Reddit reviews The Anatomy of Fascism
We found 35 Reddit comments about The Anatomy of Fascism. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Reddit reviews The Anatomy of FascismWe found 35 Reddit comments about The Anatomy of Fascism. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Trump's fabrications regarding crime should be getting more attention. Crime is a much less significant problem today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Trump lies constantly and without shame or remorse about this.
I would not call Trump himself an outright fascist--but Trumpism is a proto-fascist movement. I don't want to find out whether it blossoms into the real thing.
Robert Paxton's definition from The Anatomy of Fascism:
>"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
Trump's nativist anti-intellectual demagoguery, and willingness to fan and manipulate ethno-nationalist resentment is deeply concerning, especially now that we know he's going to have people like Steven Bannon as his top political advisor.
He still doesn't have the power of the military and national security apparatus at his disposal. There's still time to stop him and not have to find out if he will abide traditional constitutional and normative restraints.
I posted this in another thread, but going to post it again here since it's relevant.
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I feel like we should be mailing textbooks/memoirs on fascism/authoritarianism to our representatives...
I thought about organizing a gofundme to send the same book to all Republican representatives (senate and congress) from Amazon, but I think it would be more effective if it was sent from individual constituents in the rep's districts. I personally feel powerless since all my representatives are democrat, but I think it would send a really powerful message if people in red districts sent copies of books directly from Amazon. It would only cost around $10 to do that, and you can include a gift message with your address and why you're sending it.
People smarter than me probably have better suggestions, and could even point out passages that should be highlighted and bookmarked, but here are a few suggestions off the top of my head:
EDIT: Adding 1984 by Orwell to the list for obvious reasons.
Pretty sure the slaves didn't get a vote in that democracy and if you think the NSDAP rise to power in the Weimar republic had anything to do with democratic process I have to assume you have not take the time to look at how that shit went down.
In 32 they received 10% fewer votes than just six months earlier, that's when the conservative parties there made a literal deal with the fucking devil and threw all their weight behind him and had him declared chancellor in order to maintain some semblance of power. While it was "legal" Hitler was not elected president by the German people. Even then Hitler only had 2 cabinet appointees from his own party.
Course, then they lit the Reichstag in a false flag and seized power under the guise of a communist revolt, and the rest is nothing but a stain on human history.
But Nazi's being democratically elected? Rofl, good one Fritz.
If you have an interest in the truth of this check out "The Death of Democracy" and/or "The Anatomy of Fascism". While more general, the Anatomy of Fascism is the better read IMO.
People have got to stop with this massively hyperbolic trash repost. Calling the far right 'nazis' is unworthy of discussion. Calling the far right 'fascist' is only slightly less ignorant, but is still extremely hyperbolic. 99.95% of people using the term are completely ignorant of the history.
Why?:
There is no 'definition' of fascist/fascism. This shitty '14 points list' has been floating around the internet for a while and Trump checks all 14 points (as does Obama, as does HRC, as does Bush2). 1) This list is completely fabricated (fake news?). 2) The actual definition of fascism is extremely debatable by very educated people (see below). 3) you can take these lists and look at the Obama administration and check 12-13 of the 14 points. 4) and I should have to tell you this, but if you see something thats being passed around the internet between like-minded people, its probably bullshit.
If you want to read/learn about real fascism, read these two books:
Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) 2nd Edition
The Anatomy of Fascism Reprint Edition
They are both excellent, and pre-Trump. They provide and excellent overview of the fascist movement(s) throughout history. The quick takeaways are: 1) there is no 'definition' of fascist (eg that 14 point list is facebook bullshit), 2) both right-wing and left-wing political movements have shown many elements of fascism (eg extreme right wingers are just as intolerant as extreme left wingers), 3) the current right movement in America bears little in common with actual fascist movements.
So why are people calling the right 'fascists'? In my personal opinion, the left is using the term to justify vilification and aggression towards the right (I say this as a political moderate). This is not to say 'the right' are the good guys - there are plenty of situations in life where there are no 'good guys' - the current left/right debate is one of those situations.
I'm sure you saw that white nationalist, Richard Spencer got sucker punched a few weeks ago. The entire left was hand-wringing about wether or not this was justified - even the NYT published a half-assed assessment. You saw it here on reddit - 'the alt-right' is so toxic they deserve violence. You know who also thinks that speech should be silenced with violence - fascists.
