Does Opera Cause the Rise of Fascist Movements?

The Washington Post has an interesting article on the resurgence of new extreme far right movements throughout the world.

Far right movements were common throughout the world during the Great Depression. Shown here is Sir Oswald Morsley leading the British Union of Fascists: the forerunner of UKIP and the BNP

The angry far right populism that is surging to the forefront of politics today can be understood on the basis of the catastrophic influence of neoliberal austerity policies and the extreme economic pain it is causing:

The German economy was hit by the Great Depression much worse, and disillusioned people voted for the National Socialists in the 1930s as an angry protest vote, not because they wanted to bring about WWII and the Holocaust. Nor did the National Socialist Party campaign in the 1933 Weimar elections on the basis of a promise to start WWII and kill six million Jews (they just used rhetoric about the "removal" or "Entfernung" of Jews from public influence, just like Trump's exclusionary rhetoric about Muslims). The Party capitalised on a general feeling of anger and disillusionment with the mainstream political parties in the face of the collapse of the German economy due to the extreme economic pressure placed on it by reparation payments imposed by the Treaty of Versailles in the context of the Great Depression and the massive debts left by the Great War. Weimar Germany ended up in a position similar to what Greece faces today, leading to the collapse of a precocious German democracy. If the same pressures were applied today to the American or British political systems, a similar collapse of democracy could repeat.

Thomas Childers in his academic study of a statistical analysis of the demographics of the National Socialist vote summarises things well:

Although the National Socialists claimed to be a socially heterogeneous people's movement, "its basic source of recruitment. . .," Karl Dietrich Bracher concludes, "was in the petty bourgeois middle class and small landowning groups that had been hardest hit by the outcome of the war, economic crises, and the structural changes of modern society". The appeal of fascism was, therefore, based on "the psychological reaction of this lower middle class" to both the recurrent traumas of the postwar era and the gradual deterioration of its socioeconomic status and political influence.

This petty bourgeois middle class hardest hit by the GFC, and failing to benefit from the huge corporate bailouts in the wake of the crisis are exactly the same lot voting for the likes of Donald Trump.

The relevance to this musicology blog is that there are those who continue to believe that the rise of German fascism in the 1930's can be solely explained on the basis of the baleful influence of Wagnerian opera in single-handedly steering the course of world history, and that this alone constitutes sufficient explanation for the rise of National Socialism. Hitler, we are told, can allegedly be explained entirely by his secret mission to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama"—presto, WWII and the Holocaust.

These Nazi opera conspiracy theorists would likely also say that the likes of Front National, UKIP/BNP, and Donald Trump cannot possibly stand comparison to fascist movements in the 1930s because these modern far right movements do not seek to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama". However, that is a convenient neo-fascist fiction produced of a reactionary romantic way of thinking, one which imagines that world history is engendered by the thoughts of poets and philosophers. Like it or not, Marx was right in looking at the socio-economic foundations of society as the most potent driver of history, and that is why Nazi opera fantasies have about as much substance as Nazi UFO fantasies.

All of this goes to show why it is important to read credible academic historiographical accounts of the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Because people today think that fascism was a comic book movement of goose stepping, toothbrush moustached maniacs marching in bizarre uniforms setting out to transform the world into an opera production in collaboration with the aliens, when something extremely similar to fascism recurs today they simply fail to recognise when it stands right in front of them dressed in seemingly plain attire claiming to be their friend.