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Rebirth and Ruin: Understanding Fascism’s Appeal with Roger Griffin

Roger Griffin is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on the socio-historical and ideological dynamics of fascism. His work also explores the intersections of modernity and violence, particularly the political and religious fanaticism that fuels contemporary terrorism. His influential theory defines fascism as a revolutionary form of ultranationalism driven by a “palingenetic” myth—a vision of national rebirth through a radical new order. Since the mid-1990s, this theory has significantly shaped the field of comparative fascist studies.

In recognition of his contributions, Griffin was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Leuven in May 2011. His academic journey began more than forty-five years ago at what was then Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University. Under his tenure, the institution has grown into one of the UK’s top new universities, with its history department frequently lauded for research excellence in the RAE/REF assessments of 2001, 2008, and 2014.

Extending his research on Nazi fanaticism and modernity’s impact, Griffin has also become a key figure in the study of terrorist radicalization. His contributions to understanding and mitigating radicalization reflect a humanistic approach to extremism within and beyond academic circles. His “heroic doubling” theory underpins a major research initiative involving multi-agency collaboration aimed at scientifically addressing the root causes of terrorism.

Griffin’s insights into fascism’s relationship with religion, ultranationalism, totalitarianism, aesthetics, and modernism are detailed in his major works, including The Nature of Fascism, Modernism and Fascism, Terrorist Creed, and Fascism: An Introduction to the Comparative Study of Fascism. His scholarship is widely referenced, particularly in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, and has garnered attention as far afield as South Korea, China, and Japan.

Griffin’s fascination with the subject was shaped by two formative experiences: a visit to the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in East Germany during the Cold War and his mentorship under Robert Murray, a scholar who studied fascism after fighting to liberate Italy from the fascists during the Second World War.

Roger Griffin
Roger Griffin at Oxford Brookes University in 2013.

Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Professor Griffin, your research spans a wide range of topics, including the cultural, ideological, and modernist foundations of fascist movements, as well as the psychological underpinnings of terrorism. Scholars often trace their lifelong dedication to a particular field to a pivotal moment or a confluence of experiences. Could you share what initially sparked your interest in these areas of study?

Roger Griffin: Well, there’s a simple, narrative version of the story, and then there’s a deeper explanation. The narrative version involves two key moments in my life. The first was when I found myself in East Germany in 1967 during the Cold War while studying German literature and culture.

We were taken to Weimar to visit Goethe’s study, the small house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, often called the German Shakespeare, wrote much of his work. Later that afternoon, while staying in a Soviet-run hotel, we were bused to another location: the site of a Goethe oak tree, believed to have been one of Goethe’s favourites. However, this tree was located at Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where it was sometimes used to torture prisoners.

The tree had been used as a symbolic element by the Nazis, and there was a display detailing the atrocities committed at the camp. Interestingly, the exhibit that the Soviet authorities had installed presented Buchenwald primarily as a concentration camp for communists, redacting mention of the Jewish victims and the Holocaust. Confronted with this stark juxtaposition of German cultural achievement and the Nazis’ systematic inhumanity or “evil,” I began to study the history of Nazism in an amateur way. However, none of the available explanations seemed sufficient. For me, the economic crises and eventual collapse of the Weimar Republic didn’t fully explain how so many ordinary people became fanatical followers of Hitler or complicit in atrocities.

The second pivotal moment came when I got a job teaching the history of ideas at Oxford Brookes University, a smaller institution than the University of Oxford. The head of our history department, Robert Murray, was an American who had fought fascism in Italy during World War II. After the war, like many demobilized officers, he went to university and studied history. However, when he graduated, still was uncertain about the nature of the fascism he had risked his life fighting.

When he had the chance to design his history course, he devoted it to the question, “What is Fascism?” At the time, unless you were a Marxist—who often claimed to have the definitive understanding of fascism as a terroristic form of capitalism—there was what I call the “Babel effect”: numerous conflicting theories with no clear consensus.

On a more personal level, I had married an Italian, and alongside my knowledge of French and German, I quickly acquired a reading knowledge of Italian. This allowed me to read fascist writings in their original language, which was instrumental in shaping my definition of fascism. My definition is based on how fascist leaders and apologists, not their victims or enemies, understood it.

