[Preview] Cultic Groups and Nationalism
By JJ Mazzucotelli
Umberto Eco, an Italian Historian who lived through Mussolini’s Italy attempted to identify the traits of Facsim in his essay “Ur-Fascism”. He believed Syncretism was one of the said traits, and defined it as “not only, as the dictionary says, ‘the combination of different forms of belief or practice’; such a combination must tolerate contradictions. Each of the original messages contains a silver of wisdom, and whenever they seem to say different or incompatible things it is only because all are alluding, allegorically, to the same primeval truth. As a consequence, there can be no advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.”
Eco believed it was the Syncretism between Traditionalism and the Occult that gave birth to Fascism, providing the example of when “The most influential theoretical source of the theories of the new Italian right, Julius Evola, merged the Holy Grail with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, alchemy with the Holy Roman and Germanic Empire.” Other examples can be found in Esoteric Hitlerism, a pan-Hindu belief system, and Aum Shinrikyo, a Japanese cult that found a new home in post-soviet Russia. In simpler terms, Syncretism within this context can be defined as the mixing of Occult beliefs with with nationalistic beliefs in order to create a new fascist practice. The prolific and dangerous of these examples in America is Chrisitan Identity, the pieces of which can be found in the modern KKK, neo-nazis, and even in more distant belief systems like Aum Shinrikyo.
Eco grew up in Mussolini’s Italy and was intimately familiar with his form of fascism. His definition of Syncretism, which allows for the blanket denial of truth under authoritarianism and is a recognized phenomenon in the field of cultic studies, although typically goes under a different name. The British sociologist Colin Cambell is credited with coining the term The Cultic Milieu in his 1972 article “The Cult, the Cultic Milieu, and Secularisation”. Campbell defines the cultic milieu as “… the sum of unorthodox and deviant belief systems together with their practices, institutions, and personnel and constitutes a unity by virtue of a common consciousness of deviant status, a repetitive and syncretistic orientation and an interpenetrative communication structure. In addition, the cultic milieu is united and identified by the existence of an ideology of seekership and by seekership institutions.” The cultic milieu is often employed subconsciously to isolate followers of the belief system and control how they think.
When discussing how Cults can isolate and control how people think, Cult Expert Steven Hassan’s BITE Model is also incredibly helpful. Hassan developed this model by studying the work of Robert Jay Lifton, Margaret Singer, Edgar Schein, Louis Jolyon West, and others who studied brainwashing in Maoist China as well as cognitive dissonance theory by Leon Festinger. It provides an approachable set of criteria for analysis while not being so reduced that it is no longer useful. It isn’t a perfect system by any means, but it allows an approach to the concept of Mind Control within the Nationalistic cult setting.
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