[HN Gopher] Ur-Fascism By Umberto Eco (1995) [pdf]
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Ur-Fascism By Umberto Eco (1995) [pdf]
Author : monort
Score : 148 points
Date : 2022-03-20 12:44 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pegc.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pegc.us)
| jancsika wrote:
| > During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish
| war were called "premature anti-fascists" - meaning that fighting
| against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good
| American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties,
| smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other
| leftists. . .
|
| Just to troll a bit-- if you fought too early on the side of the
| lower-case "other leftists" in, say, Barcelona you may have
| gotten in a gunfight with a group of communists[1]. Turns out the
| world is a complex place.
|
| Speaking of which (and continuing to troll)-- anyone know why the
| lower-case "other leftists" in Barcelona boxed up the
| photographic evidence of their existence and sent it to the UK
| instead of the USSR for safekeeping[2]? I mean if the forces
| against fascism were "Communists, Etcetera" why not send them
| there?
|
| 1: https://medium.com/@umawrnkl/the-anarcho-communist-dream-
| of-...
|
| 2: https://autonomies.org/2019/12/the-lost-images-of-
| anarchist-...
| adg001 wrote:
| > Speaking of which (and continuing to troll)-- anyone know why
| the lower-case "other leftists" in Barcelona boxed up the
| photographic evidence of their existence and sent it to the UK
| instead of the USSR for safekeeping[2]? I mean if the forces
| against fascism were "Communists, Etcetera" why not send them
| there?
|
| You are confusing Communism in Western Europe with the
| communist state of the USSR and its Stalinist doctrine of
| socialism in one country [3].
|
| The Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel argues in "From
| Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of 'Socialism in
| One Country'" that when Soviet Union in 1924 abandoned the goal
| of overthrowing capitalism around the world lead to development
| of what later was called Eurocommunism [4], with their
| democratic way to social reforms.
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism_in_one_country
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocommunism
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think you might be too strongly associating 'USSR' and
| 'communist'. They're intertwined but not identical.
| Smoosh wrote:
| The same thing happens with Fascism and the Nazis.
| sorokod wrote:
| Well, Orwell was one of those "leftist" and did write "Animal
| Farm".
|
| BTW the photos in your second link are fantastic!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...
| memonkey wrote:
| Isaac Asimov wrote a great critique on 1984 which includes a
| few thoughts on Animal Farm:
| http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
| michannne wrote:
| It seems evident, to me at least, that Asimov views "arms-
| length extremism" as a core part of the identity of upper
| case Leftism, at least in the West (and predominantly
| America). The way Asimov approaches 1984 appears to be the
| bog-standard "Well, if you're not a Nazi then you can't
| possibly be as evil as the Nazis". It betrays a view of
| looking at politics from a standpoint of a slope, rather
| than a hill that descends into immorality on both sides,
| and I'm sure Asimov derives that view (as does much of the
| modern world) from the reasons behind and outcomes of WWII.
| IMO, we still haven't gotten past this - even entertaining
| such a discussion can't be had without acknowledging the
| 'progressive Sword of Damocles' hanging overhead, and
| almost always descends into whatabout-whataboutism.
|
| I really do hope that we eventually grow out of this phase
| and acknowledge that even the 'good guys' can be evil, we
| shouldn't need to wait and see a Communist Reich to know
| that the Leftist version of brownshirts are a bad thing, or
| wait until actual genocide is happening (or accept/ignore
| it as a possibility, even) or wait until it has a 1-to-1
| mapping with Nazi atrocity to hold those kinds of behavior
| accountable just because they're not Nazis and they're not
| actually killing people.
| vkou wrote:
| > I really do hope that we eventually grow out of this
| phase and acknowledge that even the 'good guys' can be
| evil, we shouldn't need to wait and see a Communist Reich
| to know that the Leftist version of brownshirts are a bad
| thing, or wait until actual genocide is happening (or
| accept/ignore it as a possibility, even) or wait until it
| has a 1-to-1 mapping with Nazi atrocity to hold those
| kinds of behavior accountable just because they're not
| Nazis and they're not actually killing people.
|
| Having looked at 2020, the threat of the United States
| going in this direction is not coming from some unholy
| trinity of the ghosts of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Trotsky. As
| a political idea in the public zeitgheist, it's dead as a
| parrot. It has no legs.
|
| It's coming from the _mainstream_ right. But since our
| friendly neighbourhood MAGA rallies aren 't _actually_
| sieging and heiling, we 're all in the 'wait and see how
| bad it can get the next time they take power' stage.
| michannne wrote:
| I agree, I vividly remember how bad some conversations
| used to get, to the point of ignoring or justifying
| certain atrocities, and I have seen that the acts of
| groups such as the-one-that-shall-not-be-named confined
| largely to certain counties in certain states. I don't
| know how much of the fervor dying down is attributable to
| 2020 having come and gone, but I'm at least a little glad
| that most discussions have remained firmly centrist and
| any leftover fires are the dying gasps of populist
| mainstream media wars.
