From How Fascism Works (Jason Stanley, 2020) pp152-5
In fascism, the state is an enemy; it is to be replaced by the nation, which consists of self-sufficient individuals who collectively choose to sacrifice for a common goal of ethnic or religious glorification. In a tension that we will explore in the next chapter, fascist ideology involves something at least superficially akin to the libertarian ideal of self-sufficiency and freedom from “the state.”
Cities, in the fascist worldview, are collective enterprises where people rely on public infrastructure, “the state,” for survival and comfort. Residents of cities do not hunt or grow their food, as in fascist mythology; they Purchase it at stores. This runs counter to the fascist ideal of rural agrarian self-sufficiency. In fascist ideology, it is the nation that provides, not the state – – small ethnically or religiously pure communities composed of self-sufficient individuals working as a community. We find clear evidence of this ideology in the contemporary United States as well. In the 2017 poll discussed on page 145, there was also a particularly large gulf between rural and urban respondents to the poll surrounding notions of hard work and self-sufficiency. When asked “In your opinion, which is generally more often to blame if a person is poor?” Forty-nine percent of rural residents agreed with the response “lack of effort on their own part,” while 46 percent agreed with the response “difficult circumstances beyond their control.” In contrast, only 37 percent of urban residents agreed with the response “lack of effort on their own part,” whereas 56 percent agreed with “difficult circumstances beyond their control.”
To boost the nation, fascist movements are obsessed with reversing declining birthrates; large families raised by dedicated homemakers are the goal.’4 In fascist politics, cities are denounced as sites of declining birthrates, which are blamed on the supposed weakening effect of cosmopolitanism on a population. making men and women less capable of fulfilling traditional gender roles (as soldiers and mothers, for example). In a 1927 speech by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, he writes, “At a certain point the city starts growing in a diseased, Pathological way, not through its own resources but through external support…. The increasing infertility of citizens stands in a direct relationship to the rapid and monstrous growth of the cities…. The metropolis spreads, attracting the population from the countryside which, immediately it has become urbanized, becomes sterile just like the population which is already there…. The city dies, the nation… is now made up of people who are old and degenerate and cannot defend itself against a younger people which launches an attack on the now unguarded frontiers.”
Mussolini denounces the world’s great cities, such as New York, for their teeming populations of nonwhites.
In fascist ideology, the city is a place where members of the nation go to age and die, childless, surrounded by the vast hordes of despised others, breeding out of control, their children permanent burdens on the state.
Fascist politics characteristically represents the minority populations living in cities as rodents or “parasites” living off the honest hard work of rural populations. As Hitler writes in Mein Kampf:
“Originally the Aryan was probably a nomad and then, as time went on, he became settled; this, if nothing else, proves that he was never a Jew! No, the Jew is not a nomad, for even the nomad had already a definite attitude towards the conception “work.” .. In the Jew, however, that conception has no place; he was never a nomad, but was ever a parasite in the bodies of other nations.“
In the National Socialist education system, “Jews are not seen in the occupations of factory worker, bricklayer, blacksmith, locksmith, miner, farmer, plasterer. In other words, the Jew avoided work with his hands and avoided heavy labor while living off the sweat of his neighbors. He is a parasite, like the mistletoe on a tree?”17 In fascist politics, the laziness of minorities in cities is cured only by forcing them into hard labor. Hard labor, in Nazi ideology, had a remarkable power: It could purify an inherently lazy race.
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