"9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. Thus *pacifism is trafficking with the enemy*. It is bad because *life is permanent warfare*. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a “final solution” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament."
### Commentary
What is the appeal of warfare? Hard for me to say, because my parents were on the losing side of World War II.
* My dad was a sailor in the German Navy, got a head injury in a battle. His ship was stationed in Marseille, which is where he surrendered. (He told me that when the sailors on his ship found out the US had entered the war, they knew it was lost, and their priority shifted to surviving until it was over.) Spent a couple of years in a French prisoner of war camp. It was rough, but nothing like what my uncle Paul experience as a Russian prisoner of war, which broke him for life.)
* My mother was 13 years younger, so she spent the war years at home. A good number of nights were spent in air raid shelters. (Her town was on the flight path from England to Stuttgart.) After the war, she was hungry. Used to collect snails to sell to the French soldiers bivouacked in their house. Fortunately, the victors provided food aid, though she ate so much peanut butter that she came to loathe it.
So I was not exactly raised thinking war was glorious. Rather the opposite.
Having established my lack of qualifications, I think the appeal of war is perhaps that you have an enemy, you make a maximum physical effort (which can produce an altered state of mind), and afterward the issue is *settled*. One of you is defeated. There's none of that endless deferral that makes, say, legal proceedings so frustrating. (For example, why can't the Supreme Court just *tell* us whether the old constitutional order is over or not? Does Congress still control the purse and make the laws, or is it merely an advisory body? Can the executive ignore the courts?)
So: supreme effort, showing the dominance of your in-group in the most incontrovertible way, and finality/resolution: what's not to like?
I might adjust Eco to note that it's probably not important for the majority of the Volk to feel the thrill of violence, just that (1) the rulers and their shock troops do, and (2) it is socially unacceptable not to visibly support the Leader's position on violence. (Of course, a good way to change someone's position is to keep giving them evidence that they're all alone, the odd man out. We're social animals, tend to think if everyone says something, it's probably true.)
Donald Trump does not present as a tough guy. He may admire actual tough guys (like Putin), but actually having a war seems like a lot of work. His position on Gaza seems typical. His attitude is not so much "exterminate all the brutes 
" as a mob boss ordering a bust out . See proposals about Gaza: "that would be a great resort; the US should get to wet our beak ." Recent colonial ambitions toward Mexico, Panama, Canada(!), and Greenland (!!) may be cause for concern.
Certainly, he has a loyal paramilitary who are eager for violence. Also concerning is the militarization of US police forces, which have migrated from Peelian principles like "policing by consent" to tacitly considering themselves as separate from the "civilians." At the benign edge of the new attitude is that they're sheep dogs guarding the sheep (you and me) from the wolves. The less benign metaphor is that they're an occupying army. It would be fairly easy to expand the definition of "wolves" or "the partisan resistance" to be normal people who get in the way of someone with power.
Trump presents as kind of wimpy.
#### Contradiction
Eco betrays his academic attitude. Lofty statements like "life is permanent warfare" really belong to intellectuals who're adding argumentative glosses to a basically emotional attitude. I don't think Carl Schmitt and his ilk were all that important. They didn't create attitudes and goals, they justified them after the fact.
Pointing out that the "[the good] life is permanent warfare" contradicts "we will, working together, usher in a Golden Age of peace and dominance by the Volk" is *such* an academic move. People are *great* at believing two contradictory ideas at the same time. Anyway, no fascist – even successful (long reigning) soft fascists like Franco or Salazar seemed much troubled by the "We won. What now?" question (though I could be wrong – perhaps they had sleepless nights wondering how to keep the fervor up now that they'd won.)
#### Is war the right metaphor?