As a moderate I find this rationalization for 'violence to silence' horrifying. Violence is never an answer. You'll note that actual fascists use violence and threats of violence to suppress speech - so what is the difference between the left and right these days?. I stand in the middle and have a hard time telling.
TL;DR they very people that claim to be 'anti-fascist' are abusing the term to create an enemy that's (apparently) worthy of a priori violence - if you think about that for a second it should be horrifying.
And just watch - by virtue of 1) trying to inject a little reason here 2) showing a refusal to call the more extreme right 'nazi-fascists' and 3) criticizing the left for being shitty too, I am going to get called an alt-right wing Trumpeter.
You might be interested in Robert Paxton's "Anatomy of Fascism."
I was just reading about the link between labor aristocracy and the rise of fascism a few days ago. The ruling class becomes decadent and complacent, the opposition is unable or unwilling to act, and this spurs radical change.
However, if you reject leftwing action based on internationalism and feminism (anti racism and anti sexism), and especially the destruction of class society (communism), then you're only alternative is to double down on narrow, chauvinistic nationalism, patriarchy, and patriotism. You can find anti capitalist and socialist sentiment in fascist movements, but usually it's against an imagined corrupted form of capitalism, "crony capitalism," and not the existence of class society generally. In other words, the fascists want to be the boss, not get rid of them. They think they can manifest a truly just and natural order once deviants and subversives are liquidated and everyone becomes unified by a grand national impulse. In short the fascist solution is to unleash war within and without--the standard capitalist response. But the fascist impulse carries a vital, energetic tone that fetishizes action and violence for their own sake, against both decrepit old guard bourgeoisie, low class deviants and radicals, and the foreigner.
The historian Robert Paxton described fascism as "pallangenic," or Phoenix-like, a desire to rebirth society into an imagined former greatness, but America was never great. It hasn't fundamentally changed it's character since 1776, which is why we've been fighting the same battle against the same ruling class for over 200 years. The first rebellion in the US was against onerous taxes imposed by an unelected regime built on slavery and native land theft, and since sustained by more land theft, a racial-economic hierarchy, and aggressive resource wars. All our problems stem from this, problems that cannot be addressed using tools this same system provides, for obvious reasons.
So fascists seek revolution without revolution. Not a change in fundamental order, but to supplement the current order. German Nazi party loyalists were installed into factory management positions alongside the old managers, for example.
There's a complicated mix of factors. White supremacist hegemony is threatened by an increasingly (but necessarily) globalized labor market (outsourcing and immigration--capitalism direly needs cheap labor to avoid recession) and destruction of the family as it was shaped by capitalism--its nuclear form, as women become more economically independent and no longer need to be with a man they don't want to, but this also grows the labor pool. Now that more and more whites are subjected to the economic conditions familiar to the underclasses (which are mostly nonwhite and women), they are panicking. There's nothing in the bourgeois political toolkit to handle severe existential crisis except racism, sexism, and other scapegoats.
But the Democrats and their unions are in no shape to fight this, just as the social democrats in Europe were in no way ready to combat the fundamental nature of capitalism. The problems now are so great and the interests in the status quo so entrenched it would take an aggressive movement with revolutionary orientation to reconstitute society on a less inherently antagonistic basis. Fascists believe they can do this, but have never been able to
Robert Paxton, made famous for his book Vichy France, has a book titled The Anatomy of Fascism. He focuses more on how the actions of particular fascists defined the political ideology. Maybe not the best source, but definitely worth a quick read if only to make a comparison to other books.
> Right-wing nutjobs (fascists)
Not even remotely the same, fascism originated from the Italian left and got great under Mussolini, whose party was hugely supported by Italian Jews.
Well, until he thought of Hitler as a serious threat and tried to get cozy with him.
Experts like Roger Griffin, Robert Paxton and many more generally agree that fascism is neither "Left" nor "Right" exclusive.
Edit: I just realized the glorious irony in your comment.
Prosim te, ne ti ne jaz nisva citirala enega samega kosa literature, ker je to reddit debata. Tako da ne ti meni, da si ti nadobjektiven, jaz pa dajem samo mnenja.
