Ideas - What the far-right are borrowing from history’s fascism aesthetics

Episode Date: September 8, 2026

Fascism has been called “the aestheti-cization of politics.” Nazis and Italian Fascists both made visual culture, art, even fashion part of their destructive programs. Now the far-right in the U.S. is taking lessons from history, selling its ideas through memes, and hate-filled videos.

This week on two blocks from the White House. From trade wars to the war in Iran, it's been anything but a quiet summer in Washington. And this fall shows no signs of letting up. And so this week we're asking what moments defined American politics this summer and what can we expect this fall? Find and follow two blocks from the White House wherever you get your podcasts. And watch us on YouTube. New episodes drop every Wednesday. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas, I'm Nala Ayyed.

Zara Li Ander was a Swedish actress and singer who achieved her greatest success in the Third Reich, sometimes called Hitler's Hollywood. Zara Leander left Germany in 1943, two years before the end of the war, but never shook her reputation of being a Nazi film star. Theater, spectacle, performance. The fascists and the artists they worked with

argued that politics was art and art was politics. That's what we associate nowadays with fascist aesthetics. That politics should not just be the mundane business of government, but rather imagining new worlds, that a politician was an artist. Because the point about the aesthetics of politics and a fascism in particular is that it's not about making arguments. It's about building something deeper,

something that feels intuitive to the people participating. It seems so unlike fascism to be interested in art, to be interested in building something that feels intuitive. But during Mussolini's reign, Italy produced a movement, the Novocento, a group of painters inspired by Ildece's ideology. And Hitler loved Wagner and opera and classical sculpture. These things mattered to fascist dictators because they had a motive, a use for art. When Hitler organized the first sort of public display of Nazi art, which was defined in terms of the beauty of the body based on classical paradigms,

he's looking back for his model of Arianism and the perfection of beauty of the human body to classical Greece. And in this case, we know where this lid. to the eradication of the Jewish people physically, as well as culturally. So right there you have a notion of violence entailed in a notion of aesthetics. The whole Nazi project was a theatrical production, with Hugo Boss uniforms, the riding crops, the black boots, and the S&M, the whole sexual taboo. Winnipeg contributor Tom Jokinen looks at how the far right has used art,

architecture, and music as a weapon and still uses it. And it's not just historical fascism. Maybe Bad Bunny represents the end of American Empire. Maybe the end of my job and family, our future. Hard times for Bad Bunny, multi-millionaire, Grammy-winning pop star, but also a pawn in the American culture world. Wars. And that's because he speaks and raps in Spanish.

Among Maga supporters, this caused a massive outcry because they called it un-American. They said it cannot be that an artist is refusing to sing in English. Because certain political movements take music and art and fashion, what we call aesthetics, very seriously. Now they're giving us Bad Bunny. The Super Bowl has announced a new halftime show, Bad Bunny. Are you a big bad bunny guy? Not a fan.

Quit up. Not a fan. It's all over TikTok. Here's the gimmick. The more people engage in social media slop, the less that they notice that there are wars going on in the Middle East. We're creating sort of a media sphere, an aesthetic sphere, that's built around how to maintain the conflict. That is to a degree how all radical movements work. But it's especially true for fascist politics, which is built on moving people to sort of

an almost impulsive level of violence. I think you do see in some segments of the American far right that are part of the Trumpist coalition, you do see a deliberate effort to cultivate an image that harkens back to the historical fascism of the 1930s. There is a trending retweet of yours. You retweeted somebody from Ilducci, 2016. It was a Mussolini quote, but you didn't know it was Mussolini when you retweeted. It said, it is better to live one day as a long.

lion than 100 years as a sheep. That's a famous Mussolini quote. You retweeted it. Do you like the quote? Did you know it was Mussolini? It's okay to know it's Mussolini. Look, Mussolini was Mussolini. It's okay to... It's a very good quote.

So those politics have become, in a lot of ways, the aesthetics of the American state. What difference does it make, whether it's Mussolini or somebody else? It's certainly a very interesting quote. The Duke and the Marshal of Baternick assist them to prove experimental of new types of peri. This is fashionable fascism, the aesthetics of hate.

What we taste, smell, hear, touch, see the words that we can say, how we move through the world. I'm Zoe Roth, and I'm an associate professor of French and comparative literature at Durham University in the UK. fascism really narrowed down the range of these sensory experiences. So certain words were outlawed. Fascism dictated what you could and couldn't read. Well, if we don't want to live under fascism, we have to pay attention to the regimes of images and media that are being broadcasted to the public.

