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To the extent there is a far-right revival -- and it's difficult to tell whether there is a lasting revival or if it's going to be another flash in the pan like many other far-right revivals in previous decades -- I think it's worth pointing out that it's not necessarily a purely European or Western phenomenon. I'd suggest it's also happening in (at least) East Asian politics and it could plausibly be world-systemic, for which there would be a couple of obvious reasons (e.g. the 'centre-left' becoming neoliberal and shutting out underprivileged classes from mainstream politics and the liberal attempt to suppress political antagonisms). As far as Germany goes I think it's probably the European country that's least in danger of succumbing to such a revival. It's always easy to find dramatic pictures like ^^^^ but in the broader picture the far right are impotent there and there are far stronger checks in place against it happening so it seems pretty unlikely compared to, say, France.
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Aug 10, 2013 03:35
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OwlBot 2000 posted:they've got cops and soldiers while the left has college students, In Hungary there was a recent survey showing that Jobbik had the largest student base out of all parties, closely followed by Fidesz (the government) who are pretty much equally far-right. 
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Aug 10, 2013 03:42
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^^ If you read Neumann's Behemoth it goes into exhaustive detail about that kind of thing, and specifically Nazism's relationship to markets and capitalist ideology. Nazi ideologues said very contradictory things to different audiences at different time periods, but their occasional superficial rebuttal of market relations never developed into anything systemic. bitterandtwisted posted:Two seats in parliament is two more than the BNP have ever had. The BNP got representation at the European Parliament, which puts them squarely in front of the NPD (which only ever had minor state-level representation). Zohar fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Aug 10, 2013 |
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Aug 10, 2013 17:50
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Fascism and Futurism weren't the same thing, nor did fascism derive from Futurism in any straightforward sense. While it's a neat description, I think the idea that fascism was focused on violence as an end in itself is a little too neat to be historically viable -- the emphasis on violence was more of a Sorelian thing that the Italian fascists partially co-opted. For instance, the guy who was more or less the official philosopher of fascism, Giovanni Gentile, placed emphasis on dialectical opposition but only in terms of it being subsumed into a single superior whole, the totalitarian state. The reconstruction of the world order was a pretty teleological idea for many fascists who also saw violence only as a means to the end of establishing a just world order, with varying levels of utopianism (e.g. Kita Ikki advocating the unification of the world's warring states beneath a single sovereign). I would generally describe the ideological core of historical fascism as the transposition of the language of Marxist class struggle to the international arena, with nations or states as the individual agents. (edit: Specifically in the case of Italian fascism and its derivatives, that is -- I think it's anachronistic to group together the massively divergent modern far right movements under that label) Zohar fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Aug 14, 2013 |
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Aug 14, 2013 22:39
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Vicious in-fighting in fascist parties isn't exactly new, since its creation as an ideology fascism has always been so nebulous that it goes with the brand. Look at the factions in the original Italian fascists, or the account of the development of Nazi ideology in Neumann's Behemoth. The key is that when they're in power, fascists no longer have to depend on the people who originally helped put them there, let alone fulfil whatever particular demands they may have had.
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Nov 7, 2013 22:23
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YF-23 posted:For what it's worth, there's a lot of suspicion regarding the proclamation because of how it's written, and it's very possible it's a manufactured document. Manufactured by whom? Is this strategy of tension v2?
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Nov 18, 2013 16:42
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Cerebral Bore posted:Who knows? Maybe it's some group looking to stoke the conflict, or maybe it's just some random idiots trying to stir up poo poo for a laugh. After all, the strangest groups take credit for poo poo they didn't do for all sorts of reasons. You're not wrong, but if as YF-23 is suggesting there's a possibility the state is involved then it's a pretty alarming development. (Not that we're lacking for those.)
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Nov 19, 2013 02:50
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Praseodymi posted:We can do better than that. Bear in mind these are the same people who bring up 1984 as a justification for why political correctness is a very bad thing
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Jan 20, 2014 12:11
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Well, I am a researcher (graduate student anyway) who has written on that particular topic and I don't think it's wrong? The fascists both in Italy and in Germany articulated a particular understanding of capitalism which allowed them both to oppose their idea of bourgeois culture while at the same time enforcing capitalist relations; if you're not a fascist (and disagree with their articulation) it makes perfect sense to call them capitalist. The Wikipedia section is not an impressive source because a) its references are either general histories of Nazi Germany or primary sources (implying it's just the original research of whoever wrote it) -- it doesn't reference any of the studies specifically on Nazi economic ideology, like Keith Tribe's chapter 'Capitalism, Totalitarianism, and the Legal Order of National Socialism' in Strategies of Economic Order, which conclude something quite different, and b) methodologically, Nazi articulation of economic ideology changed in quite radical ways and it's disingenuous to take statements that represent only particular snapshots of their ideology at a given time made with a particular party-political goal in mind and present them as a totalising analysis of their whole ideology.
