Thread by @TAJackson20

Today is Family Day here in Canada, but my family can't visit until tomorrow, so it's time to post about books.

A. James Gregor's "Mussolini's Intellectuals"
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sergio Panunzio and the Maturing of Fascist Doctrine

Last time: Gentile & Spirito proposed to de-liberalise/de-individualise conceptions of property so as to merge all social classes into a national gestalt consciousness of worker-capitalists. Everyone from commies to Evola hated this idea, but Mussolini didn't give a fuck.

This was mainly because Mussolini didn't care what he was doing so long as it worked.

Unfortunately, priority would shortly have to be given to less intellectual but more pressing concerns.

Accordingly, a more pragmatic intellectual comes to prominence. You may remember Panunzio from chapter 4 when, faced with the failures of syndicalism, he reformed his movement into national syndicalism, a project to turn the entire nation into a syndicate.

This is not to say that there's any fundamentla disagreements or anything like that. One of the things the fascists understood was that every movement needs a common intellectual tradition, which means a shared *arche* even more than a shared telos.

"One of their ideologues was more autistic than the other one. Therefore, fascism is incoherent." t. liberals.

This is what the anti-fascists latched onto, by the way. Truely, a much more radical difference than anything seen in Marxism or Liberalism.

The Fascists, as we learned before, were utterly obsessed with catching up to the development of advanced nations (one of *many* things which makes "American fascism" an oxymoron) and this drive only intensified with the Great Depression.

Note the fascist definition of what a "nation" is. Ethnicity isn't enough, it needs a shared tradition, spirituality, & language. The definition is explicitly Aristotelean; the state & people are a hylomorpihc union; the state is the soul of a nation & the people are the body.

(Now compare this with Hitler, who only cared about the "ethnicity" part and consequently tolerated weird neopagan cults in his security forces.)

Here, Panunzio identifies the single greatest flaw in liberal/socialist/anarchist ideology. Namely that

SOVEREIGNTY 👏 IS 👏 CONSERVED 👏

(Authority is inherent in all human societies because humans are, to quote Alasdair MacIntyre, "dependant rational animals." Sorry, libs.)

Let this be a lesson: no matter how sane and how well-intentioned you are, garbage in is still garbage out.

"Why is this good? Why should I be good at all?"
"Because you feel like it."
Modernism is emotivism, folks.

Anyway, speaking of how bad modernity is, reminder that @KANTBOT20K is our most knowledgeable and sincere public intellectual, and that the only reason he appears "ironic" is because of the absolute state of the dumpster fire that is modern education.

A second example:

Ugh.
Ultimately, fascism, for all it's positives, is the methadone to liberalism's heroin. It's not as bad as the real deal and it might help you transition out, but you're gonna have to quit it too at some point or you'll end up back exactly where you started.

What to even call this? "Spiritual positivism?"

So, if the whole point of this is to fuse the population together into a transcendental nation-spirit, where does the "Mussolini is always right!" stuff come from? From trying to make "general will" into a coherent and non-insane idea.

As Carl Jung famously put it in reference to Germany's variant of fascism: "Hitler is himself the nation. That incidentally is why Hitler always has to talk so loud, even in private conversation — because he is speaking with 78 million voices."

"Democracy" really just means "things I like," doesn't it?

And so, in one of history's grand ironies, it was Italians that completed the system of German Idealism.

But just because we're focusing on Panunzio in this chapter, don't forget the bigger picture. Panunzio was meticulous and thorough, but not particularly imaginative.

This appears to be a needlessly convoluted way of avoiding the question of political authority. "So, the state can tell me what to do?" "Well, TECHNICALLY..."

But, in any case, philosophy isn't really what Panunzio's goal is, so that's tolerable.

For instance, I am 100% on board with his thesis that revolutionary dictatorships are a unique phenomenon resultant of modernity.

Two things:
1. It's kind of weird reading this when anti-communism was the motivating for of most of these fascist groups, but the logic seems sound.
2. Looking at Hong Kong and Spain today, I have to admit that Panunzio was right about the Falange and the Kuomintang.

This isn't to say that he found all revolutionary dictatorship movements fungible; this critique of Leninism is brutal.

Ouch.

And it wasn't just commies that Panunzio was critical of. Socialists love to go on about how Trotsky predicted Hitler's actions, but no one ever mentions this.

It is through these reservations and critiques that he starts to pay more attention to Actualism, though he never 100% agreed with Gentile.

...Not that there wasn't a VERY good reason for that.

Mussolini treats this with characteristic chad irreverence, this time literally. Any virtue can be a flaw in the wrong place, I suppose. At least the Pope got Vatican City back.

All of this puts Panunzio in a bind. Can the circle be squared? Will he find a third way for his, well, third way?

The answer is "not really," sorry to disappoint.

Despite these conflicts, work goes ahead and the fascist state takes shape. As ever, parliaments just can't get shit done, even (especially?) technocratic parliaments.

Either way, things solidify and the system withstands the Great Depression better than any other western nation. With the house in order, it's time to commence fascist foreign policy.

Speaking of, remember how Panunzio was warning everyone about an alliance with Nazis? They really should've listened.

Next time: tying it all together.