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| I don't really like this critique, mostly because, in my
| opinion, it fails to understand that 1984 is a _fictional_
| book. There are some parallelisms with Stalinism and other
| tyrannical societies, yes, however they are only there as
| part of history in that world. I would say it failed to
| recognize that 1984 is more of an essay about human nature,
| more specifically into the desire for power above
| everything else. I really don 't think Orwell had planned
| to make a "reflecting" story, something like "Woah! This
| was about Stalinist Russia all along!".
|
| The critique failed to understand that, I think.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It sounds like you might be ignorant of the anarchist vs. state
| socialist divide which has existed since 1872. [1] At every
| opportunity, state socialists have suppressed or outright
| killed anarchists, especially in the USSR. [2]
|
| 1.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_A...
|
| 2.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia#In_the_Sov...
| kkfx wrote:
| Fascism, nazism etc were just puppet regimes not much different
| than modern MENA-region dictatorships, they use propaganda to
| elicit popular consensus, the same propaganda written by Gustave
| Le Bon and Eduard Bernays, with means the same propaganda used
| today in western countries by neoliberals.
|
| The puppet master of them was the classic capitalism that deeply
| fear a thing: socialism. Those regimes ware created just to stop
| socialism, for the sake of big capitals. They might have derailed
| a bit grabbing more power but not really as much as we read from
| official history: who win? Well, big companies from Germany and
| Italy with relative families behind remains almost intact.
| Porsche, Krupp, ... as examples still active today. Germany loose
| it's status of big power, now reduced to an economical-only
| power, Italy loose it's status of II grade European power, now
| reduced to a corruptocracy mostly controlled by anglophone
| neoliberals and local criminals (I'm Italian, I know well what
| happen) but "winners", so called "allies", quickly put back nazis
| and fascists in power, in the magistracy, police and armed
| forces, politics etc _for the very same purpose_ of nazis and
| fascist regimes: stop socialism. In the Soviet Union the same
| thing happen: original Mensheviks were substituted with fascist
| methods and money from Kaiser (to Lenin) and UK Crown (to Stalin)
| with equal results.
|
| The same pattern happen far earlier with the French Revolution.
| What can be really summarized is that technological progress
| makes peoples less ignorant because we need that to progress,
| that's make people less subject of religion and classic
| "propaganda", so people want freedom, better life, elites do not
| like that and when they can't overpower people organized enough
| they try to parasite their fragile and inexperienced
| organizations to reverse or revolutions apparently changing
| everything, but practically changing just a little bit to keep
| the ship up.
|
| Original nazism and fascism can't came back as they were today,
| we are in a post-ideological society, creating a new cruel enemy
| is not easy, convince people in a moment of deep _real_ crisis
| due to scarce resources it 's complicated, so today the
| propaganda instead of using nazism/fascism technique use another
| more sound these days, the bolshevik one. With equal targets of
| their ancestors. We see a came back in anti-sex, anti-abortion,
| anti sex-parity propaganda, religions start to be back a bit,
| reactionary movement grow, the very same that happen in the
| '20s-'30s just with a different large political scheme.
| Unfortunately populations remains super-influenced as Le Bon and
| Bernays have described in their books...
|
| Personally I ask myself how can Democracy be possible with such
| populations, because to have a Democracy we need Citizens, not
| slaves. In the past sometimes people have raised, certainly not
| really "commoners" in most cases there was always a "intermediate
| elite" that drive the revolution, that was for French Revolution,
| but also for Russian revolutions de facto made possible by the
| Intelligentsia their emperor have created to modernize the
| country, but such "middle class" have existed and these days I
| almost do not see it anymore... Oh, yes, there are still wealthy
| people, of course, but they are not anymore "middle class", witch
| means active and acculturated people, they are just wealthy
| mostly by heritage. Or to tell that in another way, as a nephew
| of WWII Partisans my blood boil well but I see no point in a war
| against windmills and at the same time I see no "new regime" move
| to create a new feudal class exactly to avoid a push against the
| newborn dictatorship... There might be no new ur-fascists heros
| because they are not needed anymore, but definitively there are
| too many quislings and many of them do not even see what they are
| doing. At least classic nazism and fascism have symbols and
| uniforms, it was easier to distinguish them for the masses.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| "Stop socialism"? Crony capitalism is just socialism that
| happens to benefit a corrupt elite. (Most real-world socialism,
| historically, was not very different. Even "socialism with
| Scandinavian characteristics" - quite popular among some in the
| present-day U.S. - owes much of its success to the way it
| enables a smoothly functioning market to provide consistently
| good outcomes.)
