Totalitarian Decisionism & Human Rights: The Re-emergence of Nazi Law
By Antifascist
Many scholars have written about the characteristics of the totalitarian state. Umberto Eco has listed fourteen attributes of the fascist state and its ideology. I want to focus on two of them: irrationalism and decisionism. Eco has them listed as attributes 2 and 3.
| The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is
seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense
Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism. 3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Hermann Goering's fondness for a phrase from a Hanns Johst play ("When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun") to the frequent use of such expressions as "degenerate intellectuals," "eggheads," "effete snobs," and "universities are nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values. Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html |
| Fascism has an irrational element that rejects modern
thought because it conflicts with traditional beliefs of the
Christian religion and because fascism views communist ideology
as a child of the Age of Reason and Jewish intellectuals. The
Nazis were well aware that Karl Marx was a German Jew. Evolution
is seen as modernist and is rejected in favor of Christian
creationism. This debate is repeating itself today in American
society with Christian fundamentalism attempting to gain control
of state education. Very closely related to irrationalism is “decisionism” in which action is seen as a value in itself. This is an existential element in fascism that elevates action over thought. Action is a sign of unambiguous power, and thought is associated with weakness and indecision. Carl Schmitt, a Nazi Law constitutional jurist, wrote that a decision is “(an actual historical event) and not within that of a norm (an ahistoric and transcendent idea).” The a priori is overshadowed by the posteriori. Actions over abstract principles, Fact over Idea, Power over pure thought, Certainty over ambiguity are the values and ideological norms that are primary in a totalitarian state. After fleeing Germany, Marcuse wrote in 1934 a critique of German fascist society and attempted to identify those beliefs and philosophical themes found within fascist ideology. Marcuse believed that the seeds of fascism could be found in the Capitalist Democratic Liberal State, which over time mutate as Monopoly Capitalism gain control of the State as in the case of Germany. The evolution of Capitalism is also the concealed dialectic of Fascism. Those mutated liberal democratic ideas and values are betrayed by a totalitarianism based on action and force. Using Germany as his example of a fascist society Marcuse writes: |
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And within the political sphere all
relationships are oriented in turn toward the most extreme
“crisis,” toward the decision about the “state of emergency,” of
war and peace. The true possessor of power is defined as beyond
all legality and legitimacy: “Sovereign is he who decides on the
state of emergency.” (Carl
Schmitt, Politische Theologie,1922). Sovereignty is founded
on the factual power to make this decision (decisionism). The
basic political relationship is the “friend-enemy relationship.”
Its crisis is war, which proceeds until the enemy has been
physically annihilated. There is no social relationship that
does not in a crisis turn into a political relationship. Behind
all economic, social, religious, and cultural relations stands
total politicization. There is no sphere of private or public
life, no legal or rational court of appeal that could oppose it. |
| From what social idea in Capitalistic Liberalism did this decisionism evolve? It is none other than the economic hero, the free independent entrepreneur of industrial capitalism. |
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The idea of the charismatic, authoritarian
leader is already preformed in the liberalist celebration of the
gifted economic leader, the “born” executive. |
| The total-authoritarian state is born out of the Liberal
state and the former concept of the economic leader is
transformed into a Fuhrer. We can see this mutation of the concept of the “born” executive into the leader-state (Fuhrerstaat) in George Bush’s speech and actions. An uneducated but privileged man, George Bush, has merged the idea of the CEO with that of the State Leader. But society has also made this same concatenation of ideas. He is a president of action and seen as a “strong” president. He is doer and not a thinker and his followers are proud of this persona. His opponents are “feminine” and members of the “reality based community.” Consequently, the Bush administration has attempted to engineer the executive branch to be the strongest in American history by claiming “inherent” presidential powers. It is precisely the concept of “state of emergency” that Bush has used to grab more and more state power in the name of security. He has instituted the hyper-surveillance of Americas with the Patriot act, which is based on the same justification Nazi Law used to empower the Fuhrer. A Bush lawyer and advisor, John Yoo, wrote, |
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Just two weeks after the September 11
attacks, a secret memo to White House counsel Alberto Gonzales’
office concluded that President Bush had the power to deploy
military force “preemptively” against any terrorist groups or
countries that supported them—regardless of whether they had any
connection to the attacks on the World Trade Towers or the
Pentagon. |
| Carl Schmitt, a Nazi Law constitutional jurist in Hitler’s Third Reich, wrote a similar justification of power for the State Leader using the concept of the “exception” in his work “Political Theology,” |
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Hence, the thundering opening of his treatise: 'The sovereign
is he who decides on the exception.' It is a disturbingly
'realistic' view of politics, which, in the manner of Hobbes,
subordinates de jure authority to de facto power: autoritas, non
veritas facit legem. (The law is made by the one who has
authority (i.e. power) and not the one who possesses the truth
(the legitimate sovereign).) |
| When the Bush administration argues that increased presidential power is needed to fight terrorism by suspending or overriding the constitutional protections against search and seizures, they are arguing the principles of Nazi constitutional law. |
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Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday
vigorously defended the Bush administration's use of secret
domestic spying and efforts to expand presidential powers,
saying "it's not an accident that we haven't been hit in four
years." Talking to reporters aboard his government plane as he
flew from Islamabad, Pakistan to Muscat, Oman on an overseas
mission, Cheney said a contraction in the power of the
presidency since the Vietnam and Watergate era must be reversed.
"I believe in a strong, robust executive authority and I think
that the world we live in demands it. And to some extent, that
we have an obligation as the administration to pass on the
offices we hold to our successors in as good of shape as we
found them," he said. |
| Against these ever expanding powers of the State stand the once traditional individual freedoms upheld by the Liberal Democratic State. The theologian and philosopher of the Age of Reason, Immanuel Kant wrote… |
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Human right must be kept sacred, no matter how great the sacrifice it costs the ruling powers. One cannot go only halfway and contrive a pragmatically conditioned right….All politics, rather, must bend the knee before sacred human right… |