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praptak
api
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.
michannne
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
> pissing contests based on labels
I'm getting a lot of that from both sides.
trhway
>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.
type0
What everyone fails to see is that Russiaism isn't the same as Putinism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_fascism_(ideology)
In some ways Russia already overshot the Nazi Germany, think about it if Germans in WWII would bomb german speaking austrian cities; this is what we are seeing from Russian military today.
Putin want's Kyiv because it's like Jerusalem for him and his crusaders
>> Patriarch Kirill of Moscow declared concerning the religious relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and Ukraine: "Ukraine is not on the periphery of our church. We call Kiev 'the mother of all Russian cities.' For us Kiev is what Jerusalem is for many. Russian Orthodoxy began there, so under no circumstances can we abandon this historical and spiritual relationship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world#Politicization
Unfortunately we'll be seeing Put'in not wanting to put'out of Ukraine for a long time
totetsu
So maybe its WWIV we should be worrying about..
pram
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)
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gunfighthacksaw
IMO Nietzsche was proto-Pomo and Heidegger was definitely even closer, the latter being coterminous with classical fascism (and an initially enthusiastic card carrying member of that German party) in addition to being somewhat rehabilitated by Satre after the war.
throwaways85989
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.
pyuser583
I’d recommend Anatomy of Fascism, also by Robert Paxton. Paxton’s work is fastinating and a little scary.
He treats Fascism as a historical movement, not an set of ideas.
It’s scary because it shows that rigorous study of historical Fascism hasn’t really happened. It’s been too colored by the WWII propaganda.
For example, fascism was implemented very differently in different countries.
Pre-Anschluss’s Austrian fascism was very very different from German Nazism.
Mussolini didn’t implement any anti-Semitic legislation until after making an alliance with Hitler (12 years of Fascist rule with no anti-semitism).
Fasicists in Portugal (Salozaro) became increasingly moderate. They split strongly from international Fascism (Mussolini), condemned the name “fascism” while claiming to be a “nationalist third way between capitalism and and socialism.” No real elections. Was a very pro-Allied neutral in WWII. Became a founding member of NATO and stayed in power until the 1960s.
He doesn’t feel obligated to follow the safe “Hitler is bad, Hitler was bad, Hitler was a Fascist, therefore Fascists are bad” syllogism that we find so safe.
He asks hard questions like “how much do Mussolini in 1921, Hitler in 1939, and Hungarian Fascism from 1935 really have in common?”
He really pissed people off when he pointed out that the Vichy Regime in France was an independent, preoccupation movement, and not merely “German occupation.”
Not what the French want to hear.
Bayart
> He really pissed people off when he pointed out that the Vichy Regime in France was an independent, preoccupation movement, and not merely “German occupation.”
> Not what the French want to hear.
The pre-war French far-right, which could be associated to the broader fascist trend, had very little to do with what the Vichy governement ended up being a few years down the line. You could argue the Vichy regime was a genuine artifact of French politics in 1940, but not in 1942.
loki49152
Fascism does have a body of works. The inventors, Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini, were quite proud of themselves and their creation. They wrote and spoke a great deal about it.
The idea that there is no explanation for Fascism and that it's some inexplicable mystery is gaslighting from Socialists who don't want anyone to understand that such an obvious evil is, actually, the true face of their ideology.
mrjangles
What a ridiculous rewriting of history. Fascism has a huge body of work starting most famously with Giovanni Gentile, the father of fascism, and then going back through many italian philosophers like Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, Spaventa and ultimately leading back to Hegel and Karl Marx.
I've found that whenever someone says "no one understands why this happened", it is usually because everyone understands why it happened and they just don't like the answer for ideological reasons.
qiskit
> On the contrary, fascist movements despise coherent philosophies.
Because it isn't a philosophy but rather a defensive reaction against the liberal democratic empire on one side and the communist/marxist empire on the other side. It's pretty much nationalism that rose up in europe to prevent smaller nations from being gobbled up by either the american or soviet empires. It's just easier to malign it as fascism rather than nationalism because most people are nationalists. It's also why we hate fascists in america and the soviets hated fascists. Because nationalists/fascists were against both.
