Ur-Fascism By Umberto Eco (1995) [pdf]
pegc.us
pegc.us
So his focus is on development of fascist movements in time.
I wonder if it's kind of a postmodern version of the old school militant theocratic monarchy. Like a theocracy without god, or without a coherent religious doctrine.
I know that postmodernist thought post-dated fascism but the fascist aesthetic strikes me as very postmodern. Ideas are tools for power. Nothing is true, only power.
I'm getting a lot of that from both sides.
I'm also not sure what you mean about leftism being defined by "obsessive generalising". Being somewhat familiar with left wing theory (Marxism, anarchism and postmodernism) I just don't see it - left theories have nothing to do with generalising people and everything to do with understanding socioeconomic systems.
Edit: also intersectional theory is about how different social categories play off each other, ie how being black and trans is different from being white and trans.
On obsessive generalization: You are approaching it from a purely economic perspective. I think it's disingenous to ignore the social goals of leftist theory, which are firmly rooted in removing the class concept entirely - obsessive generalization.
How is the idea of getting rid of class distinction "obsessive generalisation"? Also, the idea of getting rid of class is an explicitly economic issue.
Leftism and intersectionality is all about labelling folks into groups. Each person falls into an intersection of multiple groups (e.g. "African-American" and "presents female") and we can use this to have an understanding of their experience and the oppression that they face. Taken to absurdity, this reduces a person into a bundle of specific labels and doesn't make any distinction between the individual and their labels: well I'm a person of X race assigned Y gender born at Z time with immigrant parents who experienced A, B, and C event and therefore I feel Aleph oppression. The original critique was that, the "obsessive generalization" necessary to equalize the experiences of humanity paradoxically requires an obsessive amount of categorization.
> How is the idea of getting rid of class distinction "obsessive generalisation"?
There are many political philosophies that believe that some amount of class distinction is inherent to humanity. One can create a reductive 1D projection of political preferences by placing "classless, fully equal" society on the left as many leftist theories do and "hierarchical, predetermined classes for each individual" on the right as many fascist theories do. If you think that a "classless, fully equal" society is not extreme at all, then you're probably the one on the very left end of the spectrum.
Intersectionality is not saying that those categories are all a person is - it's saying that those factors are predictive of certain oppressive tendencies society may have towards the individual. A common misconception I hear about leftism is that it is against treating people as individuals; this is not true, but at the same time denying that black people are oppressed in the US because they have individual identity is a non sequitur at best. The leftist ideal is actually that all people are free to pursue their passions and creativity, which is not something an innately collectivist ideology (like fascism for example) would promote.
I do think that a classless society is extreme compared to our current system, I wasn't denying that - but that doesn't mean that leftists area engaging in "extreme overgeneralising"; I still have no idea what that was supposed to mean. Honestly I see a lot of people critiquing left wing ideas using these really vague descriptors and I don't get why. If somebody has an issue to raise they should raise it explicitly so we can discuss it! Political discussion helps us all to learn.
I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from this: I did explain further the context of obsessive generalization, but I'm not sure how, given you yourself say you're well read on leftist literature, you can't correlate how extreme egalitarianism requires doing away with individual characterization.
>The leftist ideal is actually that all people are free to pursue their passions and creativity
Wouldn't that imply that leftism cannot exist without allowing fascism to also exist? I don't see how you can juggle this with the view that leftism's goal is to reduce oppression, given that the definition you've provided here necessitates that opression must be possible for leftism to achieve its goals. In my mind, assuming I'm reading into this correctly, is that you've created your own "chicken vs the egg" paradox
Because it doesn't? Leftism is about doing away with socioeconomic oppression, not erasing all character difference. Leftists aren't the borg, the whole point is to create an equal playing field so that people can be their best selves.
> Wouldn't that imply that leftism cannot exist without allowing fascism to also exist?
Under a socialist or communist system, people could still hold fascist beliefs for sure (though the material drivers of fascist beliefs would be gone so I doubt it would be common) - but what matters is the systems we live under (capitalism, patriarchy etc etc) not what everybody thinks about each other.