Kar se tiče pokolov, pobojev, te izvajajo skozi čas bolj ali manj vsi politični sistemi. Samo poglej si pokole ameriških Indijancev v 19. stoletju in prej. To je bil tudi en vzor nacistom glede njihove politike v Vzhodni Evropi. Da so ZDA to počele, to ne pomeni, da je njihov sistem enak fašističnemu. Politične podobnosti se določajo na globlji ravni, kot samo o tem, koliko se pobija, strada itd.
ZDA so po mojem mnenju kljub tem dejanjem svetlobna leta pred nacistično Nemčijo glede svoje dobrote. Enako tudi glede Sovjetske zveze, sicer malo manj.
Prosim te še enkrat, ne govori iz riti. Predpostavljam, da si libertarec (popravi me če to ni res). Za osnovo ti priporočam delo Roberta Paxtona: Anatomy of Fascism.
Evo link od Amazona: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918. Ni le o fašizmu, temveč tudi o pojavu množične politike nasploh.
Če ti to ni všeč, predlagam tudi klasiko: Hannah Arendt: Izvor totalitarizma. Zelo dobro opisano, kaj je bilo pred 130 leti skupno imperializmu, fašizmu in leninističnemu komunizmu.
https://www.amazon.com/Origins-Totalitarianism-Harvest-Book-Hb244-ebook/dp/B004Q9TLJW/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Da ne bo spet, da podajam samo svoje mnenje.
Did you just try to cite Jonah Goldberg on fascism/nazism, someone that has been ripped to shreds by actual experts, a man with no clue what he's talking about?
Paxton shreds him here:
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/122231
> The best description of how Nazism fits on the Left-Right spectrum is probably that given by Jonah Goldberg: Nazism, like Italian Fascism, Spanish Francoism and Soviet Communism, is a heresy of Socialism.
Nazism was an extreme form of ANTI-socialism. Why exactly is it you think the only 2 fascist movements that came into power were put there by conservatives.
From the third Reich trilogy:
> To many readers of the newspapers that reported Hitler’s appointment, the jubilation of the brownshirts must have appeared exaggerated. The key feature of the new government, symbolized by the participation of the Steel Helmets in the march-past, was surely the heavy numerical domination of the conservatives. ‘No nationalistic, no revolutionary government, although it carries Hitler’s name’, confided a Czech diplomat based in Berlin to his diary: ‘No Third Reich, hardly even a 2½.’25 A more alarmist note was sounded by the French ambassador, André François-Poncet. The perceptive diplomat noted that the conservatives were right to expect Hitler to agree to their programme of ‘the crushing of the left, the purging of the bureaucracy, the assimilation of Prussia and the Reich, the reorganization of the army, the re-establishment of military service’. They had put Hitler into the Chancellery in order to discredit him, he observed; ‘they have believed themselves to be very ingenious, ridding themselves of the wolf by introducing him into the sheepfold.’
Or:
> Many other middle-class occupations felt their economic and social position was under threat during the Weimar Republic. White-collar workers lost their jobs, or feared that they might, as banks and finance houses got into difficulties. Tourist agents, restaurants, retailing, mail-order firms, a huge variety of employers in the service sector ran into trouble as people’s purchasing power declined. The Nazi Party, now equipped with its elaborate structure of specialist subdivisions, saw this, and began to direct its appeal to the professional and propertied middle classes. All of this was anathema to those Nazis who, like Otto Strasser, brother of the Party organizer Gregor, continued to emphasize the ‘socialist’ aspect of National Socialism and felt that Hitler was betraying their ideals. Angered by the support given by Otto Strasser and his publishing house to left-wing causes such as strikes, Hitler summoned the leading men in the Party to a meeting in April 1930 and ranted against Strasser’s views. As a way of trying to neutralize Otto Strasser’s influence, he now appointed Goebbels Reich Propaganda Leader of the Party. But, to Goebbels’s annoyance, Hitler repeatedly postponed decisive action, hoping that Otto Strasser’s propaganda apparatus would still be of some use in the regional elections that took place in June 1930. Only after this, and Strasser’s publication of an unflattering account of his row with Hitler earlier in the year, did he decide to purge the party of Otto Strasser and his supporters, who pre-empted this move by resigning on 4 July 1930. The split was a serious one. Observers held their breath to see if the Party would survive this exodus of its left wing. But things had changed markedly from the days when Goebbels and his friends had revived the Party in the Ruhr with socialist slogans. The dissidents’ departure revealed that Strasser and his ideas had little support within the Party; even his brother Gregor disowned him. Otto Strasser vanished from serious politics, to spend the rest of his life in Germany, and, later, in exile, dreaming up small, sectarian organizations to propagate his views to tiny audiences of the like-minded.
