Scary huh?
It’s like despots had been using critical speculative fiction as blueprints since 1932 and we realize now that we live in a Brave new fahrenheit 1984 world. Just setting the trend for a Bacigalupi / Atwood global crossover.
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I know it’s missing the point, but I’d vote for that guy at 3:11. That infectious laugh!
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Who would have thought that 70 years ago Encyclopedia Britannica was producing such filthy communist propaganda!!!
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I honestly don’t get all this freaking out. Hello, you’ve already gone through 8 years of full-on fascism with the Cheney/Rove administration, and that was the real thing - no opposition, propaganda on all networks, crackdown on minorities and scientists, worshiping uniforms, militarized policing, the lot. This guy is a clown in comparison, he’s less popular at the start than Cheney’s puppet was at the end and doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be doing. He’s less likely to make you wear a brownshirt than to let you smoke a joint in the White House.
Calm the fuck down, in 4 years you’ll have plenty of chances to show him for the idiot he is. Sharpening progressive candidates (for President, for Congress, for State, all the way to school boards) is a much better use of your time than branding your “Gran Torino” neighbour a Nazi.
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I’m glad to see the J. Jonah Jameson (on the extreme left of shot) was on the side of Truth and Democracy back in 1948.
Umberto Eco’s 14 common features of fascism:
- The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
- The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
- The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
- Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
- Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
- Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the 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.”
- The obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
- The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
- Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
- Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
- Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
- Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
- Selective populism. “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.”
- Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
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a handy twelve fourteen-step program. the AfD* could tick off most of them, I fear this is true for most of the current right-wing parties
* eta: and the CSU, for that matter. the Bavarian sister party of Merkel’s CDU
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GWB was at least rational. I don’t think Trump is. I think he’s a thin-skinned narcissist / sociopath without human empathy or boundaries, and one who does not respect the separation of powers of the Federal Government. GWB didn’t make a white supremacist his chief adviser. Trump makes GWB seem quaint by comparison. Freaking out, and continuing to freak out is entirely warranted. Calls for calm like yours are how we got Trump in the first place.
(I agree about working on supporting progressive candidates for other elected office, but that is not mutually exclusive to an entirely warranted freak out over Trump.)
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No, freaking out is how you got Trump. Republicans branded him as unpresentable in polite society, and that made him stronger and stronger (“they are all corrupt! I’m the only one speaking truth! I’ll drain the swamp!”). Democrats then painted him as a sexual predator, and again that made him stronger (“I’m just a red-blooded male, talking locker-room talk! I’m like you! It’s them who are lying freaks!”). He has an anti-establishment, anti-elite-mainstream message; repeating that he’s completely out of the establishment and out of the mainstream is literally validating what he says!
You have to hit him on his contradictions, showing that behind the rethoric he’s just another cheap two-faced bastard. By attacking him on his strongest positions, where his voters are more likely to be extremely principled, you’re just galvanizing his support. By attacking him for being “dangerously out of control”, you’re just validating his firebrand persona. The right response is pointing at how incompetent, corrupt and two-faced he is, by pointing at his actual policies once he pushes them, or to his appointments - look at how horrified his base already is, after a couple of “swampy” nominations! This is how you can really peel voters away from him - by breaking his “I am different” spell, not reinforcing it. And you have to do that with competent, honest and credible alternatives with populist appeal, not with backroom fixers with a compromised past like Harry Reid. Anything particularly bad he passes, you just make a flat “repeal” promise and keep repeating it from here to 2020, then ridicule it every time you can. Rioting or other absurdities will just play in his hands, he can’t wait to brand you “unamerican”… exactly like GWB did.
I love the fact that an expert on despotism is carefully studying a simple map.
Sad but true. The amount of sheer anger and hatred seems to be much worse, now the the racists and
sexists are out from under their rocks. This is our final test. If we dont stop the hate and fear now, we never will. Get active. Hold YOUR reps accountable. White Ayrian nationalism is NOT America.
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I agree with Eco, but this point needs a big asterisk and footnote. A lot of the Nazi-sanctioned “tradition” was invented, at the outside, a hundred years before their inception. The occult elements they leaned on were presented as traditional, but were invented or highly distorted for their own ends.
Runes are a great example. The Vikings got them from the Phonecians, but the Nazis preferred to ignore that part of their history because it links runes with Africa.
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He’s probably like those criminals who get jobs as cops and detectives to facilitate planning and getting away with their crimes; he’s studying the map to decide his next conquest.
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