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Because Maoism is still a communist ideology? Would you say the Soviets were fascist too? What makes China a fascist state, but Israel not a fascist state? What makes China a fascist state, but not Saudi Arabia? Also, looping back to an earlier point, what do people think of the Hindutva movement in India? Is it fascist, or just hardline ethnoreligious? Is there a difference? Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 04:03 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 03:59
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There seems to be aspects to fascism that involve a mythos of rebirth from collapse, a capturing of the youth's attention towards that cause, and a focus on devoting an individual's professional and private life to advancing the state. Did the CSA have these aspects front and center the same way that Spain, Italy, or Germany did? The CSA seemed to be more focused on keeping the status quo and letting old white interests coast by, but I am open to evidence to the contrary. Neo confederates certainly seem to hit the fascist nail right on the head though, so I wonder if that's where some of the misunderstanding is coming from.
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May 9, 2021 04:00
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A GIANT PARSNIP posted:There seems to be aspects to fascism that involve a mythos of rebirth from collapse, a capturing of the youth's attention towards that cause, and a focus on devoting an individual's professional and private life to advancing the state. Did the CSA have these aspects front and center the same way that Spain, Italy, or Germany did? The CSA seemed to be more focused on keeping the status quo and letting old white interests coast by, but I am open to evidence to the contrary. yes, neoconfederates are probably properly understood as a fascist movement. But, as was my point above, fascism should have more explanatory power than "not liberal democracy" if it's going to be a useful conceptual category.
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May 9, 2021 04:02
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You didn't say Maoism, you said China. None of us have to pretend these are the same thing.
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May 9, 2021 04:09
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So at what point did China stop being a Maoist society and become a fascist one? What features do you think mark China as fascist that apply now but did not apply in the 50s? Great Leap forward and the cultural revolution were both explicitly modernist movements against traditional Chinese society, so they don't really fit into this fascist framework that we have up here. Would you define Stalinism as fascist? Is fascism analogous to authoritarianism or dictatorship? Is the Juche of North Korea a fascist government? E: vvvvv that's what I was referring to, yes. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 04:20 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 04:12
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Discendo Vox posted:a) What "people in this thread" are "insinuating that China is a fascist state"? Not OP, but I assume they meant you, considering this statement from a previous post in this thread: Discendo Vox posted:German fascism You don't say China is fascist, but you do draw attention to both German fascism and China drawing from the same fascist source and the phrase "gosh gee I wonder why" to me implied that you thought the reason for that was obvious, albeit you don't say what that reason is! Could explain what the purpose of noting the popularity of the book in China was and what you meant by the "gosh gee" comment? If I'm misreading you, my bad. Also I just assumed China was a decade or two behind academically. I think Schmitt had a weird second life amongst neocons (through Strauss) and socialists (through Mouffe), which in the US seems to have run its course, but insofar as many people seem to think he was brilliant and insofar as he influenced academics across the political spectrum, it makes sense to me that Chinese academia might have a Schmittian moment. Although I don't know anything about the internal factors in Chinese academia.
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May 9, 2021 04:16
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Epicurius posted:Like I said in the other thread, I don't think you get fascism without WWI. I repeat my suggestion to read Payne. But I think that before you say "this government is fascist", you have to define what fascism is and what it values. A "US" group that is good and right (even and especially in opposition to factual evidence) and has to be protected stay together and a "them" that is a threat and both inferior and a massive threat at the same time and is fungible and who's membership is involuntarily (genetic, can not leave to join with the fascists, etc). Is a good base definition that usually works. Sort of contrast to a left extreme party where it presumes every human is at it's core part of the party but has gone astray and must be persuaded to join back in with the goal of unifying all humans, facists require an enemy/threat to continue existing and will exclude people by design. Flannelette fucked around with this message at 04:25 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 04:21
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Would you then say that the Spartans, who's society was founded on oppression to the point that the slaughter of their under caste was a yearly coming of age ritual, were a fascist society then? They indisputably had an extreme "Us versus them" dynamic in their society, and were constantly worried about helot revolts. But I don't think that that would be enough to make them fascist. E: back, I would say that if you were to define the CSA as protofascist, you would have to look at whether or not you would consider the Spartans that as well, what it would mean for the definition if protofascism goes back to the ancient world Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 05:30 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 04:55
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I might be that fascism requires a certain level of industry, science and technology and understanding of the reality before it goes from just a group that got things wrong because they didn't know better to willful deceit and fearmongering on a grand scale as a pillar of society that is an evolution of guilds wanting more control to make more money etc. Rather than spartans who were maybe rightfully afraid for their saftey, instead of just a small group of them trying to be rich.
