Fascism and mysticism from Werewolf Bund to QAnon

What We Think

Fascist ideology has always been open to mysticism and systematic irrationality—demonstrated by the lies the Nazis pushed

QAnon played part of the Capitol Riot in the United States on 6 January 2021 (Photo: Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

Fascist ideology has always been open to mysticism and systematic irrationality.

The Nazis pushed murderous lies about Jews, Romana and disabled people and others as part of a consciously anti-scientific worldview.

But, at the same time, they rested on the latest technologies for modern armaments and industrialised extermination camps.

The Nazis took up the “scientific” racism of the 19th century, which claimed there was a hierarchy of racial intelligence and a historical succession of “lower” races by “higher” ones. They combined that with a nostalgic myth of an imagined past of a time when there was “one nation”.

There is a material basis for fascism’s mysticism. Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote that the “petty bourgeoisie”—the core of fascism’s social base—was particularly open to mysticism.

This class, made up mainly of small-time capitalists, self-employed professionals and minor landlords, “regards the capitalist class with envy and often with hatred”.

It sees in capitalist “progress” pain and, sometimes, bankruptcy as large corporations crush smaller ones. “The petty bourgeois is hostile to the idea of development, for development goes immutably against him,” he argued.

“The Nazis curse materialism because the victories of technology over nature have signified the triumph of large capital over small.”

This contradiction in fascist thought—modernity alongside mysticism—is linked to capitalism as a whole.

When the capitalists were battling the old ruling class, they spoke of liberty and equality. But capitalists replaced one form of class exploitation with another. So, once they were in charge, the truth about class relations is dangerous.

Trotsky argued that this contributed to a contradictory world. “Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth,” he wrote.

“A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms.

“Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by human genius wear amulets on their sweaters.”

And, for those consumed by such an ideology, “Despair has raised them to their feet fascism has given them a banner.”

The Nazis attracted wide layers of people involved in an array of occult, quasi-pagan and supernatural groups.

Hitler became so concerned about this that, in his book Mein Kampf, he speaks of the danger of the Nazi party becoming home to “wandering scholars wrapped in bearskins.”

At points, the fascists crushed occult groups because they offered spaces outside fascist state control.

But, writes historian Eric Kurlander, the Nazis “repeatedly accepted former occult leaders into the party”. That was so “long as they stopped trying to maintain separate folkish-esoteric organisations like the Werewolf Bund”.

Today’s fascists also peddle myths and lies—and they are in the front ranks of Covid denial or conspiracy theories about vaccines as a means of controlling the world.

In the United States, QAnon supporters were central to the growth of the Donald Trump-backing far right.

They denounced Hillary and Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tom Hanks as paedophiles who murdered children and then harvested a chemical from their blood.

Many of the fascists in Giorgia Meloni’s party in Italy cluster around myths of racial superiority refracted through JR Tolkien’s novels and poetry.

Fascism does not just promote bizarre fictions. It moulds such ideas into a programme that can end with the horrors of the Holocaust.

Understanding the incoherence, emptiness and danger of fascist thought is important as a spur to us defeating it.