Modern day Fascism

[Cain]

Taken from Rush, Fascism and Newspeak, An Exegesis, by David Neiwert


Fascist rhetoric and memes check-list and signs



Umberto Eco with American examples


The cult of tradition.
[Who are the folks who beat their breasts (and ours) incessantly over the primacy of
'traditional Judaeo-Christian culture'?]

The rejection of modernism.
[Think 'feminazis.' Think attacks on the NEA. Think attacks on multiculturalism.]

Irrationalism.
[G.W. Bush's anti-intellectualism and illogical, skewed speech are positively celebrated
by the right.]

Action for action's sake.
[Exactly why are we making war on Iraq, anyway?]

Disagreement is treason.
["Liberals are anti-American."]

Fear of difference.
[Again, think of the attacks on multiculturalism, as well as the attacks on Muslims and
Islam generically.]

Appeal to a frustrated middle class.
[See the Red states — you know, the ones who voted for Bush. The ones where
Limbaugh is on the air incessantly.]

Obsession with a plot.
[limbaugh and conservatives have been obsessed with various "plots" by liberals for the
past decade — see, e.g., the Clinton impeachment, and current claims of a "fifth column"
among liberals.]

Humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
[Think Blue states vs. Red states.]

Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy.
[The very essence of the attacks led by talk-radio hosts against antiwar protesters.]

Life is eternal warfare.
[This perfectly describes the War on Terror.]

Contempt for the weak.
[Think both of conservatives' characterization of liberals as "weak spined," as well as the
verbal attacks on Muslims and immigrants from the likes of Limbaugh and Michael
Savage.]

Against 'rotten' parliamentary governments.
[Remember all those rants against 'big government'?]

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
[Perhaps the most noticeable trait in the current environment. The destruction of
meaning by creating "empty phrases" combining opposite ideas has, as we have seen,
become a prominent strategy deployed by the conservative movement.]


John McKay on Fascism

"Defining Fascism is a very slippery business. I spent most of a graduate seminar a decade ago studying and dissecting this question. There is no agreed upon and authoritative one sentence definition for Fascism. In fact, fighting over one is a still-healthy cottage industry that provides employment for plenty of historians and political scientists. My own take on it is to emphasize two points that lead to this slipperiness.

The first is a point you already made: Fascism is mostly reactive in nature. It is more defined by what it is against than by what it is. First and foremost, it is anti-liberal. This is not necessarily the same thing as being conservative. We too often define political positions as a scale between two polar opposites, when reality is broader and sloppier than that. So, while Fascism is a thing of the right, it is not just extremism beyond normal conservatism. Next, it is anti-pluralist, which usually means nationalist, racist, and/or unilateralist. Fascists don't like to share.

Second, it is not just one thing. There have been many forms of Fascism. The popular image of Fascism is simply Nazism. Some scholars debate whether Nazism is one variety of Fascism or a separate (though related) phenomenon. I lean toward the variety school. During its heyday in the thirties, there were scores of Fascist parties in over a dozen countries. These evolved from earlier political movements and some survive in successor movements. The use of pronouns like proto-, post-, and neo- helps a little in sorting them out, but only a little. One reason for its persistence is its mutability. Most political societies can produce a fascism."


Stanley Payne on Fascism

A. The Fascist Negations:

• Antiliberalism
• Anticommunism
• Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were willing to undertake temporary alliances with groups from any other sector, most commonly with the right)

B. Ideology and Goals:

• Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models
• Organization of some new kind of regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic
structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist
• The goal of empire or a radical change in the nation's relationship with other powers
• Specific espousal of an idealist, voluntarist creed, normally involving the attempt to realize a new form of modern, self-determined, secular culture

C. Style and Organization:

• Emphasis on esthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political choreography, stressing romantic and mystical aspects
• Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia
• Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence
• Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing the organic view of society
• Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation
• Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective


Roger Griffin on Fascism

Fascism: modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths. As a result, fascism is strongly associated with right-wing fanaticism, racism, totalitarianism, and violence.



Robert Paxton

• ne can not identify a fascist regime by its plumage. George Orwell understood at once that fascism is not defined by its clothing. If, some day, an authentic fascism were to succeed in England, Orwell wrote as early as 1936, it would be more soberly clad than in Germany. The exotic black shirts of Sir Oswald Mosley are one explanation for the failure of the principal fascist movement in England, the British Union of Fascists. What if they had worn bowler hats and carried well-furled umbrellas. The adolescent skinheads who flaunt the swastika today in parts of Europe seem so alien and marginal that they constitute a law-and-order problem (serious though that may be) rather than a recurrence of authentic mass-based fascism, astutely decked out in the patriotic emblems of their own countries. Focusing on external symbols, which are subject to superficial imitation, adds to confusion about what may legitimately be considered fascist.
  
  ...[E]ach national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy, as we shall see, not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity. Religion, for example, would certainly play a much larger role in an authentic fascism in the United States than in the first European fascisms, which were pagan for contingent historical reasons.
  