> Having shed the last vestiges of ‘socialism’, Hitler now moved to build more bridges to the conservative right. In the autumn of 1931 he joined with the Nationalists in the so-called ‘Harzburg Front’, producing a joint declaration with Hugenberg at Bad Harzburg on 11 October stating their readiness to join together in ruling Prussia and the Reich.
I'd highly suggest you avoid reading anything written by Goldberg, the man is historically illiterate and is laughed at by actual experts.
I'd suggest the third reich trilogy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Reich_Trilogy
Anatomy of fascism by paxton:
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
Or Gregors nazism:
https://www.amazon.com/Nazism-Oxford-Readers-Neil-Gregor/dp/0192892819
And a bit more, from the end of the third reich trilogy:
> The Nazi propaganda effort, therefore, mainly won over people who were already inclined to identify with the values the Party claimed to represent, and who simply saw the Nazis as a more effective and more energetic vehicle than the bourgeois parties for putting them into effect. Many historians have argued that these values were essentially pre-industrial, or pre-modern. Yet this argument rests on a simplistic equation of democracy with modernity. The voters who flocked to the polls in support of Hitler, the stormtroopers who gave up their evenings to beat up Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews, the Party activists who spent their free time at rallies and demonstrations - none of these were sacrificing themselves to restore a lost past. On the contrary, they were inspired by a vague yet powerful vision of the future, a future in which class antagonisms and party-political squabbles would be overcome, aristocratic privilege of the kind represented by the hated figure of Papen removed, technology, communications media and every modern invention harnessed in the cause of the ‘people’, and a resurgent national will expressed through the sovereignty not of a traditional hereditary monarch or an entrenched social elite but of a charismatic leader who had come from nowhere, served as a lowly corporal in the First World War and constantly harped upon his populist credentials as a man of the people. The Nazis declared that they would scrape away foreign and alien encrustations on the German body politic, ridding the country of Communism, Marxism, ‘Jewish’ liberalism, cultural Bolshevism, feminism, sexual libertinism, cosmopolitanism, the economic and power-political burdens imposed by Britain and France in 1919, ‘Western’ democracy and much else. They would lay bare the true Germany. This was not a specific historical Germany of any particular date or constitution, but a mythical Germany that would recover its timeless racial soul from the alienation it had suffered under the Weimar Republic. Such a vision did not involve just looking back, or forward, but both.
> The conservatives who levered Hitler into power shared a good deal of this vision. They really did look back with nostalgia to the past, and yearn for the restoration of the Hohenzollern monarchy and the Bismarckian Reich. But these were to be restored in a form purged of what they saw as the unwise concessions that had been made to democracy. In their vision of the future, everyone was to know their place, and the working classes especially were to be kept where they belonged, out of the political decision-making process altogether. But this vision cannot really be seen as pre-industrial or pre-modern, either. It was shared in large measure, for one thing, by many of the big industrialists who did so much to undermine Weimar democracy, and by many modern, technocratic military officers whose ambition was to launch a modern war with the kind of advanced military equipment that the Treaty of Versailles forbade them to deploy. Like other people at other times and in other places, the conservatives, as much as Hitler, manipulated and rearranged the past to suit their own present purposes. They cannot be reduced to expressions of ‘pre-industrial’ social groups. Many of them, from capitalist Junker landlords looking for new markets, to small retailers and white-collar workers whose means of support had not even existed before industrialization, were as much modern as they were traditional.123 It was these congruities in vision that persuaded men like Papen, Schleicher and Hindenburg that it would be worth legitimizing their rule by co-opting the mass movement of the Nazi Party into a coalition government whose aim was to erect an authoritarian state on the ruins of the Weimar Republic.
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton. Amazon link
I think going into this it would be wise to get a good picture of what was happening in Europe leading up the rise of Mussolini and Hitler. I recently read The Guns of August, which is a great book about the lead up and early days of WW1. You can see that the major European were focused on expansion into Africa. The tactics they employed to control the population, particularly by the English, (notably concentration camps) were then adopted by the Nazis.
