The Fascist Virus: Defeat

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that's it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

Well, thats true for the Jews, but not for all of the groups that Hitler's Germany persecuted. Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, were offered chances again, and again, to renounce their faith and gain their freedom. Same for soviets they 'found'. I think Stalin was more obvious in his breadth than Hitler, simply because the anti-Semite aspects of the holocaust were so extreme (6,000,000 Jews vs 20,000 JW's is a huge gap). 'Dissidents' of the Nazi state were treated just as dissidents in the USSR, false accusations and all.

That is, it seems to me that Nazi Germany was very much like Stalin's USSR... except they had the additional horror of the indiscriminate murder of millions of additional people based solely on race.

Zizek seems to focus on the Jewish situation to the exclusion of the other groups the Nazis went after. At least in the context of that excerpt...

I'd call that a "stupid electorate", but that's just me.

Well okay, since I did meant that as a consideration of fears of that happening here, let me explain:
The basis for the fear is a growing feeling of powerlessness and "Us vs Them" in our present government structure.

It seems (to me) that there is a growing trend of The People being "sold" on Legislative solutions to problems with
A. little regard to the big picture
B. too much "bloatware" contained in the actual legislation put in place to appease the representatives/members of government voting on it to be effective at all
C. such legislation only serves (intentional or not) to restrict the private sector and create more of a "market" for government bureaucracy to handle the new rules.

These pieces of legislation-once sold and passed-are usually damned-near impossible to repeal--even once the sales pitch wears off and buyer's remourse sets in, it's basically an uphill battle to wind back the clock because so many new departments, so many paycheques rely on them staying precisely where they are (Patriot act and Drug war, I'm looking at you).

This had led to more than a few of us having nothing but suspicion for any charismatic "Warshington-type" who shows up with a smile on his face and huge stack of "solutions" to our problems. This includes Ron Paul. This includes Obama and McCain and Bob Barr and basically anyone else who's doesn't have the balls to stand up and say "we're all full of shit but I got the majority of people in the House to sign this piece of paper swearing to outright abolish x, y, and z that isn't working and we don't give a good goddamn WHO we have to lay off."

Can you see why the tinfoil habberdashery somewhat?

The problem I see here is that we're not dealing strictly with a Progressive or Conservative system. We're dealing with a nation that changes its direction every four to eight years... and a group of citizens that do not agree on the definitions of progressive and conservative, let alone any implementation of one or the other.

I think it should be noted, however, that the so-called "free market" solutions have increased wage disparity and made the social/economic structure extremely fragile and vulnerable. 

Of course, half-implemented anything is gonna suck. We can examine the state of welfare in thge 80's to see Progressive ideals fucking up as badly as Conservative ones

[navkat]

I think it should be noted, however, that the so-called "free market" solutions have increased wage disparity and made the social/economic structure extremely fragile and vulnerable. 

This is true. I stand somewhere off to the left on some of these issues.

The far-right line of thinking is "let it all free and it'll even out. Increasing wages will only make things more expensive when overhead is passed onto the consumer because companies still owe x, y and z to their shareholders so raising wages/taking more responsibility for the workers will accomplish nothing."

My stance is "Hold up a minute, Mister. How is it the workers' responsibility to bear the weight of the promises you made to your shareholders for an exorbitant profit margin?!?"

The problem is: how do you create a market-model that solves this problem without putting a cap on profitability? Without getting into the dangerous practice of wealth redistribution?

[LMNO]

You don't.


You float between pure greed fucking everything up, and pure regulation fucking everything up.

There isn't one solution to make everyone happy.  There are just an infinite number of fingers, poking.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

LMNO is riding the correct motorcycle. Neither side has a good argument on the issue of wealth and corporations and employees etc.

As far as I can tell, only in a situation where the employee and employer are considered to have equal standing, can a business produce goods, services and a profit, without fucking their own employees. That doesn't mean that a company has to be "Employee Owned", only that management/ownership must see themselves as an equal to the production/service/distribution arms of the company. Once that existed, communication among equals might provide a useful way for employees to be honest about their work/pay/etc and owner/managers could also be honest about customer/costs/etc.

As long as the workplace in strictly hierarchical, the divide between owner and employee will continue to fuckup either a free or regulated market.

[navkat]

You don't.


You float between pure greed fucking everything up, and pure regulation fucking everything up.

There isn't one solution to make everyone happy.  There are just an infinite number of fingers, poking.

That's sig-worthy.

[BabylonHoruv]

I think it should be noted, however, that the so-called "free market" solutions have increased wage disparity and made the social/economic structure extremely fragile and vulnerable. 

This is true. I stand somewhere off to the left on some of these issues.

The far-right line of thinking is "let it all free and it'll even out. Increasing wages will only make things more expensive when overhead is passed onto the consumer because companies still owe x, y and z to their shareholders so raising wages/taking more responsibility for the workers will accomplish nothing."

My stance is "Hold up a minute, Mister. How is it the workers' responsibility to bear the weight of the promises you made to your shareholders for an exorbitant profit margin?!?"

The problem is: how do you create a market-model that solves this problem without putting a cap on profitability? Without getting into the dangerous practice of wealth redistribution?

How about you just do get into the dangerous practice of wealth redistribution?  Capitalism works by redistributing the wealth upward, without a mechanism to redistribute it back downwards it all ends up concentrated at the top.

[Cain]

Hey fuckers, you already have a thread to discuss your ill-defined, pie in the sky "libertarianism" in.

I suggest you use it and stop hijacking this thread.

[BabylonHoruv]

Hey fuckers, you already have a thread to discuss your ill-defined, pie in the sky "libertarianism" in.