Fascism wasn't defined by what it is. Fascism was defined by what it didn't want to become. What it didn't want to be slave to.
wrp
A good quick critique of the overuse of "fascism" is Antifascism Without Fascism by Stanley G. Payne. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583319)
Payne has written several books on the history of fascism and Francoist Spain. I find his approach to analyzing fascism more systematic and thorough than Paxton's.
ianwehba
> There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
lebubule
"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
"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...
unpopularopp
Interestingly the listed conditions make both Ukraine and Russia Ur-Fascist states
agapon
You probably don't know much about Ukraine then.
paleotrope
While well written, I've never found Ur-Fascism to be useful in any real way.
What he describes is sufficiently general to cover almost any political movement.
twangist
Thank you, this is not easy to find in its entirety.
maxbendick
I can't help but feel too old for this piece post-Trump. Eco succeeds in helping us identify fascism, but this is not the problem.
The story of Eco's friendship with African American soldiers is odd to me. Eco sees them as cultured human beings who brought freedom to Italy. And yet he neglects to bring up the racial unfreedom they faced at home, including their future exclusion from the GI Bill. Is this irrelevant because the US is not strictly fascist?
I mean to say we should not ignore the real psychological and economic forces that fascism is composed of. Eco touches on these forces. But it's not enough to stop at classifying whether a state is fascist or not. The forces that compose fascism are always present in liberal democracy, even if they don't crystallize into a mass movement.
What's most disturbing is that the German and Italian masses were not tricked: they desired fascism (even if it was against their material interests). Infantilizing the masses gets us nowhere in our understanding. [1]
I may be critical, but this is still a great piece from Eco. It's full of insights about fascism, and it succeeds at what it says on the tin.
For further reading I highly recommend Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism
[1] Ripped this paragraph almost word-for-word from Anti-Oedipus
mrjangles
In case it isn't clear, this article is not someone who was there talking about the history of fascism. There are plenty of history books for that. The whole point of this article is to give a different perspective on fascism and to rewrite history in a new and original way that just so happens to be more convenient to them.
This whole thing can be summarized simply as "Everything I dislike is fascism, even things that have absolutely nothing to do with fascism, and everything that actually is fascism and has a lot in common with my ideology, wasn't really fascism, and certainly wasn't socialism, even though they all called themselves Marxists"
or to quote the article specifically:
>The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini
in other words, sure it was developed by Marxists (Giovanni Gentile, and everyone else behind fascism were all Marxists philosopher), but it "wasn't real socialism". It is exactly the same "not real socialism" that all defenders of socialism always use when their ideology goes down the drain.
coldtea
This basically dumps together many non-Whig, non-progressivism ideas as "proto-fascism, including along with some key signs of fasism things that have nothing to do with what made historical fascism bad (which was: leadership cult, corporatism, uber race, antisemitism, german expansionism, etc).
It's also white-washing Stalinism and western colonialism, to which as many (or more) casulaties can be attributed to (and equally nefarious ideologies, the "white man's burden", slavery, gulags for dissidents, etc weren't invented by Hitler), but which were not "conservative" in nature, so they get a pass.
I'd rather we stop using the silly catch-all phrase "fascism" for things that don't have the attributes of historical fascism (which was a specific, time limited, historical movement), and even more so expand it loosely to mean anything and everything that's not pure liberalism.
jancsika
> 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-...
sorokod
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
Isaac Asimov wrote a great critique on 1984 which includes a few thoughts on Animal Farm: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
EMIRELADERO
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.
simonh
> There is no ability to make minor changes, even.
Good grief, how to totally miss the entire point. He’s trying to critique a political deconstruction as though it was entertainment fiction. Didn’t he realise the close parallels are kind of the point, because Orwell was writing a commentary on and illustration of those events and personalities? Introducing random variations would have completely obscured the things he was trying to say. Things Asimov didn’t even notice.
michannne
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.
guerrilla
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...
ZeroGravitas
I think you might be too strongly associating 'USSR' and 'communist'. They're intertwined but not identical.
Smoosh
The same thing happens with Fascism and the Nazis.
adg001
> 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.
csee
Stalin's doctrine wasn't only to establish communism in Russia. He just realized it was impractical to export communism immediately. His intentional long-term play was to stoke war across the world between capitalist countries so that that war would create the desperate conditions for revolution within those countries similar to the role that WW1 played in creating the conditions for revolution within Russia. That's why he blocked reform to the Versailles Treaty, among other actions.
adg001
You failed to understand what I wrote - notwithstanding the reference I provided, and which you haven't.