Finally, there’s an even deeper psychological dimension to my interest. I was born in 1948, three years after Auschwitz was liberated. That historical scar loomed large in the background of my life, shaping my curiosity and driving me to understand the nature of such profound evil.

As I grew into my early years, around seven, eight, or nine, I became aware that something terrible had happened in history shortly before I was born. I started discovering pictures of horrors. Browsing in bookshops, I found myself drawn to the books that had started appearing about the prisoner-of-war and concentration camps of the Second World War. It became, in a sense, an almost unhealthy fascination, perhaps even bordering on what could be called a kind of “pornography of horror.” I developed an intense interest in exposing myself to accounts of torture and what people are capable of doing to one another—topics that weren’t being talked about much at the time.

Additionally, my grandfather, as I later realized, was a religious fundamentalist. I didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate it then, but he held fanatical beliefs. Growing up in that environment of extreme conviction and the hatred they breed made the idea that “normal” people could harbor fanatical ideals unproblematic and accessible. So, when you combine all these factors, it now seems I was predisposed to try to solve—or at least confront—the enigma of fascism’s war against human rights and how to define it meaningfully for those researching it.

Adolf Hitler at a rally in 1934
Adolf Hitler at a rally in 1934. (Andreas Wolochow)

Jacobsen: Is there a correlation between the psychology of religious fundamentalism, fascism, and ultranationalism?

Griffin: I believe so, though it is a far more contentious study area. My definition of fascism —which proposes that it is an ideology- and value-driven revolutionary assault on the status quo, drawing on mythic pasts and conspiracy theories to construct a new future and induce societal rebirth in every area — is already contentious. When you start delving into problems of its causation and the psychological mindsets that drive it, things become even more complex. I’ve developed my approach to this—a sort of personal methodology. I often compare creating academic paradigms to cooking a curry. You use familiar ingredients, but you make your mix and flavours. To give this approach an academic label, it’s called methodological pluralism, or you could call it a magpie approach—picking up ideas and theories that glitter and saying, “This is interesting,” and hoarding them in your mental nest.

Using this eclectic approach and partial insights drawn from a wide range of texts on extremism, psychology, and anthropology, I synthesized a theory that highlights the role played by the compartmentalization of the personality in the radicalization process. One foundational text for me is Robert Jay Lifton’s analysis based on his in-depth interviews with Nazi doctors who conducted experiments at Auschwitz. In his attempt to understand how seemingly ordinary people—doctors who led everyday family lives and loved their pets—became complicit in such atrocities, he developed the theory of “doubling.”

This theory posits that these individuals had developed a “normal self” and an “Auschwitz self.” When they put on their uniforms, they became “another,” someone ready to be manipulated by a totalitarian regime. In this state, those deemed subhuman by Nazi ideology also became “othered” by them. These individuals were stripped of their humanity and any claim to human rights or humane treatment. At that point, torturing and murdering them was no longer seen as a moral crime because the emotional threads of empathy and compassion had been severed by the doctors’ identification with the Nazi ideological machine.

Lifton’s theory of doubling has enormous implications and extensions. Interestingly, Lifton went on to write two other crucial books for me. One was a study of the fanatical pseudo-religion in Japan that culminated in the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo terrorist cell. The cult members, ordinary people in many ways, believed they had a sacred duty to hasten the end of the world by triggering apocalyptic events, such as the mass killing of thousands in the subway. Lifton’s earlier interviews with Auschwitz doctors equipped him with the mental tools to understand how these seemingly normal Japanese individuals became radicalized to the point of wanting to hasten the end of history.

The word “fanatic” has fascinating roots. It comes from the Latin word fanum, meaning temple, and is linked to the words profane and profanity, which refer to actions outside the sphere of the holy. Fanaticism can be understood as a form of “holy madness.” For those gripped by it, their actions are not seen as nihilistic or terroristic but as a sacred duty. They do not feel guilty because they believe they fulfill their religious mission or political duty.

