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

[JackRiddler]

wow thank you Luther

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[Joao]

For the one or two people still here who are in the Bay Area and might find this interesting (warning: Jewish Bolshevism / Frankfurt School / book learning)--

CRITICAL THEORY IN TIMES OF CRISIS WORKING GROUP | CRITICAL THEORY AND SOCIOPOLITICAL CRISIS: THEN; AND THEN; AND NOW?

Robert Kaufman, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley

6 March, 2017, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm
3401 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley

A discussion initiated by the Critical Theory in Times of Crisis Working Group, considering how Frankfurt School and related currents in critical theory have approached, adapted, and rethought the intellectual and practical aspects of their work in, and on, crises generated by authoritarian, fascist, and fascist-oriented movements (paying particular attention to the 1930s-40s; the late 1960s; and our current moment).

All are invited to attend.

To help start discussion, attendees are asked to read, beforehand, the following brief, recent pieces about critical theory in times of crisis:

• Richard Wolin, “Our ‘Prophet of Deceit’: WWII-Era Social Scientists Explained Trump’s Appeal,” Chronicle of Higher Education (October 30, 2016)
  
• Alex Ross, “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming,” New Yorker (December 5, 2016)
  
• Wendy Brown, “The End of the World as We Know It,” Artforum (December 2016)

Attendees are also invited to consider reading four linked essays by Adorno concerning the case in defense of necessary impasses between critical theory and activist practice:

• “On Subject and Object”
  
• “Marginalia to Theory and Praxis”
  
• “Critique”
  
• “Resignation”

These essays, later collected and grouped together in Adorno’s Critical Models, are available below, or may be requested by writing to critical_theory@berkeley.edu with the subject line “Adorno Essays.”

Adorno Essays from Critical Models

Professor Kaufman’s teaching and research emphasize several interrelated areas: 20th-21st-century American poetry and its dialogues with modern Latin American, German, French, and British poetry; romantic and 19th-century poetry and poetics; philosophical aesthetics, literary theory, and the history of criticism (esp. since Kant and romanticism); and Frankfurt School Critical Theory and the arts (poetry and the other literary genres; music; cinema; painting, etc.).

[divideandconquer]

Anti-Smoking Fascism?

Doctors are refusing to operate on smokers. Here’s why the trend will grow.

An irate man contacted me recently to complain he’d been turned down for back surgery because he’s a smoker.

“It’s just not right,” said the Charlotte man, who suffers from chronic hip and leg pain. “I need this surgery. It’s to the point where I can’t walk around the block with my dogs.”

He acknowledged smoking is a “bad habit,” but after 35 years, he’s not sure he can quit. And he doesn’t think he should have to.

“It didn’t used to be this way,” he said. “Everybody’s got on their little righteous path.… My grandfathers on both sides smoked their entire lives. They didn’t die until one of them was 92, and one of them was 88.”

No doubt, genetics play a huge role in how healthy we are and how long we live. But personal behavior is also a big factor.

Most of us know that smoking is linked to heart disease and cancer. But in recent years, research has shown that smoking also inhibits wound healing because it decreases blood flow. As a result, smokers don’t do as well as non-smokers after having spinal fusion surgery and joint replacements.

Hawaii is America's healthiest state, Californians keep their smoking to a minimum and Kansas saw the largest increase in obesity in the 2016 America's Health Rankings Report from The United Health Foundation.
Natalie Fertig McClatchy

One study found that smokers who got joint replacement surgery had an 80 percent higher chance than nonsmokers of needing repeat surgery because of complications from infection.

For this reason, surgeons who do those procedures have begun asking patients to quit smoking – or at least stop for four to six months before and after surgery.

“We want the best results possible,” said Dr. Bryan Edwards, head of orthopedic surgery for Novant Health. “We’re not denying you a surgery. We’re preventing you from having a complication.

“If you’re doing surgery, you’re trying to get the bones to unite, and if you don’t have good blood flow, the results aren’t as good,” Edwards said. “I tell patients, ‘Complications from surgery are far worse than whatever condition you have now. If you’ve got an infected back that doesn’t fuse, you don’t want that.’ ”

Unlike the man who said he was turned away by a surgeon, most patients are counseled about the risks and referred for help, such as smoking cessation classes. They’re not expected to quit cold turkey.

“I expect there may have been a miscommunication” in the case of the irate patient, said Dr. Leo Spector, a specialist in spine surgery at OrthoCarolina. “A lot of things obviously boil down to the physician and patient conversation.”

