On his book Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945
Cover Interview of October 18, 2010
The wide angle
Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by the “sacred.”
This intertwining of the secular with the sacred is central to an understanding of Argentine fascism and is thoroughly explored in the book. I stress the complex interaction between secularizing processes and religious tradition and practice. The book focuses on the quasi-religious dimensions of fascism that complexly overlapped with the Catholic “sacred.”
This relation was not devoid of conflicts. But antisemitism, and with it anticommunism, provided both fascists and Catholics on the far right with a common intellectual battlefield on which to join forces as well as a symbolic shared space for enacting fascist ideology.
As a political religion, Argentine fascism was embedded in Catholicism, as the fascists understood it. In this context they resorted to antisemitism as the best metaphor to represent the internal enemy.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
The wide angle
Fascism was a cross-regional civic religion in its most extreme form. In certain Catholic countries fascism reoccupied places previously held by institutional religion but also let itself be invested by the “sacred.”
This intertwining of the secular with the sacred is central to an understanding of Argentine fascism and is thoroughly explored in the book. I stress the complex interaction between secularizing processes and religious tradition and practice. The book focuses on the quasi-religious dimensions of fascism that complexly overlapped with the Catholic “sacred.”
This relation was not devoid of conflicts. But antisemitism, and with it anticommunism, provided both fascists and Catholics on the far right with a common intellectual battlefield on which to join forces as well as a symbolic shared space for enacting fascist ideology.
As a political religion, Argentine fascism was embedded in Catholicism, as the fascists understood it. In this context they resorted to antisemitism as the best metaphor to represent the internal enemy.