| michannne wrote:
| >"The puppet master of them was the classic capitalism that
| deeply fear a thing: socialism. Those regimes ware created just
| to stop socialism, for the sake of big capitals"
|
| I think this is a sorely misguided view, and if we had the
| ability to pull a Nazi, Hitler included, directly from the
| 30s/40s, they would disagree with this
| xtian wrote:
| Regardless of whether a Nazi would disagree for ideological
| reasons, these facts are part of the historical record:
|
| 1) big capitalists within Germany and abroad funded and
| supported Hitler
|
| 2) capitalist countries rejected repeated requests from the
| USSR to form an anti-fascist alliance before WWII
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > 1) big capitalists within Germany and abroad funded and
| supported Hitler
|
| of course, big capitals funded the leader of Germany that
| by creating a giant war machine, was filling their pockets
| with bags of money.
|
| > 2) capitalist countries rejected repeated requests from
| the USSR to form an anti-fascist alliance before WWII
|
| But also Stalin provided substantial support to the nazis,
| until 1941...
|
| I'm not saying you are wrong, but cherry picking facts
| doesn't magically become history.
| kkfx wrote:
| Just try reading IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic
| Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful
| Corporation by Edwin Black or if you can read french
| "Libres d'obeir: Le management, du nazisme a aujourd'hui"
| by Johann Chapoutot to start.
|
| From recent web resources I suggest:
|
| - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/nazis-
| based-th...
|
| - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/uks-
| propaganda...
|
| - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/31/louis-de-
| berni...
|
| - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/t
| rump-...
|
| Just to pick the first I've read recently. The history
| _not_ cherry-picked say a thing: when nazism and fascism
| born their idea was common in all western countries from
| their elites to some not-so-small cohort of their
| populations. Just like today 's populism.
|
| BTW, yes Stalin (one who took money from UK Crown, with
| the excuse of reliefs for Ukraine famine, via some formal
| "NGOs" ante-litteram) have signed an agreement with the
| nazi, but only after he understand that the western
| countries will never be partners. And future development
| have proved he have had good points, just read about
| "Operation Unthinkable" and "Operation Dropshot"...
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Just try reading IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic
| Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful
| Corporati
|
| That's a well know fact.
|
| It is also a well know fact that USA went to the Moon
| thanks to a nazi high ranking member, Wernher Von Braun.
|
| Of course the west was aligned with the "WASP" west and
| not with the "commie" Russia, just like today: we side
| with Ukraine and not with Putin's Russia mainly because
| we wanna keep the western propaganda on "democracy and
| freedom and the best lifestyle ever" alive and kicking,
| not because we really believe that we share the same
| values in the end.
|
| And because if we don't, the World will say that we're
| helping Putin.
|
| Same thing happened in 1939, but reversed.
|
| Everyone was afraid of being infected by the "communist
| revolution", not only the politicians, but the public
| opinion too!
|
| It was a people's choice too, that lasted 70 years and
| still nowadays you can hear people saying that "x is bad
| because it's chinese and chinese are communists, so they
| must be bad!".
|
| It's the tragedy of tribalism: us and them, good vs evil,
| that kind of propaganda that we still endure today!
|
| > have signed an agreement with the nazi, but only after
| he understand that the western countries will never be
| partners.
|
| I love Stalin's mustache like everybody else, but history
| is history: Stalin actually helped the nazis, they didn't
| simply sign an agreement, with that pact they encouraged
| Hitler to invade Poland, since there was no more
| opposition on the east: Germany took the most of it,
| Stalin invaded the eastern part.
|
| Also they gave ton of raw materials to Germany, for
| example they contributed a lot to "Operation Barbarossa".
