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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29625 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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What is the proof of family units being like fascism instead of communism?

Why does it matter? Actually existing fascism and communism are fundamentally the same in nature and only differ in rhetoric. The family is, of course, utterly unlike either in rhetoric so the comparison has to be based on substance.

Actually existing fascism and communism are fundamentally the same in nature and only differ in rhetoric.

This doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny if for no other reason than actually existing fascism supported religion while communism dismantled it

Italian/Iberian fascism, sure. But Nazi fascism? They were merely being pragmatic about Christianity. Goering, Goebbels, and Himmler hated Christianity. Hitler was more wavering, but Christianity 100% would've been made verboten in a hypothetical Thousand Year Reich eventually.

That's your idle speculation, did the NSDAP ban religious worship or not?

(The answer is no, they banned Judaism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Masonry, but unlike communism, did not dismantle religion)

I don't think they are actually the same in nature.

But the reason I ask about the family structure being more like fascism is because I've only ever seen that claim in the context of trying to cast conservatives as fascists. It was a talking point during the 2016 US election. So to see it alluded to here surprised me, that's all.

Traditional familial structure is associated with patriarchy and father-figure role, hierarchy within families and between kin groups, concentric circles of concern correlated with kin-group and genetic similarity. Not class struggle, but genetic cooperation expressed as family love and solidarity.

Communism, a political arrangement where all property is publicly owned and all are paid by their needs, is not even close to being more similar to the familial structure than fascism.

The Critical Theorists in particular related familial discipline to propensity for latent fascist tendencies, i.e.:

A central idea of The Authoritarian Personality is that authoritarianism is the result of a Freudian developmental model. Excessively harsh and punitive parenting was posited to cause children to feel immense anger towards their parents; yet fear of parental disapproval or punishment caused people to not directly confront their parents, but rather to identify with and idolize authority figures. Moreover, the book suggested that authoritarianism was rooted in suppressed homosexuality, which was redirected into outward hostility towards the father, which was, in turn, suppressed for fear of being infantilized and castrated by the father. This hypothesis was consistent with prevailing psychological theories of the time, and Frenkel-Brunswik reported some preliminary support, but empirical data have generally not confirmed this prediction. Authoritarianism was measured by the F-scale. The "F" was short for "pre-fascist personality." Another major hypothesis of the book is that the authoritarian syndrome is predisposed to right-wing ideology and therefore receptive to fascist governments.

Kevin MacDonald has an excellent chapter on TAP. MacDonald shows that the Critical Theorists would, for example, survey respondents to measure the level of discipline exerted by the parents of the respondents. Then, even though the children who reported a more disciplined household also reported closer relations to their parents, the researchers concluded that the lower-discipline households were healthier because the respondents of those households felt more "honest" to be open about the rifts in their family.

So the "post-modern neomarxists" certainly argued the traditional family structure was more similar to fascism than communism.

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