webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

umberto Eco

===

simone de b has got your #:

===

BB 11 24

Umberto Eco's 1995 essay "Ur-Fascism" outlines 14 common features of fascism based on his experience growing up as a boy in Mussolini's Italy and his analysis of fascist movements throughout history. He begins his essay:

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists- that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject "Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?" My answer was positive. I was a smart boy.

He argued that while there was "only one Nazism," fascism appears in many different forms and it always has 14 features:

Cult of tradition

Rejection of modernism

Action for action's sake

Disagreement viewed as treason

Fear of difference

Appeal to social frustration

Obsession with plots

Enemies portrayed as both strong and weak

Pacifism seen as trafficking with the enemy

Contempt for the weak

Cult of heroism

Machismo and weaponry

Selective populism

===

an 2 22 bill blum

...The political scientist Robert Paxton, one of the world’s leading authorities on fascism, has identified five stages of fascism:

  1. The initial creation of movements;
  1. The rooting of the movements in a political system;
  1. The acquisition of power;
  1. The exercise of power; and
  1. Radicalization or entropy, the stage at which movements reach their most extreme heights, or exhaust themselves and fizzle.

We are well beyond the first two phases. We flirted with the third and fourth during Trump’s first term, but our democratic institutions—weak and tattered as they are—were able to resist.

The election of Joe Biden offered only a temporary reprieve. Now, with Biden’s coalition fraying, the GOP and Trump have another opportunity to impose their will and vision, and deal a death blow to what remains of our diminished democracy.

As I have written before, fascism is a loaded term, but if used correctly, it aptly applies to Trumpism.

In his seminal study, “The Anatomy of Fascism” (Harvard University Press, 2004), Paxton offers an instructive definition:

“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”

Trump and Trumpism similarly embody the 14 common factors of fascism identified by the great Italian writer Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay, Ur Fascism:

As the current situation demonstrates, fascism is by no means a foreign phenomenon restricted to South American banana republics or failed European states. As University of London professor Sarah Churchwell explained in a June 22, 2020 essay published in the New York Review of Books, fascism has deep roots in the United States, spanning the decades from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s to the rise of the German-American Bund in the 1930s,the ascendance of Depression-era demagogues like Huey Long, and the election of Trump in 2016.

Churchwell’s article is aptly titled, “American Fascism: It Has Happened Here.” In it, she offers another working definition of fascism, noting that while fascist movements differ from nation to nation, they are united by “conspicuous features [that] are recognizably shared.” These include:

...

===

===

NZ livestream // call of duty?!

http://www.thewaroneveryone.com/

at end sez most surprise was jnx xian ID?

Chapter 1: The Eternal Fascist

There is nothing new under the sun. In this chapter, you’ll learn about “Ur-Fascism”, and how humor and irony have historically been used to enable its rise.

The War on Everyone (52pp)

By Robert Evans

Transcribed by Grateful Members of the Behind the Bastards Community

Chapter 1: The Eternal Fascist

On November 9 and 10, 1938 Nazi stormtroopers and party members took to the streets of cities throughout Germany. They burned synagogues, shattered the windows of Jewish owned buildings, beat and murdered hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish people in the streets. This bloody pogrom is known to history as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. It’s one of those moments in history so shocking and brutal that it’s become stained into our collective consciousness, a single moment of horror forever printed on the human psyche.

Adolph Hitler and the other members of Nazi high command considered Kristallnacht to be failure. Rather than being enthused by the violence, the German people were horrified by this outpouring of brutality. World media harshly condemned Hitler’s regime, and from their plush offices in Berlin, the Fuhrer and his inner circle began to revise their plans for how to sell anti-Semitic brutality to De Volk.

Joseph Goebbels decided that film was the right medium to help crack this nut, his efforts culminated in the 1940 production, The Eternal Jew. The essential through line of this particularly vile piece of propaganda was the idea that Jewish people were an age-old parasitic force, leeching off their host nations and almost habitually working to undermine and destabilize them.

As with most pieces of vile, racist propaganda, The Eternal Jew reveals more about the men who made it than it does about Judaism. There is no eternal Jew. But there might be an eternal fascist.

