Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby kelley » Fri Feb 19, 2021 3:33 pm

Liberté

Égalité

Fraternité


not so alien
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby dada » Fri Feb 19, 2021 5:01 pm

So the feeling of true friendship that I have for society isn't a feeling of true friendship for every individual. I may be able to count the number of individuals I have a feeling of true friendship for on one hand. The number can change, it can be none at all, or I just haven't met them yet. Maybe I will someday, mabye not. The feeling of true friendship is still knowable, intelligible. I can always consider what it means to feel that strong force affinity, imagine having it for a society of individuals, of all individuals, and act as if it were the case, to maybe even see the idea of liberty take shape.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby dada » Fri Feb 19, 2021 6:34 pm

I wonder if the person who thinks in English casually reads liberty, equality, fraternity different than a person who thinks in French. Like le chat noire in English is the black cat, not the cat black. The English thinker reads liberty as the cat and the fraternity as the black, and not the fraternity as the cats.

They are black, as is their liberty. But equality is to say that the least among us are equal to the greatest. So equality is in difference, each individual in society is equal by virtue of being unique. We might say they are equal in their uniqueness. Where they are similar they are unequal, and inequality can always be found under the appearance of sameness.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby dada » Tue Mar 09, 2021 8:50 pm

Trotsky's 'fascism, what it is and how to fight it'
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p6

Less than a hundred years ago, yet I feel like things are very different now. Something about the capitalist cycles of rise and decline moving much faster, the capitalist stages or acts overlapping, now. Still the assessment of the role of the petty bourgeoisie is useful, I think.

The very idea of workers revolution seems so foreign to me.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby kelley » Thu Mar 11, 2021 6:48 am

Are we still talking about America? We must be. It makes things so much simpler to discuss.

The pandemic should have made this clear, but a near majority of Americans don't grasp the actual conditions of their disenfranchisement. This is an entire class of citizens trapped between extreme positions on both right and left, with neo-fascist dominionists on the one side, and neo-maoist jacobinists on the other. Apolitical free marketeers and real housewives give this internecine squabbling between groups a wide berth.

The very idea of money in this society precludes the emergence of anything resembling class consciousness, especially amongst the disenfranchised. Their experience of the word is usually limited to battles in chicken sandwich wars and the like. Discussions of race, obviously absent in Trotsky's analysis of a homogeneous culture, complicate matters further.

Never strategy. Always tactics, if at all, in the USA. This is what passes for politics here. What can be gotten, and what's always taken away, never to return. This is a serious differentiation. It banishes eternity for the sake of capital's perpetual 'now'.

I am really, really looking forward to summer this year. That's the limit of my revolutionary imagination right now. It can reach no further at the moment. I want to see exactly how things will have changed since the last one.
Last edited by kelley on Thu Mar 11, 2021 9:01 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby kelley » Thu Mar 11, 2021 8:04 am

lining up at the gate for the race to the new normal

lots of folks-- christ i hate this word-- with eyes on the prize

everyone gets a trophy

fascism! who doesn't want to be a winner

post-pandemic white america in full effect

let's go to the replay

etc

etc

etc
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby dada » Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:14 pm

If the extreme positions on right and left are extremes of reactionism and progressivism, the apolitical householders triangulate a centrist position to hold. The right and left is actually a circular model though, at the extreme of reactionism is a position that meets the extreme of progressivism. The centrist position is on the opposite end of the diameter of the circle from the extreme left/right point. The centrist is trapped by the historical dialectic.

Freedom is only a movement into the transgressive society, reached by cutting the gordian knot. Failing to do so is like sailing to the west, but failing to find the way to the western lands. The boat just travels around in a circle. The progressive says "not far enough," the reactionary says "here and no further." The transgressive voice which insists that we haven't gotten anywhere, and won't get anywhere while frozen in the dialectic, isn't even heard.

The transgressive moves to a left that doesn't transform into the right at its extreme point. Now the triangulation of the centrist is like a spot at the tip of the left/right surface of an iceberg, the transgressive is the monstrous, submerged mass.
Both his words and manner of speech seemed at first totally unfamiliar to me, and yet somehow they stirred memories - as an actor might be stirred by the forgotten lines of some role he had played far away and long ago.
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby Handsome B. Wonderful » Thu Mar 11, 2021 7:00 pm

Does fascism try to cancel something as innocuous as Pepe Le Pew?
Born we are the same, within the silence, indifference be Thy name
Torn we walk alone, we sleep in silent shades
The grandeur fades, the meaning never known- 'Born' Nevermore
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby kelley » Thu Mar 11, 2021 8:28 pm

no

that would be the purview of the neo-maoist jacobinists
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby kelley » Thu Mar 11, 2021 8:29 pm

:lol: :lol: :lol:
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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun May 09, 2021 7:21 pm

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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby Grizzly » Fri May 14, 2021 12:48 am

I am shocked. SHOCKED! ¡pǝʞɔoɥs

Pentagon Surveilling Americans Without a Warrant, Senator Reveals
https://www.vice.com/en/article/88ng8x/pentagon-americans-surveillance-without-warrant-internet-browsing

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“The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.”