I’ve adapted Lifton’s theory of doubling by incorporating my theoretical contributions to explore the radicalization process. It often begins with someone experiencing an existential crisis—not necessarily at a high intellectual level but a deeply cosmological or emotional one. These individuals are often disoriented and disaffected, particularly during periods of social breakdown, such as war, plague, or revolution.

In these moments of profound disorientation, people can latch onto a simplistic, paranoid worldview—like a drowning person grabbing onto a plank of wood. This revelatory, deeply mythic worldview diagnoses the root causes of chaos and misery while creating a starkly dualistic Manichean division of good and evil.

And the evil ones—anybody belonging to that world—are transformed into “monsters” or “subhumans,” no longer is fully human. If you compare the psychodynamics of ISIS with Nazism or any other extreme form of political or religious fanaticism, it soon becomes clear that they all function in a very similar way. They provide emotionally stunted, unindividuated individuals who feel lost and disoriented with a totalizing worldview, which gives them a sense of identity, purpose, and, very importantly, agency. Armed with this, they feel empowered to act on the world through a cathartic act of violence against the perceived enemy or sources of evil. This can result in their sense of mission to carry out a terrorist attack on a symbolic person or institution—a parliament, a bank, or even something like a same-sex wedding—whatever the mind seizes as an emblem of the “evil” destroying humanity. In their view, these acts are always idealistic and heroic, intended to “save the world” whatever the personal cost.

Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, and Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz, 1944
Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, and Rudolf Höss in Auschwitz, 1944. (Jewish Virtual Library)

This is a simplistic summary of my retrospective theory of the process of extremist and terrorist radicalization, but I was only led into this area of speculation after 9/11. That event forced me to apply my obsession with understanding what turns ordinary people into Nazis or other forms of fascism to the question of what could drive some educated, civilized Muslims, including a group of engineering postgraduates studying in Hanover, to participate in the destruction of the Twin Towers. It felt like I was witnessing a powerful example of the destructive fanaticism I had been studying for years as a historical phenomenon that safely belonged to the past.

In the light of the approach I developed, these individuals were not raving lunatics or hate-filled sociopaths but a split within their personality—between modern Western secular values and the worldview of the cult or ideology they embraced. Once you are part of a cult, you abandon personal responsibility. You don’t challenge or question; you conform entirely. In Nazi Germany, this was codified in the “Führerprinzip,” or “leader principle,” which dictated that all authority came from above. Challenging it was considered sedition. Islamism by an ideologue such as Qtub makes a similar claim on the believer: it tells believers disturbed by modernity what they must do to save their community and the wider world from moral decay and destruction.

This dynamic completely relieves the individual of personal moral responsibility for the atrocities they commit; on the contrary, it heroizes them. In this way, all semi-ideological or fully ideological acts of violence against perceived enemies are fundamentally similar at a psychodynamic level, contrasting the ideologies or cultures that rationalize them.

Jacobsen: How do the psychological forces you’ve studied manifest across different regions in today’s global landscape? Specifically, how do individuals who are not officially classified as “enemies of the state” come to embrace extremist ideologies and carry out attacks in the name of what they perceive as a “righteous cause,” seemingly without any moral conflict or hesitation?

Griffin: When viewed through the lens of modernity, the conditions of the modern world reveal both a key driver and effect of modernization worldwide: secularization and the erosion or loss of a metaphysical worldview that explains reality. Secularization represents the death of self-evident, totalizing truths. There was little room for self-doubt or relativism in earlier cultures—whether the Aztecs, the Maya, or the feudal Japanese. Religions like those of the Abrahamic traditions might recognize the brotherhood of other religions “of the book.” Still, within each, the belief was absolute. For those within the faith, there was no question of the existence of God or an ultimate purpose enshrined in a traditional religious faith and practice.

This worldview didn’t necessarily prevent violence—it could lead to ritual violence or wars—but it didn’t result in mass persecutions in the way we see today or the attempts to completely transform the world through the conquest of society both domestically and through territorial expansion. This was partly due to geography and technology: the world was less connected, and movement between cultures was limited. There were generally small warrior elites, and even the massive military conquests of Alexander the Great and Genghis Kahn did not lead to secularizing society and abolishing religious culture.

