Instructive bad reading, Part I: Dissecting fascism with the help of “Might is Right”

Editor’s Note: This is part four of a four-part series on the white suprema­cist text Might Is Right and the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can fas­cism. This series looks at how ideas stat­ed out­right in that late nine­teenth cen­tu­ry text have con­tin­ued to have influ­ence into the present day, from Satanists and Chris­t­ian fun­da­men­tal­ists to pale­o­con­ser­v­a­tives and right-wing terrorists.

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… Racism may wear a new dress, buy a new pair of boots, but nei­ther it nor its suc­cubus twin fas­cism is new or can make any­thing new.

— Toni Mor­ri­son, nov­el­ist and schol­ar (1995)

You start out in 1954 by say­ing, “N—–, n—–, n—–.” By 1968 you can’t say “n—–” — that hurts you, back­fires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced bus­ing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re get­ting so abstract. Now, you’re talk­ing about cut­ting tax­es, and all these things you’re talk­ing about are total­ly eco­nom­ic things and a byprod­uct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the bus­ing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N—–, n—–.”

— Lee Atwa­ter, Repub­li­can cam­paign oper­a­tive (1981)

In 2018, the video essay­ist Har­ry Brewis put for­ward the idea that cer­tain works of media are use­ful­ly illu­mi­nat­ing because they are bad art.

That is, because their cre­ators are so art­less, the works insuf­fi­cient­ly seduce and dis­tract from what mes­sage the authors are real­ly saying.

Thus a film like The Room, writ­ten, direct­ed by, and star­ring the incom­pe­tent Tom­my Wiseau, is far more use­ful to under­stand­ing how abu­sive men make movies about their failed rela­tion­ships than, say, a gift­ed screen­writer like Char­lie Kauf­man who can hide it much bet­ter.

Sim­i­lar­ly, in 2015, the Bal­ti­more-based video essay­ist Natal­ie Wynn had an insight in the wake of protests about the death of Fred­die Gray in police cus­tody: the sort of vio­lent, vir­u­lent­ly racist state­ments peo­ple were mak­ing anony­mous­ly online in response to the cov­er­age was­n’t sep­a­rate from the rest of their lives.

“I thought that if peo­ple are leav­ing these com­ments, they’re think­ing these thoughts all the time,” she told Vice.

She real­ized they would go on to vote and march and kill accord­ing to those same thoughts. Wash­ing­ton Post colum­nist George Will is less impor­tant to under­stand­ing what moti­vates con­ser­v­a­tives than is SSJ4Teen88_Pepe.

The memes, the “jokes”, the irony and exag­ger­a­tions are, in fact, height­ened expres­sions of their ide­ol­o­gy and need to be reck­oned with, not laughed off.

Peo­ple are more than capa­ble of being dead­ly seri­ous about what oth­ers would assume to be absurd, and the ama­teurs may be more awk­ward than the pro­fes­sion­als, but they’re all play­ing the same game.

It’s with that util­i­ty in mind that I rec­om­mend the turn of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pro­to-fas­cist work Might Is Right by the pseu­do­ny­mous Rag­nar Redbeard.

It is as boor­ish as it is pre­ten­tious; it is as bor­ing as its struc­ture is dif­fi­cult to fol­low. The author hates all art that isn’t Shake­speare, but to call the poet­ry he writes “dog­ger­el” is to heap undue praise on it. It’s also grotesque­ly and unapolo­get­i­cal­ly big­ot­ed in vir­tu­al­ly every way at every turn.

This book’s val­ue comes from its ter­ri­ble­ness in craft as well as substance.

Despite being writ­ten one hun­dred and twen­ty-five years ago, Might Is Right makes plain how old and per­va­sive the roots of fas­cism are in our own country.

In the process, it shows — with­out mean­ing to — why ideas like white suprema­cy, patri­archy, con­ser­v­a­tivism, and cap­i­tal­ism have such intrin­sic har­mo­ny even today.

That’s the thing about dog-whis­tles: just because you can’t hear the fre­quen­cy does­n’t mean they aren’t still just as loud.

Might is Right was pub­lished in 1896 in Chica­go under the orig­i­nal title “Sur­vival of the Fittest: Phi­los­o­phy of Pow­er”. Its author was Arthur Desmond, an Australian/New Zealan­der white suprema­cist who’d been a jour­nal­ist and failed also-ran local politi­cian before being forced to flee both countries.

But “Rag­nar Red­beard” fit the writ­ing itself bet­ter than “Arthur.”

Per­haps not sur­pris­ing­ly for a per­son clear­ly obsessed with wealth, suc­cess, and force, Desmond was poor, had lit­tle suc­cess him­self, and accom­plished noth­ing by force. He’s such a minor fig­ure in his­to­ry, many aspects of his biog­ra­phy includ­ing his death aren’t pinned down. We’re not sure of his birth name because he is of so lit­tle con­se­quence as a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure out­side of this one book.

Yet Desmond was con­vinced his book was some­thing laud­ably special.

With supreme con­fi­dence he sent a copy to Russ­ian writer Leo Tol­stoy, who appar­ent­ly did read it, includ­ing Desmond’s shots at him.

