokes in his commentary, and not just on a whim. The category of honorable crosses through the entire process of enshrinement of politics, that to Gentile is fundamental in any historiographic reconstruction of the reactionary European rights in the period between the wars. The political religion of the Catholic nationalisms forms the spiritual backdrop for what’s narrated and interpreted in books like Mussolini against Lenin (2019), or History of fascismo (2022).
Gentile, however, is opposed to the extensive use of the term “neofascism” to describe the new ultra-rights. He’s also against abusing the theory of “ur-fascism” – for either eternal fascism or the current fascism – that was popularized by a well-known book published in 1995 by Umberto Eco. Gentile and other academic historians such as David Jorge, professor at El Colegio de Mexico, recommend differentiating fascism as a regime or ideology from each one of the European right active during the middle part of the twentieth century. The confusion of those terms, especially particular to the real socialisms of the Cold War, is so common that even today a large congress “against fascism” was celebrated in Caracas, where Nicolas Maduro recently had his fraudulent reelection validated.
Despite the needed distinction, it’s evident that the fascist sense of honor runs through a large part of the extreme right wings of the west. Via their historical revisionism, those right-wing groups which Enzo Traverso calls “post fascists” have moved from comprehending to ennobling the right-wing totalitarian regimes of the XX Century. Marine LePen, for example, has directly questioned the responsibility of Vichy’s and Marshall Petain’s France in the expansion of Hitler’s power.
In her defense of the Catholic national pride of an old imperial France, Le Pen denies that the Vichy regime in France was complicit in the 1942 Vei d’Hiv roundup, when over twelve thousand Jews, including four thousand children, were crowded into the Paris velodrome, to be sent to the Aushwitz death camp. Denying the role of the Hitler-allied French right in that massacre, or ignoring the criminal toll of the French government during the colonization of Algeria and the north of France, is one of Le Pen’s tactics to save the honor of a historic conservatism that today has aligned itself with xenophobia and racism.
In Spain, Vox and its leader Santiago Abascal, refer repeatedly to the relative nature of the crimes committed under Franco. Not only that: the leader of the extreme Spanish right thinks, like Salvini in Italy, that Franco governed well and kept Communism from taking over Spain. The idea of gendarmes as necessary dates back to Cesarism and the Latin American caudillo tradition developed by Laureano Vallenilla Lanz to legitimize the Venezuelan dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gomez. It also has its Mexican, Chilean and Cuban equivalents in the work of Emilio Rabasa, Alberto Edwards and Lamar Schweyer, giving that manner of understanding the authoritarian tradition a family air.
The Latin American right wings are undergoing their own shift to the ultra-right camp. The form and spirit of the transitions at the end of the 20th century and the diverse forms of opposition to the Bolivarian current are ever more rapidly changing. The latest right-wings, as can be verified in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the Andes, and Central America, are reinventing populism by adding themselves to the style of political incorrectness that has found in Donald Trump it’s maximum expression in this hemisphere.
The restitution of the lost national honor is one of the focuses of that new right that goes so far as to embrace so-called “anti-globalism.” It’s curious in a region with a strong historic inheritance of anti-liberal and autonomous lefts, that isolationist and chauvinist tendencies should reappear on the right flank. With rhetorical inertia, the local lefts continue referring to those right groups as “neoliberals,” but that choice of adjectives is one more sign of the stagnation in Latin American political language.
There’s one way of connecting those flare-ups of conservative nationalism with the discourse on fascist honor that is growing in Europe. The new Latin American rights, typified by Bolsonaro in Brazil and Milei in Argentina, Kast in Chile or Bukele in El Salvador, are implementing militaristic pivots accompanied by visions of the past with clear fondness of the dictatorships of the Cold War. According to the new right, those authoritarian regimes fulfilled the mission of avoiding the advance of Communism in Latin America.
Sociologists linked to Dependency Theory, such as Ecuadorian Agustin Cueva Davila and Brazilians Ruy Mauro Marini and Theotonio Dos Santos, have established the affinities between those dictatorships and the European fascisms. They noted that the fascist antecedent resurged with the sophistication of repressive technology, the exceptionalist implications of the “doctrine of national security,” and in projects for the extermination of social subjects that weren’t necessarily limited to leftist oppositions or political activists.
The recent extreme right groups of the region project nostalgia for those orderly, stable, hierarchical and secure regimes of the Cold War. Those right-wings are already moving forward with their own agendas of historical revisionism, which postulate the need for a Pinochet, a Videla, or a Castelo Branco in their respective national pasts. That historic fatalism brings them to reproduce the same laments of lost honor as the old European nationalisms.
Published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.