Thread 17968569

Why is it so controversial in academia to suggest that fascism was a real ideology with real ideas and a real worldview? So many scholars go to comically great lengths to obscure or deny this fact. I suspect that on some level they understand that it’s more useful to them as a rhetorical club than a coherent concept
I’m not even claiming that they have to support it or defend it either. It’s perfectly possible to be specific when describing and explaining something you don’t agree with.

>>17968569 (OP)
Even wikipedia states that facism isn’t a clearly defined concept. It’s a boogeyman term that gets thrown around to mean anything from orange man to socialists

They also say crazy lies like Mussolini wanted to recreate the Roman Empire or that he stole all of Fascism from the Jewish woman he slept with

>>17968569 (OP)
Post war scholarship on fascism was abysmal, it's really surprising to see that serious attempts at making a coherent analysis of it based on actual things fascists did and wrote start in like 1980's.
People talk about red scare but brown scare was evidently more real if the topic wasn't approached rationally for this long.

>>17968569 (OP)
>Why is it so controversial in academia to suggest that fascism was a real ideology with real ideas and a real worldview?
Is it?

>>17968569 (OP)

Because it doesn't refer to any actual form of government.

>>17968603
No. These fags just pretend it is because they're all teenagers who need to feel like cool contrarians. There is nothing controversial about fascism. NATO co-opted fascist policy during the cold war.

>>17968614
>Nothing controversial about fascism
Nothing at all? You can’t think of a single thing? I’m not sure what world you live in but where I come from fascism has been nothing but controversial since 1945.
> NATO co-opted fascist policy during the cold war.
In order for NATO to co-opt a thing, it has to be real and describable. Which is kind of the point of my post. I don’t think we’d even disagree on this.

>>17968603
Yes.
I'm a Communist and even I acknowledge that Fascism was a FUCKING IDEOLOGY.
Three main planks of Fascism
>Futurism
Fascists were Futurists who rejected traditionalist conservatism for Futurist visions, they wanted to destroy the old and create the new, massive skyscrapers, advanced technology, rejection of old traditional social values and norms etc, Modernism etc.
>Social organism
Society is a organism, the family a cell, the stae the body, the working class the heart, the capitalists the brain etc. This is why Fascists were obsessed with shit like healthy eating, against foreign bodies/influences, environmentalism.
>Nietzschean morality
Fascists believe christcuckery is a slave morality, thus the goal of the Fascists was to restore "hero worship" pagan ideologies and train everyone into being a "hero" ubermensch. This is why you see Mussolini and Hitler jerking off over ancient pagan civilization and Atlantis. This also put Fascists on a crash course with traditional conservatives.
>>17968569 (OP)
Because defeating Fascism was the greatest success of the Communist Left, Liberals took Fascists and sublimated them into Liberalism, so the Communist left want to still have relevance by painting Fascism as an all around threat, when in reality it ceased to exist shortly post WW2, with Fascists largely just dropping the ideology beyond the seething anti-Communist parts as they basically got shoved into the Western Foreign policy departments and the top eschelons of NATO. Look at the paperclip communities today in the West and Nazi loving Balts, they are out there flying rainbow flags, mass importing indians and deriding Communist and ex-Communist states that aren't pathologically anti-Communist for not being gay and troon and mass immigration loving enough so deserve bombs.
Also no, Pinochet nor Franco, were Fascist. They were just authoritarian rightoids.

>>17968569 (OP)
The ideology is just nationalism which has been discussed to death in the social sciences.

>>17968569 (OP)
Maybe when the boomers die off

Fascism and socialism aren't actually properly defined, neither is capitalism. The entire frame of reference used to explain things is completely made up

>>17968569 (OP)
The main problems are that
a) Russia and its satellites rapidly went Fash
b) The Communist movement is an absolute intellectual Juggernaut and Fascism sits and drinks deeply from its downstream run offs.
c) Fascism in Europe was very wibbly-wobbly and ultimately just encompasses a group of anti-communist, anti-parliamentarian nationalist militaristic regimes that didn't even agree with themselves over time.

Which is why Eco's traits aren't too terrible.

>>17968569 (OP)
A word's definition is however it is used. Pretty much no one outside some academic circles use fascism to refer exclusively to the ideology of Italian fascists c. 1919-1945.
The definition is broad because it must be in order to include all the regimes that most people identify as "fascistic".

>>17968624
The name itself is controversial. The policies (corporatist-style economics, class-collaborationism, totalitarian statism, cult of the nation and violence, use of paramilitaries and state forces to supress dissidents) not so much.

>>17968569 (OP)
Because modern Academics, particularly in political/sociological faculties, are the sort of leftists who like to angrily claim that anything vaguely to the right of Trotsky smoking a joint at Woodstock is 'ERMAGERD! NURZEES!'. If they had to actually acknowledge that fascism was a real political movement that does not just automatically describe anything that they don't like they'd actually have to start thinking for the first time in their career.

>>17968569 (OP)
Zeev Sternhell is the historian I'm most aware of who emphasizes fascism as a distinct ideology. I don't know the answer to your question though, like why is it controversial. Part of the problem is that fascists themselves didn't like to be weighed down by theory, and perhaps these professors tend to be very theoretical, and the fascists didn't think like those professors do. The whole concept of systematic thought was not the fascist M.O., being based as it was on emotion, myths, and the "triumph of the will."