Smoking isn’t the only behavior patients may be asked to change as part of “surgical optimization” – the doctors’ term for getting patients in the best health possible before an operation to improve the outcome. Obesity and diabetes also decrease the chances of a successful surgery.

Spector said it’s part of a national trend for doctors to run down a checklist of behaviors in preparation for elective surgery. Before spinal fusion, Spector said he might tell a patient: “Listen, I want you to stop smoking, but if you can’t stop smoking, at least cut it in half. A two-pack-a-day smoker is going to have a higher risk (of complications) than a two-cigarette-a-day smoker.”

If patients are overweight or have diabetes, he might refer them for nutrition counseling and even bariatric surgery to help them lose weight and get their glucose levels under control. Spector said he’d ask patients with back pain to stop smoking and try physical therapy for three months to see if the pain would go away without surgery.

“Have I refused to operate because they wouldn’t stop smoking?” he asked. “Yes.”

Helping patients achieve better surgical outcomes will also help doctors as the health care payment system continues to evolve.

Today, most doctors continue to be paid in a fee-for-service system, which means they’re reimbursed for each appointment, test or procedure. Perversely, they make more money if a patient has complications and requires extra care.

In Charlotte, some surgeons who perform spine surgery and knee and hip replacements have begun using a “value-based” system that means accepting a single “bundled payment” for each patient encounter. This gives doctors an incentive to provide the best care for each patient.

If all goes well and care is delivered for less than the contract price, the doctor or hospital keeps the savings. If there are complications and the patient needs more care, the doctor or hospital absorbs the extra cost.

So, operating on smokers, with potentially expensive complications, could hurt the bottom line for physicians.

At OrthoCarolina, Spector said doctors agree that all patients who register for the bundled payment plan must go through “surgical optimization” so they’re as healthy as possible before surgery. At some point, insurance companies may even begin to refuse to pay for elective surgeries on smokers.

“A year from now, I’ll probably be at a point where I would require all my patients to stop smoking,” Spector said. “Currently, I evaluate it on a case-by-case basis. Over time, we’re going to feel comfortable being a little more stringent with our patients about these modifiable risks.”

Edwards said he finds many patients “don’t take it well at first” when he advises them to quit smoking or lose weight. But many of them thank him later.

“Everybody needs something in their life to motivate them,” he said. “Usually, if the patient makes the commitment to stop and gets through the procedure, I find the majority of them just stop smoking.”

If I smoked I'd just say I'm not a smoker.

[Iamwhomiam]

It's nonsense, you know. Surgeons refusing to operate on smokers. I've had this happen to me by a neurosurgeon, who after arduous research I felt most able of all surgeons I had consulted with, which included orthopedic and osteopathic surgeons. including Dr. Carl who operated on Christopher Reeves, (Superman).

All that would be required would be a few hours a week on alternating days of hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

I had to edit out Dr. Carl as Reeves' surgeon being whom I consulted with. A Dr. Jane performed Reeves' surgery and I'm sure I haven't met him. Perhaps the guy I remember as being Reeves surgeon assisted Jane, or whoever mentioned to me Dr. Carl being Reeves' surgeon was dead wrong and I never checked whether it was true, I just believed it.

[JackRiddler]

.

I remember this as by far the best discussion on the subject at RI so far, so let's bump it up for relevance and see how some of it has been holding up.

Wow, following are from 2012.

At the core of fascist ideologies is an aggressive contempt for what it perceives to be weak. Could be women, Jews, the poor, socialists, etc.

Capriciousness in law and how it is meted out. A general lack of concern, amidst the subjects for one another. Fear. A contradiction in simultaneously being for your nation but do everything you can to destroy it as corporations hollow it all out.

A government with a lack of empathy. A government with built in rules of empathy, but they remain rules, they don't emerge from the human heart, all the while remaining capricious enough to be incomprehensible yet set in stone.

Money and religion.

War.

Distrust.

Surveillance.

The State is more important than its many communities.

Total control over how the children are raised.

Rigidness and totally careless for those who do not have the means.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

Fascism promotes political violence and war as forms of direct action that promote national rejuvenation, spirit and vitality. Fascists commonly utilize paramilitary organizations to commit or threaten violence against their opponents.

The fascist party is a vanguard party designed to initiate a revolution from above and to organize the nation upon fascist principles.

- cult of extreme nationalism

- totalitarian ambition

- expansionist imperialism

- fetishised masculinism

- blurred demarcation between the state and corporation

That said, FDR made this essential point about fascism:

"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power."