So many roots of fascist ideology are grounded in settler colonialism. With that in mind a good read for more background would be Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
Prove it, Benito.
Here's an actual writer and author, not a propagandist.
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
Dr Suess also instructed me otherwise.
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
He gave you the textbook definition of fascism. That is what “fascism” is. It was YOU who argued that Nationalism is non-violent. I did not back up your argument: Trump has been “violently taking out” people he perceives as enemies (undocumented immigrants) by using a paramilitary force (ICE) to arrest them in and lock them in cages. Does that sound familiar?
Here’s something you can do that might be a better use of your time: read this book: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
>Antifa is an organized group of people with a singular common purpose. Sure, they may claim that "they aren't an organization," but they literally are. They are a loosely governed organization, but still an organization, regardless.
Local antifa groups might be organized, but antifa as a whole is not. There is no consistent "antifa policy" on how to approach things like violence, protests, etc because antifa is not an organization. You could have a group of people calling themselves antifa in City A who do nothing but tear down fascist posters, and a group of people calling themselves antifa in City B who do nothing but milkshake fascists, and that isn't a contradiction because the groups are not part of any organized movement in any more specific sense than ideologically (people who dislike fascism and want to do something about it) and probably don't even talk to each other other than in the very vague sense that they may both use social media.
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What are all of these "authoritarian" and "dictatorial" things that antifa does which are so horrible?
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The rest of your post argues that since antifa is authoritarian and dictatorial (????????) it's somehow fascist by stubbornly refusing to use anything but a woefully inadequate dictionary definition that nobody actually takes seriously, as evidenced by the fact that nobody unironically calls most authoritarian countries in the world fascist. You should consider looking into some actual attempts to define fascism by credible people if you want to throw the term around.
> When I say that Antifa is fascist, I don't mean that they are literal fascists like Mussolini.
"When I say that antifa is fascist, I don't mean like, you know, fascist fascists. I mean the other kind of fascists: people I don't like."
The following book is also worth looking at:
Paxton, Robert: The Anatomy of Fascism (2005)
NSDAP was a rightist/reactionary/veterans movement partially funded by businessmen and was way more popular among the middle class than the working classes (just look at voting statistics). the nsdap didn't kill businessmen, it killed workers who tried to unionize against the corporatist state the nazis created. the national union was not a union concerned with workers rights, it was concerned with maintaining industry to feed the war machine. the Nazi state never owned all the businesses and was only able to control a select few industries.
I'd suggest you read the Nazi sections in this book, in order to better understand the relationships better business, workers, and the NSDAP
Wait what? Since when are we doing the "guilty until proven innocent" shit? I thought first you'd need evidence for her being a fascist,... oh right she's a right winger, normal rules don't apply to her.
Idk man, I just go with the stuff 5 experts on fascism said because, you know they studied that crap their whole life.
here a paragraph from an article about fascism and which current politicians fit the description:
>Robert Paxton (author of: The Anatomy of Fascism) agrees: "I don't think it helps very much to use this inflammatory term [fascism] about Trump. 'Populist demagogue' works fine." So does Payne: "The Sweden Democrats and Le Pen movement in France really are just right-wing movements, in the sense of being conservative movements. There's nothing categorically fascist about them. They are outside the general consensus of center-left politics in these countries, and people want to find special pejoratives to apply to them."
Hitler also stated quite clearly:
>Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxian Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not.' - Adolf Hitler, Sunday Express, 28 September 1930
That's basically the underlying point of marxism/socialism/communism. That private property (not to be confused with personal property in the minds of most leftists) has to be eliminated. If fascists are against it, then they cannot be real socialists by definition.
Fascism is not anti-capitalist. It borrowed imagery and language from socialism because that is the idea that dominated mass politics at the time. Without doing that it would have failed as a popular movement. That would be like saying you are against affordable healthcare (I don't mean the controversial ACA here) in American politics today. Everyone wants healthcare to be cheaper and it would be political suicide to say you didn't want that. Likewise, Europe just before and after WW1 only wanted social programs. Some more socialist than others.
Additionally, when Fascism was being created, there was no revolutionary popular movement on the right. The revolutionary right-wing had to borrow key ideas from socialists in order to define their own movement. They had no intention of keeping bona fide socialist ideas, but rather corrupting these ideas for their own purposes.