And what they imply about what an ideal body is, what an ideal government is, what human rights are, who we want in a state and who we don't want in a state, who deserves rights and who doesn't deserve rights. My name is A.V. Maracini. I'm a writer, critic, and art historian, as well as a professor and critic in residence at NYU. At the end of the day,

the regime of bodily perfection under fascism is a regime about control. The music here from Act 3 of Wagner's Meister singer, it can get under your skin, or it can drive you out of the room. It all depends on the context. If you see this opera live, you might just experience what Wagner had in mind, the escape from suffering through something abstract and powerful.

Or, if you were watching a film with this music, as an airplane descends from the sky, a swastika on the tail, a cheering crowd as it lands, people in traditional costumes, and then you see Adolf Hitler step out to receive flowers and Nazi salutes, as though a god had just ascended from heaven. And that's exactly what happens in the opening of Lenny Riefenstahl's 1934 film, Triumph of the Will. I want to start this film with Nuremberg, with the city.

To bring the city, a city is only a culture picture. To make it more interesting, I have had the idea to bring the plane with Hitler, not to show Hitler, only the clouds and the part of the plane. and so I can make it through the clouds. I see Nuremberg. And that is partially what Walter Benjamin is talking about when he talks about the introduction of aesthetics into political life. Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and cultural critic,

says that fascism wields aesthetics as part of a shell game to replace what you're not allowed to have in a fascist regime, human rights, property, wealth. Instead, fascism gives you a sense. substitute, spectacle. Which is the sense that you can kind of give people an experience of a new exciting kind of political engagement, but you leave the status quo intact. You're not redistributing wealth.

And that's the point of the Lenny Riefenstahl film, Triumph of the Will. Although she spent a lot of time after the war on German TV, even on the CBC, denying it. Lenny Riefenstow, you became famous as one might say at the focal point of many things that were going on in Germany at the time, Hitler Germany. And with the end of that period, a long silence. This silence needs explanation. Why? What has happened? You mean the time after the war?

Yes. We have lost the war. I think. Said us a question, yes? We have lost the war. I think one of the things that people think about or associate with fascist aesthetics are these sort of grand spectacles.

So we think about things like the Nuremberg rallies that were choreographed in large part to be filmed by Lenny Riefenstahl. I was living in Germany. And in this time, we have had this time. We are living in this. And if you remember, 90% of the people are enthusiastic in this time. It was a time before Hitler was coming.

We have had seven millions of people without work. So we have thought it will be better and better. We are not thinking about what can happen later. That was really our mistake. We know where this led, in the case of the Nazis, to the eradication of the Jewish people physically, as well as culturally. So right there, you have a notion of violence entailed in a notion of aesthetics. My name is Mark Antleff, and I am a professor of art history at Duke University. Three years later, Riefenstahl made the film Olympia about the 1936 Berlin Olympics,

famous for its depiction of athletes like Greek sculptures coming to life, fit and muscular, Aryan, blonde, and white. Great film, great work of cinema, and disgusting. When I look at her work, I think of fascist bodily control, of images of hearth and home, and wholesome bodies and whole bodies, and I think of Nazi policy not only toward homosexuals, but also toward people with disabilities. So for me, Reef and Shep and Shep and Shep in. is deeply evocative of a kind of hypothetical perfection of the body that thrived under fascism,

but continued well after that. The fascism that emerged in the 20s and the 30s in the 40s in Europe was obsessed with purity and cleanliness. There's this idea of what constitutes purity that goes back often to an idea of classics that is shaped by white supremacy. The Nazis are perhaps the original. preveyors of wellness culture. And you certainly see how wellness culture comes back in today's far right fascist movements. Right. And fitness and meditation and yoga and all ways of controlling the body, of really sort of bringing the body to heal and molding the body so that it's something that is within one's control, which is of course a complete fantasy.

In modern times, too, it's a subject that's launched thousands of podcasts. number one health and wellness podcast. Jay Shetty. Jay Shetty. He won, the only. Jay Shetty. When you have more muscle mass, everything else kind of falls into place. If you make changes in four key areas of your life, you can have a profound impact on so many

different aspects of your health. Buying cosmetics can become, for some, a question of morality, purity and superiority. Something that everybody needs to hear. If you don't change now, when will you? contemporary culture is obsessed with the aesthetics of the human body. Things like looks maxing and lip enhancement. But it's our choice. So is that such a bad thing?