In the modern world, however, everything has become porous. Barriers—cultural, physical, and political—have eroded. Today, major religions exhibit significant internal and external conflict. Consider the Myanmar Buddhists attacking Muslims, the Chinese repression of Uyghurs, or sectarian violence within Islam. These conflicts show that the boundaries between previously separate worlds have dissolved. No wonder billions of human beings now live out a permanent identity, purpose, and belonging crisis.

For example, the term “ghetto” originated in Venice, where Jewish communities lived apart but interacted with Christian communities on a business level. While they were separate, there was still a degree of coexistence, and certainties, rituals, and traditions remained intact within each community. However, in today’s interconnected world, that separation and autonomy of communities no longer exist, creating a fertile ground for ideological and cultural clashes and the loss of meaning known by sociologists as “anomie.”

Now, all that historical separateness has broken down. It’s extraordinarily easy for people to feel that the world is falling into an abyss of apostasy, non-belief, materialism, immorality, gender fluidity, and interpenetration of identities. Everything can seem in flux, elusive, and menacing. What’s one of the main targets of populist nationalists? Multiculturalism. There’s almost a pathological fear of the “soup”—the idea that society has become a blend of different creeds, genders, peoples, languages, skin types, and abilities. This diversity threatens those seeking ethnic order, religious purity, or cultural homogeneity. There is a longing for absolute “difference” and ethnic/cultural demarcations to be restored.

For those ill-equipped to cope with the sheer complexity of the modern world, the explosion of cultural mixing and diverse realities brought by modernity can create a tremendous sense of decadence, experienced as evil, as if the world is falling apart. To see this crystallized into dogma, look at the U.S. Christian sect known as Dispensationalists. They are utterly fanatical about the end of the world, interpreting earthquakes and other disasters as symptoms of the “end times,” and instinctively support Donald Trump.

Modernity divides people in this context. Some embrace the flux, the intermixing of cultures, languages, and belief systems. They enjoy the unknown and the richness of diversity. Traveling or encountering otherness invigorates these people, not threatens them. For them, the infinite variety of the modern world is something to marvel at. Thus, they instinctively embrace a universal, transcultural form of humanism, secular or religious.

Others, however, feel overwhelmed. The American poet T.S. Eliot once wrote, “Human beings cannot bear very much reality.” People have different thresholds for coping with the immensity of the cosmos and the diversity of ways of living and thinking. For those with a low tolerance for this diversity, there’s a nostalgia for purity—ethnic purity, cultural purity, or national sovereignty. They are drawn to movements like “Make America Great Again” or similar nationalist sentiments in Russia, Britain, and France. This often leads to exclusionary ideologies, where even people born in a country are deemed not to belong because they lack some “essence”—be it Frenchness, Englishness, or Canadianness.

Of course, this idea of national or racial purity is historically baseless. Even the Inuit and other Indigenous groups migrated from somewhere. The notion of a primordial, pure race or culture is a fallacy. Interestingly, there was one fascist movement, led by Plínio Salgado in Brazil, that celebrated racial mixing. Salgado argued that Brazilianness was defined by blending Spanish, African, and Indigenous Amazonian ancestries. This stands out as a unique take on ultranationalism in the context of fascism, which is typically obsessed with notions of purity and retrieving some cultural essence.

However, for most nationalists and fundamentalists, whether religious or secular, there’s a profound fear of “the other.” This fear drives violence, hatred, and demonization in the modern world.

Jacobsen: We’ve identified the problems and explored methodological pluralism, integrating evidence, case studies, and various academic approaches to understanding these challenges. But what about practical solutions? What advice would you offer citizens living under authoritarian or theocratic regimes—or even in majoritarian democracies with autocratic tendencies? How can individuals and states counter the rise of fascist ideology, intolerance, and acts of terror driven by hatred?

