Thread 17918415

Is this book a convincing explanation of fascism?

it's Jewish pilpul that doing anything Jews don't like means you have a mental pathology

>fascism arises from a middle class upbringing with a strict conservative father
How does Adorno explain that the founder of fascism, Benito Mussolini, had a working class left-wing father who named him after a postcolonial liberal Mexican Indigenous president and was also a big fan of anarchism and humanism?

>>17918415 (OP)
He's basically trying to make an argument against masculinity. It's total bullshit.

>>17918788
To add, every single major thinker out of the Frankfurt School was a teacher in the dark arts, of manipulation through gender and general psychology, which appears to date back to ancient Babylon. It's not exactly Jewish, but some of the Jews adopted it when they were held captive there.

>>17918493
I think he's talking more about the average party member/activist than the leadership, you can't be both a turbocuck and il duce

The author is a Jew.

>>17918415 (OP)
I can tell from the title it's sophist horsecart tripe. As if authority were a discrete personality simultaneously deterministic and outdated today. Even domestic cattle understand authority, it's an efficiency measure whereby most people get to act without thinking and the leader is empowered to act correctly.

leftist arguments against conservative thought post-1991 also lean heavily on freudian psychology. conservatism can't be a political ideology so it must be a mental illness. pretty low tier stuff

>>17919070
conservatism makes sense as an elite political ideology, but surely some explanation is required for people without money/power in a hierarchy to nonetheless become fanatical defenders of a system which leaves them with nothing
False consciousness more than mental illness

>>17918415 (OP)
>Is this book a convincing explanation of fascism?
It's a good analysis of weird, aggressive guys on the internet who get into meme ideologies.

>>17919073
it doesn't leave them with nothing. conservatives and liberals agree on 99% of the same empirically derived principles of government and reality, they just disagree about which highly abstract narrative and future prediction system will give them the best outcome. that's why people who should be "ideologically opposed" can live together, and have no incentive to actually fight one another, they're part of the same economy and everything. most people don't just lack personal impact on government, the running of government doesn't dramatically impact them either. if it did, people would choose the safe side. in a situation like mid-century Europe, oddly both sides lead to apocalyptic doom. Overton window lol

>>17919073
I'll give you an example. Take the idea of "ending world hunger" your conservative will not come out in support of starvation explicitly. Starvation is morally repugnant and everyone actually wants to see progress. Two points are apparent here:
1) The essential, genuine difference philosophically is about methods. Do you feed jeets and africans directly, or try to support their economies some other way? The goal is the same for both.
2) Neither person involved in this argument has any impact on point #1 nor will they likely ever have an impact.
One thing I'll give the freudian leftists, political conversation (which cannot truly be about distant abstractions) is symbolically related to real people in real society. The attempt to re-engineer degeneracy and wield it against right wingers is a good stab at understanding what we're really doing here. Unfortunately most of the foot soldiers using these arguments don't understand the level of projection involved.

>>17919073
Ultimately the common man gets to decide between execution in the town square or starvation depending on which ideology they rally behind. And which leads to which will flip depending on the context.

>>17918415 (OP)
Fascism is just the logical result of using conspiracism and scapegoats to draw negative attention away from capitalism for the disparity and instability it creates.

>>17919144
Nah conservatives have just world fallacy and social darwinism seared into their brains by centuries of Calvinist programming. Most of them believe those suffering from poverty and starvation have only themselves to blame and it's self-evidently true that they deserve their station and that it's a good thing that the weak and undeserving are weeded out.

>>17918418
>>17919014
Not an argument.
>>17919201
Read geovani gentile

>>17918415 (OP)
this 1 is good
>another
http://www.google.com/search?q=fascism+a+very+short+introduction

>>17919201
>centuries of Calvinist programming
YAWN
is everything about enemies with you people? It's John Calvin's fault the world isn't ready for communism. It's Hitler's fault the world isn't ready for eugenics. Reality needn't factor in when the whole discourse is about casting "capitalism" as an actual movement of people and thence constructing another movement in opposition. Shit in, shit out.

>>17919201
>Fascism is just the logical result of using conspiracism and scapegoats to draw negative attention away from capitalism for the disparity and instability it creates
Okay, but there's no evidence capitalism exists

The thing with these "universal" theories of fascism, whether Adorno's (fascism as a pathology) or Eco's (fascism as a specific state of being) is that it's tricky to explain pre-modern societies with it.
Like in Ancient Rome, who was the fascist? Augustus, Caesar, Cinna, Sulla, Catiline, Cicero? All of them?

>>17919216
>book about fascism
>refuses to define the term until the very end
Fascism is just another leftist slur, which is why it's extremely evil, extremely common, extremely important, aaaaaaaaand well we can't really define it directly but like, here's a list of things Republicans do that are maybe warning signs or something.

Nobody is this fucking coy about anything else.

>>17919355
No one was fascist in ancient rome
Fascism didn't exist before WW1

>>17918415 (OP)
No. I would not take into account anything a communist says about Fascism. Considering they're still butthurt about being outcompeted by them in the inter-war period.
I would not take any post ww2 Liberal (as in, liberal-dremocrat) writings on Fascism very seriously, either, for the record. Given that they have turned Hitler into a bootleg version of Satan and are beholden by ideology to demonize and condemn to the point of absurdity.
I don't mention fascist sources because "explanation of fascism" implies an outsider view of the phenomenon. But you should not trust them very much either.