  ... The great "isms" of nineteenth-century Europe — conservatism, liberalism, socialism — were associated with notable rule, characterized by deference to educated leaders, learned debates, and (even in some forms of socialism) limited popular authority. Fascism is a political practice appropriate to the mass politics of the twentieth century. Moreover, it bears a different relationship to thought than do the nineteenth-century "isms." Unlike them, fascism does not rest on formal philosophical positions with claims to universal validity. There was no "Fascist Manifesto," no founding fascist thinker. Although one can deduce from fascist language implicit Social Darwinist assumptions about human nature, the need for community and authority in human society, and the destiny of nations in history, fascism does not base its claims to validity on their truth. Fascists despise thought and reason, abandon intellectual positions casually, and cast aside many intellectual fellow-travelers. They subordinate thought and reason not to faith, as did the traditional Right, but to the promptings of the blood and the historic destiny of the group. Their only moral yardstick is the prowess of the race, of the nation, of the community. They claim legitimacy by no universal standard except a Darwinian triumph of the strongest community. [Emphasis mine]
  
  ....
  
  ... Feelings propel fascism more than thought does. We might call them mobilizing passions, since they function in fascist movements to recruit followers in fascist movements to recruit followers and in fascist regimes to "weld" the fascist "tribe" to its leader. The following mobilizing passions are present in fascisms, though they may sometimes be articulated only implicitly:
  
  1. The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual.
  2. The belief that one's group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action against the group's enemies, internal as well as external.
  3. Dread of the group's decadence under the corrosive effect of individualistic and cosmopolitan liberalism.
  4. Closer integration of the community within a brotherhood (fascio) whose unity and purity are forged by common conviction, if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary.
  5. An enhanced sense of identity and belonging, in which the grandeur of the group reinforces individual self-esteem.
  6. Authority of natural leaders (always male) throughout society, culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny.
  7. The beauty of violence and of will, when they are devoted to the group's success in a Darwinian struggle.
  
  
  Orcinus examples of Paxton model of fascism
  
  1. [Group primacy]: See, again, the Bush Doctrine. An extension of this sentiment is at play among those jingoes who argue that Americans may need to sacrifice some of their civil rights — say, free speech — during wartime.
  2. [Victim mentality]: This meme is clearly present in all the appeals to the victims of Sept. 11 as justifications for the war. It is present at nearly all levels of the debate: from the White House, from the media, even from the jingoist entertainment industry (see, e.g., the lyric of Darryl Worley's extraordinarily popular country-western hit, "Have You Forgotten?": "Some say this country's just out looking for a fight / Well after 9/11 man I'd have to say that's right.").
  3. [Dread of liberal decadence]: This meme has been stock in trade of the talk-radio crowd since at least 1994 — at one time it focused primarily on the person of Bill Clinton — and has reached ferocious levels during the runup to the war and after it, during which antiwar leftists have regularly and remorselessly been accused of treason.
  4. [Group integration] and 5. [Group identity as personal validation] are, of course, among the primary purposes of the campaign to demonize liberals — to simultaneously build a cohesive brotherhood of like-minded "conservatives" who might not agree on the details but are united in their loathing of all things liberal. It plays out in such localized manifestations as the KVI Radio 570th On-Air Cavalry, which has made a habit of deliberately invading antiwar protests with the express purpose of disrupting them and breaking them up. Sometimes, as they did recently in Bellingham, this is done with caravans of big trucks blaring their horns; and they are also accompanied by threatening rhetoric and acts of physical intimidation. They haven't
  yet bonded in violence — someone did phone in a threat to sniper-shoot protesters — but they are rapidly headed in that direction.
  6. [Authority of leaders]: This needs hardly any further explanation, except to note that George W. Bush is actually surprisingly uncharismatic for someone who inspires as much rabid loyalty as he does. But then, that is part of the purpose of Bush's PR campaign stressing that he receives "divine guidance" — it assures in his supporters' mind the notion that he is carrying out God's destiny for the nation, and for the conservative movement in particular.
  7. [An aesthetic of violence]: One again needs only turn to the voluminous jingoes of Fox News or the jubilant warbloggers to find abundant examples of celebrations of the virtues — many of them evidently aesthetic — of the evidently just-completed war.
  