— Franklin D. Roosevelt, April 29, 1938. Message to congress.

Some of these answers have been very good in defining, on the one hand, the emotional qualities of social interaction that can be usefully described as fascist (82_28) and, on the other, the political qualities of explicitly fascist ideology, movements, parties or states.

I think it would be useful at this stage to disentangle different ways in which the word is applied.

I think we can distinguish three types of usages, although they shouldn't be seen as mutually exclusive:

1. The fascist drive: Extreme authoritarianism coupled with a particular fetish for power expressed in outbursts of often arbitrary brutality, generally against the designated out-group and the weak. This can be highly individual. It is extremely patriarchal, with a violent cult of manhood, that must be said up-front, although it may simultaneously allow selected images of women as warriors alongside those of them as faithful nurturers of the national offspring. Fascism's primary appeal is to stupid, violent, frustrated, fearful men. (As an aside, it should be noted that there are types of authoritarian personalities that are not fascist and do not fetishize violence, even if they recognize it as the necessary bottom-line for order.)

2. Ideological fascism, movement fascism or "classical fascism" is the particular organized form that developed out of 1890s militarist nationalism and came to the fore in many European nations in the 1920s and 1930s, very much in response to the rise of communist revolution and the perceived depravities of liberal bourgeois society. Its global faith was that racially-defined nations are at war with each other for survival and supremacy. The nation is the required state religion. Society must be forged with violence into a unity that actively excises and ritualistically destroys the designated others and all who won't conform to the national way. All persons receive a defined role within a steep hierarchy that is considered organic and natural. In a functioning society, we are all parts or cells of a single body. Deviations cannot be tolerated and must be punished.

And yet all this worked in the service of traditional elites and those who were already rich and powerful.

In the classical fascist ideology, it is the modernist, foreign-influenced or internationalist abandonment of supposed national traditions that cause the chaos that the fascists arise to vanquish, so naturally they view their radicalism as a defense and renewal of conservative values. In the actual history, however, it was the majority of traditional elites and the powerful, again in several nations from Italy in 1922 to Spain in 1936-9, who chose to become or to support fascist parties as a response to real economic and political crisis. I should mention that all this was positively bathed in the idea that this was true "freedom," and I think that's still a word fascists like to front today. Also, fascism is going to take on an intensely particular national character in each nation, so that fascists regimes will not all look the same from the outside, and of course many are unlikely to label themselves fascist, especially after the defeat of the fascist coalition in World War II and the exposure of the full extent of Nazi crimes.

[Nevertheless, a long series of regimes that can be categorized as updated or barely rewarmed forms of classical fascist single-party dictatorships and military juntas have occurred around the world in the post-1945 era, especially in Europe and Latin America. (Many governments elsewhere adopt the forms and techniques while diverging ideologically.) The Spanish and Portuguese regimes survived the classical fascist era until 1974-75, by which time the six Condor regimes had arisen in South America starting in 1964 with Brazil and the colonels junta ruled in Greece from 1967 to 1974. Central America had full classical manifestations in the 1950s and again in the 1980s.]

3. A third way of using the word, and now getting a lot fuzzier, is when we refer to fascist ways of governance. Fascism involves a mass-psychological handbook for using fear, hatred and national flattery. The institutional technology and ideological tropes can be detached from a generally fascist worldview and deployed by any state or large organization. These techniques both preceded and were also mutated within the classical fascist states, and continue to be developed and adapted and remain available for use to this day. They show many varieties.

It's untrue to simply call the US fascist, although I'd say a large part of the Republican Party has become ideologically so. The likes of Limbaugh and Beck and the political Islamophobes a la "libertarian" Pamela Gellar, as well as many of the televangelist Christianists, are clearly would-be fascist rulers, not to mention other leaders of movements large and small. Luckily the movement members are mostly obedient job-drones in the normal economy and otherwise couch potatoes. [2018: Is it still true? For now, still, but...] (Alex Jones is a small-potatoes version, whose main contribution has been to muddy the waters around the so-called "conspiracy" issues beyond reclamation.) I've often said that if the German variant of fascism (its own species, indubitably) required total mobilization of all popular resources to enable a relatively small country's plans to conquer vast territories abroad, the American leviathan's post-1945 imperialism does best when 80 percent of more of the people simply sleep, at least in their politics. Gives a whole new meaning to Silent Majority.

