The Far Right and Magical Thinking
The political far right has had a long historical relationship with magical thinking. This article explores the connections and implications of the belief that thinking it makes it real by extreme right wing figures from the 1930s until today.
As Lord Davies points out so eloquently in this video, so much self-delusion lies at the heart of the Brexit project. Another term for it could be magical thinking. Magical Thinking is the belief that “one’s thoughts on their own can bring about effects in the world, or that thinking something amounts to doing it” (Oxford Dictionary of Psychology). The great weakness of the extreme right is a general and sustained belief in magical thinking — saying something makes it so, believing something means it is so. This assertion is based on numerous examples I will discuss below. From Mosley to Hitler to Mussolini, Pinochet to Franco and the modern Far Right of Farage, Örban and Le Pen. From Brexit to the chaos of Trump, to the bizarre revisionism of Bolsonaro and the bravado of Duterte. They all believe their own lies packaged as an “absolute, unconditional, self-determination” to use the words of Italian fascist thinker and writer Julius Evola.
Magical thinking can be contrasted with the projections of the traditional Left, which follow a collective goal orientated thinking; that the Revolution will come, that there will be victory and that it is just a matter of time before somehow things change and the utopian society is realised, but first everyone has to get in line and do some work…..(you, straight to Gulag!). At the present historical moment, the Right has increased its profile in many nations, and with it comes a strong sense of magical thinking. I would like to examine the far right and their obsession with magical thinking, beginning with perhaps the most famous example, deep in the Führerbunker in Berlin in late April 1945.
As the Russians encircled Berlin and began the final brutal push into the suburbs, Adolf Hitler continued to believe his own delusions and lies to the very end. He believed he had been betrayed, that “the Jews” had destroyed him, that his generals were incompetent, that he was the only effective military mind leading the army and that if he had only been able to work harder, and with greater obedience from his underlings, then his victory would have been total. Of course this is total (evil) magical thinking.
Up to the end Hitler believed his was a mission of absolute, unconditional, self-determination, that he was always destined to lead the German people to victory. But this deluded conviction was despite years of blunders and bad decisions on his part, both on the battlefield where he commanded that no army surrender or that offence was the best form of defence, and in the economy were he believed slavery and theft were sustainable economic strategies. Perhaps the height of his folly was Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, which opened up a double front and committed millions of his troops to the hopelessly stretched supply lines and brutal weather of the Russian steppes. The madness of the design of the German military uniforms was another example of the practical application of magical thinking, with disastrous results. But Hitler’s fanatical commitment to the destruction of the Soviet Union goes further back to his twisted ideas about racial types.
On 23 November 1939 Hitler declared that “racial war has broken out and this war shall determine who shall govern Europe, and with it, the world”. The racial policy of Nazi Germany portrayed the Soviet Union (and all of Eastern Europe) as populated by non-Aryan Untermenschen (“sub-humans”), ruled by Jewish Bolshevik conspirators. Hitler claimed in Mein Kampf that Germany’s destiny was to “turn to the East” as it did “six hundred years ago” (see Ostsiedlung). Accordingly, it was stated Nazi policy to kill, deport, or enslave the majority of Russian and other Slavic populations and repopulate the land with Germanic peoples, under the Generalplan Ost. The Germans’ belief in their ethnic superiority is evident in official German records and discernible in pseudo-scientific articles in German periodicals at the time, which covered topics such as “how to deal with alien populations”. This belief was the product of over a decade of Nazi doctrine being taught as facts in schools, via media and in universities. Anyone who opposed these ideas was either arrested or killed.
Before and during the invasion of the Soviet Union, German troops were heavily indoctrinated with anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic, and anti-Slavic ideology via movies, radio, lectures, books, and leaflets. Likening the Soviets to the forces of Genghis Khan, Hitler told Croatian military leader Slavko Kvaternik that the “Mongolian race” threatened Europe. Following the invasion, Wehrmacht officers told their soldiers to target people who were described as “Jewish Bolshevik subhumans”, the “Mongol hordes”, the “Asiatic flood”, and the “Red beast”. Nazi propaganda portrayed the war against the Soviet Union as both an ideological war between German National Socialism and Jewish Bolshevism and a racial war between the Germans and the Jewish, Gypsies, and Slavic Untermenschen (“sub-humans”). An ‘order from the Führer’ stated that the Einsatzgruppen were to execute all Soviet functionaries who were “less valuable Asiatics, Gypsies and Jews”. Six months into the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Einsatzgruppen had already murdered in excess of 500,000 Soviet Jews, a figure greater than the number of Red Army soldiers killed in combat during that same time frame. German army commanders cast the Jews as the major cause behind the “partisan struggle”. The main guideline for German troops was “Where there’s a partisan, there’s a Jew, and where there’s a Jew, there’s a partisan”, or “The partisan is where the Jew is”. Many German troops viewed the war in Nazi terms and regarded their Soviet enemies as sub-human. When it became clear that the Soviet forces were superior to the Germans, many of the German troops struggled to comprehend it as it contradicted their ideas based on the magical thinking of racial superiority.