I suggest you use it and stop hijacking this thread.

I figured it was a better hijack than the "navkat is a daft cunt" hijack that was going on before.

[LMNO]

Last relevant post...

Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that's it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

Well, thats true for the Jews, but not for all of the groups that Hitler's Germany persecuted. Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, were offered chances again, and again, to renounce their faith and gain their freedom. Same for soviets they 'found'. I think Stalin was more obvious in his breadth than Hitler, simply because the anti-Semite aspects of the holocaust were so extreme (6,000,000 Jews vs 20,000 JW's is a huge gap). 'Dissidents' of the Nazi state were treated just as dissidents in the USSR, false accusations and all.

That is, it seems to me that Nazi Germany was very much like Stalin's USSR... except they had the additional horror of the indiscriminate murder of millions of additional people based solely on race.

Zizek seems to focus on the Jewish situation to the exclusion of the other groups the Nazis went after. At least in the context of that excerpt...

[Cain]

I wasn't especially pleased with that, but at least there weren't two other active or recent threads addressing the exact same topic.

[Cain]

Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that's it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.

Well, thats true for the Jews, but not for all of the groups that Hitler's Germany persecuted. Jehovah's Witnesses, for example, were offered chances again, and again, to renounce their faith and gain their freedom. Same for soviets they 'found'. I think Stalin was more obvious in his breadth than Hitler, simply because the anti-Semite aspects of the holocaust were so extreme (6,000,000 Jews vs 20,000 JW's is a huge gap). 'Dissidents' of the Nazi state were treated just as dissidents in the USSR, false accusations and all.

That is, it seems to me that Nazi Germany was very much like Stalin's USSR... except they had the additional horror of the indiscriminate murder of millions of additional people based solely on race.

Zizek seems to focus on the Jewish situation to the exclusion of the other groups the Nazis went after. At least in the context of that excerpt...

He does, but he qualifies it futher down the page, in terms of ideology.

For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders. Which is why for me no attitude is a priori ideological. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological. You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.

For example, I would like to use the wonderful model of Lacan. Let's say that you are married and you are pathologically jealous, thinking that your wife is sleeping around with other men. And let's say that you are totally right, she is cheating. Lacan says that your jealousy is still pathological. Even if everything is true it is pathological, because what makes it pathological is not the fact that is it true or not true, but why you invest so much in it—what needs does it fulfill? It's the same with the Jews and the Nazis. It is not a question that they attributed false properties to the Jews; the point is why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew as part of their ideological project?

Jews served a role in Nazi ideology that very few others approached.  Maybe Communists, but I don't recall many other groups getting a look in, except as a passing insult.  Its true that the Nazis did go after other people (homosexuals, gypsies, the mentally ill), just as it was true that Stalin was capable of inflicting terrible crimes on particular ethnic groups alone (look what he did to the Chechens).  But in terms of ideology, pathology, Jews are far more important to the worldview of Nazis, and traitors played a massive part in the worldview of Stalinism.  The emphasis on them is part of the defining features of the regime.

As an aside, an autopsy of Stalin shows he in fact had an illness which made him highly paranoid, which is very interesting.

[LMNO]

So, the first and immediately preceding posts (skipping the bickering between) brings up an interesting question: In keeping with the "Fascist Virus" theme, how does this mindstate breed?

I can see "the masses" flocking to a "strong leader" who can "guide them through the squalls of morality" (I don't know why I'm using all these quotations, by the way), but what drives the leaders themselves towards the idea that Fascism is a good solution?

There seems to be an implication that some people reject both the liberal and conservative political platforms, that both socialism and capitalism are bogus.  But is there a rational drive towards dictatorship?  Can Fascism be stated or explained in a way that doesn't sound batshit crazy?  Once it gets started, it's easy to explain away, or use propoganda or semantics to convince people that A is B.  But where and how does it start?

There are plenty of pro-democracy racists, and both the Democrats and the Republicans have power-mad political manipulators.  So there must be an additional factor that causes them to embrace what has been shown to be a difficult, fragile, and short-term political solution.

[Bu🤠ns]

could it be equal parts complacency and sloth?

[LMNO]

I don't think complacency and sloth could provide a strong enough drive to attempt becoming a dictator.

[Template]

So, the first and immediately preceding posts (skipping the bickering between) brings up an interesting question: In keeping with the "Fascist Virus" theme, how does this mindstate breed?

I can see "the masses" flocking to a "strong leader" who can "guide them through the squalls of morality" (I don't know why I'm using all these quotations, by the way), but what drives the leaders themselves towards the idea that Fascism is a good solution?

There seems to be an implication that some people reject both the liberal and conservative political platforms, that both socialism and capitalism are bogus.  But is there a rational drive towards dictatorship?  Can Fascism be stated or explained in a way that doesn't sound batshit crazy?  Once it gets started, it's easy to explain away, or use propoganda or semantics to convince people that A is B.  But where and how does it start?

There are plenty of pro-democracy racists, and both the Democrats and the Republicans have power-mad political manipulators.  So there must be an additional factor that causes them to embrace what has been shown to be a difficult, fragile, and short-term political solution.

I don't have Transmetropolitan close at hand, and it can't be considered a direct source of truth anyways, but the words coming out of those two presidents' mouths form a good answer.

On the people side:  http://members.shaw.ca/jeanaltemeyer/drbob/TheAuthoritarians.pdf .  Some people just follow.  Sticky things tend to coagulate.  You end up with a Bible Belt, and whole voting blocs/political parties.

On the leadership side:  POWER.  The problem that dictators intend to solve is "I don't have enough power."