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May 9, 2021 05:26
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Yeah, I think I would say that would be a defining feature for m: Fascism is a product of industrial and post-industrial societies, and I don't think it would make a lot of sense to apply it as a label to pre-industrial societies that legitimately feared peasant or slave revolts (which is really what the CSA was).
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May 9, 2021 05:30
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Beelzebufo posted:What makes China a fascist state, but Israel not a fascist state? What makes China a fascist state, but not Saudi Arabia? I'm going to think that saudi arabia makes a much easier to make a case for "if it isn't technically fascist, it just reeks of fascism 24/7" -- Israel more feels like 'illiberal ethnonationalism is transforming this system into fascism in progress, please stand by!" and it has spent my politically active years alive doing a bunch of weird mask-off somersaults of varying severity as it descends into post-democracy whose systems of republic feel like a gritty, rusted-out engine throwing a rod and starting to vibrate too heavily to ignore. Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is all the way there in that whole brutally authoritarian thing with the government having burrowed into every artery of society and business to serve the interests of the chosen holders of power, and directs every exercise of media, speech, and society towards the permanence of those power structures.
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May 9, 2021 05:34
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Kavros posted:I'm going to think that saudi arabia makes a much easier to make a case for "if it isn't technically fascist, it just reeks of fascism 24/7" -- Israel more feels like 'illiberal ethnonationalism is transforming this system into fascism in progress, please stand by!" and it has spent my politically active years alive doing a bunch of weird mask-off somersaults of varying severity as it descends into post-democracy whose systems of republic feel like a gritty, rusted-out engine throwing a rod and starting to vibrate too heavily to ignore. Saudi Arabia, in contrast, is all the way there in that whole brutally authoritarian thing with the government having burrowed into every artery of society and business to serve the interests of the chosen holders of power, and directs every exercise of media, speech, and society towards the permanence of those power structures. I actually think this is a good point, because I've often thought that fundamentalist movements (in Chrisitanity and Islam) as being similar and related to fascism as ideologies, pulling from a religious versus ethnonationalist mythic pasts. Modern fundamentalist movements would be totally incoherent to adherence of their religions during the golden ages they imagine returning to.
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May 9, 2021 05:36
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Beelzebufo posted:Yeah, I think I would say that would be a defining feature for m: Fascism is a product of industrial and post-industrial societies, I think that facism requires industrialization and capitalism to create the fertile soil of concentrated alienated people first.
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May 9, 2021 05:49
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I like the inclusion of fundamentalist christian movements to that. At least based on all my own personal interactions with them in the states and my knowledge of them from anything that lets us peer into the fundamentalist charismatics and dominionists, they are an explicitly fascist movement wholly invested in totality of information control, subjugation to traditionalist power structures (which elevates the lowest man over any woman, and aggregates power upwards towards charismatic leaders whose word is law in the community and to whom deference must be increasingly absolute). And they absolutely want to remake America in service to their own image and their own entitlements, complete with the exhaustive purges that would be necessitated by the literal requirements of who is too deviant and sinful to be permissible in God's land. There's never going to be a single moment in something like Jesus Camp or 19-20-21 Kids And Counting where I am watching this and thinking anything short of "these people have no ambition below fascism" and would be absolute despots in a heartbeat if our society ever fell to them. The ultimate failings of people like Gothard in terms of their own ambition is that they never solidified enough power to be like the Saudi royals, and restructure society and law itself to effectively immunize them from any potential complication resulting from their depravity or their power climbing. The only consolation I would have in that scenario is that it would not take long before the individual charismatic leaders moved quickly to the "elimination of competition" purges. These preachers would be killing each other off and doing a more modern recreation of the "airbrushed out of photos" phase of despotism, in no time flat.