Nazis, “grew up during a flowering of supernatural thinking across Germany and Austria. So even the Nazis who were skeptical recognized it as a profound theme. You have both Hitler and Goebbels in the 1920s acknowledging that ‘folkish [völkisch]’ thinkers are the ones most likely to join the Nazi Party. Many of these people want to wander around ‘clothed in bearskins,’ as Hitler put it in Mein Kampf, talking about mystical runes. Now Hitler and Goebbels said, ‘That’s not what our movement is about.’ (Slate, The Nazis were Obsessed with Magic). The Slate article goes on to discuss World Ice Theory (Welteislehre), a discredited cosmological concept proposed by Hanns Hörbiger, an Austrian engineer and inventor. Hörbiger did not arrive at his ideas through research, but said that he had received it in a “vision” in 1894. According to his ideas, ice was the basic substance of all cosmic processes, and ice moons, ice planets, and the “global ether” (also made of ice) had determined the entire development of the universe.
The fantasy of World Ice Theory suited the mythological needs of the Nazis, which were trying to reconstruct a pagan mythology based on the ancient Nordic stories. World Ice Theory supporters wrote things like: “Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man.”, “Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture — Hitler! — to put the Jewish politicians in their place, so it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of Jewish science.”, and “the Führer, by his very life, has proved how much a so-called ‘amateur’ can be superior to self-styled professionals; it needed another ‘amateur’ to give us a complete understanding of the Universe.” Magical thinking indeed.
Hörbiger had various responses to the criticism that he received. If it was pointed out to him that his assertions did not work mathematically, he responded: “Calculation can only lead you astray.” If it was pointed out that photographic evidence existed that demonstrated the Milky Way was composed of millions of stars, he responded that the pictures had been faked by “reactionary” astronomers. He responded in a similar way when it was pointed out that the surface temperature of the Moon had been measured in excess of 100 °C in the daytime, writing to rocket expert Willy Ley: “Either you believe in me and learn, or you will be treated as the enemy.” Adolf Hitler, an enthusiastic follower of World Ice Theory, adopted it as the Nazi party’s official cosmology. He claimed that Hörbiger was not accepted by the scientific establishment because “the fact is, men do not wish to know” (sounds familiar — Fake News my friends, fake news). The World Ice Theory was intended to form part of a planetarium Hitler planned to build on Linz’s Mount Pöstling. According to the structure’s plans, the ground floor was to centre around Ptolemy’s universe, the middle floor Copernicus’ theory, and the top floor, Hörbiger’s theory.
Oswald Mosley was one of Hitler’s greatest admirers outside Germany. From 1932 he led the British Union of Fascists until it was banned in 1940 and he was interned by the British Government until 1943. He was given a special post to solve unemployment in the Ramsay government in 1929. Mosley then boasted for the rest of his life of his acumen as an economist, which was mostly never tested. his radical proposals were blocked either by Lord Privy Seal James Henry Thomas or by the cabinet.
Mosley struggled to formulate policies that actually addressed the terrible conditions of the 1930s for the working class of Britain. He eventually put forward a scheme in the “Mosley Memorandum”, which called for high tariffs to protect British industries from international finance, for state nationalisation of main industries, and for a programme of public works to solve unemployment (sound familiar). However, it was rejected by the Cabinet, and in May 1930 Mosley resigned. The Mosley Memorandum was a standard fascist response to the problems of an emerging competitive global economy — isolate and set up public works with nationalisation of all industry unless it is owned by your wealthy backers. The Mosley approach failed to take into account the market conditions as well as production and consumption that had been created by 200 years of British imperial trade within the Empire. Rather than analyse the situation, Mosley and his supporters chose instead to blame ‘the Jews’.
