Gene Veith on Modern Fascism Revisited

In 1993, I published a book titled Modern Fascism: Liquidating the Judeo-Christian Worldview. In it, I showed that the various fascist movements in Europe of the 1930s and 1940s were facets of the modernist movement, particularly, the branch of that movement that morphed into postmodernism. I also showed that the intellectual establishment of the 1990s, as represented in the academia of the time, was still holding to the ideas of the intellectual establishment of the 1930s that gave us Adolf Hitler, the Holocaust, and World War II, as if those catastrophes had never happened. But, as I wrote,

My concern is not so much with the current intellectual scene as it is with what might come next. What will the “post-contemporary” movement look like, once the postmodernists have successfully discredited objectivity, freedom, and morality? What sort of society will be erected on the rubble, once the Western tradition is deconstructed?

“What might come next”? Well, Tabletalk magazine asked me to revisit my book to see how it stands up nearly three decades later. Reading it again after all these years was an unsettling experience. Much of what I predicted and warned against has come true. And even when I was wrong, I was wrong in underestimating the magnitude of the fascist revival…

To continue reading Gene Veith’s essay, “Modern Fascism Revisited,” from the November, 2021 issue of Tabletalk magazine click here. Also, at the beginning of WHI episode 1598 featuring Gene Veith, selections were read from Dorothy Sayers’ 1940 classic essay “Creed or Chaos.” To download a PDF of this essay CLICK HERE.