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Matt Christman

Postby JackRiddler » Sun Aug 15, 2021 3:02 pm

.

About 91% of what this guy says is what I would say and do say when properly focused, but he's better, an off the cuff natural. Since the schtick for this series is 'The Inebriated Past' and he's actually drunk (or sounds like it at the start) he misstates the date of the March on Rome (1922, not 1942) and attributes 'hundreds' of millions dead to WWI rather than tens of millions, but the whole is very grounded in a knowledge of the history. I would have added much about the roots in 19th century nationalisms and imperialisms. This part covers mainly the classical fascism, pre-1945, and reviews views that are now familiar to this thread on the question of what constitutes fascism after 1945.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKwZGyRoJvQ

The addendum is really good in describing the cadre and the voting base of the National Socialists and how they came to power, and all the ways in which this differs or is similar to the present moment (regarding Trump Republicanism, this was in 2018).


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbbGu6XRewk

Totally worth listening to it -- never mind my comments, watch it.

At the end I think he makes the mistake, which he doesn't usually, of expecting history to repeat. Fascism he defines roughly as colonial-imperialist genocide tactics turned inwards on the metropole when it hits an insurmountable domestic crisis. In the classical fascisms of post-WWI Europe, the crisis was the left, or Bolshevism, amid the social upheaval during evident capitalist-national failure. No such left exists today, he argues, so there is no need for capital to turn to fascism as the solution. (This may understate the extent to which people may just believe in it regardless.) If instead the inherent crisis itself leads to a collapse of society, he expects the military to become the government openly, rather than a fascist party. Which makes ample sense, in 2018. Being pre-Covid, he didn't have a chance to consider biodigital convergence and total centralized minute-by-minute surveillance and control of all individuals as an alternative for the crisis-collapse case. He's also been slow to cottoning to this now that it's actually happening.

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Re: Fascism: What exactly is it and how do you recognize it?

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sun Jun 04, 2023 1:17 pm


@JeffWellsRigInt
·
...“we might draw up a list of political pledges which today’s obedient citizen is effectively required to make in order to be accepted by society.... 'I will deny reality when ordered to do so....'

https://twitter.com/JeffWellsRigInt/sta ... 19264?s=20

Mr. Wells was quoting from the below piece, which can be added to a number of threads here.

“WOKE IS FASCIST”
Posted on June 4, 2023

by Paul Cudenec

Image

I have sometimes been criticised for describing the society being ushered in since March 2020 as “fascist”.

That word has become so misunderstood and misapplied, associated with superficial historical detail rather than with underlying essence, that some argue it is not an appropriate label for what we are experiencing today.

So it has been reassuring to read The Road to Fascism: For a Critique of the Global Biosecurity State [1] by Simon Elmer of Architects for Social Housing, which, as the title suggests, comes to similar conclusions to those I reach in Fascism Rebranded: Exposing the Great Reset.

The author insists: “We are now a fascist society in everything but name, and ready to form a properly fascist state under the new forms of sovereign authority that rule over the Global Biosecurity State”. [2]

Elmer must be blessed with the ideal brain for a good architect: not only does he have an overall vision of the structure of society, but he also pays careful attention to the detail of all its supporting pillars and embellishments and is very aware of all the financial implications.

His reporting tends to be comprehensive to the point that the book is not only worth reading, but also worth keeping as a reference for years to come.

One important aspect of his work is the way it describes the means by which the new global fascism is being imposed by forces which are “in thrall to finance capitalism”. [3]

For example, his lists of 20 bodies constituting the unelected global governance, [4] of 23 WEF Young Global Leaders occupying former or current ministerial positions in Western governments, [5] and of 17 ridiculous expanations provided for the sudden post-jabbing rise in heart attacks in the young and healthy, [6] are invaluable.

Elmer’s reminder that the UK authorities threatened to use the army against pro-freedom demos in 2020 is a useful one [7] and his dissection of the UK’s Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 is sobering.