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Feb 2, 2014 15:24
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Haven't read the Traverso essay, but it's worth pointing out that the very idea of a 'national socialism' was, I think, first articulated by Friedrich Naumann, who was definitely not an anti-capitalist given that in a sense his whole project was figuring out a way to pacify the working classes without disrupting capitalist relations by introducing actual socialism. As I understand, generally historians have tended to deny the connection between Neumann and Hitler's Nazism, but there was an article published just last November titled 'National Socialism before Nazism' which makes quite a good case that they're actually very similar. e: Naumann, not Neumann
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Feb 2, 2014 15:37
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Jobbik, which I think is proportionally the most powerful far-right party in Europe, is very definitely working on an old fascist paradigm and not the right-libertarian one you see further west. They have the whole third-way ideology of opposition to both 'Zionist' neoliberalism and communism. Of course in Hungary the left is basically non-existent, even more so than in places like the UK without a major leftist movement but which still have factions like Old Labour, so that's probably one reason why.
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Feb 2, 2014 18:39
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computer parts posted:Fascism is also much weaker than in the 30s in everywhere but Europe, though, and nationalism in general is not that high. Well in most respects it's certainly much weaker than in the 30s in Europe as well -- we don't have any explicitly far-right governments, at most there's something like Hungary which flirts unsubtly with it. Like I pointed out towards the beginning of the thread though, there's a similar resurgence happening in at least Northeast Asia so I don't think it's helpful to perceive it as a purely European phenomenon.
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Feb 2, 2014 22:36
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OrganizedInsanity posted:That doesn't answer how EU conservatives are apparently against the idea of gender roles when every other conservative group in the world is for it. I assume it's that they deny that gender is a distinct thing from sex. e: Yep: quote:When describing this gender ideology, church officials have referenced the central premise of gender theory -- that gender is a product of culture and not inherent to human nature.
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Feb 7, 2014 17:05
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Guildencrantz posted:Eh, I was talking more about the actual bona fide fascists, like ONR/RN and rest of the Independence March clowncar. It's an open question as to whether PiS, as well as their ideological kin like Fidesz in Hungary, can be described as "fascist" if you're not just using the term as an insult. Don't get me wrong, they're still utter cunts and if they win I'll have a one-way plane ticket booked faster than you can say "Prime Minister Kaczynski", but I don't think they can accurately be termed fash. Modern national-conservatism is kind of its own thing. Fidesz did adopt policies wholesale from the Jobbik manifesto after getting elected.
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Feb 8, 2014 18:41
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Dusz posted:You're not acknowledging reality. The prospects of leftism in Eastern Europe are very slim right now. Over here, leftism is associated with Russian imperialism and domination and it's only "alive" in the form of red-coated Russian nationalist/minority rights parties calling themselves "communist" for historical reasons. I think this is more than a bit patronising. Most "D&D communists" are perfectly aware of the establishmentarian nature of communism in the late Soviet Union, and it has nothing to do with Mans's basic point about the far-right presence in Ukraine.
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Feb 24, 2014 12:11
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SSJ2 Goku Wilders posted:They aren't and it does So what's the intrinsic connection between the statements "communism in Eastern Europe is Soviet imperialism" and "fascists don't play a significant part in Maidan" -- which is how I was reading the implication of that post? e: nm on D&D communists, stupid thing to argue about Zohar fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Feb 24, 2014 |
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Feb 24, 2014 12:34
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Well I agree with that, but Mans's basic point was just that people pointing out the fascist threat in Ukraine are being called pro-Russian propagandists and fringe communists.