There's a real idealization of particular kinds of bodies, of cleanliness. I guess it depends on what we mean by choice. If you're pure of body, then you're also ideologically pure. And that's the uncanny thing about us. They can be horrible to you and me and perfectly delicious to your neighbor. That's the great discovery of the 20th century fascists, or at least how they refined it. The emotions can be triggered by art and material culture and mobilized into political action. You have these charismatic leaders who are very aware of the power of aesthetic media.

So things like the radio, things like film. and the notion that you can broadcast, in particular, your voice into people's homes in very intimate spaces, encapsulates, I think, in a sense, what fascism meant. Transgressing that boundary between the private and the public, I think, was something very novel. Germany, 1933. early in the Nazi tenure. Propaganda minister Yosef Goebbels introduced the Volksmfonger, a radio for the people, cheap, made out of bakelight, accessible to working folk.

Radios up till then had been only for the rich and the privileged, but Goebel said, we want a radio that reaches everyone, a radio that works as an intermediary between the government and the people. Minister Goebbels has in five years of Nazi rule whipped 65 million people into a nation with one mind, one will, and one objective, expansion. The radio played a crucial role in Germany and in Italy, the fascist countries. I think certainly in Italy there is the sense which is rooted in history that the fascist era was the moment in which Italy entered modernity.

It was the moment where radios and cinema appeared. where motor cars started to where motor cars started to appear on the roads, where much of the peninsula's modern infrastructure was developed. So

if you're looking at a building with a modernist aesthetics, chances are it was built during the fascist era. My name is Joshua Arthur's and I'm a professor of History and Museum Studies at the University of Toronto. The Movement Futurista Italian

attira the tension of the world. The futurists were an artistic movement founded in Milan in 1909, a group of visual artists, poets, composers, playwrights. Led by Philippo Tomazzo Marinetti, who was a kind of combination of impresario, provocateur, performance artist, poet. Let's break out of the... the horrible shell of wisdom, and throw ourselves like pride-ripen fruit

into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind. Let's give ourselves utterly to the unknown, not in desperation, but only to replenish the deep wells of the absurd. And what brought the futurist together was a kind of generational revolt. We say that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty,

the beauty of speed, A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes like serpents of explosive breath. They shared this with other avant-gards in Europe prior to World War I, a generational revolt against what they saw as the staleness and corruption and sterility of European culture in the late 19th century, in the Fend de Sceckel, at the turn of the 20th century. The other avant-gardeauze The other avant-gards include Dada in Switzerland

at the Cabaret Voltaire, a movement founded by Hugo Ball who wore a paper suit and looked like a human rocket. Data was anti-war, anti-Bourgeois, while futurism was grooming a far-right political movement. And the Italian futurists were pushing back against a world

they thought had gone fat and stale. Their aesthetic to counter this staleness was built around speed, aggression, machines, conflict. We're going to burn museums. That's what he said

as a kind of metaphor of his iconoclasm. Burn museums. reject the Renaissance in favor of this embrace of modernity. That ancient cities like Rome or Florence and Venice needed to be burned down or flooded, that museums and libraries needed to be burned down, that there needed to be a new beauty in the world to replace the decadent culture

that had emerged after a century of European prosperity. Along with this embrace of modernity, Marinetti also venerated and celebrated violence, had a notion of a cult of the warrior, a cult of the combatant. And his movement was not only an aesthetic movement and a cultural movement, but it was also a political movement. How do you describe the kind of sound of the futurist? So it's extremely jarring, dissonant, often mechanical,

using homemade instruments with all kinds of grinding and whirring sounds that are meant to replicate the beauty of the machine age in their view. This music and these instruments were clearly meant to be provocations. And the futurist would hold these special soirees where they would have demonstrations of the music and poetry readings. And invariably at these swarets would break out and people would be aghast at what was going on on stage. and that's precisely the energy that the futurists wanted to provoke.

They wanted conflict and outrage and violence. And again, this is why they then will gravitate toward the early fascist movement. The futurists, in creeping with the celebration of machine, technology, primitivism, and the idea of militarism, founded a whole movement around the cult of the airplane, Aero Pitura, which celebrated machine technology in the context of aerial combat. The first ever aerial bombing mission was November 1911 near Libya. It was an Italian plane.

