09-14-2020, 07:28 PM
(02-06-2019, 11:54 AM)Hintergrund Wrote:(11-20-2018, 09:18 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Let's keep aware of a significant checklist (Umberto Eco):
- The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
- The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
- The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
- Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
- Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
- Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
- The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
- Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
- Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
- Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
- Selective populism. “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.”
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
The Trump cult fits well on most. Trump has yet to call for aggressive warfare, but we all know that he is but one hurt feeling away, and I doubt that he is inculcating heroism as a virtue in its own right. We have resistance to his worst.
Thanks for mentioning, but didn't he also mention that fascism necessarily runs into contradictions?
Contradictions? with objective reality, with human nature, or within itself? Either way fascism creates its own trouble. People who fail to think things out get into trouble when they try to reshape things on a grand scale. Fascism depends upon restoring some national glory perhaps long lost without contemplating whether the purported glory is so wondrous. "Restore the glory of the Roman Empire" ignores that such people as the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanians have as much claim to Roman heritage through language alone, that the Greek people had much to do with the intellectual glory of Rome, and that the English (not to mention their American partial successors!) have absorbed much of the spark. Add to this, much territory that was Roman has a very different basis in culture.
In any event a sordid regime that overreaches can bring forth consequences such as this:
... the last legions to enter Rome, most under the ultimate command of a cripple who could have never led an army into battle.
Fascism is typically a disaster for a country in part due to its inner contradictions.
1. Tradition ordinarily wins against the cultural avant-garde either by demonstrating more suitability or by (what usually happens) co-opting the innovation. Tradition may define how a society adapts to needful change. Ragtime and jazz illustrate how something daring could become an indelible part of American culture. Both were daring expressions when new... and they are now basically 'establishment' in contemporary America. Fascism in all forms is far more rigid... and brutal.
The potential conflict in America under any fascist leadership is not so much a conflict between some single tradition and a cultural avant-garde; it is instead most likely between traditions.
2. The conflict between one mainstream set of values and a modern challenge can manifest itself in a struggle in which people recently and currently treated badly in which pariahs show that their mistreatment contradicts key values in the national tradition. Americans have a traditional disdain for political violence; having to choose between non-violent people demanding the full right to participate in society and people using violent means such as assassinations and arson (including bombings) to keep people down, most Americans could choose between Martin Luther King and the KKK (the latter having much in common with and Nazism). More recently I had some ugly encounters with gay-bashers from which I cut and ran. I decided then that gay-bashing was incompatible with law-and-order essential to a civil society and that whatever was necessary to protect homosexuals from violent crime would make my life safer from people who might misconstrue me as a homosexual. The problem is not that I am inadequate in convincing a gay-basher that I am straight; the problem is instead that people think it acceptable to attack gays and lesbians. If mainstream gays and lesbians can concur with me that sexual predation of children is intolerable, then I can I can accept gay rights.
3. Action for its own sake could be terrorism, vandalism, and robbery. No thanks!
4. The absence of dissent indicates either perfection (which we have yet to achieve, and may even have its own cyclical characteristics) or that the political and economic leadership have found some absolute truth that defines all people responsible to people who owe the rest of us nothing other than bare survival. All economic elites, from shamans to feudal lords to capitalist tycoons to a Soviet-style nomenklatura have all become egregious exploiters who take everything they want while ensuring that their own issue practically inherit soft lives while treating the fellahin, serfs, and proles badly. Exploiters invariably seek to squelch dissent by people seeking dignity.
5. Difference allows creative and imaginative people to offer alternatives to mindless conformity that effectively preserve only one thing: rot under an impressive front.
6. Wherever inequality other than that based upon different levels of competence, talent, toil, and investment lies exploitation. Fascism invariably intensifies whatever exploitation already exists., effectively making things worse for the common man.
7. The classic example of a plot is the infamous Protocols of the (Learned) Elders (of Zion), which expresses the idea that all successes of Jews result from a conspiracy to dominate and exploit gentiles. It should be obvious that Jewish successes in culture, business, art, science, and law are consequences of dedication, talent, and work as individual achievement than as any plot to push Jews forward. Malcolm Gladwell (who is not Jewish) has a better explanation in his Outliers in that at the current level of performance and marketable excellence and professional competence, high-level achievement in just about any activity from law to painting to musical performance to writing to acting to medicine takes about ten thousand hours of dedicated effort. Ten thousand hours of dedication early in life may require that one have people around who tolerate such an activity as playing pieces of numbing boredom to family members and not doing something else.
In truth, conspiracies and plots are usually efforts to achieve through ruthless cunning in methods that the overall society condemns. Criminal cliques operate that way, and those usually unravel because robbery schemes and insurance frauds usually result in behavior that exposes the criminality of the offenders.
8. That the enemy is both strong (ruthless and cunning) and weak (decadent) is about as absurd a contradiction as is possible.
9. Most people recognize war as mindless slaughter, and that heroic deaths in battle are themselves tragedy. This said, Humanity has about the same contradiction as its favorite pet, the dog. Dogs can go from extremely docile to extremely ferocious in a split second. This is no contradiction. Such is also true of people and nations. People who may have no desire to pick a fight have proved the ability to win the fight.
10. Contempt for the weak is a pretext for exploitation and subjection. People seeking to defend their lives and dignity have shown the ability to defend themselves, perhaps because they best know the stakes.
11. If fascism pushes the idea of national heroism, then anti-fascist ideologies discover that they are able to resist fascistic cruelty with their own heroism.
12. Machismo and weaponry. The opponents of fascist conflict find ways to get or develop weaponry, too.
13. Selective populism ignores that a medium so much a frontier as the Internet can itself develop coherent alternatives.
14. Newspeak ultimately degrades the ability of a society to innovate and even to develop any solidarity not based upon fear and loathing.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.