You should either read them all with an eye for what is fact and what is distortion then make your own mind up or wait 70 years for a sober unideological appraisal of the phenomenon to appear on the market.

>>17920337
I fully agree with this. Any favorite books that you feel are key "sober unideological appraisals" that may have gone undernoticed?

>>17920337
Thoughtful Jewish takes on fascism are the best. My Dinner with Andre sums it up in a word: "sentimentality".

>>17920395
Zeev Sternhell is an Israeli author who wrote a good book on fascism that I'd describe as a "sober unideological appraisal." That is, it's about fascist ideology but it treats it as a serious and coherent ideology. From a review:

>This is an excellent and sophisticated introduction to what Sternhell believes is the primary fascist doctrine developed by French and then Italian non-conformist revolutionaries just prior and subsequent to the Great War — before the seizure of power in Italy forced a wide-spread accommodation with many of the pre-existing institutions of Italy. This body of thought was no less coherent, he thinks, than Marxism (which had already suffered many alterations and deviations by this time. Thus, the “origins of fascist ideology” of the title.

>Fascism was a synthesis between two very strands of 19th cen. European thought. First, the organic, integral nationalism of Maurice Barrès and Enrico Corradini which saw the nation as the primary unit (of which the individual was just a dim expression) that had its roots deep in occult realms of Romantik and the Counter-Enlightenment and which was intensely anti-intellectual, anti-rationalist, and anti-individualist. And, secondly, and an anti-materialist (i.e. Nietschean) and vitalist deviation of non-conformist (anti-Reformist) Marxists connected with the Cercle Proudhon, Georges Sorel, and the Anarcho-Syndicalist, and of which the polemics of the young Mussolini was the final culmination.

>A very good book, and largely persuasive — though Sternhell’s strong emphasis on the French origins of this synthesis have proven to be controversial.

>>17920419
Another one (1/2):

>A compelling explanation of the intellectual origins of Italian Fascism, tracing a line from Georges Sorel to Mussolini.

>Sorel, originally a Marxist socialist, began a process of "anti-materialist" revisions of Marxism that eventually abandoned all of the original content, leaving only a belief in the necessity of revolution. These revisions were discussed and implemented by groups of "revolutionary syndicalists", who eventually evolved into "nationalist socialists" and finally "Fascists". It was only with this final turn that they self-consciously broke ranks with the Left and began fighting and exterminating the socialists and labor unions.

>Some of the crucial revisions and the reasons/situations which led to them (note that explaining why these revisions occurred is not the same as justifying them):

>- The failure of parliamentary socialism -> anti-democratic values must be cultivated, the political party must be abandoned (anti-liberalism, anti-politics)

>- Socialist parties are weak because they believe that capitalism will evolve into socialism without the self-conscious action of workers -> science and materialism must be replaced with a belief in the human will (anti-materialism, voluntaristic idealism)

>- Strikes require heroic, even violent, action -> violence must be idolized (anti-pacifism)

>- Violent action is encouraged by a willingness to sacrifice oneself -> individualistic values must be replaced by a belief in collectivities (the party, the corporation, the nation) in whose service new values must be developed (anti-individualism)

>- Social welfare reduces the desire for violent revolt -> social reforms become seen as negative (anti-reformism)

>- Reason inhibits bold action -> myth and irrationalism must replace reason (anti-enlightenment/irrationalism)

>>17920422
(2/2)
>- Finance capitalism is unproductive and harmful to society -> the distinction between bourgeois and proletariat is replaced by one between producers and parasites (abandonment of the Marxist notions of class)

>- Neoclassical economics suggested that a true "free market" would be beneficial to all producers alike -> capitalism and private property must be upheld, the revolution becomes a rebellion against bourgeois values and not against economic exploitation (abandonment of anti-capitalism)

>- Recent sociology (Mosca, Pareto) suggested that all societies are run by a class of elites -> a heroic elite must be cultivated (abandonment of anti-elitism)

>At this point in their evolution, the "revolutionary syndicalists" in France and Italy have stopped resembling Marxist socialism or anarchism almost entirely. All they have left is a disdain for "bourgeois values" and a belief in a violent revolution led by elite "syndicates" of workers. But, when even the syndicates fail to be interested in revolution, the "revolutionary syndicalists" start looking for other ways to cultivate heroic revolutionary values. They toy around with using nationalism, imperialism, and warfare as ways to develop these virtues.

>We can finally see Fascism take its "classical" shape: a cultivation of heroic, violent values, encouraged by fighting for one's Nation, is supposed to lead to a revolution in morality which leaves the productive economic structures intact. Social unrest comes to an end, not when exploitation is ended, but when everyone knows their place within a harmonious society working in the service of the Nation.

>>17920419
I'm sorry, chatgpt makes me feel ill. I skimmed and there was a much better post by some anon, much shorter, which had to do with the ruling class changing from an aristocratic to managerial base. That caused a power struggle which led to both fascism and communism as different ideas of the new industrial socialized state.