Griffin: That’s a tough question. To borrow a phrase from an early Bob Dylan song: “I try to harmonize with songs, the Lonesome Sparrow sings.” In other words, I accept the world’s chaos, carve out a little piece of it, and write books about modern reality’s complex, dynamic nature. They are useless in terms of their practical effects in countering fanaticism and extremism. My theory has informed one or two initiatives to combat terrorism, but I have no illusions about the overall impact of my publications. I take part in debates in the press about whether Trump is a fascist and so on, but I know in advance that I would never change the mind of any Trump supporter and would be instantly demonized as a “woke” academic and thus “the enemy.” In short, I will give you a despairing answer about combating anti-humanistic ideologies.

Liberal humanism—the deep-seated empathetic commitment to the universality of human rights and the equal humanity of all people—is a minority view. It is not inherently secular, however. This belief has existed and has been fought for within religious traditions. I’m not talking about Western modernity here. Good Buddhism and good Hinduism—if you look at the original Hindu gurus, for instance—contained this sense of universal humanism. You have to read their works to see that.

But this lack of fear of the “other,” embracing the richness of humanity and multiculturalism is now an increasingly minority response to modern existence. All over the world, except in a few rare countries such as Scandinavia—Finland, Norway, and Sweden, for example (and even there, Denmark now has a strong populist movement) — people like me, humanists, have our backs to the wall.

The Enlightenment hope—that the world would become more enlightened with prosperity, education, and growing social equality—has been proven to be a myth. That hope was formulated without any awareness of ecological crises, nuclear weapons, or the complexities of modernity. It was whistling in the dark. So-called progress has created conditions of anguish, depression, uncertainty, confusion, and a pandemic of anomie. It breeds simplistic, hate-driven visions of the world.

And that’s what we saw inaugurated and ritualized yesterday with Trump’s “brave new world.” Hearing people whoop and cheer as he announced the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and the opening of more opportunities for oil drilling was terrifying. It felt like bad science fiction—a dark, apocalyptic satire like Dr. Strangelove from the 1960s—but it’s real.

I am a pessimist. I believe humanity is in the process of destroying this phase of civilization. The world will collapse into wars and poverty as the ecological crisis intensifies and natural disasters increase. Wars for resources will erupt, sectarian hatreds will deepen, and nations will turn against one another. There will likely be massive deaths—what I call a “mega-death” event—or a prolonged period of devastation.

I don’t believe humanity will disappear entirely, but some Hollywood apocalyptic scenarios may prove alarmingly accurate. The Day After Tomorrow comes to mind, though its idea of Americans moving to Mexico and living happily ever after hosted by the Mexican government because the U.S. is frozen solid is absurdly optimistic.

So, I conclude that I can’t do much more in my small life. I’ll be 77 next week. Right now, I focus on staying active with my wife and looking after my mother-in-law, her uncle, and our son. This pathetic answer resonates sadly with a recent bestseller called Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins, but at this point, I can’t offer you anything grand or heroic.

I don’t foresee a great counter-movement of heroic liberals or academics rising to stem this tide of intolerance, conspiracy theory, and scapegoating. Populism and retrenchment into ethnic, ideological, or religious fortresses are taking place in various forms worldwide, whether in Viktor Orbán’s “illiberal democracy” in Hungary, Putin’s ethnocentrism in Russia, or China’s aggressive nationalism. The world is retreating into narrow definitions of identity, which have lethal consequences for demonized “others.”

We will likely see a world dominated by illiberal democracies or autocratic states. Much like antifascists during the Nazi regime in World War II, people like me will face a choice. Whether to be a coward, keep our heads down and survive or be heroic and join some underground resistance and face persecution and death.

It’s a terrifying prospect, and I hope I’m wrong. But I don’t see any “grand narrative” solutions right now.

And if the geniuses of history—people like Gandhi, Bob Dylan, and the visionaries who created the United Nations—haven’t been able to stem the tide of leaders like Trump, Putin, or the regime in North Korea, then who am I to think I can achieve anything except stand up for liberal humanism?

I’m sorry to sound so pessimistic.

However, I will end on a more positive note with a quote from Nietzsche, who said that every great book written against life is an invitation to live life more fully. Perhaps every interview that seems like an invitation to despair is, paradoxically, an incitement for the reader to rally inner resources of idealism, hope, and heroism—and to live life more fully.

Jacobsen: Dr. Griffin, thank you very much for your time.

Griffin: I appreciate it.