Tol­stoy men­tioned it in his own book “What Is Art?”, but Tol­stoy says noth­ing com­pli­men­ta­ry. He uses Desmond’s book as an easy exam­ple of what’s fun­da­men­tal­ly wrong with the artists of his own time.

Tol­stoy sum­ma­rizes the book’s mes­sage thus:

Right is not the off­spring of doc­trine but of pow­er. All laws, com­mand­ments, or doc­trines as to not doing to anoth­er what you do not wish done to you, have no inher­ent author­i­ty what­ev­er, but receive it only from the club, the gal­lows, and the sword. A man tru­ly free is under no oblig­a­tion to obey any injunc­tion, human or divine. Obe­di­ence is the sign of the degenerate.

“The author has evi­dent­ly by him­self, inde­pen­dent­ly of Niet­zsche, come to the same con­clu­sions which are pro­fessed by the new artists,” Tol­stoy goes on to con­clude, per­haps unchar­i­ta­bly toward the oth­er artists.

Oth­er­wise, Might Is Right most­ly lan­guished after its ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion, rid­ing on the coat­tails of Niet­zsche as oth­ers described it as the same phi­los­o­phy as Niet­zsche but with an “Amer­i­can expres­sion.” That may just be a euphemistic way to say it enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly hat­ed Jews and non-whites. Its Social Dar­win­ism was pop­u­lar but not excep­tion­al and cer­tain­ly not revolutionary.

The book like­ly would have been for­got­ten com­plete­ly if the eth­ni­cal­ly Jew­ish Howard Lev­ey had­n’t picked it up, seen the need to laun­der it of its most odi­ous anti­semitism and slurs, then re-pack­aged sec­tions of it as his own under the name “Anton Szan­dor LaVey” to become the first sec­tion of The Satan­ic Bible.

We’ll return to this, but LaVey res­cued from the dust­bin of his­to­ry a nine­teenth cen­tu­ry book that had essen­tial­ly said “take what you want by what­ev­er force nec­es­sary because you’re an indi­vid­ual and you’re free” — but he excised the explic­it basis on which you base that free­dom to mere­ly imply it.

The ideas remained the same, but LaVey had moved them from lit­er­al­ly using the n‑word into “forced bus­ing” ter­ri­to­ry. After his appro­pri­a­tion of Might Is Right was rec­og­nized in 1987, LaVey con­tin­ued to praise the book publicly.

What I saw should not have been in print. It was more than inflam­ma­to­ry. It was sheer blas­phe­my. As I turned the pages, more blas­phe­my met my eyes. Crazy as it was, I found myself charged at the words. Peo­ple just did­n’t write that way.

For­ward to “Might Is Right”, Anton Szan­dor LaVey (Octo­ber 1996)

Between the under­ly­ing ideas and that sort of endorse­ment, it’s no sur­prise that flocks of rugged indi­vid­u­al­ists would want to read for them­selves the same pure work that had inspired their hero. Since it had been long enough to fall out of pro­tect­ed copy­right sta­tus, mul­ti­ple small pub­lish­ers were able to reprint the book and it’s dis­sem­i­nat­ed wide­ly on the Inter­net now.

In com­ment­ing on it, Might Is Right’s boost­ers will often describe the book and its prose as “out­ra­geous”, “rad­i­cal”, or “elec­tri­fy­ing”, but it real­ly is the lazi­est form of reac­tionary pol­i­tics in every way, down to “there are too many divorces these days.” It is a defense of the struc­tures and hier­ar­chies of the sta­tus quo, defend­ing inequal­i­ties as they are because, by exist­ing, they prove they’re the nat­ur­al ones that should exist. It wor­ships vio­lence as not just a legit­i­mate source of author­i­ty but the only source of authority.

Human rights and wrongs are not deter­mined by Jus­tice, but by Might. Dis­guise it as you may, the naked sword is still king-mak­er and king-break­er, as of yore. All oth­er the­o­ries are lies and — lures.

The sci­ence fic­tion author Robert Hein­lein wrote some­thing sim­i­lar in his 1959 nov­el Star­ship Troop­ers; he put it in the mouth of an author-sur­ro­gate high school teacher and intend­ed it to be tak­en as seri­ous wisdom.

When adapt­ed for a movie, Dutch-born direc­tor Paul Ver­ho­even, whose for­ma­tive years were under the Nazi occu­pa­tion, decid­ed to uti­lize the same speech but with­in the con­text of a satire of fas­cist propaganda.

Hein­lein’s polit­i­cal writ­ing need­ed no mod­i­fi­ca­tion to work as self-par­o­dy.

This is inter­est­ing because, at the time, review­ers had to won­der whether a name so over-the-top as “Rag­nar Red­beard” with con­tent so obvi­ous­ly absurd was­n’t intend­ed as reduc­tio ad absurdum. 