Mosley’s antisemitism “proved to be a sign of the growing irrationalism of the movement perhaps best signified by Major Genera Fuller’s weird mysticism [a follower of Aleister Crowley from 1906–1911], Ezra Pound’s incoherence and the ludicrous personality projections of William Joyce , E. G. Clarke and A. K. Chesterton in their antisemitism.” (Thurlow p30). Mosley stated in a speech in 1935 that “Behind the Communist and Socialist mob is the alien, Jewish financier supplying the ‘palm-oil’ to make them yell.” This statement is clearly fanciful, with its word play and paranoia. The claim that any resistance to the fascist state comes from paid agitators is still used today by authoritarian and fascist governments. Then Fuller wrote in 1936, “There is, consequently, no magic in my system: if the masses yell “black!” I start with white and then examine it and ascertain whether it may not be grey or some other colour” (Fuller p465). Conspiratorial paranoia and fear are directed towards any doubt in the mind of the reader, but when one considers the statement, it means actually very little beyond hateful innuendo. It is based on the belief that the masses know nothing, therefore Democracy is a farce and only serves the mysterious powers behind the system. This is of course opinion, and enacting it as policy becomes the totalitarianism of fascism. Likewise the idea that fascist government is superior to other forms of government is also opinion.
Benito Mussolini invented modern Fascism, and his work inspired Hitler and Franco. In the words of Fuller “‘When Mussolini goes to war he does so whole-heartedly, and he selects his leading soldier to lead his men.’ The Italian approach to war was [presented as] a logical outgrowth of fascist politics. ‘Because the Fascist Government is a scientific political instrument,’ he argued, ‘it logically follows that the Fascist Army is a scientific military instrument.’” (Watson p 58). When Fuller wrote these words of praise for his employer, The Daily Mail (who also supported the Italian fascists and their invasion of Ethiopia), he was perhaps unaware of the hold Julius Evola had over Mussolini and his esoteric role in the formation of fascist Italy.
Julius Evola was an Italian writer born of minor aristocracy, who in adult life regaled against the modernity he saw around him with its feminism, multiculturalism, socialism and the like in the mid-Twentieth Century. He explored social theories, politics, magick, sex, art, yoga and religion. Evola adopted extreme metaphysical, magical, and supernatural beliefs (including belief in ghosts, telepathy, and alchemy), and his extreme traditionalism and misogyny. He himself termed his philosophy “magical idealism.” Many of Evola’s theories and writings were centered on his idiosyncratic mysticism, occultism, and esoteric religious studies and this aspect of his work has influenced occultists and esotericists. Evola also justified rape (among other forms of male domination of women) because he saw it “as a natural expression of male desire.” This misogynistic outlook stemmed from his extreme right views on gender roles, which demanded absolute submission from women. At the same time Evola suggested the superiority of men who threw off the conventional thinking of mass culture and took up the idea of being special:
What I am about to say does not concern the ordinary man of our day. On the contrary, I have in mind the man who finds himself involved in today’s world, even at its most problematic and paroxysmal points; yet he does not belong
inwardly to such a world, nor will he give in to it. He feels himself, in
essence, as belonging to a different race from that of the overwhelming
majority of his contemporaries. — Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul (1961), Baron Julius Evola, Introduction
Mussolini read Evola’s Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race in August 1941, and met with Evola to offer him his praise. Evola later recounted that Mussolini had found in his work a uniquely Roman form of Fascist racism distinct from that found in Nazi Germany. With Mussolini’s backing, Evola launched the minor journal Sangue e Spirito (Blood and Spirit). While not always in agreement with German racial theorists, Evola traveled to Germany in February 1942 and obtained support for German collaboration on Sangue e Spirito from “key figures in the German racial hierarchy.” Fascists appreciated the palingenetic value of Evola’s “proof” “that the true representatives of the state and the culture of ancient Rome were people of the Nordic race.” Evola eventually became Italy’s leading racial philosopher.
Evola blended Sorelianism with Mussolini’s eugenics agenda. Evola has written that “The theory of the Aryo-Roman race and its corresponding myth could integrate the Roman idea proposed, in general, by fascism, as well as give a foundation to Mussolini’s plan to use his state as a means to elevate the average Italian and to enucleate in him a new man.”