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May 9, 2021 05:55
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I would always associate Fascism with a "strong" cult of personality leader or faction of such, and the antithesis of democracy so if a country has something like multiple parties and elections for said parties that would be the opposite of Fascism. The Nazis banned political parties and became the de facto only party in Germany. A country like Israel, or even Apartheid South Africa still had elections and multiple parties, it's just that most of those parties were ineffectual and followed the country policy, and denied voting rights to a segment of the population. In other words fascist state is single party/leader and no political opposition whereas no fascist but still badly run state can still have opposition but be badly run. No every country that is bad is fascist.
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May 9, 2021 05:59
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Beelzebufo posted:What makes China a fascist state, Under Xi the CCP behaves exactly the same as actual self-declared fascist parties so it's not hard to decide they are fascists. The China thread(s) go into great length the things they do and it's like Xi is reading the Mussolini with Chinese characteristics instruction manual. SA is a theocracy which is sort of the closest thing to a proto-facists state as mentioned above, possibly they are just the same thing with different levels of faith. Kavros posted:
Which is sort of what I mean, fascists are generally defined as capitalists who are trying to consolidate power to be rich and powerful and they just use religion as a means to an end while people like Jesus Camp might actually believe this religion stuff and want to consolidate power in the name of the religion. Madkal posted:
Depends if you draw a distinction between fascists have wiped out all opposition and fascists are in the process of wiping it out. There was a long period where Germany had democratically elected fascists and opposition parties and was called a fascist state. Flannelette fucked around with this message at 06:18 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 06:10
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I am not yet sure we can say that it automatically strikes "essentially fascist" as a descriptor from an autocracy that utilizes institutional trappings of autocratic capture, and I think that there's more than a few ways that a nation's fascist tenor is unimpeded by them maintaining a show democracy or show marxist worker's-ownership and having managed opposition and controlled faux-voting or parliamentary bodies.
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May 9, 2021 06:16
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axeil posted:I like that you provided a definition, so thank you for that as it allows us all to work off the same understanding. First, the authoritarian nature of the state is pretty much implied by the other 14 points. You can't declare disagreement is treason, for example, without a huge authoritarian apparatus to enforce it. The big reason Eco avoids a definition rooted around governmental organization is that--looking at the fascist regimes of the 20th century--they didn't really follow any particular organizational philosophy or principles. Every definition along those lines seemingly fails to include some obviously fascist state or another, or unfairly includes some otherwise non-fascist regime because of some political quirk or traditional rule/law or what-have-you. Iirc, the first half of the essay goes into this area--and the historical difficulty in defining fascism in this way--for quite some time. He's deliberately avoiding this kind of definition. This is actually one of Eco's more valuable insights: Do not define fascists by what they believe (because they don't really believe anything); instead, define them by their rejection of coherent/consistent belief structures, and the specific ways they reject them. Furthermore, he wasn't trying to define what a fascist state looks like at the end. He was defining how it arises. In his view--and this is the part I'd take the biggest issue with--any one of those 14 characteristics would be enough to generate the other 13 (personally, I think you need more than one in most cases). The list, then, is a way to spot fascist movements and fascist-friendly cultures before they made themselves known as such. As far as point #5 goes (and again, iirc; the full article is behind a paywall now), his argument there is about the obsession with a plot. Think of a hoax/conspiracy theory like Protocols of the Elders of Zion or something. There must be an enemy that is both within and without--an enemy that is purely outside of national borders doesn't really work the same--thus generating what we would most commonly call racism today. AtraMorS fucked around with this message at 06:33 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 06:30
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Yeah, fascism can adopt all kinds of fancy veneers. american evangelicalism and faux-constitutionalism, technoutopianism or libertarian corporatism, ecofascism, marxist revolution and communism, in each one they will keep the vestigal imagery and trappings and justifications but they can all be thoroughly bent to a fascist structure, if not any other stunningly predictable authoritarian degeneration endstates you want to label them as.