| michannne wrote:
| You are conflating the alignment based on a subset of
| shared goals with shared origins. Capitalists supported
| "some" of the things early Nazi Germany was doing, that
| doesn't mean the Nazi purpose was to combat socialism
| (although, if combatting socialism furthered their other
| goals, then they wasted no time in doing that)
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > (I'm Italian, I know well what happen)
|
| You might be Italian, yet you fail to mention any notable
| Italian family name, but I am Italian for real and this
| sentence
|
| > Italy loose it's status of II grade European power, now
| reduced to a corruptocracy mostly controlled by anglophone
| neoliberals and local criminals
|
| doesn't make any sense at all.
|
| Historically, for starters.
|
| Your "essay" read mostly like some truth (capitalism in Italy
| sided with fascism because, at laest at the beginning, their
| interests were aligned - for example they both hated worker
| unions and both feared the Bolshevik Revolution), but coated in
| zeitgeit-ism (sorry for the bad neologism)
|
| Also the XVII Congress of the Italian Socialist Party that took
| place in 1921 in Livorno ended up with the split between
| socialists and communists in Italy, something that did not
| really help the socialist cause in Italy.
|
| You produced what we call "populism" nowadays, even if yours
| seems like coming from the left, it's still populism.
|
| If you are really Italian, you probably voted for the five star
| movement, which means you are (big) part of the problem, not of
| the solution.
| kkfx wrote:
| > You might be Italian, yet you fail to mention any notable
| Italian family name
|
| The first name is Agnelli, the ones who say being fascist in
| Rome and socialist in Turin, Pirelli, FIMM (Magneti Marelli),
| Piaggio just to name few that still exists today.
|
| > If you are really Italian, you probably voted for the five
| star movement
|
| I'm Italian, and no I do not voted M5S because coming from a
| Partisans family I was trained to recognize fascism. The
| original PNF and it's successors (I might know "Partito
| dell'Uomo Qualunque" for instance) have started as the 5S,
| apparently a left-ish, young and innovating party, but in
| reality a PR engine to elicit consent. If you know Italian
| history a bit you might know that Giorgio Bocca (one of the
| famous Partisans commander) when young was one who took PNF
| card with just two digit number, he learn after. The same
| have happened in Germany, original nazism appear as a kind of
| "moderated socialism".
|
| Actually in Italy there is exactly ZERO party I can vote, and
| exactly no left parties. The most _left-ish_ read that three
| time are Fratelli d 'Italia (YES, I'm not joking) and Lega,
| of course not because their are really left-ish, they are
| actually fascist, but they present themselves to the masses
| with left-wing ideas speech and that's why they grab
| consensus from "poor" working classes replacing historical
| PC-derived parties like PD witch it's correct name should be
| Partito Democristiano not Partito Democratico.
|
| I suggest a relatively modern song from what it left from the
| real political left:
| https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=61641
| perhaps together with
| https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=219 and a
| small history of how songs from Resistenza have been pushed
| into oblivion substituting them with Bella Ciao almost no one
| have chanted except perhaps some small white militia in
| Tuscany or why in France famous song like "Le deserteur"
| changing the last part from Prevenez vos
| gendarmes Que j'emporte des armes Et que je
| sais tirer
|
| to Que je n'aurai pas d'armes Et
| qu'ils pourront tirer
|
| just to give few examples of the slow push toward a new
| dictatorial society.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > The first name is Agnelli, the ones who say being fascist
| in Rome and socialist in Turin, Pirelli, FIMM (Magneti
| Marelli), Piaggio just to name few that still exists today.
|
| Do you mean Elkann? :D :D :D
|
| Agnelli (I guess you mean Giovanni Agnelli, or
| "L'avvocato") also financed this
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolyatti
|
| Which still exists
|
| It's the most popular scapegoat among Italian zeitgeist-
| ers.
|
| > Actually in Italy there is exactly ZERO party I can vote,
| and exactly no left parties
|
| CVD: the man criticizing "l'uomo qualunque" (the average
| Joe) is the one expressing an average Joe's opinion.
|
| I am from a partisan family as well, all my family was
| communist and fought for the freedom of Italy from nazi-
| fascism, but the problem today on "our" side is exactly the
| nostalgic leftist, that person that between Ukraine and
| Russia shouts "take Italy out of NATO"
|
| > The same have happened in Germany, original nazism appear
| as a kind of "moderated socialism"
|
| It always start with this giant lie with people like you...
|
| I know where you come from, don't even try, it doesn't work
| with me.
|
| > The most left-ish read that three time are Fratelli
| d'Italia
|
| And here it is the "I was trained to recognize fascism"
| that goes out of the window!
|
| I'm not even curious to hear why, because I know very well
| why.
|
| Unfortunately...
