On his book Transatlantic Fascism: Ideology, Violence, and the Sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919-1945
Cover Interview of October 17, 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.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
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.