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May 9, 2021 06:43
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I've been thinking a lot about this over the past 4 years... Fascism in the 21st Century Racial supremacy myths Some identifiable racial group is imagined to be 'superior' to other humans Nationalism Not just patriotism; nationalism advocates for governance of a defined landmass by (and inherently privileged in favor of) people of a particular common descent and culture. Black Hebrew Nationalism is an example of a non-white nationalist movement, and the state of Israel is just one obvious example of an 'ethnostate', but by far the largest group of nationalists in the Western hemisphere are /white/ nationalists. Authoritarianism Not merely dictatorialism (Trump was a dictator, wasn't he? Ruling by tweet and EO…), authoritarians insist upon strict hierarchies whereby one is obligated to obey one's 'betters', and seeks to normalize the expectation that one /will/ be obeyed by one's 'lessers.' Threats of violence and harm are thought just tools to enforce compliance. Totalitarianism There is One party, it controls all facets of all levels of government, it is present in all church gatherings and book clubs and sporting events. Going against the party results in harassment, shunning, exile or worse. And a key element - distinct from the above - of fascism: Disinformation
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May 9, 2021 06:49
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Minenfeld! posted:Several of your points above rely on redefining words or using them outside of their historical context in order to anachronistically label the CSA fascist. Some of the key enabling features of fascism are modernity and mass-media politics--things that did not apply to the time period. My favorite is when he said that the CSA had a cult of tradition based on Anglo-Saxon* gentry. The CSA was a non-industrial society that lived and died in the Victorian period; they didn't follow tradition, they established it. *plantation owners were predominately Scotch-Irish and unless they were paying weregilds I'm not sure what Anglo-Saxon gentry is supposed to refer to.
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May 9, 2021 08:03
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fart_man_69 posted:I would agree that Dimitrov's definition is incomplete. It doesn't really get into the ideological motivation of fascism as much as the material reality of it. It seems to me that the racial aspect of fascism is inseparably integrated with its class aspect. The oppression of the "lower races" was justified by the same principle as the oppression of the worker; someone lower on the class hierarchy, or racial hierarchy, deserved to be abused by their superiors, as was natural. Race was indicative of a constitutional weakness in the same way that the poverty of a worker was. It's telling that the Western eugenics movement, which was embraced by the elites of liberal nations as well, conflated class and race in a similar way. But doesn't a focus on a conflation between lower races and lower classes in turn ignore that fascism often went after Elites and Middle Class members as well? The original definition you shared limits this to Revolutionary elements of the higher classes, but history doesn't really bear that out. One of the Nazi Germany's biggest problems, economically, was that they continually privileged ideological purity over efficiency and effectiveness. They would deliberately destroy companies and individuals that failed to institute racial purity and anti-Jewish policy and conversely reward those that did, regardless of which ones were actually better or more successful means to their ends. Its arguable that some forms of fascism were so fixated on esoteric ideological goals that they abandoned Capitalism in their pursuit. Just as a random example that popped into my head, think about how even as it became increasingly clear that the Wermacht couldn't possibly reach Moscow before Winter came during Barbarossa, logistics commanders refused to even begin PRODUCING Winter Clothes for the army, let alone actually shipping them out to the front lines. In the world where fascism is a reactionary capitalist response to communism, why would you ever make your chances of crushing the worker's resistance to your exploitation even the smallest bit less, especially when its ALSO war profiteering and allows you to consolidate even more state wealth by making a product for the army to buy? The Nazis refused to produce those winter clothes because the slavic communists of Russia were so inferior to Germans according to doctrine that to even consider the possibility that they could stop the advance long enough to make Winter Clothes necessary, even with winter less than three months away, was defeatist bordering on treason. HOW they would win mattered as much, if not MORE, than actually winning, specifically because of who they were fighting. "Capitalism cannot fail, it can only be failed," is not something that Capitalism actually believes, that's why it works so hard to turn state power to its advantage. If you are acting in such a way where you risk the preservation of Capitalism for the sake of Ideology, you're not being a very good capitalist.