  
  Dick Anthony and Thomas Robbins – Millennialism and Violence
  
  Nine characteristics which appear to us to be shared by authoritarian personalities, fundamentalists and authoritarian cults such as Hare Krishna, the Unification Church, etc.:
  
  1. Separatism or the heightened sensitivity and tension regarding group boundaries. This usually includes 'Authoritarian Aggression' which entails rejecting and punitive attitudes toward deviants, minorities and outsiders.
  2. Theocratic leanings or willingness to see the state expanded so as to enforce the group's particular moral and ideological preferences at the expense of pluralism or church-state separation.
  3. Authoritarian submission entailing dependency on strong leaders and deferential attitudes toward authorities and hierarchical superiors.
  4. Some form of conventionalism in terms of both belief and practice. Apparent exceptions such as antinomian groups, for example, the Bhagwan movement of Rajneesh or the quasi-Marxist Peoples Temple of Jim Jones ...
  5. Apocalypticism.
  6. Evangelism or a focus on proselytization and conversion.
  7. Coercive tendencies in terms of either punitive reactions toward internal dissidence and nonconformity (for example, exile from fellowship, shunning, harsh 'self-criticism,' confessional sessions) or willingness to have non-conformists suppressed or discouraged by the state.
  8. Consequentialism or a tendency to see moral or ideological virtue producing tangible rewards to believers. This may entail belief in a 'just world' in which the good are tangibly rewarded and the wicked undone on the human plane.
  9. Finally, groups whose members tend to score high in authoritarianism or dogmatism tend to have strong beliefs and tend to make doctrinal acceptance a membership criterion. As with 'Moonies' studied by Galanter (among whom strong belief was correlated with feelings of group solidarity and the 'relief effect'), authoritarians and fundamentalists appear to have a strong 'investment' in their beliefs.

[hooplala]

Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.
[Perhaps the most noticeable trait in the current environment. The destruction of
meaning by creating "empty phrases" combining opposite ideas has, as we have seen,
become a prominent strategy deployed by the conservative movement.]

Very interesting. I couldn't think of any examples for this one, though - do you have any?

[Cain]

"The Surge"?  Implies a temporary increase in troops in Iraq, yet there are always going to be troops in Iraq keeping order.  Or any statements by Bush etc about free societies.

[LMNO]

Contempt for the weak.
[Think both of conservatives' characterization of liberals as "weak spined," as well as the
verbal attacks on Muslims and immigrants from the likes of Limbaugh and Michael
Savage.]

Also:  "The poor simply don't work hard enough."  Anti-Affirmative Action, tax cuts for the rich, anti-welfare, etc.

[Golden Applesauce]

I wallpapered my dorm door with a variety of propaganda posters, and it's alarming how similar some of the Nazi ones are to modern day slogans/ideas.

We do not speak of peace, we fight for it!
The people of Germany have but one command: that what happened in November 1918 never be repeated.
Our country will never be defeated if you are united and loyal.

Also see their Anti-Bolshevism Propaganda Plan.  It lays out pretty clearly how Germany was fighting a defensive war against Jewish Bolshevism.  As far as I can tell, the only difference between this and our war on Islamic Terrorism is that our Reichstag actually was burned down by who the government said it was, and the power difference between the US and Middle East is a lot bigger than Germany and Russia.

[Requia ☣]

Is there any evidence at all for the conspiracy theory centered around the Nazis having burned down the Reichstag?

[hooplala]

Is there any evidence at all for the conspiracy theory centered around the Nazis having burned down the Reichstag?

Yes.

[Golden Applesauce]

Is there any evidence at all for the conspiracy theory centered around the Nazis having burned down the Reichstag?

Yes.

No.

[Requia ☣]

Is there any evidence at all for the conspiracy theory centered around the Nazis having burned down the Reichstag?

Yes.

No.

[Citation Needed]

[Verbal Mike]

If it's not true that's hilarious, I learned that little gem while studying history for Israel's official state exams... It's taught there as historical fact.

[Cain]

If it's not true that's hilarious, I learned that little gem while studying history for Israel's official state exams... It's taught there as historical fact.

Its possible that some of Nazi leadership knew of it.  However, there is no real proof.  Der Lubbe was a pyromaniac, but its unlikely he could have caused so much damage so quickly alone.  Goering joked he was behind it, and apparently there is a wealth of circumstansial evidence in the secret Gestapo papers (which only researchers have access to).  Its more likely a section of the Nazi elite knew of it and planned it without Hitler's knowledge, or took advantage of the situation to make it worse.

[Verbal Mike]

Hehe, iirc I was taught it was Hitler's plan.
But maybe I was taught an unknown party did it and the Nazis used the opportunity to blame the commies, my brain is a lil fuzzy on this memory right now.

[Cain]

Often the blame is laid on Goering, Himmler or elements of the SA.

[Requia ☣]

The Nazi's definately took advantage of it, but it always seemed to me that the idea they did it became prominent only because everyone wanted to villify them.  Part of it also seems like people simply don't want to consider that the Nazis could have taken power without having thrown a coup or arranged a conspiracy.  After all, if we didn't assume conpiracy, people might learn that panicking and giving control to the government after a disaster or attack would be a bad idea.

And checking on that circumstantial evidence nobody is allowed to see, it wasn't available to researchers until the 90s, well after the idea was mainstream.

[Cain]

Very true and good points as well.

There was always a level of doubt at the time, the Communists were up in arms about it obviously, and often the early research on Naziism was conducted by Marxists as well, so that could account for it.  But its hardly good history, I agree.