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Feb 24, 2014 12:53
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King of Hamas posted:There is much less of a Fascist threat in the Ukraine right now because many of the Fascists that were in the Ukraine have fled, already having been hired by the government to beat protestors and then chased out by the very same. 'Many' is a weasel word. The fascist party Svoboda is still an active part of the opposition, a fascist was just recently appointed attorney-general, and Pravy Sektor are still cooperating with the Interior Ministry forces in maintaining order in Kiev. From where I'm standing there has been no substantive change in the composition of the protest movement in one direction or the other. I agree that it would be disingenuous to use their presence to delegitimise the protest movement as a whole, as the Russian propagandists have been doing, but what I've been driving at is that there is also legitimate cause for concern. The practical point isn't that we (I mean non-Ukrainians and particularly Westerners) should be anxious or frightened, it's simply that we should be aware of what is actually happening. And that we should be prepared for this kind of sudden legitimation of the far right in the future. It happened on a lesser scale in Hungary in 2006 and I'm sure it will happen elsewhere in the future. King of Hamas posted:Fascism supports authoritarianism, not rebellion. It can support both, and has done so historically. Methodologically, appeals to an imagined essential nature of fascism aren't particularly robust. It is what it is.
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Feb 24, 2014 17:56
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God drat, I don't 100% agree with Mans but you're twisting their words virtually beyond recognition.
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Feb 26, 2014 18:18
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Gantolandon posted:I don't feel I misrepresented something there. It certainly didn't help that their post contained a lot of assumptions that simply are not true. There were no widespread ban of the Communist Party, the regional bans didn't single them out (as opposed to the Party of Regions) and I don't know anything about incidents where people clamored to have LGBT rights curtailed. I was referring to statements you were attacking like only True Bolsheviks having any authority to comment, the Polish protests being leftist, Euromaidan only happening because of the fascists, the fascist 'cognitive dissonance' thing, none of which were things Mans was actually saying as far as I could tell. Ardennes posted:I would say that IMF (or just "structural reforms") and minority rights (or the relationship between Kiev and Russian/Russo-philic regions) is the two key flashpoints. I think the test will be if and when the new government does make unpopular decisions and how they handle them. Given the track record I fully expect IMF reforms to cause further popular unrest in the near future -- maybe not for certain, but it's definitely likely.
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Feb 26, 2014 23:43
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Omi-Polari posted:And outright pro-Putin, as well, to the point of wanting a Putin-type leader in America. The left tends to either equivocate about Putin or side with the Kremlin's foreign policy positions. Yeah the Western right actually support or at least sympathise with Putin's policies, whereas the pro-Russian left only like him in as much as he's anti-Western and they conceive of everything as a geopolitical showdown between a hegemonic (therefore evil) West and an anti-hegemonic (therefore good) Russia/China bloc.
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Feb 27, 2014 19:09
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Hungarian elections are coming up at the start of April. In the Eastern Europe thread I said that it looks like the fascist party, Jobbik, is going to get a mediocre result, but it seems like it's enjoyed a precipitous rise in support over the past week or two. Some polls are putting it at almost 20% support now among decided voters -- for reference, it got 16.7% in the last elections in 2010. I'm not sure what's caused this, but I doubt it's to do with their ongoing weird "hold cats in publicity photos" campaign. They've been running a bit of a Janus-faced campaign this year. Last election it was all about immediate radical change, campaign videos with riot footage set to dramatic music, and open paramilitary activity. This time around their national campaign has gone for a much softer look, focusing on defending the traditional family, securing a future for children, etc. Their regional chapters have been playing to the base, though:  For reference, that symbol is the Arrow Cross, essentially the Hungarian equivalent of the swastika. Hungary actually had two regimes during the Second World War: one was an authoritarian regime led by Regent Miklós Horthy, but Horthy was an old-school reactionary who was never entirely sympathetic to fascism and Hitler eventually got fed up of him after he made overtures to the Allies in 1944. Germany invaded, Horthy was overthrown and replaced by a much more radical fascist regime under Ferenc Szálasi, the Arrow Cross guy, which oversaw the full extension of the Holocaust into Hungary. Most of the time the far right in Hungary will affirm Horthy and disavow Szálasi, but the Arrow Cross has been making more of an appearance with Jobbik's rise.
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Mar 1, 2014 05:12
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Obdicut posted:Karl Popper is at least semi-identified with libertarians, and yeah, he was pretty smart. Popper has been appropriated by libertarians but the most that can be said about him in that regard is that he was an anticommunist and had personal connections to neoliberals like Hayek and Friedman through the Mont Pelerin Society. He explicitly advocated for government regulation of the market, cf The Open Society: "Here we are clearly faced with an important problem of social engineering: the market must be controlled, but in such a way that the control does not impede the free choice of the consumer and that it does not remove the need for the producers to compete for the favour of the consumer."
