“The strategic adversary is fascism … the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. It’s too easy to be antifascist on the molar level, and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both personal and collective,” Michael Foucault wrote in the Preface to the English edition, Anti-Oedipus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The 20th century was an epoch of world wars, Nazi death camps, Communistic mass murders of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the like. The first two decades of the twenty-first century has been accompanied by the ‘return’ of fascist behaviour and the cultivation of Fascist philosophy in the troubled liberal democracies of the West. We have also witnessed the consolidation of authoritarian one-party States in Russia, China, the Middle East, Asia and Africa, producing some non-traditional alliances across the East-West and North-South divides. Fascistic sexuality based on domination and sex-authoritarianism in a masculinist culture is fundamentally anti-women. The rise of neo-fascist parties in Europe is often seen as a consequence of the mass ‘refugee problem’ of immigrants in Syria, Libya and North African states who are fleeing war or conflict. Fascist parties in Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Poland, Italy, Greece, Spain and other European countries have become extremely xenophobic insisting on limits to immigration and increased militarized borders. The ideology of Germany at the time was an ‘affective ideology’ anchored in emotions rather than argument. Fascism is anchored in the body, in desire and the emotions.

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. According to him the old Gods of the German state died and they moved to a new god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle. In personifying the “German psyche” as a furious god, German worship Hitler, the personification of the Jewish desire for a Messiah. But that power only exists, he says, because “Hitler listens and obeys the true leader,” says Jung, “is always led.” So was Hitler not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation.

Eric Fromm, a German-escapee Jew who fled to New York when the Nazis came to power was a prominent social psychologist and philosopher associated with Frankfurt. He Escape from Freedom published in 1941 explores the psychological conditions that gave rise to the Nazi regime. He begins the book with a Talmudic Saying : ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now– when?’

Modern man freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom, which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man. “Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat?” Foucault observes that fascism is already in ‘everyday behaviour’; it is ‘the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ the basic value system of schizoanalysis, finally, is grounded in a Nietzschean critique of consciousness and celebration of unconscious will-to-power.

Oedipus Rex is one of the Theban plays. The Greek tragedies were composed to moralize the city state. The article explores Oedipus Rex as a moral play. But Freud made it a play substantiating his Oedipus complex. Sex repression became abnormal and even unhealthy. Morality was questioned. His system becomes conducive to fascistic culture. We are in danger of the rule of the unconscious and reason and morality are dethroned from life and society. We are left with an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field with no ethical demands. It is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. The leaders of the backlash may talk Christ, but they walk corporate.