“We have been a lit­tle puz­zled, it must be con­fessed, to know whether Dr. Red­beard’s work is to be tak­en quite seri­ous­ly,” The Humane Review won­dered in 1900, an exam­ple of Poe’s Law near­ly a cen­tu­ry before the Inter­net. But Desmond was dead­ly seri­ous, and more impor­tant­ly, mul­ti­ple gen­er­a­tions of angry young men have tak­en him dead­ly seri­ous­ly as they take their inspi­ra­tion from it.

If you’re a lib­er­al who under­stands that the best way to fight bad ideas is to pro­vide greater expo­sure to them, this should be good news, espe­cial­ly giv­en how poor­ly writ­ten and obvi­ous­ly grotesque the work is. Sun­light is the best dis­in­fec­tant, robust debate in the mar­ket­place of ideas, and so on.

A year ago this month, a 19-year-old mass shoot­er attacked the Gilroy Gar­lic Fes­ti­val in Cal­i­for­nia, killing three as well as him­self, and injur­ing 17 more while stream­ing it. As he did, he told his audi­ence to read Might Is Right.

Our pop­u­lar his­to­ry edu­ca­tion, from pub­lic school cur­ricu­lum to enter­tain­ment, is not going to be ful­ly accu­rate on any sub­ject, but fas­cism is a par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult myth for us to han­dle in the Unit­ed States.

His­to­ry class­es are lin­ear and often don’t get much past the Sec­ond World War before it’s time for all the fund­ing-deter­min­ing test­ing to take place. Stu­dents get left with an under­stand­ing of “Amer­i­ca good, Nazis (and Sovi­ets) bad.”

Our com­mon knowl­edge reduces fas­cism to be entire­ly equiv­a­lent to Nazi Ger­many, embod­ied whol­ly and per­son­al­ly in Adolf Hitler. We’ve come to let him rep­re­sent tran­scen­dent, inhu­man evil as com­plete­ly as Euro­pean Chris­tian­i­ty let Jesus Christ do the same for the con­cept of goodness.

Though intend­ing crit­i­cism, seri­ous peo­ple today still unin­ten­tion­al­ly ele­vate the pro­pa­gan­da of Leni Riefen­stahl’s images and Joseph Goebbels’ rhetoric with the result that we view the Third Reich as more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced than all oth­er gov­ern­ments of their day, uber-effi­cient in indus­try, and supreme­ly capa­ble in war rather than the cor­rupt, inco­her­ent, and self-sab­o­tag­ing klep­toc­ra­cy it was.

There is a ten­den­cy, for some rea­son, for many to believe that morals and empa­thy are arti­fi­cial con­straints hold­ing humans back from their full, awful poten­tial, and they are drawn to that con­cept as like a for­bid­den spell.

Hitler and the Nazis thus become an almost super­nat­ur­al aber­ra­tion, out­side of and a break from all human his­to­ry before and since. They are meant to be scary but to have noth­ing to do with us beyond being fright­en­ing antagonists.

For that rea­son, to take events con­tem­po­rary to us or take actions of our own ances­tors and com­pare them with Hitler, the Nazis, and fas­cism risks the imme­di­ate response that you’ve engaged in an insult­ing hyperbole.

The phrase “con­cen­tra­tion camp” has already been swept into one, tiny cor­ner of all his­to­ry and equat­ed with “exter­mi­na­tion camp” at the expense of all sim­i­lar ver­sions, before and after. But the Holo­caust was an end, not the begin­ning, and the Nazis do not stand as the only fas­cists in his­to­ry, or even the first.

Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni took a com­mon sort of Ital­ian orga­ni­za­tion and turned it into some­thing else, giv­ing us the last­ing name for a com­mon kind of polit­i­cal move­ment: Fascism.

Many sim­i­lar move­ments exist­ed through­out Europe before and after the Sec­ond World War. When the Nazis rolled their tanks into Aus­tria, they pushed out the Catholic nation­al­ist “Father­land Front” to replace Aus­tro-Fas­cism with their own pan-Ger­man Fas­cism. Roma­nia had the Nation­al Chris­t­ian Par­ty as well as the Iron Guard. Hun­gary and Yugoslavia had their Fas­cist polit­i­cal fronts, but so also did France, Great Britain, and yes, the Unit­ed States.

Umber­to Eco’s 1995 essay “Ur-Fas­cism” famous­ly tries to make a coher­ent bun­dle of all these dis­parate groups, start­ing from his own expe­ri­ence as a boy in Italy dur­ing the war and know­ing noth­ing but Fascism.

Eco comes up with four­teen fea­tures that func­tion as some­thing of a clus­ter for genre, like selec­tive pop­ulism and cult of tradition.

Eco deter­mines:

“Fas­cism became an all-pur­pose term because one can elim­i­nate from a fas­cist regime one or more fea­tures, and it will still be rec­og­niz­able as fascist.”

It turns out, one can even elim­i­nate regimes and a pop­u­lar fol­low­ing to find exam­ples of it. In the next install­ment of this series, we’ll exam­ine what fas­cist rea­son­ing (plain­ly stat­ed) looks like, and why under­stand­ing it is cru­cial to rec­og­niz­ing why the so-called hypocrisy Amer­i­can lib­er­als are fond of point­ing out among con­ser­v­a­tives actu­al­ly is entire­ly self-consistent.

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