Postwar fascist intellectuals traded racial science for aestheticized cruelty as revolt

Evidence

The postwar writers no longer needed the scientific demonstrations of genetics, and they made little if any use of the collected works of Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which belonged already to the cultural household of the Philistines. They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade. If they believed at all in universal laws, they certainly did not particularly care to conform to them. To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content, and they elevated cruelty to a major virtue because it contradicted society’s humanitarian and liberal hypocrisy. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 784

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The move from needing scientific justification to purely aesthetic attachment — ‘blind partisanship in anything respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content’ — is a paradigm shift in how ideology attaches to content, applicable beyond fascism to how any exclusionary identity latches onto arbitrary targets.
• XREF: The claim that ideology can be content-free — attachment to anything banned, cruelty for its own sake — parallels later theorists (Sloterdijk on cynical reason, Žižek on ideology) and directly informs how Islamophobia functions as free-floating animus rather than coherent belief.