The Thought Architecture of Fascism
The logic of gigantic evil — Vienna lecture text
This is the text of a lecture to the Lecture to mark the 30th anniversary of @IFK_Vienna — the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, University of Art and Design Linz, delivered 14 June 2023. Some of the slides are in text…
Good evening and congratulations to the IFK on its 30th anniversary. What did we know for certain in 1993 when the Institute was founded? That communism had collapsed, revealing among its ruins such horrific evidence, on top of what we already knew, that it would certainly never return.
On top of this, fascism — in the form of a serious movement, a state, an authoritative intellectual current — had been completely vanquished in 1945. It was a finished historical episode.
This, indeed, was the foundational statement of fascist studies, outlined in Ernst Nolte’s book Fascism in its Epoch: fascism was the product of a time, place and social conditions that can never be repeated.
Today, both certainties are gone. We have a self-proclaimed communism in the People’s Republic of China which is in systemic competition with the West, desires an end to the rules based global order, has re-adopted a “Sinicised” Marxism as its ideology, and is coming to a lecture hall near you to…