The pilot, Giulio Gavati, dropped four hand grenades wrapped in a leather pouch. The Ottoman Empire claimed the Italians had bombed a hospital. the first time in history, and not the last. The futurists were thrilled. And their ultimate vehicle for achieving this cultural revolution was war. And so they were early advocates for Italy's intervention in World War I. This is ultimately what brings them close to Mussolini, is their joint interest in war as a revolutionary instrument.

In their words, it is, is the hygiene of the world, a cleanser, a bath of warm blood. If Italy in the early 20th century was backward, underdeveloped, high illiteracy rates, a lack of identification with the nation state, that this was because Italians were too stuck in the past. They were too enthralled to what they called passatismo, pastism. And therefore, war would sweep all of these,

cobwebs away and paved the way for futurism, quite literally. Italy was part of the Triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany, but stayed neutral at the start of the war. A year later, they declared war on Germany as part of the Entente with Great Britain. By 1918, 460,000 Italians had been killed, and almost a million were injured. Many of these wounded men and their returning comrades would later become the source of Mussolini's power. Mussolini, hailed by his compatriots as the genius of Italy, addresses half a million fascists from the Piazza del Duomo in Milan.

Another popular song from the era, which is sort of like still around in neo-fascist circles, is called Facetta Neda, which means little blackface. And this was a song composed during the invasion of Ethiopia. It is a love song addressing an Ethiopian woman, an Abyssinian woman, saying, we are coming to liberate you from backwardness and ignorance and slavery. they still practiced domestic slavery in Ethiopia. And one of the justifications that the fascist gave for invading Ethiopia

is that they were going to end slavery. That was a humanitarian mission, even as they were basically enslaving Ethiopians themselves. But there is a whole discourse around Ethiopia eroticizing African women. Okay. Particularly because essentially it was only Italian men, soldiers and settlers, going over there. And so there was this fetishization of the beauty of Ethiopian women,

which then, in real terms, took the form of essentially taking on concubines or forced marriages to local women. And justification of rape during wartime, too, I would see. Exactly. Absolutely. One of the figures was this guy named Indian. Montanelli, who was a journalist, a famous journalist in the post-war years in Italy, but had served as a soldier in Ethiopia. And he proudly recounts in his memoir how he took a 12-year-old girl to be his bride during his time in Ethiopia. 1969, Italian TV talk show. Montanelli is sitting, leg crossed over knee.

I bought her from her father, he says. I bought her from her father, he says. I chose very well. She was beautiful. In Africa, he says, it's another thing. In Africa, he says, it's another thing. This is fashionable fascism, in the sense that I've bought by the father and that has accompanied.

This is fashionable fascism, the aesthetics of hate, by contributing. Tom Jokinen. I'm Nala Ayyed. This is Ideas. Hey, Nick, why should people listen to Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer? Because most of what we've been taught about the economy is just plain wrong and designed to make inequality even worse. Well, that's cheerful, but also useful. Every week, we talk to people who help explain how the economy really works and how we can make it work better for everyone, not just those of us at the very top. That's pitchfork economics. Check us out wherever you get your podcasts.

Modern Rome is an architectural palimpsest. The new, over the old, over the ancient, over the prehistoric. It's possible to come across an inscription or a mosaic of a sheaf of sticks bound together, the facies, the symbol of Mussolini's government. There's no commentary, no sign, no plaque. It's just there. If I went to Rome now. Contributor Tom Jokinen.

How much of the fascist fingerprint am I going to see on that city still? You would see a tremendous amount. So when it comes to their interventions in the historic center, the emblematic case is a street called the Via de Fori Imperiali, or the Road of the Imperial forums, which runs from Piazza Venetia, the kind of center of the city, to the Colosseum. And it passes by all the Roman forum and all the forums built by Rome's emperors.

