Product Description

This new book in the Concordia Scholarship Today Series examines how fascist views permeate modern philosophy, art, movies, and eugenics--decades after the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II. Dealing with a variety of fascist thought--from the intellectuals to the skinheads--Veith shows how the fascist's focus on self and human will is in direct opposition to the Christian's faith in a righteous God. (Concordia Publishing House)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69499 in Books
• Published on: 1993-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 187 pages

Customer Reviews

Amazing Connections
Dr. Veith wrote this well researched book to explain why fascism as best personified by Nazi Germany in the 1930's and 40's can be seen in today's culture. Veith uses an amazing amount of source material to craft an intricate series of arguments that expose the philosophical underpinnings of fascism, as well as arguing how that philosophy has been adopted by intellectuals today.

Fascism, and especially Nazism, have been made out to be the ultimate evil, due to its actions in Europe during the early part of the twentieth century. What few people seem to know is that fascism is an ideology, one that has a philosophy. Veith makes a good point that concentration camps and war were effects of fascism. These effects sprang from the ideas of fascism.

I was especially interested in how Veith showed that Communism and National Socialism are really two sides of the same coin. The difference is in their outlook. Communism has an international outlook, while National Socialism deals with a localized outlook (the nation). While there are flaws in this argument, Veith does a pretty good job of supporting himself with evidence.

Much of the book is spent discussing these philosophical ideas. There is much discussion of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and Frederich Nietzsche, and how they were the leading theorists of fascist thought. Many of today's intellectuals are vigorously trying to clean up Heidegger's writings to try and hide his obvious affinity for fascism. They just can't understand how he could embrace this mode of thought. Veith shows how his writings that are so loved by intellectuals today are outgrowths of fascist thought. He also shows that by adopting Heidegger's tenets, intellectuals are inadvertantly adopting fascist principles. Veith also spends time discussing how Christianity responded to fascism, especially in Nazi Germany where the church was viewed with great suspicion by the Nazis. Why? Because Christianity is an outgrowth of Judaism. Christianity started out as a Jewish sect, and all of its early theologians were Jews. Go look at your Bible. The only non-Jew in the New Testament is Luke (I've seen arguments for John as well).

A rare book that makes the reader look at things in a different way. I gave it four stars due to a few errors in the book. The first one was in the first paragraph, when Veith says that David Duke was a member of the American Nazi Party. Duke was never a member of the ANP. He was a member of the KKK. Also, using Nietzsche as a theorist of fascism might be a bit misleading. Nietzsche's sister edited his works after his descent into madness, and it from these versions that fascism borrowed some of their ideas. This seems to be the prevailing view today, anyway. I may concede the point to Veith, though, because this may be an attempt by leftist intellectuals to cleanse Nietzsche of what they perceive to be fascist thought. Also, I wish that Veith would have spent more time looking at how fascist thought has permeated our society today. There is only one chapter devoted to this, and it is the last one in the book.

I'd highly recommend this book. It'll make you question some of the ridiculous behavior that is going on in our country today.

The New Pagans- Veith exposes the real fascism today.
Prof. Gene Edward Veith, a Lutheran professor of English at Concordia Univ. in Wisconsin, if anything else, has taken a word which has come to be used as a contentless, empty and generalized "catch-all" insult, and has attempted to remind a historically ignorant generation of what "fascism" was really all about in the 1930's and 1940's and from whom, whence, and what sources this terrible political and philosophical system was derived, the form it took then, and the form it takes today.

First of all, Veith has a smiling Ezra Pound on the cover giving the fascist salute in 1958. This picture is not meant to cleverly provoke, but to show, as is detailed in the chapter, "The Beautiful Ideas Which Kill", that in his allegiance to fascism, Pound and some of his artistic and intellectual allies, Imagist poet T.E. Hulme, George Bernard Shaw, and the pre-war Wyndham Lewis, found the political vehicle of fascism (to them at least) a very logical outgrowth of their theories and views of art and life. The celebration of "the primitive", the concrete over the abstract, and overall contempt for the "bourgeois, moderate, classical..."(quoting from Thomas Mann), in favor of the Nietzchean and Dionysean unrestraint represent not any kind of a current "conformity" to classical and historical traditions but at the time, the very "avant-garde" throwing off of all such shackle.

There are many such illustrations of the sort, which Veith uses not for purpose of mere "high-brow" name-dropping or ad hominem indictment, but for the deeper meaning of the book itself: Fascism has always been on the cutting edge, and the people who first loved and propagandized it were not bourgeois businessmen in suits, but the writers, artists, poets, and philosophers. It is important to realize that one reason that the Jewish people were singled out for castigation was that they represented a transcendent intellectual order, anti-paganism and moralism. Although it has become a matter of cliche, Frederich Nietzche really did popularize many of these ideas in works such as "The Will to Power", where Judaism and Christianity were systems of weakness and artificial supports for weaknesses in their hindrance of man's primordial will and drive to power and action.