I'll quote from The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert O. Paxton. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in what fascism is and the danger it poses.
>Whenever fascist parties acquired power, however, they did nothing to carry out these anticapitalist threats. By contrast, they enforced with the utmost violence and thoroughness their threats against socialism. Street over turf with young communists were among their most powerful propaganda images.
Libertarians of all people should be especially sensitive to politicians who say one thing but do another. If a politician says they are libertarian, but does not act like it, then they are actually a sympathizer with the political actions they take, not the words.
>essentially fascist
Stop using that word like it has no historical definition. There are a lot of things you could critique about the current Turkish state but the idea that it's equivalent to some kind of mid-20th century form of militaristic nationalism is absurd.
http://theleder.com/docs/Misc/Paxton_Five%20Stages%20of%20Fascism.pdf
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
According to Robert Paxton (author of Anatomy of Fascism), fascism in United States would likely be religious
>For example, while a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well;
I think Christian Theocratic Republic would manifest itself trough the five stages of fascism as described in the book and article above:
>The language and symbols of an authentic American fascism would, of course, have little to do with the original European models. They would have to be as familiar and reassuring to loyal Americans as the language and symbols of the original fascisms were familiar and reassuring to many Italians and Germans, as Orwell suggested. Hitler and Mussolini, after all, had not tried to seem exotic to their fellow citizens. No swastikas in an American fascism, but Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy.
ps. I like Paxton's take on fascism. He sees fascism as strategy to achieve power. Fascist movements can
have very opportunistic turns in their ideology and policies.
> So we should wage war against everyone who has bad ideas?
If that bad idea involves the systematic murder of 6 million Jews, then yes, I'd say we should try and stop them, forcefully if necessary
> And how would one tell the difference between nazis and non-nazis?
You just need to know the signs to look for. If you want to learn more about them, I'd suggest reading Anatomy of Fascism or The Origins of Totalitarianism, both of which give you a good understanding of how to identify actual fascism. Also, while I'm linking to Amazon, I'd also like to recommend It Can't Happen Here, which is a novel written in the 1930s about how the rise in Fascism would look in America
I will check it out.
Currently finishing Anotomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
And the similarities make me wake up screaming daily. Seriously we are goose-stepping to plan.
Hate on news
Demonization on religion
Blame immigration
Sprinkle apathy and complacency of public and leaders
What gives me hope is the judges who put a stay. That didn't happen in either Italy or Germany.
The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton
Give it a read. It's a pretty interesting book about what fascism is,what is isn't, and how fascist governments come to power.
Like others have mentioned, the Hindu Caste system is closer to a traditional land-based feudalism seen in Medieval Europe and pre-Imperial Japan.
It's important to emphasize that fascism is very different from feudalism/the Hindu Caste system, because it involves the mass participation in politics. While defining fascism has been very difficult, Columbia Univ. WWII historian Robert Paxton has defined it as:
>a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline ... and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence ... [the] goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
You can read more about fascism in Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism.
Just a nitpick - "Dr" Lawrence Britt doesn't really exist. This is a chain email that was popularized during the Bush administration. Robert Paxton's Anatomy of Fascism is a much better definition.
Anyway, yes, he's a fascist, fascism is inherently populist.
They didn't underestimate his support, they tried to co-opt the nazi movement.
There's a fantastic book called the anatomy of fascism that goes into detail on this and talks about exactly what is required for actual fascists to come into power:
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
The Cleanest Race is very much a fringe view, and itself has been highly criticized for (among other things) not recognizing the range of variation and character in totalitarian ideologies. It glosses over the rather fine-grained spectrum from communism through nationalist fascism, concluding that just because North Korea is definitely not communist in the traditional sense (which few would challenge), it much be some type of fascist state. But that dichotomy is a false one.
North Korean juche ideology does certainly share some similarities with fascism, particularly in its ultra-nationalism. But that is not enough to qualify it as fascist (at least in any way which preserves the meaning of the term, importantly distinct from other flavours of authoritarianism and totalitarianism), and there are some important areas in which it seriously diverges from fascism. As just a snippet, there is the "collaboration with traditional elites" that Paxton emphasizes; the maintenance of market-based economic structures (albeit with serious state intervention in labour and production markets in the form of fascist corporatism); and the important rhetoric in popular opposition to socialism that Griffin emphasizes (sorry; don't have a digital source for that).
