Iconic Fascism: The Excess of Destruction and Creation in Interwar Radical Right-Wing Politics

In Iconic Fascism, Aristotle Kallis uncovers the paradox at the heart of fascist politics: the simultaneous obsession with destroying and creating powerful symbols.This book demonstrates how fascists were simultaneously some of history's most passionate icon-lovers and most ruthless icon-breakers, wielding symbolic excess as both weapon and worship in their revolutionary project.Through a sweeping comparative analysis, Kallis reveals how fascist movements and later regimes were driven by a relentless battle of absolutes, seeking not only to eradicate the icons and reclaim the spaces of their enemies, but to saturate public life with their own emblems, rituals, and myths; and to make the political visceral.Kallis demonstrates that fascist violence was never merely blind or indiscriminate.Instead, it was a meticulously choreographed struggle for symbolic dominance, in which the destruction of enemy 'false' icons was inseparable from the performative creation of new, sacred icons of fasci