"Modern Fascism" covers eugenics, abortion, political ideology, and religion in addition to the artistic and philosophical aspects of fascism, marking his obvious subject: the National Socialist state of Hitler's Germany. Veith offers disparate examples of how history has been revised and ignored to the absurd point that "fascism" is now considered somehow "conservative", and the opposite of the Left. Actually, the extreme Right and the extreme Left are two competing sides of the same fascistic coin (i.e. National Socialism (Nazism) and International Socialism (Marxism). Veith also debunks (as have numerous others) the pernacious myth that Nazism was somehow Christian. The truth is that Hitler perverted and used "God-words" for his own end, and eventually dropped them altogether once complete power was gained. The German Protestant Church had become so weakened by liberalism and humanistic thought, that it was powerless to resist. True Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer were executed.

Finally, one of the most interesting and frightening sections is the end where Veith links much of modern 1990's culture in America with the very same fascism it falsely purports to hate. The very modern return to paganism and Gnostic/New Age type religions (in a friendly face) and the celebration of the violent, arrogant, and unrestrained raw sexuality in film, television, literature, and music is indeed very close to the old fascism in truth no matter how many "anti-Fascist messages" are attempted. The popular culture and modern media which was used by the Nazis (Leni Reifenstahl's use of cinema, the mass rally, etc.) to pound home their message also sounds current. Veith also reminds us that the Nazis were supreme environmentalists, criticizing the mercantile and urban Jews for creating "alienation" between man and nature.

There is a very real problem with skinheads and white racist and anti-Semitic groups of hooligans in both the U.S. and Europe. But there is also a much more subtle and less overt form of it in the academic community where political correctness is enforced and books are not burned, but "deconstructed." At the very least, the modern academic community which immerses itself in this nonsense will have no ground nor the tools to fight fascism if it ever comes here politically, with power to be enforced. At the worst, they are collaborators with it. Professor Veith is sure to be criticized by those who are convinced that Fascism consists solely of either grainy, black & white newsreels of goose-stepping German officers or all people who want to "impose their morality" on others, but I believe he is prescient and absolutely correct in his general thesis that modern Fascism is ultimately paganism in modern dress. Veith's final sentence encapsulates the book: "Fascism is the modern world's nostalgia for paganism. It is a sophisticated culture's revolt against God."

Fascinating. Utterly fascinating.
Wish I'd known about this book years ago, instead of discovering it a couple weeks ago.

It's a given that Nazi's are the perennial bad guys of movies and history, with Hitler usually a stand-in for Satan. It's normally overlooked that they had a specific philosophy, that most of their support and leadership came from university intellectuals.

What did Nazis believe and why? Why did they want to kill Jews? Most people actually don't know (some European counties even ban Hitler's book "Mein Kampf") and that, to some degree, is by intent, though it flies in the face of "... if you don't know your history, you are condemned to repeat it...."

In the 1920's and 1930's fascism was popular among intellectuals in the US and abroad. It wasn't until after the war, when the results became clear that many repudiated it.

This book shows the ideas actually lived on, tracing them through specific people and events into the "kinder, gentler" faces we now call New Age and "PC" and "Post-modernism".

Whereas the Judeo-Christian heritage focused on a transcendent God and moral law, fascism rejected that for what is tangible and in nature. Nature and community assume a mystical role.

Essentially, these things are the pre-Christian European paganism of antiquity, coupled with modern media and armies. As part of this, Goering sought to re-establish the ancient "sacred" sites of Germany ... in many ways, Nazism was the revival of the cult of Woten, reborn in the philosophies of Darwin, Nietschze and Romantiscm.

These beliefs were the unquestioned underlying assumptions of the intellectual elites in the 1930's and they remain so today.

Marxism and fascism, far from being polar opposites have much in common. Nazism = socialism + nationalism, while Marxism = socialism + internationalism. Difference is mostly method and in the early part of the century, intellectuals would switch back and forth from being marxists to fascists.

This book draws extensively on original sources to document the purpose and intent of 20th century fascism to eliminate the Judeo-Christian heritage. It documents Hitler's orders to Goebbels and Goering to maintain leadership roles in the church, to maintain credibility, against their will and how in his own words "... after difficult inner struggles I had freed myself of my remaining childhood religious conceptions...".

Hitler wrote how, having solved the more manageable Jewish problem, it would be necessary to address the "church problem": "The point that must be reached is to have the pulpits filled with none but boobs, and the congregations with none but old women. The healthy young people are with us."

And from a Hitler Youth camp song: "We are the happy Hitler youth, we have no need for Christian virtue for Adolph Hitler is our intercessor, and our Redeemer ..."

The book then traces the philosophy of fascism from it's origins into the modern institutions of today. Not perfect, but an awesome book in implication.