Meanwhile, the highly compartmentalized and segregated realms of nation-state and society include many institutions that make use of fascist governance: within the prison-industrial complex, the military, the "drug war" and "war on terrorism," the reaction to protest and strong social movements (ranging up to mass imprisonment and assassination), and of course in the way that many corporations handle their "human resources." It's hard to look past the many elements of fascist ideology or rhetoric within the political discourse, and the degree to which these are far more top-down than in Nixon's time (when the white majority entered the grip of a genuine popular reaction).

This really brings us to a fourth meaning: support for fascism by powers and institutions that may not be fascist themselves. When can we consider this fascist? The US state has often supported regimes overseas that are classically fascist or neo-fascist, such as the Condor nations in the 1970s, among many other examples. The US has been a pioneer of the fascist toolkit, establishing research programs and international schools of torture and violent counterinsurgency. The state has prepared and wargamed for decades for the contingency of implementing a full and open military rule in the name of freedom, if this is ever considered necessary; and the expansion and perfection of the operant surveillance regime is the most impressive achievement in that effort.

Finally, the term is absolutely subject to abuse and has been watered-down from over-use and projection. So we have PC fascists, feminazis, the idea that Obama leads a fascist movement, Islamofascists -- these tend to come from people on the right who confirm that "projection is powerful" -- and, of course, over-easy application by leftists of the fascist label to any authoritarian or arbitrary policy.

And as a post-script, it is useful to distinguish between what I've called classical or ideological fascism as opposed to post-fascism (the passing of the "toolkit" into the common realms of governance, which can also come in a liberal form) and neo-fascism (explicit attempts to revive classical fascism).

Note: I reserve the right to edit myself for style and clarity, and I did some of that above and below.

The following one may show something (positive, I think) of the increased academic influence on me. It is from 2016, as the rough Trump beast slouched toward Jerusalem waiting to be born and happened to be attacked that week by an outmoded character you may remember name of Glenn Beck. Disgustingly, his operations are still active. The Blaze has a TV network, I noticed the other day, and it features crude history propaganda as bad or worse, if you can imagine it, than FOXNEWS.

[On Confusionism]

A common mistake on the left, right and center is to take statements of ideology as always indicating some kind of essence. This fosters the notion that a concept like "the right" can best be understood if it is mapped quasi-geographically, with disparate, identifiable, clearly-labeled features, like an organism, and with its various parts rooted in traditional categories of social class or group identity, and modeled as developing through discrete stages over time. Such a description can never be the whole map, however, and may be highly misleading, for it leaves out the overall rhetorical-performative environment. To illustrate what I mean, let us return to the example of Beck and Trump.

Beck is not "attacking Trump" so much as making speech-sounds directed at whomever will listen, from a platform accessible to all. Why is that not a trivial observation? Like Trump, Beck is a professional practitioner of confusionism, with ego-aggrandizement or an internal savior complex as his motivating force. In explaining such "leaders," a model of neurosis is as necessary as an understanding of the ostensible political faith ascribed to them, or the surrounding systemic developments.

Beck strings impact labels into sentences, adapting to feedback in a constant search for maximum attention, or at least for real-world responses that he can interpret as impactful. This feeds him. His feedback has certainly told him that "socialism" is a high-impact label. So if he attacks Trump or anyone else, he will likely throw "socialism" in there, as he does with most other figures he attacks, such as Obama. He need not define it, wonder what it means, or care what the history of "socialism" may be.

Again, this is largely a function of his ego, no doubt saliently in this case based on the fact that despite once attracting 80,000 goonballs to see him speak in Washington, Beck is not currently placed where Trump is.

The importance of this goes beyond individual personality disorder. Confusionism lives on arbitrary switching of labels, until they lose meaning and are basically little more than weapons, and until any black-is-white argument becomes viable. Irrationality is both an ideological booster for irrational beliefs, and a general tactic: the more of it you spread, the less effective any rational counter becomes.

If we are to speak of "active disorganization" of progressive movements, then it is not COINTELPRO-type actions (which are important) but the fostering of this irrational rhetorical environment that may be its most common and successful move. Everyone enters a post-reality where anything can signify anything (so that the right for example can repeatedly take over liberationist rhetoric), many people come to think that nothing matters, and the most simple, fanatic and persistent tendencies of whatever ostensible political coloration gain an advantage. Among other effects, it lessens the impact of everyone who lacks access to the biggest bullhorns, as Beck and Trump do, or (the gargantuan one) those who get to speak as "the state" also do.