> A common misconception I hear about leftism is that it is against treating people as individuals; this is not true, but at the same time denying that black people are oppressed in the US because they have individual identity is a non sequitur at best
I'm not sure where you got the "denying" bit from. Again I think you're viewing this as a fight _against_ leftism when that's not what I'm going for. There are plenty of philosophies that decidedly accept the issue of historical discrimination _without_ buying into intersectionality. A good example of this is affirmative action or the Indian concept of Scheduled Classes. Both of these measures came from understanding historic discrimination without thinking about intersectionality at all. Leftism doesn't have a monopoly on the ideas of anti-discrimination.
> The leftist ideal is actually that all people are free to pursue their passions and creativity, which is not something an innately collectivist ideology (like fascism for example) would promote.
Do you have a source for this? This ideal is older than Marx, Rousseau's Social Contract first posits this idea I think.
> I do think that a classless society is extreme compared to our current system, I wasn't denying that - but that doesn't mean that leftists area engaging in "extreme overgeneralising"; I still have no idea what that was supposed to mean.
Again I think you're too wrapped up in defending leftism. If you're having a hard time seeing your views as extreme then, I like to point to a thought exercise. An extreme position is one where there's very little more ideologically extreme than it. So in your case, what's _more_ Left than the classless society you're positing? If there's nothing more extreme than your position, then you're probably at the extreme edge of it.
I know, I'm not disputing that (and appreciate that you point out that affirmative action is a liberal rather than leftist idea, many don't make the distinction).
> Do you have a source for this? This ideal is older than Marx, Rousseau's Social Contract first posits this idea I think.
Yes, the leftist ideal is that of the humanist/liberal (liberty, equality, fraternity): this goes back before Marx to the utopian socialists who established the ideals, where Marx was more interested in historical determinism and developing a science of political economy.
> If you're having a hard time seeing your views as extreme
I'm not, that's what I said.
Proponents of standardized tests emphasize that the grading of each booklet is fair. The multiple choice portion is unambiguous and graded by machine. The essay portion is graded blind and by several readers with high inter-rather reliability. We are fairly confident that no specific child is writing down the right answers and then getting a bad score because of her race.
Opponents argue that the test score distributions reproduce classic racial hierarchies. Lower scores lead directly to fewer students from marginalized backgrounds attending college, and from there to lower lifetime earnings. Therefore standardized tests are an obvious target for reducing the racial wealth gap.
It seems to me that the left, idealistically speaking, is intent on removing forced categorization by others. You would be hard pressed find anyone who is trying to remove all individual distinctions, and if you did, that person would be an outlier.
On the contrary, the left, again idealistically, seems to embrace differences, just not those that are imposed and used as a rationale for discrimination.
In my experience, those who go on about "freedom" are usually the most intolerant of individual differences. How about that for irony?
Thats like saying fire departments are obsessed with categorizing houses into 'burning vs not burning' because fire departments require burning houses.
I thought they were against fires? Why are they always asking me if my house is on fire or contains flammable material? If they just stopped bringing it up then the fires would put themselves out.
not surprisingly that German's back then and the today's Russian fascism (which is closer to German Nazism than to Italian fascism) each appeared after a decade of economic and political disorder and were precipitated by a terroristic acts after which tired and scared people happily clang to the promise of order and stability by a "strong hand".
Germany - military defeat and crash of empire, the decade of disorder, the burn of Reichstag leads to Hitler taking total power, a decade of tightening of all political screws and huge nationalistic "master race" propaganda, directly appealing to the brain stem and thus supported by population, culminate in genocidal (wrt. Jews and Slavic) war.
Russia - military defeat (Cold War and Afghanistan) and crash of empire, the decade of disorder, the multiple apartment building by FSB in September of 1999 leads to Putin taking total power, 2 decades of tightening of all political screws and huge nationalistic "master nation" ("Great Russia chauvinism") propaganda, the same way directly appealing to the brain stem and thus supported by population, culminate in the genocidal war against Ukrainians (UN genocide definition https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml). If history is any guide there is no other end here except like in WWII - the coalition should take over Russia and completely denazify and demilitarize it like it was done to Germany. Such profound war loss and failure of society and the following rework of country and society is what gets to the population's brain stem. Just beating the military like in WWI isn't enough as it only excites that basic instinct of tribal nationalism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_fascism_(ideology)
In some ways Russia already overshot the Nazi Germany, think about it if Germans in WWII would bomb german speaking austrian cities; this is what we are seeing from Russian military today.
