The Appeal of Fascism

Vile ideologies like fascism 'work' or succeed in incarnating themselves by harnessing foot-soldiers to the developing movement. And these foot-soldiers - the necessary weight or mass without which the movement's leaders are utterly impotent - are drawn in by means of an appeal, not to the intellect or a desire for truth - though superficially this area will be dealt with - but by satisfying the two most forceful dichotomies and longings of the spirit: firstly the yearning for love and belonging, and secondly by legitimising and utilising hatred and its direct physical expression. 

As an ideology fascism is very simple: power and glorification of ego in some kind of fancy dress, so onto its successful enrolment of acolytes. Love as a force or feeling by its nature is not solitary, it brings us out of ourselves towards life beyond us, and so fascism will tap into this by pointing the individual towards the nation as the most powerful and true form of precisely this love, towards which ideal form all aspirations should be directed. In this bizarre cult, the nation is both that which is most worthy of the individual and collective mass of individuals' sense of love, but also is necessarily in itself the source of this love - while the leader and party are something of the Word made flesh. And along with this excessive and morbid focus on the holiness of patriotism is, for the active rank and file of the fascist movement, more intensely than the love of nation because less abstractly, the desire for love and belonging satisfied by the dwelling within a brotherhood of ardent fellow believers. This is the ancient tribal sense of belonging, which is of course very natural, and indeed should be satisfied healthily by society.

 The other drive satisfied is the legitimisation of hatred. The reason someone will be drawn into such blatantly toxic bodies, as fascism or communism, is that he is lacking greatly in self-worth, happiness and a sense of belonging, and thus the enormous bolstering of these facets by belonging to a strong group, united by not just beliefs but uniforms and dramatic spectacle! But beneath the exterior of such unhappy people lies - because human nature doesn't simply meekly dissolve in meek circumstances - very twisted and thwarted souls, seething with frustration and hatred which society doesn't ordinarily permit it to express; and now the fascist movement encourages precisely its expression in the most absolute physical forms directed against those external causes it can persuade itself is responsible for all this frustration and self-hatred in the first place. And thus the most ordinary and sad individuals within those SS suits are able to gain revenge, not so much on elements within life, but on life as whole. Where once they were small and inconsequential, now life quakes beneath them.

Much later edit: 

Of course all the above applies exactly to supposedly “anti-fascist” groups like Antifa, which are more or less indistinguishable from the fascists which allegedly gives them their whole reason for existence in the first place.