Insofar as it is used by the "right," confusionism targets not just "real" progressive movements but the entirety of liberal, enlightenment thinking and humanism going back centuries. It is a discourse aimed at rendering discourse impossible.

In a confusionist environment, speaking to a largely irrational audience, ideological labels that rationalists or leftists can define and genealogize are of little importance. It's about a feedback loop of mutual confirmation. The underlying politics is much more visceral, and more the dangerous for it.

Revanchism and neoliberal authoritarianism are real and obvious features of the present political geography, to be sure. The first is a reaction to the sense of loss of power among white people, and it produces its armed and violent factions. Trump and Beck both speak to this audience, again competing for attention, which explains more about Beck's attack on Trump than any other supposed ideological difference (neither are married to ideology -- both are performance artists).

Neoliberal authoritarianism, however, arises from the systemic development of real-existing capitalism in its crisis since the 1970s. Maintaining an economy of private ownership of production and private return demands the brass knuckle treatment, and its extension and development in all fields.

Finally, the "right-wing counterattack" is not a counterattack. It's been happening since before the Enlightenment and never ceases in its Ovidian transformations.

[liminalOyster]

I think Trump is much better understood by comparison to two-bit Rhode Island mafiosi than to real fascists. I continue to think he's driven far more by a dual-fold hatred of Mexicans and intellectuals than something ideologically unifiable. Like Barack Obama was sort of the biggest brand that ever came along and I think Trump viscerally recoiled at this effete internationalist wimp who effortlessly negated the entire fantasy image and brand he had constructed for himself. That said, I think "political violence" has long been held at bay in the US and Trump has gleefully set it free. That emphasis makes far more sense to me than Fascism. In some sense, I think Trump is a very likely precursor to a true fascist, rather than one himself.

[JackRiddler]

I think Trump is much better understood by comparison to two-bit Rhode Island mafiosi than to real fascists. I continue to think he's driven far more by a dual-fold hatred of Mexicans and intellectuals than something ideologically unifiable. Like Barack Obama was sort of the biggest brand that ever came along and I think Trump viscerally recoiled at this effete internationalist wimp who effortlessly negated the entire fantasy image and brand he had constructed for himself. That said, I think "political violence" has long been held at bay in the US and Trump has gleefully set it free. That emphasis makes far more sense to me than Fascism. In some sense, I think Trump is a very likely precursor to a true fascist, rather than one himself.

Sure. As you describe. Now read the bolded part, your own words, again. Bad enough!!! The political violence being unleashed tends to fascism. It can become very normal and the state will become far more violent. I think Trump is the closest to a "leader" we will get -- a clown playing Hitler wannabe for the fun of it, Kayfabe Hitler as I keep calling it. (In a sense, so were they all: Clowns playing it.) The true fascism he is unleashing if it comes to full form will be that: more ism than ist, a collective/organizational rather than a leader-centered form. If it comes to full form, it is still likely to maintain the election ritual.

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[JackRiddler]

Because a fundamental aspect of the ideology is community composed of nationals bound by their similarities against their foes. Sometimes racially bound, but always culturally. That's what creates the authoritarian pyramid. At the top are the archetypes of nationalism which certain submissive groups of the proletariat yearn to resemble, to emulate, to commune with for their own ends, for their own profit at times of crisis. And by committing themselves to this yearning they segregate and separate those who fail to fit into the national mold, by force if necessary. Nationalism is itself a fascistic kernel, and needs just a push in the right direction to become fascism whole.

Fascism is, to me, a far-right political form because it's ultimately fanatically culturally exclusive and social darwinist, drawing its exceptionalism from the supremacist authority of the archetypical national character in opposition to forces - cultural, military, ideological, or especially economic - in conflict with it. These aims of cohesion require the crushing of political opposition, curtailment of freedom of speech, outlawing opposing parties or points of view, massive and immersive indoctrination, etc., in order to create a fundamentally homogenous society. This reactionary requirement to homogenize against the conflicting forces, the cult of nationalism and the accompanying intolerance - is so essential to fascism that without it you're really talking about something else.

True fascism is horrifying enough that there's no point in watering down the meaning of it so dilute as to try and make it fit as a shorthand for the United States. I'm not accusing you of that shorthand, Jack, just commenting on the general idea that there are places that are truly fascist, and to describe this country as being so does a criminal disservice to the suffering of the millions for whom the general quality of life here - not specific instances of severe repression of which indeed there are many, but the general quality - surely would be a fucking gigantic step in the direction of personal and political freedom.

