Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/07/bertrand-russell-knew-all-about-the-maga-threat-in-1959.html
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Volumes of wisdom contained herein. I love it.
ETA: And look what I found!
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In the so-called “marketplace of ideas” if you have to lie to promote some aspect of your philosophy then there is something wrong with the philosophy. It’s like coming up with a glitzy ad campaign to sell a faulty or dangerous product.
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Russell famously refused to debate fascism, knowing that to do so would only lend it a sense of ‘legitimacy’ which it should never have been able to attain.
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All this concern with facts and truths seems hopelessly quaint and 20th century these days. Facts become obsolete, truths become irrelevant. These things are important to citizens with the autonomy to determine their own lives.
When constructing a reality for politically irrelevant drones, it’s not any sort of truth you want to be talking about, but rather, what does so-and-so think about these (maybe) “facts” and (debatable) “truths”. Because thats a narrative that doesn’t build on itself, it can be constructed -from scratch- every news cycle.
But what do I know about it? That’s like, just my opinion, man!
/s
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Bertrand Russell knew all about the MAGA threat in 1959
Well sure, everyone remembered the Nazis in 1959…
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The term “Big Brother” was made famous in 1948, “Nemiah Scudder” debuted in 1947, and “Obnoxico” was invented in 1940.
Everything old is new again!
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Please do elaborate.
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I think the headline for this piece is more than a little misleading. It implies that Bertrand Russell was somehow able to predict with uncanny accuracy the kinds of problems we’re having today with totalitarian movements and fascist leadership. And since Russell is known for being an intellectual heavy hitter, it kind of implies that he alone could forsee these trends.
Shuck’s reply served to remind me that this was a pretty active topic of inquiry, and something a lot of people were trying to puzzle out for a long stretch from the 40s to the present.
Besides those fictional titles touching on these issues there’s a host of nonfiction writers, from Eric Hoffer to Karl Popper to Albert Camus to Hannah Arendt and a bunch of others… all writing in this same space.
I guess I’m trying to make two distinct points here:
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Bertrand Russell was not alone in deconstructing totalitarian and fascist trends
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if this work, and the work of his contemporaries were better known and more discussed, we might not be in this situation.
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Though I don’t get the inference that Russel was alone - not from the title or from the body of the post.
Russel himself was aware of his predecessors and contemporaries in this area of inquiry. I think his points are additive, not subtractive, to that body.
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I find it no surprise that fascism is on the rise as the living memory of that war starts to die.
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For some reason this makes me think of Clockwork Orange (the novel) and how Burgess shot down the idea that it was science fiction. The book was casting his experiences in Germany before WWII into the present (c1960) British youth gang scene. It was supposed to be warning of history repeating.
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Fascism is on the rise because they keep trying. See the letter in @Melizmatic’s comment where Russell refuses to debate Oswald Mosley, who was leader of the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s. That was in the 1960s.
Keeping the subject to the UK, Rock against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League were in the 1970s and 1980s, Anti-Fascist Action was in the 1990s. Antifa, despite claims to the contrary (I have even seen people here do it), started in the mid 2000s (I understand that it was around earlier in Germany)
The fight against fascism only exists because fascism exists, and never stopped existing.
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I could imagine it helps fascists some that their marches don’t all go straight past veterans who watched the Nazis slaughter their comrades in Europe. Your point is a very important one though. History doesn’t progress or regress or cycle on its own – it is always the result of people striving for one outcome or another. Fascism rises when they push and not enough people push them back.
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The current British fascists think that WW2 was a war against Germany, Italy and Japan, not fascism. They think they would not have been interned had they been around in the 1930s.
On Remembrance Day some of them lay wreaths for the British troops, others lay wreaths for the fascists, but somehow they are all allies down at the pub later that day.
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I saw this recently and thought it pithy:
Saying Anti-Fascists are the same as Fascists is like saying Firefighters are the same as Arsonists.
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