It was explicitly envisioned as a monumental kind of procession space, a place for the black shirts to march. It was meant to be a triumphal route, just like the ancient Romans had their triumphal marching routes. So that road is how most tourists today engage with the historic center. Wow. Is it possible to talk about the impact over the decades since the war on Romans, on Italians, of this constant presence of fascist architecture and the fascist look of Rome constantly in their midst? I mean, what's been the impact? Since World War II, there have been moments of activation and other moments of obsolescence or neglect. a good example is that Rome hosted the Olympic Games in 1960. And the principal sites were fascists built athletic complexes that even today have inscriptions praising the ducce,

that have mosaics depicting various scenes from fascist history. There's a massive obelisk with Mussolini's name inscribed on it. And the political left, the Italian left in 1960, essentially said, how can we possibly host these Olympic Games with their message of peace and international unity

in a fascist propaganda site? Ultimately, they did something interesting, which was rather than remove anything, they added a couple of panels that marked the end of fact. But preserving the history, even if it's unsavory. Yeah, preserving it and preserving it and also preserving it without any kind of mediating explanation. So to this day, there are no plaques saying this is what these symbols mean. This is why this site was built as a place to train young men

to be warriors for imperial conquest. There isn't any explanation of that function. Instead, there is a celebration of this site as an achievement of modernist design. So it's regarded as a valuable heritage site that is just as worthy of preservation as, let's say, the Roman Coliseum or any other site in Rome. And for the Italian far right today, it's also a place of commemoration. So they will lay wreaths at the base of the Mussolini obelisk on his birthday or on the day that he was executed. Yeah, that's interesting. What kind of counter-narrative, like what public uprising against this stuff? There has been vandalism and graffiti and unsanctioned reaction? Yep, there has been, interestingly, particularly since 2020,

A lot of that popular action has been connecting Italian fascism and particularly its imperial conquests in Ethiopia to the global racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd. And so fascist sites, much like Confederate sites in the United States, are seen as racist sites. Okay, so you could have an anti-racist protest here and the contemporary fascists laying down a wreath to Mussolini there. There's all kinds of places to mark your ideology in Rome. Absolutely. Dole! Dole! Dole! The Nazis used art to shape an idea of nationhood and communicated that idea to the masses through media on the radio

and in exhibits like the July 1938 Great German Art Exhibition. When Hitler organized the first sort of public display of Nazi art, which was defined in terms of the beauty of the body based on classical paradigms. He's looking back for his model of Arianism and the perfection of beauty of the human body to classical Greece. The pieces were carefully chosen. Unlike the Italians, who cut some slack for the modernists, as long as they were ideologically in line,

the German Reich exercised a firm grip on its list of allowable artists and artworks. Pieces in the 1938 show included works by Adolf Ziegler, Hubert Vilm, Paul Schulz Noromberg, and others that you've never heard of unless you studied them at one time for a master's degree on Nazi art. Well, simultaneously, this exhibition, which opened up in a newly created neoclassical building, opened in 1938, that was paired with another exhibition of so-called degenerate art. All these forms of artistic production, which were basically the avant-garde,

were being vilified under this kind of dichotomy. That's art by African-American and Jewish artists, modernists. These works were meant to startle and frighten people who couldn't or wouldn't make sense of cubism or formalism, to stand as hallmarks of decadent. multicultural liberal society. The artist's label as degenerate by the Nazis included Picasso, Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Bittmandrian, Grant Wood, Kirch Witters.

The other target, American jazz. Meanwhile, what the anti-fascist revolutionaries had was a fragile solidarity, and for what it was worth, a grassroots aesthetic, the music of rebellion, folk songs, like Bella Chow, a 19th century song against oppression that would carry over to the Second World War as a partisan anthem.

Roughly translated, goodbye, beautiful. I woke to find the fascists at my door. If I don't make it, bury me there on the mountain. One of the effects of fascism is that it's so overwhelming. Zoe Roth of Durham University in the UK has taken the phrase, The Aesthetics of Fascism, and turned it into what she calls the anesthetics of fascism. So not so much an intensification, but a kind of numbing or paralysis of our senses. A kind of dental freezing for the psyche. It collectivized or homogenized bodily experiences.

So if you go back to these spectacles, you have all these people moving in choreographed motions that really reduce their individuality. Ultimately, I think fascism radically restricted how people could speak, how they could act, how they could behave. So in a sense, it's really deadening people's sensory worlds. Hannah Arendt calls totalitarianism a sandstorm. that sweeps away the fences of laws between men. And we might think about how there's all of this kind of constant change works on the nervous system. So people begin to feel overwhelmed, paralyzed, eventually numb.