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May 9, 2021 08:04
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Defining fascism is always going to be complicated by the word "fascism" coming to mean both an ultra authoritarian state, and a particular manifestation of ultra authoritarianism. It's further complicated by every instance of it having unique characteristics depending on the local national mythology, and that's also going to vary wildly across time as well. The fascists that Smedley Butler ratted out in FDR's time manifested completely differently to the modern Chud movement despite both being American as the underlying myths and social drivers have shifted. Likewise the authoritarianism of communist China has shifted more towards traditional fascism now that China is a state capitalist society, and will probably move towards some kind of weird cyberpunk fascism as the CCP continues it's evolution towards becoming a megacorp that employs a nation. How is it possible to understand and catalogue these kinds of governments when there's nothing but shifting sands? Personally I think we do need to think of it as a kind of urfascism rather than getting fixated on specific manifestations. Spartans, Confederates, Stalinists and Nazis clearly share some deep core and it's probably more productive to research that and understand it rather than splitting hairs on whether Franco was a true fascist or not. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 09:39 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 09:36
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This is what I find problematic of the fascist label, it's vague but also morally charged. China, because it is an authoritarian state is labelled fascist, but India, where there government is undertaking land reforms to benefit corporate agriculture, throwing indigenous people of their land, and demonizing Muslims to the point of having literal murderous pogroms to distract people and shore up support, is still an ally against the totalitarian enemies. I don't think China is fascist. Being authoritarian isn't enough, and the colonial projects in Tibet and Xinjiang are literally analogous to things the US and Canada did to their indigenous populations. Would you say that Canada or the US were fascist or protofascist states? Or is it the suppression of dissent? Because the US does that too, for its marginalized populations.is China just further down the scale than the US? I think China is acting in a colonialist, imperialist manner, but I don't think that's analogous to fascism.
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May 9, 2021 10:00
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Beelzebufo posted:I think China is acting in a colonialist, imperialist manner, but I don't think that's analogous to fascism. Yeah, Fascism and Imperialism are clearly not the same thing. All Fascists are pretty definitionally imperialists, but not all imperialists are fascists.
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May 9, 2021 10:17
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China does really strive these days to fulfill the aforementioned "if not technically fascism, simply reeks of it 24/7" idea, and a lot of that ultimately comes down to its most recent directions under increasingly consolidated power structures. Under which it has engendered increasing quantities of fanatical ultranationalism, a dictatorial lifetime appointment supreme, increasingly belligerent encroachments against sovereign powers, blatant large scale ethnic cleansing processes, and the centrality of severe controls over information, dissent, organization of the individual and the worker, etc, typically in service to business and capital interests as much as the ruling party. None of these things really configure in a way which make it easy to shake off the impression. I don't necessarily think I would argue for it being strict fascism, but they do an excellent job of being observably closer to fascism than communism, and either way showing the adeptness of capitalism in its ability to seamlessly integrate into such structures and repeat in totalitarian states the same egregious degeneration of material conditions it does anywhere else. And, just next door, India takes on the same issue I mentioned before: certainly much further down on any sort of fascism defcon but often screaming at us about how it seems like it wants to move up. This last decade has not been good, worldwide.
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May 9, 2021 10:40
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Ok, so looping back, was the continental scale ethnic cleansing of Canada and the US fascist in nature? Was the period of belligerent expansionism than the US undertook aroundd the Spanish-American war fascist? E: This century literally kicked off with the US declaring a war that it's leader defined as "with us or against us", and issued as a pretext, along with totally fabricated evidence, to obliterate two nation states in endless wars. This also coincided with a massive increase in three militarization of domestic police, and yes, an increased targeting of dissent. Again, the definition of fascism seens to fall to "not liberal democracy", even at the US continuously stretches that definition via voter suppression and gerrymandering. Beelzebufo fucked around with this message at 23:44 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 11:02
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May 9, 2021 11:13
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I'd just call that basic racism and genocide. The heart of fascism is the authoritarianism, primarily inflicted on the internal out-groups. Fascism by it's nature often leads directly to war and genocide, but you can do both without fascism. Edit to your edit: it's also worth bearing in mind this is all on a continuum. Voter suppression is the USA is clearly a fascistic policy, and it pushes the US down that continuum. Having fascistic policies doesn't instantly make you a full fascist state though, but they are worth resisting. Bug Squash fucked around with this message at 11:20 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 11:17
