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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5896 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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It's a common theme with both tribes. My enemy is both incredibly stupid but also somehow also a giant threat. The cognitive dissonance never seems to register.

But only one accused the other of being the only one to think in such a manner. Eco claimed of facists in his 8th out of 14 points:

Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as "at the same time too strong and too weak". On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

Reading Eco is good mental exercise. He is quite smart, capable and well-read, not without fault, but still well-read and smart. I think The Prague Cemetery could be something that wold interest many Motte users just for peeking at the sheer amount Eco has read about the 19th century politics to write it. (Never mind the plot.)

Concerning Eco's definition of fascism. If you read the original, it appears that Eco gets that because something fits his definition is not eternally always equal to Mussolini's fascism. Truncated quotes (apologies, but Eco does not write succinctly)

If we still think of the totalitarian governments that ruled Europe before the Second World War we can easily say that it would be difficult for them to reappear in the same form in different historical circumstances. If Mussolini’s fascism was based upon the idea of a charismatic ruler, on corporatism, on the utopia of the Imperial Fate of Rome, on an imperialistic will to conquer new territories, on an exacerbated nationalism, on the ideal of an entire nation regimented in black shirts, on the rejection of parliamentary democracy, on anti-Semitism, then I have no difficulty in acknowledging that today the Italian Alleanza Nazionale, born from the postwar Fascist Party, MSI, and certainly a right-wing party, has by now very little to do with the old fascism. In the same vein, even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement.

Nevertheless, even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives. Is there still another ghost stalking Europe (not to speak of other parts of the world)?

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini’s regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. ...

Nevertheless, historical priority does not seem to me a sufficient reason to explain why the word fascism became a synecdoche, that is, a word that could be used for different totalitarian movements. This is not because fascism contained in itself, so to speak in their quintessential state, all the elements of any later form of totalitarianism. On the contrary, fascism had no quintessence. Fascism was a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions. Can one conceive of a truly totalitarian movement that was able to combine monarchy with revolution, the Royal Army with Mussolini’s personal milizia, the grant of privileges to the Church with state education extolling violence, absolute state control with a free market? ... [W]hen the King fired Mussolini in 1943, the party reappeared two months later, with German support, under the standard of a “social” republic, recycling its old revolutionary script, now enriched with almost Jacobin overtones. ...

So we come to my second point. There was only one Nazism. We cannot label Franco’s hyper-Catholic Falangism as Nazism, since Nazism is fundamentally pagan, polytheistic, and anti-Christian. But the fascist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change. The notion of fascism is not unlike Wittgenstein’s notion of a game. A game can be either competitive or not, it can require some special skill or none, it can or cannot involve money. Games are different activities that display only some “family resemblance,” as Wittgenstein put it. ...

But in spite of this fuzziness, I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.

... (insert the list with explanations) ...

We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” Freedom and liberation are an unending task.

More briefly, I don't think Eco would have had any problem acknowledging that his list does not overdetermine "fascism". He says he is trying to gesture at a syncretic fuzzy ball of ideas but want to argues the fuzzy ball "ur-Fascism" can meaningfully still be called "fascism" in post-Mussolini era. He quite clearly gestures that many of his points are generally unpleasant types of political thought that the free world would be better without and people wearing black shirts do not have a monopoly over them. And what would be "the most innocent of disguises" if not a political ideologue who argues to be antifascist yet deploys the same tactics and ideas?

The uncharitability is more on the people who take a distilled list of his in Wikipedia and choose to apply it like Der Hexenhammer to identify witches they want to identify as witches.

edit. this was intended as a reply to @FistfullOfCrows here edit2 @ not /u/

TBH Eco can go fuck himself with his uncharitable bullshit. One can be both in a position of political and economic power and still be a spineless coward (in a personal way), with weak morals and not enough "will to power".

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