An Introduction
Meeka le Fay, a successful YouTuber and history major, released a video on July 24th, 2024, titled “the Fascist Physique: Weaponizing the Body”, which, despite portraying many aspects of Fascism in a quasi-correct light, seems to intentionally obfuscate the genuine ideology around of the movement of which she has mystified.
Le Fay correctly typifies futurism as an originator of the Fascist movement, correctly establishing core tenants of its philosophy of violence & masculinity, while on the other hand incorrectly accusing the same progressive movement (which she previously labelled as futurist) of reactionism and bourgeois-direction [1] [2].
Furthermore, she accuses Fascism of incoherent platforms, and displays a critical lack of insight into the ideological & philosophical basis of Fascism beyond the understanding of an aesthetician [2]. This curates a shallow & empty understanding of general ideology. To attribute to Fascism only an aesthetic value is intellectually dishonest and atypical for what is expected of an investigative piece on ideology.
Around 7:08 in Le Fay’s video, she accuses Fascism of a variety of things: first and foremost, of abuse of the discontent of the crowd, of reactionism (again), of ideological hatred, and of racialism. All of these points lack any real standing, even among modern scholars on Fascism such as Zeev Sternhell & A. James Gregor. Even more critical scholars of Fascism such as Robert Paxton & Stanley Payne do not attribute reactionism, racialism, or ideological hatred to Fascism. Additionally, Le Fay conflates national socialism with Fascism several times.
While this conception may be popular among pop-culture & pop-history, it lacks any accepted intellectual precedent or ideological value. We have written extensively here of the ideological differences between national socialism & Fascism but do request that Le Fay review her ideological misconceptions.
Further, Le Fay accuses Fascist states of an abuse of aesthetics in an attempt to dominate and control the masses in order to evoke their authority. The truth is that Le Fay lacks an understanding of the broader context of politics. All ideologies, regardless of their extremism or lack-thereof, utilize populistic tones to appeal to the crowd. To accuse Fascism of inventing this use-function is hypocritical. All states, whether Fascist or antifascist, utilize aesthetic systems of control to exist. The simple study of Gustov Lebon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind”, would suffice to demonstrate that even in liberal & democratic states, populism is a necessity to maintain mass power.
The Fascist Physique – A Philosophy
In some insanity, Le Fay accuses Marinetti, a man born in Egypt among Arabs, and raised in France amongst the French, of glorifying war solely for the purpose of suppressing revolution or “inferior races”. This is incredulous. The glorification of war in futurism & in the Fascism that followed it, is not the glorification of one race over another, or one power over another. War is powerful as a conduit for societal hygiene, breathing life into the national being through struggle. War is not for elimination. Le Fay accuses futurism of seeking war as an eliminative power. This is flatly wrong.
War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death.
The Doctrine of fascism
Le Fay correctly diagnoses two aspects of futurism: firstly, it’s opposition to the concept of “human nature” and its positioning of the femininity of motherhood in this nature, and secondly through this, a form of idealist misogyny. What Le Fay incorrectly diagnoses from this is “the pursuit of domination or control”. The futurists, and through them the Fascists, do not seek to control the individual on the level at which it is accused. Le Fay applies Orwell’s misunderstanding of totalitarianism to her own understanding of Fascist ideology, the notion that Fascism seeks complete robotic control over all facets of life.
Marinetti himself in “War, the World’s Only Hygiene”, can be quoted as stating: “All liberties should be given to the individual and the collectivity, save that of being cowardly”, while Fascism further can be seen upholding the concept of the individual which is not at all at odds with the state, in opposition to the liberal doctrine of the individual, but rather in union with the metaphysical concept of “the state”.
The nation is never complete—nor is the State simply the nation in its concrete political form. The State is always in fieri. It is all always in our hands. It is therefore our own immense responsibility.
the doctrine of fascism
Le Fay continues in this excessive insistence that Fascism is of the far right, when, if you were to ask Fascists of the era, you would find the complete opposite of the answer. Mussolini, Mosley, Giovanni Gentile, Georges Valois and Edmondo Rossoni all considered Fascism a phenomenon of the left.
The fascism I knew in my family is the libertarian, joyful, generous kind. I think of the revolutionary fascism of the beginning and the end, the one that doesn’t preserve but changes, the socialist and socialist-leaning one.
Luciano Lanna e Filippo Rossi
Such figures as Zeev Sternhell, directly in their research, that they do not consider Fascism to be of the right, but rather of the left or, at the very least, the center-left.
Finally, in her last statement before moving to the next chapter, Le Fay claims that Fascist states glorify suicide for political & social causes. Not only is this completely incorrect, but it borders on intentional dishonesty. While Fascism does promote a beautiful death, the beautiful death is meant to be obtained in struggle & in toil. Suicide is intolerable and disgusting to Fascism, as the Fascist conceives life not solely for the purpose of the individual. While endorsing the individual, Fascism, like all national movements, encourages a shared community of struggle. As such, every citizen is equally important, and equally valued.