Umberto Eco was probably the first person to really grasp this idea and try to define it in a scholarly way. His 1995 essay Ur-Fascism is still one of the single finest pieces of writing on the subject. Eco was an Italian novelist, a literary critic and a professor. He was born into fascist Italy. In 1942, at the age of 10, he won an award in the provincial competition for young fascists where he gave an elaborately positive answer to the question “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?”

Eco came to hate fascism slightly later in life, and he came to also love the partisans and rebels who fought back against Benito Mussolini’s regime. As he grew older and began to analyze his world, and the history behind the war that had torn apart his childhood, Eco found himself drawn again and again to the question: What is a fascist?

That’s not an easy question to answer. Most dictionary definitions you will find for the word fascism leave rather a lot to be desired. Here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition: “A political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts the nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.” Now, that definition seems decent enough on its surface, but you could apply the bulk of it to the USSR, or Mao’s China, or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for that matter. Now, that may not seem like a problem to you. After all, Hitler and Mao and Stalin and Saddam were all pieces of shit dictators who did horrible things to their people. But there is a reason Fascism is more than just a system that brings about dictators. Fascism arises out of, and murders, vibrant democracies. As such, it only comes to power with the enthusiastic consent of the people. Umberto Eco understood the singular nature of fascism. He also understood that when it reappeared in the future it would come in different guises than the ones that had popped up all around Europe in the 1920s and 30s. He wrote: “I think that 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.”

Eco’s concept of eternal fascism started with a cult of tradition. The belief that “Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message.” Whether you’re looking at Nazis and their concept of the Aryan civilization or you’re looking at modern American fascism and this idea that there was a point in which America was great and perfect that we need to get back to.

Now, you might translate this to conservatism, which doesn’t mean that conservatives are all fascists, just that fascism gestates within conservative movements.

Next, according to Eco, is a rejection of modernism, particularly a rejection of modern depravity. As traditionally marginalized and oppressed groups stand up for their human rights in modern societies, fascists inevitably seek to reverse these trends. The first books the Nazis burned were Magnus Hirschfield’s library of research on transgender individuals. Hatred of trans men and women is still a central unifying tenant of modern fascists. Then there is the cult of action for action’s sake, expressed as a worship of the soldier, of the man with a gun in his hand, willing to do violence at a moment’s notice. For fascists, according to Eco, thinking is a form of emasculation.

Eco also recognized a rejection of criticism and disagreement as central aspects to fascism. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.” He wrote.

It’s worth noting that 8chan’s /pol/ board, one of the largest gathering places for neo-Nazis on the internet, the community that spawned both the Christchurch massacre and the Poway synagogue shooting was formed as a direct result of Gamer Gate. Gamer Gate was a reactionary movement inspired by rage at female video game reviewers who had started to critique what they saw as artistic shortcomings of popular video games. Before too long, gamer-gaters took to harassing and threatening to murder these video game reviewers, which got them off of 4chan and sent them scurrying to 8chan. Once again, Eco hit the nail on the head.

Racism and hatred of diversity, exploitation of the natural fear of differences, these are the other characteristics of Ur-Fascism. Eco recognized it as derived from social frustration, generally rising out of an “appeal to a frustrated middle class. A class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.” Ur-fascism promises its followers a social identity, in the kind of false equality that comes from belonging to a nation and a people that are set above all the other nations and peoples of this earth.

Fascism of course requires an absolute rejection of pacifism. Life is lived for struggle, war is permanent. We see this translated in our modern fascist movements in an obsession with the tools and aesthetics of war. Black and camo and tactical everything. Earlier on the day I wrote this, I was browsing Twitter and I came across a post of someone’s bug-out bag. He wrote in the Twitter post, “How’s this for a bug-out Boogaloo setup?” if you aren’t aware, Boogaloo is a far right term for the civil war that many in that corner of the populace believe is coming, as in Civil War II: Electric Boogaloo. This guy’s emergency preparedness kit contained no food, no water, no medical supplies. His gas mask had no actual filters, and seemed to be only for aesthetics. But he did have an AR-15 rifle, a 12 gauge shotgun, a Glock sidearm with a 30 round magazine and a .44 magnum revolver, along with a tomahawk, a throwing knife, and stylish green body armor the exact same shade as his tactical backpack.

