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Three recent books—Claudia Leeb's The Politics of Repressed Guilt: The Tragedy of Austrian Silence, Keith Kahn-Harris's Denial: The Unspeakable Truth, and Federico Finchelstein's A Brief History of Fascist Lies—help ground an understanding of why fascists are paradoxically both lying and honest. All three books contribute to understanding the fascist's concept of truth and the psychological mechanisms by which the fascist seeks to bury or hide from the truth. According to Federico Finchelstein in A Brief History of Fascist Lies, “Lying is a feature of fascism in a way that is not true of…other political traditions.”1 Fascists do not only lie tactically, to “con” enemies or the masses. According to Finchelstein, fascists also lie as a matter of epistemological principle, since they view the truth as something created and enforced by violence, not as something to be discovered. Paradoxically, then, fascists’ lying has an element of honesty: a sincere and genuine rejection of the idea that their beliefs could ever be rationally proven or disproven, since they believe their beliefs are simply intuitively known to the select few destined for power, or conveyed by the leader or movement to the followers. However, as Finchelstein points out, and as Kahn-Harris's and Leeb's work help illuminate, fascists also lie for disingenuous, psychological reasons—that is, fascists lie as a mechanism of denial, to protect their consciences from awareness of what they are doing and to hide from “unspeakable truths” about themselves.
Finchelstein, Leeb, and Kahn-Harris are not the first to broach this topic. Fascists’ dishonesty, insincere use of language, and self-deception are not new discoveries. For example, in his study of 1940s fascist antisemitic U.S. American agitators, Frankfurt School scholar Leo Lowenthal remarked on their linguistic “unseriousness.” Although as Lowenthal points out, the antisemitic agitator appeals to popular ideals—in the case of Lowenthal's “American agitato