Since the 15th century, movements had emerged to create civic religions, ranging from secret societies (Freemasonry, the Illuminati, Opus Dei) to Jacobinism and positivism. Faith in the nation and in nationalism was a way to combat socialism and contain Catholicism. The revolutionary socialism of the early Mussolini was intended to be more of a belief than a science. As he often said: “Humanity needs a belief.” It was about appealing to an experience of faith in the religion of the Nation. The patriotic religion. Giovanni Gentile argued that fascism had a religious character, “insofar as it takes life seriously,” and “as a movement it arose from the very soul of the nation.” It aimed to create an ethical state.

The sacralization of politics has always involved the sacralization of war, purifying violence: the ultimate sacrifice of body and soul for a sublime cause. Death and resurrection appear transfigured in the cult of martyrs and heroes. The connection between war and the awakening of religious sentiment is as evident in D’Annunzio as it is in Marinetti. In Il Fascio from 1921, it was written: “We are the custodians of a generation that, long ago, transcended the limits of its own historical reality and advances unstoppably toward the future… We are the highest of the high… The Holy Communion of war has molded us all with the same spirit of generous sacrifice.” Fascist belief transcended the natural attachment to life on earth.

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The new promised land is Silicon Valley, theorized with reference to Carl Schmitt and, in a distorted and perverse way, to René Girard (the theory of the scapegoat and imitation as the flip side of rivalry). The new Antichrist is the entire historical accumulation of knowledge, organization, and struggle that has been warning of the existential risks humanity and planet Earth face if nothing is done to curb social, historical, environmental, racial, and sexual injustice; if democracy cannot defend itself against anti-democrats; if imperial will replaces international law; if war, genocide, and the plundering of resources are the only means of “resolving” conflicts. For the fascists of the Antichrist, all this historical accumulation of the last two hundred years is a training ground of stagnation that impedes the only possible redemption, technological redemption.

The fascism of the Antichrist and the extremist identitarianism—both Christian and Zionist—on which it is founded, are nonetheless manifestations of Eurocentric thought, which should come as no surprise since every civilization contains “its own” barbarism. And in true European fashion, the “laboratory” experiments of this fascism begin outside the Eurocentric metropolises, in Western Asia (Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Iran, and Lebanon), but one never knows where they end. After all, wasn’t the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples of Namibia carried out by the Germans between 1904 and 1908 a rehearsal for the Holocaust of the Jews in Europe?