[JackRiddler]

As troubling as the term may be, one need to face the reality, I believe, that it is fascism itself which has evolved, rather than one or another nation "tending" or "moving" towards it. Anyone looking for a photo-repeat of the past will be caught looking forever.

[liminalOyster]

I think Trump is much better understood by comparison to two-bit Rhode Island mafiosi than to real fascists. I continue to think he's driven far more by a dual-fold hatred of Mexicans and intellectuals than something ideologically unifiable. Like Barack Obama was sort of the biggest brand that ever came along and I think Trump viscerally recoiled at this effete internationalist wimp who effortlessly negated the entire fantasy image and brand he had constructed for himself. That said, I think "political violence" has long been held at bay in the US and Trump has gleefully set it free. That emphasis makes far more sense to me than Fascism. In some sense, I think Trump is a very likely precursor to a true fascist, rather than one himself.

Sure. As you describe. Now read the bolded part, your own words, again. Bad enough!!! The political violence being unleashed tends to fascism. It can become very normal and the state will become far more violent. I think Trump is the closest to a "leader" we will get -- a clown playing Hitler wannabe for the fun of it, Kayfabe Hitler as I keep calling it. (In a sense, so were they all: Clowns playing it.) The true fascism he is unleashing if it comes to full form will be that: more ism than ist, a collective/organizational rather than a leader-centered form. If it comes to full form, it is still likely to maintain the election ritual.

.

I don't diminish the gravity of the situation. Political violence flirting with anything more than fringe acceptability in the US in 2018 is very fucking grave and its maybe mincing words to distinguish it from fascism itself by identifying it more as a preliminary. But the current anti-Trump script feels simultaneously far too hyperbolic (about the villain himself) and nowhere near hyperbolic enough (about all the other tributaries feeding the swelling river Thanatos). What you say about our proto-neofascism as a leaderless form is very interesting to me and feels exactly right.

[liminalOyster]

Photos show German Nazi soldiers dressing up in women's clothing
His and Herrs: Photos reveal how cross-dressing Nazis loved to wear women's clothes for fun during World War Two
By Sara Malm for MailOnline
Published: 04:19 EST, 6 November 2018 | Updated: 09:39 EST, 6 November 2018

A series of fascinating photographs showing how German Nazi soldiers would dress up in women's clothing and put on cross-dressing shows on the front line, has been compiled in a new book.

Photos in original article here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... thing.html

[JackRiddler]

Photos show German Nazi soldiers dressing up in women's clothing
His and Herrs: Photos reveal how cross-dressing Nazis loved to wear women's clothes for fun during World War Two
By Sara Malm for MailOnline
Published: 04:19 EST, 6 November 2018 | Updated: 09:39 EST, 6 November 2018

A series of fascinating photographs showing how German Nazi soldiers would dress up in women's clothing and put on cross-dressing shows on the front line, has been compiled in a new book.

Photos in original article here: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... thing.html

I don't think this is unusual in prolonged all-male environments. Stories like this one can contribute to the false postwar conservative image of sexually derangement or perversion or excessive libertinage somehow being the essential driver of Nazi Germany. No more true than the postwar leftist-German 1968 view that it was all about sexual repression (they were reading a lot of Reich and seeing their parents, who were sexually repressive in 1968, and who had largely been Nazis, and thinking sexual repression must have been the key element).

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[liminalOyster]

The same day you bumped this thread, SLAD had bumped a Reich thread with a bunch of links to RI threads about fascism, which I didn't quite follow the logic of. Hence grabbing this one - for the prompt towards Reich and sexual repression as fascism generating.

I will say I'm interested in the level of ire towards trans women in particular that seems to recur in alt-light circles like those of the Proud Boys. Seems uncanny. Or, for that matter, the way in which the kind of post 68 Left thesis you refer to was rehashed in pop culture on that show Transparent a few years ago via a subplot about trans ancestors during Weimar.

[JackRiddler]

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I kind of missed the other thread you're talking about.