Fascism needs that kind of deadening in order to work because it undermines the forces of resistance against it. I wonder if, For example, Hitler's National Socialist fascination with opera is part of this, a kind of medium that overwhelms the senses. It's everything. Do you think it fits in as an example? Well, we might think about this idea of the sublime, which obviously is not, you know, it's not a fascist idea. But the sublime is something that is both beautiful and it is something that is horrific as well. One thing that's interesting about this idea of the anesthetizing effect of fascism is you can't have a conversation with somebody who's drawn to that ideology. It's like having a conversation with somebody who's under anesthesia, who's asleep. It just won't work.

There's no dialogue to have there. Yeah. There's a sense in which the anesthetic element of fascism numbs thought as well. It makes it harder to have a dialogue. it makes it harder to discuss things with people. It made me think of this German term glycchaltung, right, which means literally synchronization. And this was a term that was from engineering,

which means coordinating electrical circuits. But in Nazi Germany, it described the policy of Nazification of bringing all political, cultural, and civic realms into line with national socialist principles. But we can also think about how, you know, it means being on the same wavelength and coordinating people so they are on the same wavelength. And I think that when you have fascism, this kind of this idea of Gleichshaltung, it's impossible to talk to people who are not on that wavelength.

And indeed, it can be very dangerous then if you don't plug into that kind of electrical grid. If you think about anesthesia as an inability to feel to register things in the body, then that means that we're not going to be able to remember things as well. in a sense of failure to remember the past is an effect of how fascism numbs the mind and the body in anesthetizing us. It means that we forget what it's like to live under fascism. And that is perhaps the biggest warning that we need to take from that period. That's really interesting because that was almost legislated in Spain after Franco's death was the idea that you forget, forget it, just forget it, pretend it never happened. Yes. Of course, it's very different in Germany where there were laws requiring people to remember. But that also has led to the situation today with like the AFD, the alternative for Deutschland, exploits this idea that people are, they're sick and tired of remembering. You know, there's almost a kind of a desire to forget what happened and the shame and the guilt that's associated with that. But along with that comes a forgetting of history.

Or a forgetting of specifics and a remembering of an idealized version, which is happening in Italy. It's this kind of nostalgia for Mussolini. Yes, a kind of, yeah, a sort of idealization of this mythical past, a mythical past that never really took place. There's the famous Susan Sontag essay from the 70s in the New York Review books talking about the sexualization of fascism. So I'm wondering, in talking even about Mussolini as the virile, shirtless philander, why this connection between sexualization and fascism? Well, as you say, I think at its core, it's about strength and virility and the assertion of masculine dominance. Mussolini very much cultivated this image.

He, for example, encouraged rumors. of his many infidelities and affairs and had himself photographed with beautiful actresses and socialites to reinforce this image that he was a man's man. One of the models for Mussolini's body language was actually an early film star in Italy called Machiste, who was basically a bodybuilder

and who appeared in films at the turn of the century as a kind of Tarzan-like figure, shirtless performing acts of strength. The paramilitary element of Nazism, which was extreme, you know, did embody the notion, should we say, of homo social community. So a bonding around mythic notions of male virility, stoicism, the exercise of violence in a disciplined way, collectivity. We could see that in Lenny Riefenstahl's triumph of the will.

One sees these images of the Nuremberg rallies with coordinated movements, individuals' loss in a mass, as it were, of a collective identity. The sum is greater than the parts that compose it. All this did lend itself to the notion of, homo-social bonding as a central thread. Femininity is restricted to a domestic sphere to procreation, really divorced from this warrior cult that was central to the fascists. And power means men. At first, it's national pride, as Mussolini boasts that all Italians will be straight and strong. Italian youth is built for better life and brighter future.

One of Sondag's other interests, and she herself was queer, was the queer culture of the New York downtown Demi Monda of her time. Even in a relatively short time, you know, we're talking about the early 1970s after World War II, people were already subverting leather or subverting bondage. We're taking something that had been used to oppress them and getting off to it. An instance where weatherproof leather strikes a new note in high fashion. And of course, the Nazis did have Hugo Boss uniforms, right? there is an intrinsic, sinister beauty. You can see it in Mapplethorpe photographs in the way he uses bondage aesthetics as well. And Sontag saw, I think, a salient connection between the aesthetics of domination and submission

and the aesthetics of the fascist state which relied on domination and submission on a mass scale. And I think she wanted to end her essay not on the expected note just of the condemnation of Refinstall, but say that there are other ways in which we can mobilize these. aesthetics that are not harmful that do not oppress people, but rather liberate an interest and titillate them. Do you think that's what she was trying to say, or was it more of a warning of overly cosmeticizing the reality of national socialism? I think it's both. I think she doesn't want national socialism to be redeemed, nor does she want us to engage in leather or bondage play or bondage porn without knowing its historical context or the reasons for it.