He explains how protesters are now deemed to be committing a crime if they cause “unease”, “annoyance” or “disruption” and can be punished by up to ten years in prison, “effectively banning protest in the UK in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights (Article 11, Freedom of Assembly and Association)”. [8]

Undeterred by the criticism of its treatment of Julian Assange, the UK state also seems to be ramping up its intimidation of dissident journalists, as Kit Klarenberg recently discovered.

Elmer is certainly right to warn against any complacency stemming from the end of Covid lockdowns and the restoration of something that looks the old normality.

Image

He writes: “Having been trialled over those two years with unexpected and astonishing levels of compliance, lockdown – justified in the future by a new virus or strain of coronavirus, insufficient reduction in carbon emissions, a crisis in energy or food supplies, rising sea levels, wild fires or a myriad of excuses yet to be invented – will be the new monetary and fiscal mechanism of global capitalism”. [9]

There are some interesting reflections on the psychological methods of the new fascism and parallels with historical precedents, drawing on the thoughts of the likes of Hannah Arendt and Umberto Eco.

In both cases, says Elmer, we are looking at a society “in which every citizen must adopt the political positions and respect the political statements of their Government, and any deviation from that orthodoxy is censored and punished on the grounds, as Eco wrote, that all disagreement is a threat to the security of the state and therefore a form of treason”. [10]

He explains that woke dogma is the “means by which the violence of the Global Biosecurity State is justified”. [11]

Image

Elmer writes: “Just as the neoliberal ideology of multiculturalism created a global monoculture, so the government and corporate funding and institutional and educational hegemony of woke ideology has subsumed contrary social and political opinions and practices within the homogeneity created by monopolised cultural markets.

“Indeed, no other movement since fascism has been as adept as woke at creating a nexus for cultural, legal and political change to shore up a failing capitalism, or has more rapidly attained ideological hegemony in the West. And like fascism before it, woke’s first task has been to destroy the Left as a viable opposition”. [12]

He adds: “Woke is not liberal, and it certainly isn’t socialist: woke is fascist”. [13]

On the basis of Elmer’s astute analysis, we might draw up a list of political pledges which today’s obedient citizen is effectively required to make in order to be accepted by society:

Image

I pledge to follow The Science. Not only was the epidemic real and the vaccines safe and effective, but all technological innovation is necessarily desirable and those who gainsay this are anti-social reactionaries seeking to drag us back to the Stone Age”.

Image

I stand by Ukraine. Nobody could possibly dispute the moral rightness of supporting Ukraine. Allies of my government are Good, enemies or rivals are Bad. Their soldiers are murderous terrorists, ours are heroes. Questioning the narrative makes you an enemy combatant and/or a traitor”.

I take the knee. While doing nothing to oppose real-life racial discrimination, I like to signal both my virtue and my submission to the Globalist Faith by participating in organised collective rituals”.

I will deny reality when ordered to do so. I accept that the notion of ‘truth’ is dangerously essentialist. A man who says he is a woman really is a woman. A woman who says she is a man really is a man. Women can have penises and men can have vaginas. If you don’t really believe this, you still have to say it because otherwise you are a transphobic hate-criminal”.

Image

I pledge to swallow anything if it is sold to me as saving the planet. The only environmental problem of any importance is man-made climate change, which is irrefutable scientific fact. The only way to combat this is to pour trillions of pounds of public money into vast corporate-industrial projects involving massive amounts of pollution, destruction and exploitation, and to throw people off their ancestral lands across the world”.

Image

I pledge to remain blind to the existence of conspiracies. Only the insane or ill-intentioned imagine that the world is run by a public-private power nexus which deliberately manipulates events and misleads the public in order to further its own aims. Any evidence pointing in this direction should automatically be banned as disinformation and those spreading it punished”.

Image

I pledge not to recognise fascism when it is staring me in the face. My government has always says it is against fascism and therefore it cannot be regarded as in any way fascist. It is disrespectful of victims of historical fascism to suggest equivalence today and so those who identify the current system as fascist can safely be labelled ‘fascist’ without any need for further justification”.

For my own part, I will be making none of these pledges.

I have no desire to follow The Science and its diktats, neither do I stand by Ukraine or any other state; I take the knee to nobody; I am not inclined to believe that women can have penises or that fake-green industrialism will save the planet; I know full well that the ruling global mafia conspire against us and lie to us all the time, and I am absolutely certain that they are trying to transition us into a worldwide and woke-facilitated 21st century form of transhumanist fascism.

In all that, I know that I am certainly not alone.

https://winteroak.org.uk/2023/06/04/woke-is-fascist/
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