Sternhell saw it as a synthesis of nationalism and anti-materialist (anti-Marxist) socialism. It was a revolutionary ideology which rejected Enlightenment rationalism while focusing on "unity" and myths of a heroic struggle. War for the fascist is a revolutionary force, it's a positive thing that leads to transformation and renewal. It's a purifying, unifying, even spiritual experience. The military and war-focused stuff doesn't get mentioned as much but I think it's central to it. It's a bit like Starship Troopers or something, which also ties into not thinking too much, it gets in the way of taking action and demonstrating courage. The fascist parties were organized along military lines with the leader being like a commander-in-chief, and it relates to the cross-class / "organic" society stuff because everyone in the military has a place to be and a job to do:
https://youtu.be/TryfqARSEd4

>>17968649
>Look at the paperclip communities today in the West and Nazi loving Balts
Well you're not wrong but these groups exist in Russia too. And Ukraine. In Ukraine, they came out of football ultras and formed their own brigades in the military. Now in Russia there's the RO which is a glowie-controlled fascist (essentially) organization of military veterans. In Eastern Europe, there's a history of these types doing dirty jobs for the deep state, and the different intelligence services have their own pet fascists. They don't even hide it there. In America, these right-wing types all call each other glowies, but the recruiting videos for these groups over there will have them marching around in paramilitary formation, and then putting on suits when they go in to their day jobs working as criminal prosecutors, it's fucking wild:
https://youtu.be/nqScrEBmDI8

>>17968571
>>17968569 (OP)
Fascism actually is extremely well defined, but yes many blowhard academics who want public money/views would rather the masses never define it. It serves as a dramatic tool for them to use to woo audiences.

>>17968569 (OP)
fascism is the way

>>17971262
another

>>17971265
moar
>>17968571
>Even wikipedia...
go kys

>>17968569 (OP)
Because Jews control the universities and practice nepotism to get fellow Jews through the door as students and also into faculty

>>17968569 (OP)
Italian Fascism was not really a coherent ideology, as overstated by A. James Gregor and Sternhell, but a movement. It included various elements, that agreed on common short term aspects (authoritarian state, that had to educate and integrate the masses, corporatism, nationalist geopolitical revisionism, industrial development, a degree of philosophical anti-materialism, praise of military-like virtues), but disagreed on long term goals and practice, and was led in a highly personalist way by Mussolini. This was combined with high prevalence of remaining conservative elites and interest groups in the state after the Fascist takeover. Giovanni Gentile also wasn't the "ideologue of Fascism" (he didn't even join the movement until it was in power), but a prominent academic philosopher, who gave a largely metaphysical justification for Fascism that wasn't universally accepted within the party.

In generic sense, there's pretty much a consensus now in the field of study of "fascism", that it refers to interwar, mainly European, phenomena of radical nationalist movements, which sought a national regeneration through a creation of a new authoritarian or totalitarian state, based around vitalistic, militarist and idealist culture, development of "new man" and highly regulated economy of class collaboration with certain social reforms. Particular manifestations of fascism were quite different between countries and usually ideologically eclectic.

Because the only book most scholars read on Fascism is Mein Kampf.

>>17968569 (OP)
Its literally just liberalism if it were honest about its objectives

>>17968569 (OP)
Leftist rely on Eccoslop to use "Fascism" as a generic term to label anyone who doesnt agree with them as some deranged freak. When your uncle says he thinks gay pride flags at the NFL halftime show are stupid, thats fascism. Its a sort of deliberate retardation.

Also, I've talked to someone like this way back in like 2017. I mentioned that I read parts of Mein Kampf before to better understand Nazism and he said that he would never do that. His argument was that if he read Mein Kampf he might end up becoming a Nazi. Like he had no confidence in his own convictions, had no ability to entertain an idea without converting to it, and treated Mein Kampf as like the Pharoahs Curse or something.

These two things combined make it clear that Fascism is just a boogeyman. Btw, these same people that call anyone and everyone a fascist/nazi at the drop of a hat are also the ones to whine if you call them a communist when they are "akshully a post anarcho-syntality socialist peepee poopooist"

'The Doctrine of Fascism' by Mussolini, 1932.

https://sjsu.edu/faculty/wooda/2B-HUM/Readings/The-Doctrine-of-Fascism.pdf

9 pages, easy read

>>17969924
This is Fascist?

>>17968569 (OP)
It was never a true ideology until the racialist and ethnic supremacist characteristics were introduced. Before then, it was simply "war = increase demand = good!!!"
It is buried under the rug because the capital class that contemporary fascists so desperately want to serve don't want their racially exclusive model of indentured servitude. It brings back poor dividends and hinders economic growth for the sake of something arbitrary that capitalists will never care about, which is the "nation" or the "people".
The people that propped up fascism were dumb disenfranchised losers. These people, whether they were the blackshirts, brownshirts, or whatever other fascist gangs you idolize, were not dogged psychopath genius builders or inventors. They did not own anything and they did not create anything. They were brutes that wanted to seize the state to redesign capitalism capitalism.
They only had support of the corporations at the time because the people (their customers) were fully in support of fascism. Once these corporations threw in the towel, everything crumbled overnight.

>>17971292
>Let me tell you about muh universities
You couldn't get into one with all the money in the world becaude youre a retarded community college dropout.