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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

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So you dispute the idea of "clerical fascism"?

Not quite. Falangists were clerical fascists. Mere radical religious nationalism is not. Lest we have to call every single European regime before the French Revolution fascist. Which is not even true under the Marxist lens.

The hard to draw line is for Integralism, which has totalitarian mass politics and hangs out just on the frontier between fascism and other ultranationalisms. I think it depends on the implementation for that one.

But mere traditional nationalist monarchism? That's not clerical fascism.

Japan

I think quite a bit of what is said about Japan being fascist is abuse of analogy for lack of precise understanding by Europeans, frankly.

The wikipedia article you linked mentions this:

Early Shōwa statism is sometimes given the retrospective label "fascism", but this was not a self-appellation. When authoritarian tools of the state such as the Kempeitai were put into use in the early Shōwa period, they were employed to protect the rule of law under the Meiji Constitution from perceived enemies on both the left and the right.

Japanese imperialism was a lot more like the IInd Reich than the IIIrd. I don't really think it makes sense to analyze it under the lens of fascism, precisely because the ideological component is quite different.

According to who?

Anyone who refuses to turn their brain off at the mention of Boomer anathema. The numbers are growing every day.

You yourself seem to still live in this world where "Nazi" means anything. But it is nearly done. And when it is, understanding history beyond such clichés will be more valuable than the ability to manipulate a defunct frame. Because if you do you're able to reconstruct a new narrative.

What people miss about Lindsay's schizo rants is that he's actually right. Liberalism is a dead doctrine and the right is in fact memetically summoning something new out of its failure. I wish that people would stop themselves from laughing at the man driven mad by reading too much critical theory and actually give his claims as charitable a reading as they give, say, Nick Land. Lindsay's true failing is lamenting this, as a man who desires everything to be based on logic and reason he can't do anything else. But reason and logic alone brought us into this mess. Something easy to miss for someone who fought on their side against krits for so long.

Now the real reason to be weary of fascism under such auspices (and therefore to accurately identify it) is that it contains the worst parts of modernity alongside an unrestrained rejection of reason. This is what led to its failure in large parts. Repeating history would be pointless here, so at the least whatever new reaction needs to address its rightward critiques and more likely integrate the leftward ones as well.

Whatever comes needs to transcend the neocon frame. And you can't do it with naive XXth century idealism.