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Mar 3, 2014 16:31
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Ardennes posted:Zohar, personally, I don't know what I am worried about more, the fact that Jobbik is seeing a rebound in the polls or the fact that Fidesz is still doing quite strong and with certainly will have a strong majority. The latest poll you were talking about still had 49% of Fidesz and based on the constitutional changes they have already made, they are going to have no problem holding on to their majority. They may have slightly less of a percentage of the vote than they had in 2010 but with the electoral system the way it is, they very well may be make further constitutional changes. There's certainly not much difference between them nowadays, here's the conclusion of an opinion piece published today in the leading right-wing newspaper, which is generally understood to be a Fidesz mouthpiece (my translation): quote:Those responsible have still not realised that it is not just they, the deliverers of this ideology, who have failed, but the ideology itself. The Hungarian government, with the leadership of Viktor Orbán and the use of its two-thirds majority, has broken the nightmarish tyranny of the left-liberals, deceptively called 'democracy' by the globalists. The point of the piece is to justify restrictions on press freedom on the basis that the 'lackey left-liberal media' is creating an 'orgy of hate' and spreading anti-Hungarian propaganda in foreign media.
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Mar 5, 2014 00:26
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Gantolandon posted:instantly interpreting his posts in the worst possible light? Welcome, to D&D.
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Mar 6, 2014 19:57
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computer parts posted:Given that this thread is about fascism it's fairly relevant to identify why some developed nations (Europe) are more sympathetic towards it than others ( mostly in North America), or even why developing nations do not appear to be terribly susceptible to it either. Neither of those statements is true
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Mar 7, 2014 09:21
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computer parts posted:Would you like to elaborate? Which developing nations would you say are particularly friendly to fascism? Would (e.g.) Egypt be one since they are essentially a totalitarian military state? Talking flatly about the 'susceptibility' of countries to fascism as though they have some kind of essential affinity for it is methodologically missing the point completely: fascism, at least to the extent that it refers to a general ideal type and not just a specific historical phenomenon, emerges out of a particular contingent constellation of social, economic and political forces which can theoretically come into being anywhere in the world. With regards to developing nations, many of the most successful explicit far-right movements today are in developing countries like Russia or Hungary, Arab nationalism had a significant historical basis in fascism (the most obvious example being in Syria, and yes potentially Egypt could be included in that), the Park regime in South Korea was heavily influenced by fascism, fascism had a major presence in China and arguably has a less explicit one today, there is a large far-right movement in India, and I could go on.
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Mar 7, 2014 16:40
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Funnily enough I've just been reading on this exact topic -- Walter Lippmann had more or less the exact same concern at the start of the New Deal era, and his answer was pretty much that the executive needs to have initiative in fiscal matters. He talks about it in The Method of Freedom (Google Books). And Weber said the same thing about Germany, here if you can read German. Contemporary democratic theory tends to overlook this aspect of democratic politics in general I think because of its massive prioritisation of discussion over decision-making thanks to discursive democracy theory etc. Just a historical aside 
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Mar 7, 2014 23:18
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Install Windows posted:It's not what states see themselves as, it is the literal basis of the country. So, it is what states see themselves as.
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Mar 7, 2014 23:29
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Install Windows posted:Saying it's what they see themselves as implies that it isn't actually true. I was being facetious. Validity as a historical basis and abstract atemporal truth are completely different things: the fact that two and a half centuries ago the United States emerged on those grounds has no bearing on whether they can still viably be held to be true in contemporary political analysis. I would suggest it certainly hasn't been true since at least the 60s, most probably since the early 20th century (Ira Katznelson analyses the South at that point as a 'country within a country' in his recent book Fear Itself but not the states themselves), and quite likely since the middle of the 19th century.
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Mar 7, 2014 23:37
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Install Windows posted:The country is structured on that basis, and it is indeed how it functions. Vast areas of operation are done independently, or with merely some federal cash and guidelines to follow to keep getting the cash. That is true of all countries with a federal structure. Their subjects are not, however, sovereign.
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Mar 7, 2014 23:42
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Besides, this is a complete tangent given that the problem that Tarrannor is pointing out depends simply on the existence of a general interest expressed by a particular represented demos, it could potentially apply just as much to the EU, which certainly is a 'federation of sovereign states' or whatever.
