Editing Fascism (section)

==Culture==
===Aesthetics===
[[File:Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.jpg|thumb|[[Filippo Tommaso Marinetti]]]]
In ''[[The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]]'' (1935), [[Walter Benjamin]] identifies [[aestheticization of politics]] as a key ingredient in fascist regimes.{{sfnp|Jay|1992|pp=41–42}} On this point he quotes [[Filippo Tommaso Marinetti]], founder of the [[Futurism (art)|Futurist]] art movement and co-author of the [[Fascist Manifesto]] (1919), who [[Violence in art|aestheticizes war]] in his writings and claims "war is beautiful."{{sfnp|Benjamin|2008|pp=36–37}}

In ''[[Simulacra and Simulation]]'' (1981), [[Jean Baudrillard]] interprets fascism as a "political aesthetic of death" and a vehement [[countermovement]] against the increasing rationalism, secularism, and pacifism of the modern Western world.<ref>{{harvp|Baudrillard|1994|p=48}}: "Fascism itself, the mystery of its appearance and of its collective energy, ... can already be interpreted as the 'irrational' excess of mythic and political referentials, the mad intensification of collective value (blood, race, people, etc.), the reinjection of death, of a 'political aesthetic of death' at a time when the process of the disenchantment of value and of collective values, of the rational secularization and unidimensionalization of all life, of the operationalization of all social and individual life already makes itself strongly felt in the West. Yet again, everything seems to escape this catastrophe of value, this neutralization and pacification of life. Fascism is a resistance to this, even if it is a profound, irrational, demented resistance, it would not have tapped into this massive energy if it hadn't been a resistance to something much worse. Fascism's cruelty, its terror is on the level of ''this other terror that is the confusion of the real and the rational,'' which deepened in the West, and it is a response to that."</ref>

The standard definition of fascism, given by Stanley G. Payne, focuses on three concepts, one of which is a "fascist style" with an aesthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political liturgy, stressing emotional and mystical aspects.{{sfnp|Payne|1980|p=7}}

Emilio Gentile argues that fascism expresses itself aesthetically more than theoretically by means of a new political style with myths, rites, and symbols as a lay religion designed to acculturate, socialize, and integrate the faith of the masses with the goal of creating a "[[New Man (utopian concept)#Fascism|new man]]".{{sfnp|Payne|1995|pp=5–6}}

Cultural critic [[Susan Sontag]] writes:

{{Blockquote|Fascist aesthetics ... flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domination and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force. The fascist dramaturgy centers on the orgiastic transactions between mighty forces and their puppets, uniformly garbed and shown in ever swelling numbers. Its choreography alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, 'virile' posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.{{sfnp|Sontag|1975}}}}

Sontag also enumerates some commonalities between fascist art and the official art of communist countries, such as the obeisance of the masses to the hero, and a preference for the monumental and the "grandiose and rigid" choreography of mass bodies. But whereas official communist art "aims to expound and reinforce a utopian morality", the art of fascist countries such as Nazi Germany "displays a utopian aesthetics – that of physical perfection", in a way that is "both prurient and idealizing".{{sfnp|Sontag|1975}}

According to Sontag, fascist aesthetics "is based on the containment of vital forces; movements are confined, held tight, held in." Its appeal is not necessarily limited to those who share the fascist political ideology because fascism "stands for an ideal or rather ideals that are persistent today under the other banners: the ideal of life as art, the cult of beauty, the fetishism of courage, the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community; the repudiation of the intellect; the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders)."{{sfnp|Sontag|1975}}

===Popular culture===
{{Further|Art in Nazi Germany|Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda}}
[[File:Bundesarchiv Bild 183-S34639, Joseph Goebbels und Leni Riefenstahl crop.jpg|thumb|upright|Joseph Goebbels with film director [[Leni Riefenstahl]] in 1937]]
In Italy, the Mussolini regime created the {{lang|it|Direzione Generale per la Cinematografi}} to encourage film studios to glorify fascism. Italian cinema flourished because the regime stopped the import of Hollywood films in 1938, subsidized domestic production, and kept ticket prices low. It encouraged international distribution to glorify its African empire and to belie the charge that Italy was backward.{{sfnp|Ben-Ghiat|2015|p=60}} The regime censored criticism and used the state-run Luce Institute film company to laud the Duce through newsreels, documentaries, and photographs.{{sfnp|Sorlin|2007|pp=111–112}} The regime promoted Italian opera and theatre as well, making sure that political enemies did not have a voice on stage.{{sfnp|Berezin|1991|pp=640–641}}

In Nazi Germany the new [[Reich Chamber of Culture]] was under the control of [[Joseph Goebbels]], Hitler's powerful Reich Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda.{{sfnp|Overy|2005|p=361}} The goal was to stimulate the [[Aryanization (Nazism)|Aryanization]] of German culture and to prohibit postmodern trends such as [[surrealism]] and [[cubism]].{{sfnp|Steinweis|1996|pp=159–160}}{{sfnp|Barr|1966|pp=17–18}}