In May, 1951, Evola was arrested and charged with promoting the revival of the Fascist Party, and of glorifying Fascism. Defending himself at trial, Evola stated that his work belonged to a long tradition of anti-democratic writers who certainly could be linked to fascism — at least fascism interpreted according to certain Evolian criteria — but who certainly could not be identified with the Fascist regime under Mussolini. Evola then declared that he was not a Fascist but a “superfascist”. He was acquitted.
Donald Trump’s former chief adviser Steve Bannon noted Evola’s influence on the Eurasianism movement; According to Joshua Green’s book Devil’s Bargain, Evola’s Revolt Against the Modern World had initially drawn Bannon’s interest to the ideas of the Traditionalist School. Alt-right leader Richard B. Spencer said that Bannon’s awareness of Evola “means a tremendous amount”.
Like the other fascists mentioned in this text, the philosophy of Evola and those he influenced relies on a form of magical thinking. Evola’s magical idealism is defined by himself as;
It is that if we conceive history as existing in itself, as therefore imposing the bad misfortune of a group of given elements from which, in one way or another, the current moment would come to be conditioned, a demonstration of the historical necessity of magical idealism in truth could have value only as a true rebuttal of magical idealism itself, since the fundamental principle of this doctrine is absolute, unconditioned self-determination. What cannot therefore happen if something stands against the I, that is simply given to it, something that is there without the participation of its will.
“Absolute, unconditional, self-determination” or the belief in a personal mission of will, sounds like it includes that “one’s thoughts on their own can bring about effects in the world, or that thinking something amounts to doing it” (Oxford Dictionary of Psychology). Such a self-absorbed sense of reality, as it is so dependent on total determination resulting in domination, can easily spill over into opinionated delusion if not psychosis. There is also a clear sense of magical thinking imminent in such a self-image.
Today, an increasingly authoritarian line is peddled in the USA with the ‘Drain the Swamp’ slogan an example of how it is sold to the common citizen:
- Ronald Reagan, who called to “drain the swamp” of bureaucracy in the federal government in 1983.
- Pat Buchanan during his 2000 presidential campaign, when he invoked the saying in opposition to the dominant political parties: “Neither Beltway party is going to drain this swamp: it’s a protected wetland; they breed in it, they spawn in it”.
- Donald Trump to describe his plan to fix problems in the federal government. Subsequent protests against the role of Goldman Sachs alumni in his administration also used the metaphor.
- Traditional Unionist Voice on the front cover of their manifesto for the 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly election.
- Henry Bolton, the leader of UKIP when referring to the NEC on 22 January 2018.
Draining the swamp when used as an appeal to the masses for change is illogical by its vague generalisation. However it is a powerful metaphor, referencing fears of disease, danger and the threat of a rising tide or flood. It can be considered magical thinking as it does not refer to a specific thing and was not real (as the video linked below asserts), but it appeals to emotional and wishful elements in the electorate posited upon the idea that thinking something amounts to doing it.
Donald Trump has masterfully exploited this American tendency to embrace unreason and ignore facts. In doing so, he gains support from the powerful forces that benefit from the promotion of magical thinking and solidifies the votes of those groups whom he seems to champion, at least in the short term. This same selling of simple idea based on pandering to the individual ego, either through mysticism and nationalism (e.g. the specialness of being British and the Brexit movement) was critiqued in the first Disney cartoon telling the tale of Chicken Little in 1943:
In the Trump administration, for example, there is no serious scientific opposition to the idea of human activity being a significant factor in climate change, and by ignoring the science the administration is advocating environmentally dangerous policies, Trump at once endears himself to the petrochemical industry and displaced coal miners who desperately want to believe Trump’s ascientific and deeply cynical line. The emergence of a powerful natural gas industry that sells an abundant, relatively cheap, and more environmentally tenable product ensures that promises of bringing back the coal industry are hollow and cruel.
Donald J. Trump once used his Twitter feed to post a quote attributed to Benito Mussolini, the founder of the fascist movement, from a parody account. The tweet compared the Italian dictator to Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination.
The @ilduce2016 account even features a profile picture that is a composite of Mr. Trump’s hair and Mussolini’s face. “Il Duce” was how Mussolini was known by Italians. While this is a clumsy example of the fascistic tendencies of Trump, it supports the idea of a continuity of thought between the current President of the United States and the magical thinking of a hundred years of fascists. The machismo and wishful theme of the quote used by Trump reflects the idea that personal will, as “a lion” can bring about a grand life and victory for the special man. This same wishfulness is present in the Brexit campaign from the rightwing side of the debate.
