The Mass Psychology of Fascism - Anxiety Depression Self-Help

"Anti-bolshevist" propaganda states that "bolshevism" is the "consistent enemy of any religion," particularly of
"valuable" religion. Due to its "materialism," bolshevism knows only material goods and is interested only in
producing material goods. It has not the slightest understanding of intellectual and psychic values.
What, then, are these 'intellectual and psychic values"? Faith and belief are often mentioned, but otherwise the
phraseology dissolves into a vague concept of "individuality":
Because bolshevism wants to kill anything that is individual, it destroys the family which always gives a person an individual
stamp. This is why bolshevism hates any nationalist strivings. All peoples should be as similar as possible . . . All efforts at
destroying personal individuality, however, will be in vain as long as there is any religion left in people, because in religion personal
freedom from the external world is again and again achieved.
When the mystic says "bolshevism" he does not refer to the political party founded by Lenin. He does not have
the faintest idea of the sociological controversies of the turn of the century. "Communist," "Bolshevist" or "Red"
have become slogans of the reactionary which have nothing at all to do with politics, party or economics. These
slogans are as irrational as the word "Jew" when used by the Fascists. They express the antisexual attitude of
mystical and reactionary individuals. Thus the Fascists called Roosevelt a "Jew" and a "Red." In the eyes of the
church hierarchy Bertrand Russel is a Bolshevist. These irrational slogans are always provoked by what is alive
and sexual, even though those [110] to whom they are applied are far from any affirmation of infantile and
adolescent sexuality. The Russian Communists were farther from the affirmation of sexuality than any American
middle class individual. If one wants to fight mysticism, the core of all political reaction, one will have to
comprehend the irrationalism of slogans. Wherever in the following pages "bolshevism" is mentioned, one should
think of "orgasm anxiety" at the same time.
The fascist reactionary assumes a close relationship between family, nation and religion, a fact which
sociological research hitherto has completely overlooked. The formulation that religion means "freedom from the
external world" confirms the sex-economic clinical finding that religion is a substitute for the gratification which
is lacking in real life; this is in accord with Marx's statement that religion acts on the masses like opium. This is
not a mere simile. Vegetotherapy demonstrated that the mystical experience in fact sets in motion the same
processes in the autonomic life apparatus as an opiate. They are processes of excitation in the sexual apparatus
which cause conditions similar to intoxication and which call for orgastic gratification.
But we must first study the connections between mystical feeling and family feeling. Braumann writes, in the
manner which is typical of reactionary ideology:
Bolshevism, however, has yet another means of destroying religion, and that is through systematic destruction of marital and family
life. Bolshevism knows only too well that the strong forces of religious life stem from the family. For this reason, marriage and
divorce are being facilitated to such an extent that the Russian marriage approaches free love.
With regard to the "culture-destroying" effect of the Soviet-Russian five-day week, Braumann states:
This serves the purpose of destroying family life as well as religion . . . Most serious are the destructions which bolshevism has
wrought in the sexual field. By its destruction of marital and family life it [111] furthers immoral excesses of every kind, including
incestuous relations between siblings and between parents and children. [This refers to the abolition of the punishment for incest.]
Bolshevism does not know any moral inhibitions.
In Soviet Russian literature, instead of countering such reactionary attacks with an exact presentation of the
natural sexual process, attempts were made to defend oneself by pointing out that it was not true that sexual life in
the Soviet Union was "immoral"; that the marriages were again being consolidated, etc. Such attempts at defense
were not only politically ineffective; they also did not correspond to the facts. Sexual life in the Soviet Union
was, in fact, "immoral" from the Christian point of view; there could be no question of the consolidation of