Political Psychology of Fascism: Attempt of Critical Analysis of the Wilhelm Reich’s Concept

Abstract

In the context of the global aggravation of the information struggle, the escalation of tension caused by the difference in worldview and ideological attitudes of the leading geopolitical players of the current world order, the current trend towards rewriting the history of the Second World War and re-evaluating the role of separate political regimes and ideologies cause concern. In the year of the 75th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War particularly relevant becomes the identification of the ideological origins of modern concepts of political understanding, historical interpretation and memory policy of several countries of the Collective West related to attempts to revise the results of the war and the decisions of the Nuremberg Tribunal, equalize responsibility for its beginning between the aggressors and the victims of aggression. The author shows that one of the underlying reasons for such attempts, in addition to the current foreign policy dictated by expediency purposes of application reputational damage to the Russian Federation as a successor state of the USSR, is in the US tradition of broad psychological interpretation of the phenomenon of fascism rooted in the famous work of German-American psychologist Wilhelm Reich’s “Mass Psychology and Fascism” which, after publication in 1933 became the starting point for the study of totalitarianism of the twentieth century from the psychological positions in the Western, first of all, Anglo-Saxon literature.