|
| > be Partito Democristiano not Partito Democratico
|
| as I've said: you're part of the problem, not of the
| solution.
|
| You might as well voted for five stars, as the saying goes
| "if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, if it
| quacks like a duck, it is a duck"
|
| > Prevenez vos gendarmes
|
| Sorry, I am born and raised Roman, I don't take lessons
| from those that tried too many times to destroy my city
| (and Italian lives with it), I side with the busts of
| Gianicolo, not with the heirs of napoleon, who let his
| troops stable their horses in the refectory were the
| Leonardo's "Last Supper" is, ruining it forever that then
| colonized Africa and lately put Libya in jeopardy just to
| put their hands on Italian ENI gas infrastructure over
| there...
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| > slow push toward a new dictatorial society
|
| Why would 'they' do that, when they've become so adept at
| selling anything to the public?
|
| With universal voting rights, you can tell the customers
| you're just serving their wishes and there is no ground for
| complaint.
|
| Playing a whole level up from "Pour la canaille la
| mitraille", that's just incompetence nowadays.
| lebubule wrote:
| "even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like
| movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including
| Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is
| about to reappear as a nationwide movement."
|
| "Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are
| constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of
| the enemy."
|
| "The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he
| more frequently sends other people to death."
| usrusr wrote:
| "The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he
| more frequently sends other people to death."
|
| Sounds like a perfect match for atomics...
| popilewiz wrote:
| motohagiography wrote:
| While I think Eco is generally a muddled thinker with moments of
| profound lucidity, I really don't think we're ever going to
| separate fascism from being a euphemism for evil, and Eco's essay
| elevated it from the woo of theology to something secular critics
| can tilt at. There's not much to defend about it, it's that the
| quality of interpretation and criticism of it is never more than
| an arbitrary litany of its sins. (though he gave it a more than
| fair treatment before deconstructing it)
|
| He's accurate that Mussolini's fascism was something different
| from Nazi'ism (which just adopted and co-opted the italian
| aestheitcs, directly), but it was more of a kind of secular anti-
| clerical republicanism but with all the awe of divinely appointed
| monarchs.
|
| The crux of fascism was the unity of corporate and state power
| together - where Eco takes it in a few other directions, which I
| think its disingenuous to de-emphasize this core property of it,
| because I think he's also an elitist who would be glad to have
| the reins of a unified corporate state. He's freighted an
| obsolete political system with the countercases to his own
| ideology and branded it evil. I was going to suggest Eco should
| have stuck to fiction, but in this case he has.
|
| It was a peculiar reactionary artifact of the nation state, which
| itself is a modern(ist) post-enlightenment phenomenon as
| monarchies gave way to republics. It's different from
| totalitarianism (as Eco notes) in that Mussolini, Franco, and
| Salazar lacked the imperialist and colonial urges that would
| define totalitarian movements of Hitler and Stalin (even though
| the latter two inherited colonial territories). Post war, the
| word fascism became just a secular version of evil as defined by
| largely marxist/socialist thinkers, and fascist has become a kind
| of a catch-all slur against those who assert people should be
| accountable to principles.
|
| It didn't really matter before, as there was nothing to defend
| about its vague and myriad definitions, and the people who spat
| the word fascist at others didn't have enough control of
| institutions for anyone to care what they meant by it. Today,
| that it is a euphemism for Evil matters because the people
| wielding it now are still only as sophisticated as a mob of
| superstitious villagers, but its nebulous definition has come to
| envelop some things I think regular people actually value, and
| instead of Evil being presented as witchcraft, it's wrapped in
| layers of critical theory, but the mob mentality is just the
| same. Fascism doesn't have much going for it today as it was a
| moment of 19th century nation states adopting 20th century
| technology, but I'd say the people indexed on it now are just as
| much of a mob as they ever were, and whatever they dress it up
| in, they're the same people, still just hunting witches.
| syntaxfree wrote:
| Bravo!
|
| This comment might as well be Peak Hacker News.
| motohagiography wrote:
| How is your comment peak HN?
| baud147258 wrote:
| > Mussolini [...] lacked the imperialist and colonial urges
|
| I'm not sure this is congruent with Italy's actions in
| Ethiopia, Albania and Greece.
| throwawaybutwhy wrote:
| Umberto Eco was one of the writers/thinkers whose 'profound
| truths' later surprisingly turned into quite revolting
| revelations. One of those whom I cannot trust at all.