But again, all of this is largely beside the point: the focus on the "fascism vs. communism" spectrum kind of bypasses the most important ideological components of North Korea. Rather, its most significant ideological characteristic is that of totalitarianism; you can take a look at Hannah Arendt's key work on totalitarianism to see how this perspective is the overriding one when it comes to understanding the nature of serious state oppression.
I would recommend this. In particular, chapters two and three go into detail about the onset of Fascism and Nazism in Europe. It's a very in-depth read.
He lost me when he said it's like Rome under Augustus. In Rome under Augustus your life was the property of your paterfamilia. Go against the family and you have to kill the paterfamila or he will kill you. The closest any of us will get to this is going to see a movie about Michael and Fredo Corleone.
Also I am skeptical that Abby Martin is capable of using the word protean in a sentence correctly though I would be glad go be proven wrong.
Paxton's book is really great!
Have you read Paxton? I'm asking because I'm convicend by the others comments that it would be the best option for me (since I don't have too much time for it).
Thank you very much for your attention!
Sure do. There's even a book you can read on the subject.
https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-O-Paxton/dp/1400033918/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1495981371&sr=8-1&keywords=the+anatomy+of+fascism
If you want to know what drives the fascist worldview, and exactly why people are like this, I'd suggest: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Fascism-Robert-Paxton/dp/1400033918
The third reich trilogy is also fantastic and lays out the entire context and explains exactly why Nazis had so much appeal.
The best book, on the topic, hands down: Origins of Totalitarianism. Not for the weak in mind, though. There is also this: The Anatomy of Fascism. Books are cool.
>>Antifa is an organized group of people with a singular common purpose. Sure, they may claim that "they aren't an organization," but they literally are. They are a loosely governed organization, but still an organization, regardless.
>Local antifa groups might be organized, but antifa as a whole is not. There is no consistent "antifa policy" on how to approach things like violence, protests, etc because antifa is not an organization. You could have a group of people calling themselves antifa in City A who do nothing but tear down fascist posters, and a group of people calling themselves antifa in City B who do nothing but milkshake fascists, and that isn't a contradiction because the groups are not part of any organized movement in any more specific sense than ideologically (people who dislike fascism and want to do something about it) and probably don't even talk to each other other than in the very vague sense that they may both use social media.
They are still operating under the name of Antifa and so they are a part of Antifa. Also, Antifa groups usually tend to be radical so I highly doubt that most of them are just "milkshake and posters" Antifa protestors.
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>What are all of these "authoritarian" and "dictatorial" things that antifa does which are so horrible?
Destroying public property, assaulting people who haven't actually committed any violence against anyone (not all the people they attack, but good amount), forcibly censoring people that dont share their opinions and making threats to people that they consider their enemies.
There's literally footage of them doing this shit on the internet. They basically behave like a bunch of filthy anarchists under the guise of being "left wing."
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>woefully inadequate dictionary definition that nobody actually takes seriously,
Oh that's convenient that "nobody takes it seriously" when it disproves their argument. You're also not realizing that it's literally the definition by Merriam Webster, which is basically the definitive credible source for definitions of terms.
> as evidenced by the fact that nobody unironically calls most authoritarian countries in the world fascist.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean that they aren't engaging in fascist practices. You don't have to directly associate yourself with the fascist party to be a fascist. Just like you don't have to associate yourself with the Nazi party to be a Nazi.
>You should consider looking into some actual attempts to define fascism by credible people if you want to throw the term around.
What makes your definition more legitimate than mine other than the fact that it proves your argument? I also trust a definition that was determined by a group of scholars more than a definition by some random author on Amazon.
> When I say that Antifa is fascist, I don't mean that they are literal fascists like Mussolini.
>"When I say that antifa is fascist, I don't mean like, you know, fascist fascists. I mean the other kind of fascist, people I don't like."
Ummm no, I mean literally the other definition of fascist that I presented to you (Of course I know that doesn't mean anything to you since "nobody takes that seriously," conveniently enough) Like I said, you don't have to associate yourself with fascism to be a fascist. You just have to hold a very similar ideology to them.