![]() ![]() ![]() In this article, I problematize some of the thinking that has led to his work being characterized as fascist, for this often involves a logic of contamination, whereby if Hitler read Nietzsche and Lawrence read Nietzsche, Lawrence becomes tarred with the fascist brush. Several scholars have chased up Russell’s suspicion that Lawrence somehow ‘imbibed prematurely the ideas afterwards developed by Hitler and Mussolini’ from Frieda and her circle of German intellectuals, and much energy has been expended on drawing dubious parallels between völkisch ideologues, such as Oswald Spengler, Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Chamberlain, and the work of Lawrence. ![]() In the wake of Bertrand Russell’s contention that Lawrence’s ‘mystical philosophy of “blood”’ led ‘straight to Auschwitz’, academics have been dutifully unearthing evidence of latent, cryptic or proto-fascist ideas in his work. ![]()
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