I wouldn't call the Proud Boys "light" anything. They're worse in some ways than the explicit Nazis who only talk online. Brownshirts camouflaged in suits, with recruitment skills. Recently have really revealed themselves. The call to strangle "trannies" says a lot, but is it constitutive of a transphobic type? Yes and no. If I may speculatively psychologize for a moment, I think they have problems with the expression of deviance more than with the deviance itself. The offense is in not conforming to the man-ideal in public, where ridicule is possible. I don't know that, but remember there have also been homosexual brownshirts... like the leaders of the original Nazi brownshirts, the S.A.! It's may not even be that the "trannie" offense is in the deviance. I think it is more important that the association with non-conformity and weakness (and presumed ideological opposition to the Proud Boys ideology) defines the target to be beaten. Their talk makes it clear to me that enforcement of norms is less a priority than the opportunity to batter someone, to experience the pleasure of violence and domination that can be shared with a group. It's like a club for bully-boys to self-actualize.

We're all aware that forms of sexual repression figure in patriarchy, the gender system of binary masculinity and femininity, racism, strict religions, and right-wing thinking. Explicit fascism without a doubt upholds a strong and rigid idea of masculine-feminine. But to what extent is sexual repression a cause, a hidden driver? Is it the main thing? Is shaming children for sexual expression at the root of sadism and authoritarian personality? I used to take Reich a lot more seriously on that. Now I'd think that cruelty in childhood generally is important, more general than sexual but also including repression of sexual expression.

In any case, the Nazis in practice were incredibly sexually repressive -- against the groups designated for oppression. Procreative heterosexuality among able-bodied Aryans was celebrated, even to the point of deemphasizing monogamous marital fidelity, and of course the Nazis encouraged a highly sexualized body cult in arts and sports. They were pro-pleasure, for Germans. Girls making German babies, good. Single moms were not exactly celebrated but were supported and protected compared to the international standards of the time. So the key was not sexual repression, but the racial-supremacist ideology that used selective sexual repression as a tool. A lot of it was pragmatic and governed by a "racial hygiene" perspective. This is why gay men were not pursued in the same way as Jews. There was no concerted effort to discover closeted gay men, as there was to discover hidden Jews who were passing as non-Jewish. Gays who organized, who were political, were subject to immediate imprisonment and murder. Gays who did not conform and closet themselves, or who were caught, were also endangered. But closeted men weren't viewed as an urgent threat.

The Röhm faction illustrates some of the paradoxes. Again, this is the leadership of the S.A., and they're largely gay, of course very macho about it but also engaging in a lot randier drag and sex behavior than what's in those pictures, which looks more like theater or initiation. When Hitler, now head of state, goes after them in 1934, their "degeneracy" is used as a pretext. It's suddenly a terrible thing. Until then it was tolerated, at least for them, as it would not have been tolerated for Jews or leftists. But the reason the Party came purged them, as one of the last moves in the consolidation of total power, is because besides being terrorist gangs murdering people on the streets they were also the anti-capitalist Nazis. They wanted to nationalize shit, and Hitler of course had lined up with the businessmen. To the postwar conservative Germans, the Röhm faction became the image of Nazi degeneracy. That's what the Nazis were really about, sexual perversion!

Nazi ideology condemned Weimar for its supposed libertinage and perversion, but mainly insofar as this was characterized as Jewish. At the same time the Nazis encouraged a kind of controlled libertinage. Strength through Joy! Olympia! Arno whatsisface. Conservative regime supporters complained about excesses, while utopian Nazis dreamed along more Mormon lines. The Lebensborn stuff is exaggerated in retrospect, especially by the postwar conservatives (who, again, were sexually repressive). Not that they weren't devoted to extreme eugenics, with the most horrific consequence being the extermination of hundreds of thousands of people starting right before the invasion of Poland. But Lebensborn was more like a camp for captive sex-slave women, or also non-German Aryan girlfriends of SS officers from occupied territories, than a eugenics program to breed the perfect Aryans. (The latter myth is still being played in Man in the High Castle, but that show is problematic in 101 ways.)

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[liminalOyster]

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I kind of missed the other thread you're talking about.

I wouldn't call the Proud Boys "light" anything. They're worse in some ways than the explicit Nazis who only talk online. Brownshirts camouflaged in suits, with recruitment skills. Recently have really revealed themselves. The call to strangle "trannies" says a lot, but is it constitutive of a transphobic type? Yes and no. If I may speculatively psychologize for a moment, I think they have problems with the expression of deviance more than with the deviance itself. The offense is in not conforming to the man-ideal in public, where ridicule is possible. I don't know that, but remember there have also been homosexual brownshirts... like the leaders of the original Nazi brownshirts, the S.A.! It's may not even be that the "trannie" offense is in the deviance. I think it is more important that the association with non-conformity and weakness (and presumed ideological opposition to the Proud Boys ideology) defines the target to be beaten. Their talk makes it clear to me that enforcement of norms is less a priority than the opportunity to batter someone, to experience the pleasure of violence and domination that can be shared with a group. It's like a club for bully-boys to self-actualize.

