Fascist Disabled Persons Movements

Comrades, I want to apologise for not writing for the last three months. I’ve been experiencing not just ill-health but problems with academic freedom, with my employment being targeted in retaliation to my writings. I’m now starting to recover and am trying to get back to writing. Today I want to write about fascist disabled persons movements and why we need to recognise and confront them as such. I’ll publish more regularly again going forward.

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Yesterday a new documentary that looks at Hitler’s DNA made the news, for suggesting he did not just have a micro-penis but also may have been genetically disposed towards a number of neurodivergent disabilities. The documentary, which I haven’t watched, is controversial both scientifically and ethically. But I want to take this moment to say something about the fascist mass mobilisation of disabled, including neurodivergent, people.

Usually in disabled person’s movements, of course, fascism is seen as the enemy — and not without good reason. Fascists have always targeted disabled people, from Hitler’s Aktion T4 programme to the ableism of the Make America Healthy Again movement. The fascist imaginary positively fetishises the idea of a world without disabled people, and much of fascism’s libidinal appeal relates to the ways people with certain disabilities or deformities can evoke feelings of disgust among the able bodied and minded.

Yet fascism, I want to argue, has also always mobilised disabled people in support of its cause, even while simultaneously targeting disabled people in its effort to achieve racial purity. As such we need to recognise the reality of fascist disabled persons movements, or at least the fascist mobilisation of disabled people, as part of the fascist programme.

To be clear: I am not just talking here about fascists who happen to be disabled, which would include basically any fascist who lives long enough to develop bodily or mental impairments. I am talking specifically about the mass mobilisation of disabled people, or certain groups of disabled people, as a core part of fascist strategy.

The clearest historical example is the mobilisation of war veterans. Both Mussolini and Hitler were war veterans themselves and started their fascist movements as war veteran movements. Many of these veterans, Hitler included, were physically impaired through things like mustard gas or gunshot wounds. And if many were physically injured, many more were psychologically traumatised, so much that fascism itself was initially sometimes dismissed as a kind of temporary ‘war psychosis’.

In any case, Hitler even claimed in Mein Kampf that much of his political philosophy was synthesised while he was in hospital during the First World War, partially blinded, along other veterans he saw as let down by the German state. And his project of eliminating not just disabled people but also the Jews, Sinti, and Roma was fully bound up with his task of restoring what he saw as the diminished health and strength of the race.

While they did not identify as a disabled person’s movement, the various forms of disablement of the veterans were a core part of the way in which they were both grouped and mobilised towards the advent of fascist domination. And since these veterans provided the vanguard of their respective movements, fascist dictators would almost certainly not have come to power without this support.

If it sounds strange to talk about fascistic disability mobilisation, it is worth noting something that clearly distinguished those disabled people targeted for sterilisation and extermination, from those mobilised in favour of the fascist cause. This is that the former had disabilities that were, wrongly or rightly, considered hereditary, while the latter group acquired their disabilities through bodily and psychological trauma. There was and remains more room for acceptance of the latter in the fascist imaginary, since they were still considered hereditarily fit even if some were simultaneously considered mentally or physically unfit for service due to injury. As such they could be accepted, even lionised, even while being disabled.

Back to the mobilisation and movements themselves, I think this is important to point out because we see something similar today. I recently spoke to a British therapist who works specifically with veterans, and they were telling me how their clients unanimously believe that Britain is inevitably heading towards a civil war which will be between Muslims and leftists on the one hand and everyone else on the other. (None of the veterans were taking the side of the leftists and Muslims). In this case we see this increasingly mainstreamed far right narrative gripping people traumatised by war (although the narrative has been adopted much more widely than among veterans, aided through promotion from celebrity fascists such as Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk).

More broadly, contemporary fascist recruitment is starting much younger, with a focus on lonely boys and men with mental health problems, traumatised not by the experience of war but the devastation of decades of the neoliberal hollowing out of education, welfare, health services, and community. These forms of trauma and mental ill-health in combination with the broader material conditions that cause them make people vulnerable in all kinds of ways, and especially for teenagers this can sometimes include a vulnerablisation to disinformation and ideological conversion through far right influencers such as Andrew Tate.

The rise and spread of fascist fitness clubs is an example of something similar: they specifically target men who feel disconnected and lonely, and who are physically unfit, to give them a sense of belonging, purpose, and brotherhood, thus priming them to become dedicated to the fascist cause. In this they are targeting not just a certain demographic (cishet white boys and men) but more specifically members of that demographic experiencing certain forms of disablement and ill-health.

I want to be clear that in emphasising the significance of disablement and ill-health here I don’t mean to imply that mentally-unwell people (or indeed veterans) are inherently more likely to become fascists. Nor am I implying that fascists are innocent and that their views are an expression of mental ill-health. Neither of these is the case.

I am only saying that, just as in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, fascist leaders are specifically targeting certain groups of people with who have experienced certain forms of ill-health and disablement, and are seeking to use this as to help their recruitment. And I draw attention to this because to understand the danger of fascism, including when it comes to disability and disabled people, we need an accurate understanding of not just who it mobilises but how and why.

Hitler may or may not have been disabled himself. But to combat fascists effectively we will likely need to recognise the reality of fascist disability mobilisation as a core part of the fascist project. It is thus something those of us on the left to provide an alternative to if we are to defeat them.