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Sanguinia posted:But doesn't a focus on a conflation between lower races and lower classes in turn ignore that fascism often went after Elites and Middle Class members as well? The original definition you shared limits this to Revolutionary elements of the higher classes, but history doesn't really bear that out. One of the Nazi Germany's biggest problems, economically, was that they continually privileged ideological purity over efficiency and effectiveness. They would deliberately destroy companies and individuals that failed to institute racial purity and anti-Jewish policy and conversely reward those that did, regardless of which ones were actually better or more successful means to their ends. Its arguable that some forms of fascism were so fixated on esoteric ideological goals that they abandoned Capitalism in their pursuit. It's true that fascist persecution was not exclusively limited to revolutionaries, of course. But that doesn't negate the classist and elitist nature of fascism, or disprove the fact that the goal of fascism was to do away with class struggle by utterly subjugating the lower classes. The "terrorist vengeance" was chiefly directed against the socialists and communists, and the Jews, who Hitler saw as communists (as you mentioned). So, I see the description as being not wrong or misleading at all, just not comprehensive. I don't think that messing with individual companies or implementing a war economy counts as abandoning capitalism, really. It just means that absolute laissez-faire in all things was not the economic or social policy of the Nazis. That fascist authoritarianism included the bourgeoisie under its control in certain social matters, like the racial policies you mention, certainly earned them the critique of liberal elites, but that does not mean that fascism is anti-elite by any means. The fascists promised the bourgeoisie freedom from the political power of the masses. The only principles they had to give up in return were humanist ones. Hitler and the Nazis were not exactly rational actors, as exemplified by the missing winter clothes. I think it was primarily Hitler who forbade winter clothing, for propaganda reasons and probably ideological reasons as well. That they failed to prosecute the war against the Soviets in an efficient manner doesn't really say anything about the nature of class conflict in Germany. Besides maybe that many of the ruling class probably failed to appreciate just how nuts Hitler was and how far he intended to go. And that's maybe the principle weakness of fascism; your ubermensch leaders are not guaranteed to act in a way that brings long-term prosperity to the Volk or the ruling elite, good capitalists or not. Interestingly, "capitalism cannot fail, it can only be failed" is actually something that Hitler did believe. That's why he ordered the destruction of Germany's infrastructure - the German people had failed him, had failed in the struggle for supremacy, and deserved to perish. State power has been an integral component of capitalism since its beginning; early liberals were explicit about the role of government in suppressing the working class through violence - that was its entire purpose. Capitalism has always been about guaranteeing the "freedom" of a small group of elites to exploit and control the vast majority of "lower" humans. In this way, fascism is the culmination of capitalism.
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May 9, 2021 12:24
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Fascism is the political expression of toxic masculinity.
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May 9, 2021 12:59
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I haven't dived that deeply into Carl Schmitt's influence in China, but I'll see him referenced in very different contexts, and there are some articles that says Schmitt's views have influenced Chinese neo-authoritarianism on the one hand, and influenced legal scholars in China who want to move to a liberal-democratic system, so what does that mean? I've also seen Schmitt referenced on the Chinese New Left website Utopia (which supports the CPC's political hegemony but can be critical of it from the left) about why liberalism can be easily rolled over by national populists like Donald Trump who is essentially a fascist in their eyes or at least pointing in that direction. Was Schmitt wrong about that? I've also read that (top CPC ideologue) Wang Huning's judgement of the U.S. is that it's essentially a fascist system and a sham democracy. I think China is just a Marxist-Leninist system, but with "communism" becoming something more like an intuitive ideal that's beyond the horizon, while retaining the dialectical and historical materialism as a framework for analysis and practical problem solving. Stephen Kotkin, the biographer of Stalin who is by no means sympathetic to communism, has also insisted that China is still communist, but they've compromised on the anti-capitalism while retaining the anti-imperialism. You will see wild nationalism like this but I've always interpreted this as a defensive and patriotic thing, and even if it's bombastic, kept within certain limits. And I think they see themselves as (the most successful) inheritors of a third-world anti-colonial revolution and as leaders of the developing countries of the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojpN6PjRcQc&t=3764s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3T1q-W_2nM It's not liberalism, but I think it's too easy for liberals to see everything that's illiberal as "the same." But even liberalism makes exceptions as every system's overriding priority is to reproduce itself, and the U.S. will only allow dissent within its own terms. If you try to overthrow the U.S. system like some of Trump's supporters tried to do, then your "freedom of speech" will be curtailed. Trump has essentially been silenced and banned from major social media platforms. He hasn't been thrown in prison, of course, but he could've been. Maybe he should've been? Madkal posted:I remember being told that the Italian ideal of Fascism was kind of a make it up as you go along, the leader is the only one who can make it up part. That is to say there aren't any written down set ideals and anything the leader says is the right thing. From there everything gets justified. This was the early Italian ideal of Fascism where Benito just made up a philosophy/policy that he didn't always abide by but whatever.  