We're all aware that forms of sexual repression figure in patriarchy, the gender system of binary masculinity and femininity, racism, strict religions, and right-wing thinking. Explicit fascism without a doubt upholds a strong and rigid idea of masculine-feminine. But to what extent is sexual repression a cause, a hidden driver? Is it the main thing? Is shaming children for sexual expression at the root of sadism and authoritarian personality? I used to take Reich a lot more seriously on that. Now I'd think that cruelty in childhood generally is important, more general than sexual but also including repression of sexual expression.

In any case, the Nazis in practice were incredibly sexually repressive -- against the groups designated for oppression. Procreative heterosexuality among able-bodied Aryans was celebrated, even to the point of deemphasizing monogamous marital fidelity, and of course the Nazis encouraged a highly sexualized body cult in arts and sports. They were pro-pleasure, for Germans. Girls making German babies, good. Single moms were not exactly celebrated but were supported and protected compared to the international standards of the time. So the key was not sexual repression, but the racial-supremacist ideology that used selective sexual repression as a tool. A lot of it was pragmatic and governed by a "racial hygiene" perspective. This is why gay men were not pursued in the same way as Jews. There was no concerted effort to discover closeted gay men, as there was to discover hidden Jews who were passing as non-Jewish. Gays who organized, who were political, were subject to immediate imprisonment and murder. Gays who did not conform and closet themselves, or who were caught, were also endangered. But closeted men weren't viewed as an urgent threat.

The Röhm faction illustrates some of the paradoxes. Again, this is the leadership of the S.A., and they're largely gay, of course very macho about it but also engaging in a lot randier drag and sex behavior than what's in those pictures, which looks more like theater or initiation. When Hitler, now head of state, goes after them in 1934, their "degeneracy" is used as a pretext. It's suddenly a terrible thing. Until then it was tolerated, at least for them, as it would not have been tolerated for Jews or leftists. But the reason the Party came purged them, as one of the last moves in the consolidation of total power, is because besides being terrorist gangs murdering people on the streets they were also the anti-capitalist Nazis. They wanted to nationalize shit, and Hitler of course had lined up with the businessmen. To the postwar conservative Germans, the Röhm faction became the image of Nazi degeneracy. That's what the Nazis were really about, sexual perversion!

Nazi ideology condemned Weimar for its supposed libertinage and perversion, but mainly insofar as this was characterized as Jewish. At the same time the Nazis encouraged a kind of controlled libertinage. Strength through Joy! Olympia! Arno whatsisface. Conservative regime supporters complained about excesses, while utopian Nazis dreamed along more Mormon lines. The Lebensborn stuff is exaggerated in retrospect, especially by the postwar conservatives (who, again, were sexually repressive). Not that they weren't devoted to extreme eugenics, with the most horrific consequence being the extermination of hundreds of thousands of people starting right before the invasion of Poland. But Lebensborn was more like a camp for captive sex-slave women, or also non-German Aryan girlfriends of SS officers from occupied territories, than a eugenics program to breed the perfect Aryans. (The latter myth is still being played in Man in the High Castle, but that show is problematic in 101 ways.)

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Alt-light isn't my term. Using it only for ID purposes (basically groups who don't want to be publicly associated with Richard Spencer, as best I can tell) and would agree the Proud Boys are much much more dangerous, potentially, than armchair hate-ists. But then I do not want to take my own cues too much from the recent dom/pop discourses of neo-fascism. They're good-enough sometimes but I also always recall the degree to which the SPLC was early to label certain 911 Truthers as hate groups.

I sort of group Reich with Alice Miller in the sense you mention him. As having a kind of generally prescient sensitivity to how sadism gets encoded in conventional domestic institutions, regenerating certain kinds of psychopathology (and not others) as a foundational part of social reproduction. But I think, secondarily maybe, he remains one of the better anchors for a relatively accessible intersectional theory of metaphysics and politics. Like, maybe he offers a still good-enough language for a more "refined" materialism that is more accessible to the masses than Deleuze etc. Maybe not too. I know more about his "story" than I intmately know his work. But I don't think the complex uses of sexual repression, even among Nazi society, can be understood entirely as a variable discourse on procreation, etc. Meh, far too big questions for me to write about so quickly. Maybe wasting space but will come back when have more time.