| praptak wrote:
| To complement this I recommend Five Stages of Fascism by Robert
| Paxton. He takes a temporal view of fascism rather than
| ideological, reasoning that unlike most other -isms, fascism does
| not have a body of works that define the ideology. On the
| contrary, fascist movements despise coherent philosophies.
|
| So his focus is on development of fascist movements in time.
| api wrote:
| Fascism strikes me as the politics of the brain stem. To the
| extent that it has an ideology at all it tends to be explicitly
| _anti-rational_ and obsessed with power, hierarchy, and
| mystical destiny.
|
| I wonder if it's kind of a postmodern version of the old school
| militant theocratic monarchy. Like a theocracy without god, or
| without a coherent religious doctrine.
|
| I know that postmodernist thought post-dated fascism but the
| fascist aesthetic strikes me as very postmodern. Ideas are
| tools for power. Nothing is true, only power.
| throwaways85989 wrote:
| Ideas are the shackles of the neuro-facists (superior
| intelligence should get away with all things) for the stupid.
| To not accept any concept or idea, but that of power, could
| be interpreted as resistance to a eternally explained away
| opening scissor of redistributed wealth in a society.
|
| Take also the tendency of intelligence to produce ever less
| scientific break-troughs producing surplus for all and ever
| more parasitism (Encapsulating companies predating on
| established industries), a not "hackable" aka anti-
| intellectual resistance might be all that remains.
|
| Parasitism is also a large "topic" in fascism, be it
| redistributing parasitism (left bureaucracy), lawful
| parasitism ( citizens exploited by law-constellations) or
| plain anti-semitism, which todays miracolously _onaires
| escaped - for now._ Cough* social engineering _cough_ for the
| rescue.
|
| Another large topic is "walling off" against the "stranger".
| As the unlearned are in a much harsher competition against
| the other unlearned, a walled of society to reduce that
| competition is preferred.
|
| Also a recurring topic, is past injustice, which justifies
| current and future injustices, perpetrated. It really is just
| a falling apart of any semblance of intellectual problem
| solving, into a tribal mindset, taken for a ride by a
| miserable counter-elite.
| pram wrote:
| I think it was extremely modernist, personally. The
| narrative, grandeur and mystical destiny make it more
| modernist than post-modernist. Like a lot of the late
| 19th/early 20th century ideologies, civilization was
| inevitably and imminently heading towards the eschaton.
| Society had to be reformed and restructured to bring about
| this glorious material utopia.
|
| It's definitely about feelings and aesthetics, rather than
| economic or rational concerns though. You saw similar
| constructions in fringe communist regimes (Romania, North
| Korea)
| [deleted]
| michannne wrote:
| I liken far left extremism to descending from obsessive
| generalization, and far right extremism descending from
| obsessive categorization - from the latter of which emerges
| hierarchies, divisions based on things like race or genetics,
| and pissing contests based on labels.
| donatj wrote:
| > pissing contests based on labels
|
| I'm getting a lot of that from both sides.
| michannne wrote:
| Intersectionality paradoxically requires obsessive
| categorization while being promoted by those who are
| obsessive generalists
| trhway wrote:
| >Fascism strikes me as the politics of the brain stem.
|
| not surprisingly that German's back then and the today's
| Russian fascism (which is closer to German Nazism than to
| Italian fascism) each appeared after a decade of economic and
| political disorder and were precipitated by a terroristic
| acts after which tired and scared people happily clang to the
| promise of order and stability by a "strong hand".
|
| Germany - military defeat and crash of empire, the decade of
| disorder, the burn of Reichstag leads to Hitler taking total
| power, a decade of tightening of all political screws and
| huge nationalistic "master race" propaganda, directly
| appealing to the brain stem and thus supported by population,
| culminate in genocidal (wrt. Jews and Slavic) war.
|
| Russia - military defeat (Cold War and Afghanistan) and crash
| of empire, the decade of disorder, the multiple apartment
| building by FSB in September of 1999 leads to Putin taking
| total power, 2 decades of tightening of all political screws
| and huge nationalistic "master nation" ("Great Russia
| chauvinism") propaganda, the same way directly appealing to
| the brain stem and thus supported by population, culminate in
| the genocidal war against Ukrainians (UN genocide definition
| https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml). If
| history is any guide there is no other end here except like
| in WWII - the coalition should take over Russia and
| completely denazify and demilitarize it like it was done to
| Germany. Such profound war loss and failure of society and
| the following rework of country and society is what gets to
| the population's brain stem. Just beating the military like
| in WWI isn't enough as it only excites that basic instinct of
| tribal nationalism.
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