Seeing this post brought to mind what Eco wrote about the fascist Armageddon complex. “Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle after which the movement will have control of the world. But such a final solution implies a further era of peace, a golden age which contradicts the principle of permanent war.” No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.

Umberto Eco goes on to name contempt for the weak, the cult of the hero, machismo and a sense of contempt for women and femininity, as other key aspects of incipient fascism. For a fascist movement to evolve, a number of these things must coalesce together, generally around the personality of a single charismatic man with dreams of power. This man will of course never admit to desiring power. Instead he claims to speak for some broad mass of the population. A claimed majority that stands behind him and his movement. Eco called this “qualitative populism”, and noted that in the modern era, “We no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome, or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or internet populism in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the voice of the people.”

Umberto Eco was not wrong, but he did miss something, and since y’all are listening to my audiobook, I hope you’ll forgive my arrogance in adding one new element of fascism to Eco’s list.

Fascism often wraps itself in irony humor as a way to disguise its true intentions as black comedy and test the waters for its most extreme goals. If you’re someone who’s paid attention to the rise of fascism on the internet, if you’ve followed my work on 8chan or read much about the alt-right, you understand what I’m getting at, but you probably view this as a rather new wrinkle in the history of fascism. The truth is that it goes all the way back to the beginning.

If you want a picture the personality of the Fuhrer, what he was like on a day to day basis with the people he liked and trusted, Hitler’s table talk is about the best resource that exists. Starting in 1941, Martin Boreman, Hitler’s secretary, convinced his boss to allow a series of aides to transcribe his private conversations for posterity.

Some of these were the traditional Hitler ranting monologues you’d expect, others were just, y’know, chats between courses at dinners and the like. There’s a lot of debate as to how truly off the cuff any of these were, but Hitler’s table talk is generally regarded as an incredibly useful resource for understanding the minds of the top Nazis. In his 1998 book, “Explaining Hitler”, journalist and historian Ron Rosenbaum turned to the table talk records several times in his attempt to understand, in essence, how bouncing baby Adolph turned into the genocidal warlord we all know and hate. He focuses on one passage in particular. “The passage in which Hitler, Himmler, and Heidrich are ostentatiously debunking the rumor, that they know to be true, that the Jews are being exterminated. ‘It’s silly that people should say such things, Hitler piously avers, when we’re only parking the Jews in the marshy parts of Russia’. Although he adds that if it were true, it would be no less than the Jews deserved. It seems to me a transparent charade in which the three architects of the Final Solution were becoming the first Holocaust deniers. The first revisionists, so to speak, and doing so in a particularly repulsive winking and nodding way.”

Rosenbaum brought his theory to another scholar, a fellow named Lange, who agreed that this was probably evidence of Hitler company concealing their crimes via humor. Both to keep explicit discussion out of the historical record, and so that those in the know could laughingly revel in their crapulence. Lange said “the inventiveness seems to me in some ways really to come to the heart of the matter, even though its subtler than the brutality. Primo Levy used the phrase Needless Violence, which is not quite what I’m saying. It’s the element of gratuitousness, but it’s more than the gratuitousness, there seems to be this imaginative protraction, elaboration that one finds best exemplified in art forms in which in art we usually take to be indicative of a consciousness, an artistic consciousness of an overall design.”

For Nazis and their modern descendants, shittiness is a form of art. It’s never enough to gain power, or even to hurt or kill your rivals. These people’s ultimate goal is to shift the nature of reality itself to be further in line with their own narcissistic beliefs. Irony is a powerful tool to achieving that. Lange goes on, “Brutality is straightforward. It’s not imaginative. This isn’t just brute strength, it seems to me that there’s a sense of irony constantly. The sign over the entrance gate to Auschwitz you know “Arbeit macht frei”—work will make you free. It’s like a joke, it is a joke. The orchestra playing as these people go out to work.”