Aesthetics are not politics, but you can't really understand politics without the aesthetics of politics. Traditional European authoritarian art was not intended to depict leaders in a realistic way, but to depict their authority. They stood in these contrapposto poses, like with the hand on their hip along with some signifiers of authority and command. I think the Nazis updated / synchronized and (importantly) retained these traditional patterns of deference and command that had been in vogue in Europe for centuries, translating them into the modern era after World War I, incorporating mass politics into it as well, with Hitler as the leader of "the people," but above them in a top-down fashion. The ideology as such was more violent and intensified than the empires they were challenging like the British, but the racism could've easily been at home in Victorian England. Communist art was very different and tended to depict Stalin as on the same level as the people, with no obvious or visible symbols of authority or command. Today, this painting looks very conservative and traditional, but at the time would've been seen as radically anti-authoritarian, whether you think that was the reality of the Soviet Union under Stalin or not:  Vasukhani posted:fascism has to drive towards the creation of a new man, fascism has to be aware of its modernity, it has to exult in speed and violence and humanity's own power. It has a desire to violently create the future by returning to the past. I think another thing is that fascism took root in Italy and Germany, which were European countries that lost out in World War I. Italy was on the winning side but plunged in chaos right after and didn't get anything out of the war. They had aspirations for empire but didn't have one. The Anglo-French and American empires justified themselves with liberalism so only those who agreed to their terms would be respected as equals, which obviously didn't work for the Germans because they had been screwed over at Versailles and embraced this Heideggerian action-for-action's-sake willpower ideology that would punch through and overcome the dilemma they were in. The other "winners" of World War I were the communists as well who came to power in the former Russian Empire, so I think fascism can be seen as like a negation of both Anglo-French-American liberalism and Soviet communism. Which leads me to today: Uglycat posted:I've been thinking a lot about this over the past 4 years... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JRKzpp7w58o  (2)   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFFXBsEQ7SY (3)  quote:As the futurist vision of Europe and the US as hubs of civilized solidarity fades into the past, some people are trying to violently push the wheel of time back towards an optimistic version of the future. Exactly one hundred years after the invention of Futurism, they want to reestablish the future as it had been imagined in the first decades of the twentieth century. BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 16:00 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 14:07
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E: nm
sean10mm fucked around with this message at 14:10 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 14:08
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fart_man_69 posted:The fascists promised the bourgeoisie freedom from the political power of the masses. quote:When will the state agree to cooperate?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9SGYBHY0qs 
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May 9, 2021 15:51
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I've gotta say, Laibach are real geniuses. I've posted enough video links but they'd render Beatles songs as totalitarian anthems and the lyrics were perfectly compatible. It's a joke but they were making a joke about how fascism is latent in liberal systems. I mean that Trump ad is practically out of 1930s Germany. And the richest man in the world's ditsy girlfriend is making music videos where she's waving swords around and whining about how the state won't let them do what they want. I posted ISIS and Azov imagery because it's in the shattered zones on the periphery of the empire where the pointy spear of the 21st century blackshirted legionnaires are able to operate freely, just like d'Annunzio was able to seize Fiume and douse anyone who resisted with castor oil. The fascist foreign volunteers who are traveling to Ukraine for the combat experience are fighting to cleanse out the ethnic Russian population in the eastern part of the country. They also certainly see themselves as enemies of western liberalism at the same time, but I see it as like the other side of the same coin, and they both believe in supremacy of the west and so forth, although on a different basis which puts them in a contradiction with each other. They also like sleek video game imagery of first-person shooters. https://twitter.com/yo_herran/status/1389661059267514370 BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 20:28 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 16:28
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:They also certainly see themselves as enemies of western liberalism at the same time, but I see it as like the other side of the same coin, and they both believe in supremacy of the west and so forth, although on a different basis which puts them in a contradiction with each other. I recently read an interesting book, The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism by Ishay Landa (highly recommend this book), who proposes a conceptual split of liberalism into political liberalism and economic liberalism to explain this contradiction. Fascists despise parliamentarism and the political apparatus which grants political rights in a shockingly egalitarian manner, but seek to prop up and accelerate the capitalist (liberal) economic system surrounding that apparatus. Both sides wish to enable Western imperialism, but liberals would like to do so within certain "democratic" constraints that will help them sleep at night. In this framework fascism is a reaction to, and the negation of, specifically the political aspect of liberalism, which by the 1920s had evolved to permit the operation of powerful trade unions and working class parties, thus realizing the possibility of a socialist takeover and the end of capitalism. Of course, when forced to ditch either political liberalism or capitalism, we know which way the liberals went. Looking at modern politics in the West, we can see them making the same choices over and over again, which is pretty alarming I gotta say.