Putin want's Kyiv because it's like Jerusalem for him and his crusaders
>> Patriarch Kirill of Moscow declared concerning the religious relationship between the Russian Orthodox Church and Ukraine: "Ukraine is not on the periphery of our church. We call Kiev 'the mother of all Russian cities.' For us Kiev is what Jerusalem is for many. Russian Orthodoxy began there, so under no circumstances can we abandon this historical and spiritual relationship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_world#Politicization
Unfortunately we'll be seeing Put'in not wanting to put'out of Ukraine for a long time
Take also the tendency of intelligence to produce ever less scientific break-troughs producing surplus for all and ever more parasitism (Encapsulating companies predating on established industries), a not "hackable" aka anti-intellectual resistance might be all that remains.
Parasitism is also a large "topic" in fascism, be it redistributing parasitism (left bureaucracy), lawful parasitism ( citizens exploited by law-constellations) or plain anti-semitism, which todays miracolously onaires escaped - for now. Cough* social engineering cough for the rescue.
Another large topic is "walling off" against the "stranger". As the unlearned are in a much harsher competition against the other unlearned, a walled of society to reduce that competition is preferred.
Also a recurring topic, is past injustice, which justifies current and future injustices, perpetrated. It really is just a falling apart of any semblance of intellectual problem solving, into a tribal mindset, taken for a ride by a miserable counter-elite.
It’s definitely about feelings and aesthetics, rather than economic or rational concerns though. You saw similar constructions in fringe communist regimes (Romania, North Korea)
I've found that whenever someone says "no one understands why this happened", it is usually because everyone understands why it happened and they just don't like the answer for ideological reasons.
He treats Fascism as a historical movement, not an set of ideas.
It’s scary because it shows that rigorous study of historical Fascism hasn’t really happened. It’s been too colored by the WWII propaganda.
For example, fascism was implemented very differently in different countries.
Pre-Anschluss’s Austrian fascism was very very different from German Nazism.
Mussolini didn’t implement any anti-Semitic legislation until after making an alliance with Hitler (12 years of Fascist rule with no anti-semitism).
Fasicists in Portugal (Salozaro) became increasingly moderate. They split strongly from international Fascism (Mussolini), condemned the name “fascism” while claiming to be a “nationalist third way between capitalism and and socialism.” No real elections. Was a very pro-Allied neutral in WWII. Became a founding member of NATO and stayed in power until the 1960s.
He doesn’t feel obligated to follow the safe “Hitler is bad, Hitler was bad, Hitler was a Fascist, therefore Fascists are bad” syllogism that we find so safe.
He asks hard questions like “how much do Mussolini in 1921, Hitler in 1939, and Hungarian Fascism from 1935 really have in common?”
He really pissed people off when he pointed out that the Vichy Regime in France was an independent, preoccupation movement, and not merely “German occupation.”
Not what the French want to hear.
> Not what the French want to hear.
The pre-war French far-right, which could be associated to the broader fascist trend, had very little to do with what the Vichy governement ended up being a few years down the line. You could argue the Vichy regime was a genuine artifact of French politics in 1940, but not in 1942.
Because it isn't a philosophy but rather a defensive reaction against the liberal democratic empire on one side and the communist/marxist empire on the other side. It's pretty much nationalism that rose up in europe to prevent smaller nations from being gobbled up by either the american or soviet empires. It's just easier to malign it as fascism rather than nationalism because most people are nationalists. It's also why we hate fascists in america and the soviets hated fascists. Because nationalists/fascists were against both.
Fascism wasn't defined by what it is. Fascism was defined by what it didn't want to become. What it didn't want to be slave to.
The idea that there is no explanation for Fascism and that it's some inexplicable mystery is gaslighting from Socialists who don't want anyone to understand that such an obvious evil is, actually, the true face of their ideology.
Payne has written several books on the history of fascism and Francoist Spain. I find his approach to analyzing fascism more systematic and thorough than Paxton's.
"Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy."
"The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
Sounds like a perfect match for atomics...
What he describes is sufficiently general to cover almost any political movement.
The story of Eco's friendship with African American soldiers is odd to me. Eco sees them as cultured human beings who brought freedom to Italy. And yet he neglects to bring up the racial unfreedom they faced at home, including their future exclusion from the GI Bill. Is this irrelevant because the US is not strictly fascist?
I mean to say we should not ignore the real psychological and economic forces that fascism is composed of. Eco touches on these forces. But it's not enough to stop at classifying whether a state is fascist or not. The forces that compose fascism are always present in liberal democracy, even if they don't crystallize into a mass movement.
What's most disturbing is that the German and Italian masses were not tricked: they desired fascism (even if it was against their material interests). Infantilizing the masses gets us nowhere in our understanding. [1]
I may be critical, but this is still a great piece from Eco. It's full of insights about fascism, and it succeeds at what it says on the tin.
For further reading I highly recommend Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism
[1] Ripped this paragraph almost word-for-word from Anti-Oedipus
This whole thing can be summarized simply as "Everything I dislike is fascism, even things that have absolutely nothing to do with fascism, and everything that actually is fascism and has a lot in common with my ideology, wasn't really fascism, and certainly wasn't socialism, even though they all called themselves Marxists"
or to quote the article specifically:
>The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini
in other words, sure it was developed by Marxists (Giovanni Gentile, and everyone else behind fascism were all Marxists philosopher), but it "wasn't real socialism". It is exactly the same "not real socialism" that all defenders of socialism always use when their ideology goes down the drain.
It's also white-washing Stalinism and western colonialism, to which as many (or more) casulaties can be attributed to (and equally nefarious ideologies, the "white man's burden", slavery, gulags for dissidents, etc weren't invented by Hitler), but which were not "conservative" in nature, so they get a pass.
I'd rather we stop using the silly catch-all phrase "fascism" for things that don't have the attributes of historical fascism (which was a specific, time limited, historical movement), and even more so expand it loosely to mean anything and everything that's not pure liberalism.
Just to troll a bit-- if you fought too early on the side of the lower-case "other leftists" in, say, Barcelona you may have gotten in a gunfight with a group of communists[1]. Turns out the world is a complex place.
Speaking of which (and continuing to troll)-- anyone know why the lower-case "other leftists" in Barcelona boxed up the photographic evidence of their existence and sent it to the UK instead of the USSR for safekeeping[2]? I mean if the forces against fascism were "Communists, Etcetera" why not send them there?
1: https://medium.com/@umawrnkl/the-anarcho-communist-dream-of-...
2: https://autonomies.org/2019/12/the-lost-images-of-anarchist-...
BTW the photos in your second link are fantastic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...
I really do hope that we eventually grow out of this phase and acknowledge that even the 'good guys' can be evil, we shouldn't need to wait and see a Communist Reich to know that the Leftist version of brownshirts are a bad thing, or wait until actual genocide is happening (or accept/ignore it as a possibility, even) or wait until it has a 1-to-1 mapping with Nazi atrocity to hold those kinds of behavior accountable just because they're not Nazis and they're not actually killing people.
Having looked at 2020, the threat of the United States going in this direction is not coming from some unholy trinity of the ghosts of Stalin, Pol Pot, and Trotsky. As a political idea in the public zeitgheist, it's dead as a parrot. It has no legs.
It's coming from the mainstream right. But since our friendly neighbourhood MAGA rallies aren't actually sieging and heiling, we're all in the 'wait and see how bad it can get the next time they take power' stage.
The critique failed to understand that, I think.
Good grief, how to totally miss the entire point. He’s trying to critique a political deconstruction as though it was entertainment fiction. Didn’t he realise the close parallels are kind of the point, because Orwell was writing a commentary on and illustration of those events and personalities? Introducing random variations would have completely obscured the things he was trying to say. Things Asimov didn’t even notice.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Workingmen%27s_A...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_Russia#In_the_Sov...
You are confusing Communism in Western Europe with the communist state of the USSR and its Stalinist doctrine of socialism in one country [3].
The Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel argues in "From Stalinism to Eurocommunism: The Bitter Fruits of 'Socialism in One Country'" that when Soviet Union in 1924 abandoned the goal of overthrowing capitalism around the world lead to development of what later was called Eurocommunism [4], with their democratic way to social reforms.
They really aren't. The Communists fighting in the Spanish Civil War -- the ones who put their boot down on Orwell's beloved POUM and other Trotskyists -- were honest-to-god Soviets.
But yes, more democratic "Communist" parties did exist in Western Europe later, and there is a large space of "third way" Socialisms and Communisms that are not Stalinist hell.
As an aside, I once met a Spanish Civil War veteran from South Wales. I got the impression that he went to fight the fascists because it was the right thing to do ('If you tolerate this then your children will be next' was a famous slogan that made it into a song), not because of ideological indoctrination. He was a socialist in the British sense, but that should not suggest the slightest parallel with Stalinism
https://www.britannica.com/topic/communism/Stalinism#ref5391...
> "A third feature of Stalinism was the idea of “socialism in one country”—i.e., building up the industrial base and military might of the Soviet Union before exporting revolution abroad. To this end, Stalin rescinded the NEP, began the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, and embarked on a national program of rapid, forced industrialization.
> In foreign policy, socialism in one country meant putting the interests of the Soviet Union ahead of the interests of the international communist movement. After World War II, as Winston Churchill famously remarked, an Iron Curtain descended across Europe as Stalin installed communist regimes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Romania, Albania, and Soviet-occupied East Germany as a buffer zone against an invasion from western Europe.
> Beyond Europe, the Soviet Union supported anticolonial “wars of national liberation” in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and gave economic and military support to communist regimes in North Korea, North Vietnam, and Cuba."
He's accurate that Mussolini's fascism was something different from Nazi'ism (which just adopted and co-opted the italian aestheitcs, directly), but it was more of a kind of secular anti-clerical republicanism but with all the awe of divinely appointed monarchs.
The crux of fascism was the unity of corporate and state power together - where Eco takes it in a few other directions, which I think its disingenuous to de-emphasize this core property of it, because I think he's also an elitist who would be glad to have the reins of a unified corporate state. He's freighted an obsolete political system with the countercases to his own ideology and branded it evil. I was going to suggest Eco should have stuck to fiction, but in this case he has.
It was a peculiar reactionary artifact of the nation state, which itself is a modern(ist) post-enlightenment phenomenon as monarchies gave way to republics. It's different from totalitarianism (as Eco notes) in that Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar lacked the imperialist and colonial urges that would define totalitarian movements of Hitler and Stalin (even though the latter two inherited colonial territories). Post war, the word fascism became just a secular version of evil as defined by largely marxist/socialist thinkers, and fascist has become a kind of a catch-all slur against those who assert people should be accountable to principles.
It didn't really matter before, as there was nothing to defend about its vague and myriad definitions, and the people who spat the word fascist at others didn't have enough control of institutions for anyone to care what they meant by it. Today, that it is a euphemism for Evil matters because the people wielding it now are still only as sophisticated as a mob of superstitious villagers, but its nebulous definition has come to envelop some things I think regular people actually value, and instead of Evil being presented as witchcraft, it's wrapped in layers of critical theory, but the mob mentality is just the same. Fascism doesn't have much going for it today as it was a moment of 19th century nation states adopting 20th century technology, but I'd say the people indexed on it now are just as much of a mob as they ever were, and whatever they dress it up in, they're the same people, still just hunting witches.
This comment might as well be Peak Hacker News.
OP is a great article but I regret upvoting it, because the discussion is full of stale political tropes and the blaming of The Other Side. If I have time later, I’ll go through and downvote every comment, including my own.
I'm not sure this is congruent with Italy's actions in Ethiopia, Albania and Greece.
There is an argument to be made that totalitarianism itself wasn't new or notable or is even a coherent thing that can't be shown to have manifested in pretty much every other imperial effort. I've got ideas about some of its other sufficient conditions that still preserve it as a unique effect and form, and as far as an intellectual renaming of Evil goes, tot'ism is pretty close to what critics of fascism come up with as well. Some of these things only exist at a certain level of abstraction and then dissolve under further scrutiny.