HISTORIES - Fascism, Totalitarianism, Branding
Nazism (and by extension Fascism/fascism) was a revolutionary force, offering, in Brown's own words, ‘new forms of expression', and a ‘recoding’ of identities. It highlights the central role played by the invasion of socio- psychological space by the symbology of fascism, giving a new dimension to the superbly documented analyses of this process already carried out, for the fasces by Emilio Gentile and the Swastika by Malcolm Quinn.
‘Fascism an Anti-Culture’ Renaissance and Modern Studies (vol. 42, Autumn 2001), pp. 95-115.
Indeed, as what Malcolm Quinn (1994) calls a migratory image, the brand is continuously being placed and displaced; while having ambitions to define its own context as universal, it only becomes visible, recognizable and mobile through processes of selection and exclusion.
‘Marking Time with Nike: The Illusion of the Durable’ The Blackwell Cultural Economy Reader Wiley-Blackwell 2003 p.384
What makes Quinn’s analysis of the swastika ultimately so compelling is that he generously summarizes the primary research on ancient and modern history while proposing many original ideas about the swastika’s symbolic role during and after the Nazi period . . . Ultimately this is among the most important books about design history and design’s role in political and social persuasion that has been published to date.
Design Issues 11:3 (1995)
Read Steven Heller’s review at: www.typotheque.com/site/article.php?id=21
RECENT OUTCOMES OF THIS STRAND OF RESEARCH -
A lecture ‘Occupying the Totalitarian Imagination’ at Romanian Cultural Institute London 15 July 2008, as part of the London Festival of Architecture.
Read the lecture here
A television interview for Desi DNA, BBC2 23 Jan 2008.
An interview on the topic of political symbolism and the new Conservative Party logo, by Philip Dodd for Nightlines, BBC Radio 3, on 15 September 2006.
An entry on the Nazi swastika for A Historical Encyclopaedia of World Fascism, ed. Cyprian Blamires, New York, ABC-Clio, September (2006).
This essay deals with the manner in which the development and use of the Nazi swastika as a tool of propaganda demonstrates the nature of the link between Nazism and Fascism. Key issues addressed in the essay include:
- The pre-Nazi anti-semitic discourse on the swastika
- The politicisation and militarization of anti-Semitism by Nazism
- The relationship between the design of the Nazi swastika and the Bismarkian concept of the state
- The graphic identity of the swastika
- The differences between Nazism and Italian Fascism
The conclusion of the essay offers a reading of Ernst Nolte’s thesis that the Nazi flag, unlike the lictor’s bundle of Italian fascism, did not recall a particular historical era, but a racial consciousness whose greatness was ‘lost’ in history, and whose final victory lay in the future. Nolte’s argument is that Nazism was fascism in extremis. My thesis, in contrast, is that Nazism was racist extremism in the form of a fascist political programme. Nazism, in other words, may be thought of as fascism plus the swastika.
See World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia on Amazon: www.amazon.co.uk
Malcolm Quinn ‘Branding the symptom’ Brand.New V&A 11- 12 November 2000 Lecture Theatre.
See the programme at: www.vam.ac.uk/vastatic/microsites/BrandNew_Site/info/learning.html
Malcolm Quinn ‘The rebranding of Britain: where's the beef?’ The Independent 21 March 2000.
Read the article here: www.independent.co.uk