FooBarBizBazz
> You are confusing Communism in Western Europe with the communist state of the USSR and its Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country
They really aren't. The Communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War -- the ones who put their boot down on Orwell's beloved POUM and other Trotskyists -- were honest-to-god Soviets.
But yes, more democratic "Communist" parties did exist in Western Europe later, and there is a large space of "third way" Socialisms and Communisms that are not Stalinist hell.
jimnotgym
I don't have my copy of Homage to hand, but I seem to remember Orwell being in the POUM militia was more or less an accident of how he arrived in Spain and nothing to do with it being 'beloved'.
As an aside, I once met a Spanish Civil War veteran from South Wales. I got the impression that he went to fight the fascists because it was the right thing to do ('If you tolerate this then your children will be next' was a famous slogan that made it into a song), not because of ideological indoctrination. He was a socialist in the British sense, but that should not suggest the slightest parallel with Stalinism
motohagiography
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.
baud147258
> Mussolini [...] lacked the imperialist and colonial urges
I'm not sure this is congruent with Italy's actions in Ethiopia, Albania and Greece.
motohagiography
Indeed, and you're right, it deflates the "italian fascists were nationalists and not totalitarians," argument to a great extent. The rationale I think for separating them was the pretext of dubious historical claims to Albania via the "Roman" empire, vs. the global dominion aims of hitler and stalin - but even then, that argument is mainly in service of reinforcing the overarching idea of totalitarianism being a new, coherent, and unique 20th cen ideology and phenomenon, and maybe not as a complete read of the history.
There is an argument to be made that totalitarianism itself wasn't new or notable or is even a coherent thing that can't be shown to have manifested in pretty much every other imperial effort. I've got ideas about some of its other sufficient conditions that still preserve it as a unique effect and form, and as far as an intellectual renaming of Evil goes, tot'ism is pretty close to what critics of fascism come up with as well. Some of these things only exist at a certain level of abstraction and then dissolve under further scrutiny.
syntaxfree
Bravo!
This comment might as well be Peak Hacker News.
motohagiography
How is your comment peak HN?
labster
This comment is also Peak HN.
OP is a great article but I regret upvoting it, because the discussion is full of stale political tropes and the blaming of The Other Side. If I have time later, I’ll go through and downvote every comment, including my own.
throwawaybutwhy
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.
kkfx
[flagged]
peoplefromibiza
> (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
> 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 déserteur" changing the last part from
Prévenez vos gendarmes
Que j'emporte des armes
Et que je sais tirer
Que je n'aurai pas d'armes
Et qu'ils pourront tirer
B1FF_PSUVM
> 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.
peoplefromibiza
> 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
Agnelli is simply the most popular scapegoat among Italian zeitgeist-ers, but only the older ones, who actually grew up with their parents telling them that he was the source of anyone problems, so I guess you're in your 50s and agree with Wu Ming because you think they are "real leftists"...
> 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"
> Prévenez 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...
You know what's really funny?
That the Umberto Eco's essay on the UR-fascism (that should be the topic of this post) is about exactly people like you.
And about the reasons why fascism and nazism went to power, which is not to fight socialism.
If you read it before jumping to the comment section, you'd know it.
> 13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of view – one follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People. Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was "I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniples" – "maniples" being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
Doesn't it sounds strangely familiar to what you said? that, paraphrasing, more or less was
- in Italy everybody is corrupt, only a few anglophones and criminal family matters
- there's no real leftist party, the only good leftist party is the one that doesn't exists anymore, all the others are accomplices of the few anglophones and criminal families ruling the country aforementioned
You're no Gaber or Pasolini, you're average Joe.
michannne
>"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
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
> 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.
michannne
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)
csee
2) This has nothing to do with capitalism. The reason Britain didn't form a coalition with the USSR was because they were petrified of getting Stalin's troops out of central Europe after a war. And for good reason given who Stalin was. So they wrongly chose appeasement in the hope that Hitler wouldn't do more. A big mistake, but one you can sympathize with to at least some small extent, and it'd be disingenuous to try to link it to capitalism somehow.
zozbot234
"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.)
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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.