Well, one way to do that is to keep the connection to the roots of fascist aesthetics, the whips and the boots, what they were for in the first place. Susan Sontag went there in a different work regarding the pain of others. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is and how normal it becomes. can't understand, can't imagine. That's what every soldier and every journalist, an aid worker and independent observer

who has put in time under fire and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right. There's no sexualization of fascism in contemporary America. I mean, it's a very sterile kind of fascism. What do you think? I think amongst the alt-right, the younger, more extremist groups, I think that there is an aesthetic which is supposed to mimic the masculinity, the virility of historical fascism.

And this was something very much that was built into Italian fascism as well, is sort of Catholic conceptions around reproduction and domesticity. in the body politics of the Trump coalition, that that traditionalism looms very large. Under the Trump administration, we're standing strongly behind Americans of Faith, stopping the attacks on our values, our traditions, defending religious liberty, like no president. I believe like no president has ever done before. I do believe that. What does it take to be the greatest? Is it the blood, sweat, and tears soaked into the... canvas, is it a drive that burns inside when everything is on the line?

To his credit, he did erect a cathedral of sorts on the White House lawn in term two. A giant cage for barely dressed men to pummel each other nearly to death. On one night and one night only, we are going to pull off the boldest idea in sports history. Not so much a religious shrine More of a machiste movie come to real life We're having a big fight This is the moment we have all been waiting for You see the kind of pounding he'll take

And then all of a sudden it's over and the other guy's Not in good shape, right? It's a crazy name. Not in good shape He is a savage and he doesn't want away from anything We're having a big fight Big fight. Big fight.

I think you do see in some segments of the American far right that are part of the Trumpist coalition, you do see a deliberate effort to cultivate an image that harkens back to the historical fascism of the 1930s. Do you have any sense of the source of this? Like who's the architect of this propaganda strategy? We have figures like Steve Bannon that helped set up Trump's kind of political vision. Pang, bang, bang, I said, all we have to do is flood the zone. We have Stephen Miller, who really is driving a lot of the politics of this.

To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties. My name is Shane Burley. I'm a journalist in Portland, Oregon, and I write about the far right and about social movements and anti-Semitism. Trump has also really brought in only loyalists, and those loyalists are picking people for ideological reasons. And their ideological base, particularly with young people, are people that would have come up in this particular environment. So they know very clearly what they're doing. When they're

posting these sorts of memes or videos, they know what works with their audience because that is them. America's falling turned our men into women. Our billionaires get private islands where they're trafficking children. The flag is burning in the streets. We don't believe the politicians. We defunded the police and free speech has been restricted. And Canada has fallen. Their dollar ain't worth a buck. If you misgender someone there, you're getting fined or locked up. Trudeau censored the internet then they banned half the guns the trucker convoy was the last brother freedom in their lungs and the uk has fallen there's a whole world of mega rap you know a really popular example of this is tom mcdonald protests and riots covid record inflation the people lost their freedom great people

most people haven't heard of but if you were to search him on somewhere like facebook or like truth social or rumble you're going to see that millions of people are big fans of them and everybody that we know so just say it screw everything won't say it at the top of your lungs don't let it go out into the streets, I promise that you're not alone. Go and say what you're supposed. From Rap and Tom McDonald's, all the way back to Zara Leander, it's the aesthetics of hate.

But the way through an aesthetics of hate, is through real art. The kind John Berger says exposes brutality. So in the end, maybe the idea is to make more art, not the kind that puts you to sleep, but the kind that wakes you up. One morning, I woke up for lay.

Oh, Bella, chow, bella, chow, bella, chow, bella, chow, chow, chow. A morning, Make more art. The conclusion to fashionable fascism, The Aesthetics of Hate by contributor Tom Jokinen. Special thanks to Bill Siegman in New York, Jessica Lindsay and Madeline Green at CBC Victoria,

Elliot Fong and John Artel at KUCR in Riverside, California. Lisa Ayusa is the web producer for ideas, Technical production, Emily Carvezio, Sam McNulty, and Danielle Duval. Nicola Luxchich is the senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. Sorry! Are you good? Yeah, I'm good.

Are you sure? Yeah, let's go again. Hey! For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.