The Fascist accepts life and loves it, knowing nothing of and despising suicide; he rather conceives of life as duty and struggle and conquest, life which should be high and full, lived for oneself, but above all for others — those who are at hand and those who are far distant, contemporaries, and those who will come after.
The doctrine of fascism
Yukio Mishima – The Tragic Story of Not-A-Fascist
Le Fay opens her new chapter by immediately implying that Japan, under its imperial military regime from 1934 to 1945, was Fascist. This claim is ridiculous. The Japanese military regime shared no commonalities with Fascism whatsoever, with the sole exception of militarism, a commonality between the vast bulk of regimes of the time regardless of their political affiliation. In fact, the very same military regime of the Emperor Showa had violently suppressed domestic Japanese Fascism. Figures such as Ikki Kita, who was executed for his ideological backing of the last attempt of the Fascists of the “righteous army” to seize power in 1936. To then claim that the regime which had violently suppressed Fascism and crushed Fascist revolt, was in fact Fascist, is absurd comedy.
Le Fay continues with a remarkably well-investigated and sensible reading of Mishima’s history until she again insists that Yukio Mishima is a Fascist, even though at several times throughout her own script, she admits that Mishima was an anti-Western reactionary, which puts himself in absolute opposition to the ideological & philosophical convictions of Fascism. Even Ikki Kita & his young officers upheld a very pro-West and anti-traditional concept of the Japanese state, going so far as to even promote the removal of the emperor, the destruction of the Samurai and an end to the Zaibatsu class.
Le Fay claims that Mishima’s cult of death and his insistence upon reactionism, is inherently Fascism. While the belief in a beautiful death is espoused by futurism, the promotion of seppuku enshrined in Mishima’s thought, finds no succor in Fascism. Rather, he formulates an ideology reminiscent of older Japanese ultranationalism, the very ultranationalism which put the Fascist ideology led by Kita to death in Japan, and although he may have written positively of Kita’s coup attempt, he shared none of the tenants which the young officers upheld, and instead assumes the suicides of young officers were of their own volition, in other words, that their deaths were in line with his ideological convictions.
Kita was the only one at that time who was anti-imperial in terms of historical theory and advocated social democracy
Junji Sakano
An era-comparable piece of art which more correctly understands Fascism in Japan is a film by Hideo Gosha titled “Four Days of Snow & Blood”.
Here again, Le Fay insists that the politicization of sports is either an inherently Fascist concept, or is bad, when in fact this is common to all nations. One would not claim that John F Kennedy is a Fascist for desiring to implement the La Sierra Highschool Physical Fitness regimen. Nor would one claim that the politicization of the Olympics is an example of Fascist praxis.
Le Fey attributes what is the cornerstone of all revolutionary movements, be they left, be they right, that is the construction of a base from dissatisfied and alienated peoples, and attributes this solely to Fascist or reactionary movements. One would seemingly forget that the largest and most vehement supporters of the Russian Social Democratic Party were the dispossessed and oppressed peoples of the Russian Empire; that being the Jews, Ukrainians, etc. etc. or how the core of the Jacobin movement in France centered itself around the “inactive citizenry”, the poor and dispossessed populace of the French lower class. This is a malicious, hypocritical attack on radical politics entirely, by labeling it as Fascistic for simply entertaining the disenfranchised underclasses of their respective societies.
Again and again, Le Fay attempts to attribute to Fascism the mysticism of a glorious forgotten past, despite the fact that Le Fay quotes Marinetti and seems to understand the broad aspects of futurism. She ignores the core tenets of Marinetti’s belief and of Fascism. While mythmaking is crucial to the curation of a state, there does not need to be the construction of a glorified past. Fascism denounces this concept. Previously quoted in “War, the World’s Only Hygiene”, “Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be cancelled by the Italian greatness a hundred times greater.” Although this quotation should not require a great amount of elaboration, it must be expanded upon, in that by itself it refutes the very basis of Le Fay’s primary claim formulated within her video: that Fascism requires a mystified and glorious past and that Yukio Mishima, by recalling this history, is a Fascist.
Yukio Mishima is many things. He was a talented writer. A troubled man. A good poet. A revolutionary of a reactionary sort– and the tragic end to a story of Japanese traditional culture. But what he was not, is a Fascist. He may be an ultranationalist, he may oppose the bourgeois in his own way, and he may insist upon a beautiful death, and a militarized society. But he holds no philosophical understanding of Fascism, and none of the ideological tenants which all Fascist states upheld. Within his writings, you’ll find no reference to a syndicalized economy, no mention of a union-run government, no adoration of pure democracy or of the noble-liberalism of Giovanni Gentile. Rather, you will find only the reactionary treatise of a deeply troubled man, who could not find his place in society.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoFwZZCbiK4&t=291s
- ibid.
- Gentile, Giovanni. Origins and Doctrine of Fascism: With Selections from Other Works Giovanni Gentile ; Translated, Edited, and Annotated by A. James Gregor. Translated by Anthony James Gregor, Transaction, 2009.
The Seamusite Fascisti 