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Mar 7, 2014 23:52
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Install Windows posted:Not always, no. Sovereignty is not an absolute. It pretty much is by most definitions of the term that I'm aware of -- you're either sovereign or not, there is no in between. If you take the Schmittian or the Hobbesian definition, there can only be one sovereign -- one authority with the final power to decide on a given political case -- in a given area, by definition. In terms of classical (and, as far as I know, current) international law, only one authority can be sovereign, because only one authority can ultimately embody the decision-making power of a people in international relations (clearly US states don't have this power). There might be marginal cases like condominia, which the Hobbesian/Schmittian account would discount in any case, but that's basically it.
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Mar 8, 2014 00:05
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Install Windows posted:In practise, all kinds of reductions of sovereignty happen all the time, frequently with no easy way for a country in question to easily break the restrictions without incident. Indeed, and many theorists have pointed this out as a supplement to the theory of sovereignty, but it has no bearing on the question of whether there can be overlapping fields of sovereignty since even where sovereignty is impinged upon by another political force, that force doesn't itself take on the characteristics of sovereignty. Cosmopolitan IR theorists like Archibugi and co might take issue with this on a normative basis, but as a descriptive account I think it's fairly consistent. To take a random example, Pol Pot may have made a sovereign decision to start massacring Vietnamese people, and Vietnam's military intervention in Cambodia impinged upon his ability to carry out this decision. Vietnam, however, did not (other than maybe instantaneously) assume any kind of 'sovereignty' over Cambodia in doing so -- that is, they did not assume either the right (or ability) to represent the Cambodian people before international law, or the right (or ability) to overrule the Cambodian government's sovereign decisions in general. In any case, at any given moment, only one authority can practice ultimate decision-making power in a territory, by definition -- that's the claim of the Schmittian/Hobbesian theory of sovereignty. (e: To simplify, the general point here is that ultimate authority is not the same as total authority) If we take the Weberian definition of the state as a monopoly on the legitimate use of force -- which isn't precisely a theory of sovereignty anyway -- then the status of federal subjects with a certain capacity to carry out legitimate acts of violence, like US states, might blur a bit. But that can still be incorporated in the final analysis, given that Weber after all himself participated in the construction of the Weimar Republic, based on a federal constitution. In the US, the federal state has assumed a certain legitimate authority, at least in extraordinary situations, to withdraw or impose force on the constituent states. To that extent their capacities are practiced at the pleasure of the federal state, not the other way round as the constitution might originally have it. Like I said, though, as interesting as this discussion is (or probably isn't, for most other people) it has little bearing on the original thing that was being discussed. Zohar fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Mar 8, 2014 |
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Mar 8, 2014 00:24
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David Horowitz is the obvious American example that springs to my mind.
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Mar 22, 2014 02:38
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Turns out one of Jobbik's MEPs is a literal KGB/FSB informant  So much for patriotism.English article: http://budapestbeacon.com/featured-articles/spy-little-eye-russian-spy/
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May 24, 2014 00:34
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KomradeX posted:Do you have any sources for this, hopefully something in English? Not attacking you just something I would like to read and share on Facebook. It's been an open secret for ages (along with their Iranian backing), though it's only now that the Hungarian government has actually started investigating it. Here are some good sources in English: http://hungarianspectrum.wordpress.com/2014/04/13/jobbik-and-the-russian-connection-the-role-of-bela-kovacs/ http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141067/mitchell-a-orenstein/putins-western-allies (about Russian support for European nationalism more broadly)
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May 24, 2014 17:33
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computer parts posted:In fairness it only really seems to be Europe and maybe some Middle Eastern countries. It is an issue in most of South, Southeast, and East Asia it just doesn't get as much coverage in English-speaking media
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May 26, 2014 02:58
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computer parts posted:I know there's a strong junta streak but I don't know if it's fascist specifically. I'm not talking about dictatorships, I'm talking about far-right racist-nationalist popular sentiment.
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May 26, 2014 14:33
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It's absolutely true that globalisation in general has weakened the capacity of leftist politics on a national level as well as strengthening the hand of the xenophobic far right in developed countries, but the progressive response to that is to globalise leftism and not to try to hold back the tide by resuscitating mercantilism, throwing up protectionist barriers etc. Leftism in one nation makes as much sense as anti-racism in one bantustan.
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May 28, 2014 04:10
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