Hitler’s sense of humor is not something we talk about much. But perhaps we should. Ironic humor was used regularly by the incipient Fuhrer during his rise to power. In August of 1920 in one of his earlier speeches, Hitler told an audience that he supported “removal of the Jews from our nation, not because we would begrudge them their existence, we congratulate the rest of the world on their company.” This line was met with widespread laughter. “But because the existence of our own nation is a thousand times more important than that of an alien race”. Lucy Davidowitz, the Holocaust scholar who brought that speech to Rosenbaum’s attention believed that the joke and the thing that Hitler’s audience was laughing at was not the line “We congratulate the rest of the whole world on their company,” but the earlier line “We do not begrudge them their existence.” I’m going to quote again from “Explaining Hitler”, “This, Davidowitz suggests, is an inside joke for party members who know the secret meaning. That in fact, they do begrudge, they are dedicated to eradicating the Jews’ existence.” Now reading that quote brings to mind a post I found on 8chan’s /pol/ board, during one of my regular sessions browsing that image board in between the mass shootings carried out by its members. In one thread I found anons discussing the value of comedic memes about mass killing as a way to camouflage their very real efforts to inspire more massacres. One user typed, “The best thing about this is that they will never be able to discern an ironic, tongue-in-cheek frog poster from a man of action like Terrent or Bowers. We have all the plausible deniability in the world and unless they’re going to start locking people up for shitposting, we have nothing to fear.”

In the decades since Adolph Hitler shot himself in his bunker, ironic racist humor has been one of the through lines connecting every Nazi and fascist movement that’s arisen around the world. George Lincoln Rockwell, the founding father of American Nazism, had his minions dress up in racist gorilla costumes to interrupt events and distract attention from civil rights activists. The main weakness of Rockwell’s humor is that it was far too overt and hateful to be viewed as ironic by most Americans. But down through the years, his descendants have become much better at straddling the fine line between dog-whistling to people in the know and maintaining plausible deniability. One good example would be Count Dankula, a failed UK political candidate who first achieved notoriety for a video in which he trained his dog to Sieg Heil. When he was fined for this, he was able to frame himself as a free speech crusader and raise thousands of dollars while claiming to fight back against political correctness. There is tremendous power within humor. It's why satirists and comedians are some of the first people purged by a dictatorial regime. It’s why nothing is more important to fascists than to powerful and serious. Getting hit by a milkshake is worse for a Nazi than getting hit by a brick. Blood looks cool, milkshakes look like milkshakes. But humor also has an incredible ability to act as a sort of ideological Trojan Horse, allowing ideas to sneak into someone’s mind, cloaked as jokes. Actual fascists know this—it’s why the Nazis on 8chan spend so much time crafting memes to spread their ideas. But this process can take place even within the head of an individual fascist.

...

Chapter 2: An American Fascist Faith

The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting, the Poway Synagogue shooting, the Olympic park bombing and dozens of other terrorist attacks all have one thing in common- Christian Identity. In this chapter, we delve into a cultic belief system at the heart of American fascism.

Chapter 3: The Apostle of Fascism

William Luther Pierce is the most important Nazi you’ve never heard of, and his work has helped inspire a generation of terrorists- right up to the present day.

Chapter 4: How to Build an Army

Louis Beam was once a normal American soldier. But in the wake of the Vietnam War, he would painstakingly craft a vicious fascist insurgency. When Beam’s ground-level activism met Pierce’s propaganda, the result was the birth of a terrorist movement that still stalks us to this day.

Chapter 5: The Hidden Civil War

Inspired by Beam and Pierce, a young man named Bob Mathews attempted to spark a Second American Civil War. Whether he succeeded or failed is still up in the air.

Chapter 6: The Perfect Soldier

In his life and death, Timothy McVeigh represented the best-case scenario for the kind of warriors Louis Beam wanted to inculcate through his “leaderless resistance” strategy. His story is a tale of triumph for American fascism.

Chapter 7: The Digital Reich

This is where we are now: an era where a distributed network of individual extremists are able to radicalize each other and inspire acts of violence worldwide. This is not the result of an unhappy accident, or an unforeseen consequence of the digital era. It’s the result of decades of careful planning.

===