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May 9, 2021 19:17
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fart_man_69 posted:I recently read an interesting book, The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism by Ishay Landa (highly recommend this book), who proposes a conceptual split of liberalism into political liberalism and economic liberalism to explain this contradiction. Fascists despise parliamentarism and the political apparatus which grants political rights in a shockingly egalitarian manner, but seek to prop up and accelerate the capitalist (liberal) economic system surrounding that apparatus. Both sides wish to enable Western imperialism, but liberals would like to do so within certain "democratic" constraints that will help them sleep at night. That reminds me about this, which I'll slap into this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6EtKqf33E4 This is a music video from an Italian band that is associated with the fascist group Casa Pound. And you'll see Casa Pound members wearing shirts that reference the Black Shirts and hanging out in their clubhouse. The subjective experience is an act of rebellion against constraints. They're speeding down the highway and one guy leans halfway out the window and screams at passing cars.   There's a ramped-up intensity to it. This also ties somewhat into the usage of the term "totalitarian" which was originally used by the Italian fascists to refer to themselves, but was also picked up by Hannah Arendt. This term "totalitarianism" has often been used to equate Nazi Germany with the Soviet Union. But for Arendt, totalitarianism refers to a period of such intensity that normal "politics" as such (as in an open debate on what to do next) freezes up completely and the violence unleashes itself in a horrific fashion. For the USSR under Stalin, that would've been the Great Purge when people were just swept up at random either because they didn't denounce others enough (thus raising suspicion) or denouncing too *many* people. And that would certainly be the case in a wartime environment where anyone who questions the war is shouted down. For Nazi Germany, that was certainly the case. There's also something Zizek said about the obscene enjoyment of nationalism, and how ultranationalism provides a certain permissibility and freedom to indulge in acting like a sadist toward designated enemies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4lq3SOB8sw Edit: All of this is to say that I don't believe people who say Russia or China are fascist governments. They're not western-style liberal democracies, but that's just not the energy I get from them. It's said that Navalny, who is championed by western liberals, is to the right of Putin in a Russian political context. Fascists also seem like they're reacting to what they perceive as moribund and dying societies, but the Russian economy has recovered (as shaky as it still is) and China's economy is still bustling, so I don't see it. BrutalistMcDonalds fucked around with this message at 21:02 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 20:16
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Brutalist McDonald's, what's your opinion on Modi and the Hindutva movement. For me, it has the hallmarks of a fascist movement in ascendance, even if it hasn't entered it's totalitarian phase yet.
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May 9, 2021 21:00
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Beelzebufo posted:Brutalist McDonald's, what's your opinion on Modi and the Hindutva movement. For me, it has the hallmarks of a fascist movement in ascendance, even if it hasn't entered it's totalitarian phase yet. This is good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzwCBnYZgbE
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May 9, 2021 21:04
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Baron Porkface posted:My favorite is when he said that the CSA had a cult of tradition based on Anglo-Saxon* gentry. The CSA was a non-industrial society that lived and died in the Victorian period; they didn't follow tradition, they established it. My favorite part is your apparent ignorance on this topic. The thing about mass delusions is that they tend to be ahistoric. Cults of tradition are almost always bullshit fabrications used as ad hoc justifications for heinous acts. The actual racial makeup of plantation owners did not impede the narrative of a return to Anglo-saxon tradition before, during, or after the Civil War. Mythmaking doesn't care about historical accuracy and often it's the first casualty in the formation of racial narratives. https://twitter.com/KevinLevin/status/1383394537045856263?s=19 FLIPADELPHIA fucked around with this message at 21:47 on May 9, 2021 |
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May 9, 2021 21:45
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