The magical thinking of Brexit is best typified by the bus slogan that will live in infamy: ‘We send the EU £350 million a week, let’s fund our NHS instead — Vote Leave’.
Many commentators maintain that the evocative message emblazoned on the side of the German manufactured Neoplan Skyliner bus swung Britain’s referendum to leave the EU in the favour of the Leave side, plunging Britain into a period of uncertainty, embarrassment and economic peril. The claim that voting to Leave the EU would somehow (not actually stated on the bus) result in £350 million a week remaining in the UK is perhaps the most infamous example of magical thinking in recent times. In 2016 the UK Statistics Authority described the £350 million claim as “potentially misleading” as it didn’t take into account the rebate which is applied before Britain pays its contributions to the European Union. FullFact described the claim as a “clear misuse of official statistics” in September 2017. However, Boris Johnson has doubled-down on the contentious claim. “There was an error on the side of the bus. We grossly underestimated the sum over which we would be able to take back control,” Johnson, who played a lead role in the Brexit campaign, told The Guardian. The former Foreign Secretary (2016–2018) continues to believe his own magical thinking.
This same magical thinking flowered late in the Brexit process when it became clear that the division by a border on the island of Ireland was going to make a simple exit from the EU impossible. The response to the new “Irish Question” from the right wing of the Tory party was to ignore it. To dismiss the invisible line that is the border as ‘imaginary’. But the problem is the so-called “Troubles’ were far from imaginary. Life was removed from the equation as bomb blasts and shootings, and pitched battles in the street filled the TV screen. This flaw in the Brexit plan must have been considered somewhere along the line, but it seems to have been ignored in favour of magical thinking, as in when Jacob Rees-Mogg stated; “It’s not a border that everyone has to go through every day. But of course for security reasons during the Troubles, we kept a very close eye on the border to try and stop gun-running and things like that.” History invents itself when in the hands of those that benefit from its reinvention.
Fascism generally appeals to an exaggerated sense of self, combined with a strong sense of bespoke tradition and an aggressive mistrust or hatred of modernity and liberalism. Power defines how fascism creates the individual subject. In this way the individual is not the subject of Free Will according to rational thought under a consensus morality that projects out from the democratic tradition. Rather the individual is subservient to the hierarchies of belief, as practiced by those with power according to the state apparatus. This leads to a deficit between observation and assertion. Magical thinking is the mother to propaganda, which Joseph Goebbels said is;
To attract people, to win over people to that which I have realised as being true, that is called propaganda. In the beginning there is the understanding, this understanding uses propaganda as a tool to find those men, that shall turn understanding into politics. Success is the important thing. Propaganda is not a matter for average minds, but rather a matter for practitioners. It is not supposed to be lovely or theoretically correct. I do not care if I give wonderful, aesthetically elegant speeches, or speak so that women cry. The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right. I speak differently in the provinces than I do in Berlin, and when I speak in Bayreuth, I say different things from what I say in the Pharus Hall. That is a matter of practice, not of theory. We do not want to be a movement of a few straw brains, but rather a movement that can conquer the broad masses. Propaganda should be popular, not intellectually pleasing. It is not the task of propaganda to discover intellectual truths. Those are found in other circumstances, I find them when thinking at my desk, but not in the meeting hall. (Joseph Goebbels, Speech on 9 January 1928 to an audience of party members at the “Hochschule für Politik”, a series of training talks for Nazi party members in Berlin),
(Large parts of this text are lifted directly from other non-proprietary sources).
Citations
Liam Liburd, Empire and the articulation of fascism: The British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940 https://thelanguageofauthoritarianregimes.wordpress.com/2017/06/14/empire-and-the-articulation-of-fascism-the-british-union-of-fascists-1932-1940/
J. F. C. Fuller, Memoirs of an Unconventional Soldier (London: I. Nicholson and Watson, 1936)
Richard C. Thurlow (1976) Racial populism in England, Patterns of Prejudice, 10:4, 27–33, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.1976.9969321
Rebecca Onion, The Nazis were Obsessed with Magic: What can their fascination with the supernatural teach us about life in our own post-truth times? Slate Magazine AUG 24, 201710:47 AM https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/08/an-interview-with-historian-eric-kurlander-about-his-book-hitlers-monsters-a-supernatural-history-of-the-third-reich.html
