Great post. Although American fascism has an end goal. To bring America back to its golden era, even if that ideal is a fiction of misremembered TV ads and propaganda pamphlets.
Interestingly your definition of fascism can extend to local governments in the South from the Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement. Where a black man’s life was worth less than a white man’s irrational worries.
Depends upon the scientist. Most of them don’t think about this sort of stuff at all, although they may have a vague idea of Popper.
To quote a bit from an old thread, where I had an extended Phil O’Sci rant:
Not I. I quit watching then.
BTW, you might get a kick out of this book:
Alan Chalmers, What Is This Thing Called Science? . A fantastic short book that provides a thorough introduction to the Demarcation Problem and a bunch of other Phil O’Sci playthings. Very readable, worth a look.
Fascism is forcing other people to live the way you decided they must. It is at the root of all war.
By your definition even parenting is fascistic and the root of war.
It is horrible seeing how people do not understand what fascism is and people are trying to redefine it to serve their own ______ interests.
And yet you too are redefining it.
It isn’t limited to just one of its aspects.
Cool - thanks, that is going straight on the eReader.
Enjoying reading through the full discussion, great rant-thread. Had encountered Latour by way of Stengers by way of interest in Whitehead, (although I don’t claim to have a deep grasp of his notions quite yet), but enjoyed the perspectives laid out in Science and the Modern World, a work which seems to factor into all this somehow.
Going on a bit of a tangent here… about the original, ancient Roman “fasces”, the bundle of sticks. It was a symbol of authority, being carried in front of their officials. And a hatchet was added to symbolize their authority to decree capital punishment. But they did not have that authority within the city wall of Rome (the pomerium), i.e. the area of the Roman democracy proper. Only when they stepped outside did they gain this authority and add the hatchet. With the exception of the Dictator, who could be installed by the Senate, and had absolute authority over life and death, even within the city.
See also this post:
This is confusing Mussolini’s personal philosophy (of achieving personal fame and affect in the world without moral concern over what that affect was) with the system of control he used. The problem with fascism isn’t it’s totalitarianism, but with its divisiveness and the conviction it engenders in its followers. The Germans and Italians and Japanese people’s didn’t go to war and commit atrocities because they were forced to at the point of a bayonet - they wanted to.
I argue that they used seemingly progressive policies to suppress people.
An example was the Reichstierschutzgesetz. It banned kosher/halal butchering, arguing for the sake of the animal - but clearly targeting Jewish culture.
In Juadic tradition, animals have a soul. Kosher butchering allows the soul to leave the body with the spent blood.
(Please excuse the oversimplifications in my example, this is of course more complicated than "the Nazis invented animal protection it to hurt Jewish people. Nevertheless, an apparently progressive law was passed on Nov. 24., 1933 - and it was used on a massive scale for exactly said purpose.)
Thanks for bringing your old rant to my attention. I shall look at it at an unspecified time in the future, or at least keep in mind that you labeled Feyerabend as a troll. TBH, reading the Wider den Methodenzwang didn’t leave many memories, but just a feeling of non-applicability to sciences (or at least most fields of biology I am familiar with).
Thank you for the kind words.
I think I disagree. I think the othering comes first and then, finding that there’s suddenly an Us (since there is certainly a ‘them!’) some unifying principle is sought and found in an aesthetic more than an actual time period or ideology or state of being. The very fuzziness characteristic of fascism (and contra Eco, even in more rigidly-proper Nazism) is, to my mind, the result of it being expediency. After all, fascists are fuzzy on what they really want done, on what they truly believe, but they are crystal clear on who they hate.
Trump doesn’t have the power that the other examples had, but he has repeatedly tried to act out his fascism in clearly unconstitutional ways that. Go and read Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco, which @wait_really has already linked to and compare Trump to the fourteen signs of fascism.
https://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf
If Trump could get an enabling act passed you can guarantee that America would be just as recognisably fascist as Germany, Italy and Spain were in 1938
That’s reactionaryism, which can be fascist but is not necessarily so.
Well, speaking of facses hatchets and such, meet Cincinnatus!
The legendary Roman is seen here after he had defeated the Aequians and rescued the trapped Roman Army. With one hand he returns the fasces, symbol of power as appointed Dictator of Rome, his other hand holds the plow, as he resumes the life of a citizen and farmer.
And following on that:
The Framers were steeped in classicism. This legend was especially important to George Washington, who rejected the idea that the Presidency should be a monarchical one for life.
I wouldn’t call it a tangent but an important part of the discussion. The fasces were chosen as a symbol by Mussolini not only as a call-out to Italy’s imperial past but because it symbolised the blackshirts’ conception of a bunch of corporate elements, thin and relatively weak on their own, bound into one powerful entity by the vanguard party/state, which exercised the dictatorial power you describe.
We will not be able to settle the question of “What is fascism?” for the same reason we can’t easily define “socialism”. These terms are floating signifiers whose meanings are highly contextual and deeply historical. It is very interesting to know the history of early fascism. However presumably we’re not talking about fascism here because we’re history nerds, but because we’re facing a serious problem of contemporary fascism in our society. This video is not addressing the questions we actually need answered.
The pragmatic questions are:
A) What are the self-described fascists in our society trying to express by using that term?
B) What are the implications of their philosophy which they actually believe but may not be saying outright?
It doesn’t really matter who’s truly fascist or not - it’s not a contest. What matters is understanding the worldview and goals of those who want to destroy us, so that we can stop them.
They’re totalitarian, not fascist. Fascist is a specific sort of state that is distinct from democratic socialist, and there is variation there as well (the Stalinist variants vs. post Stalinist Soviet Union vs. Yugoslavia, vs. Cuba - all democratic socialist, all different). Fascism isn’t just “whatever you think is bad.” It has a distinct definition. It’s an extreme form of exclusionary nationalist government, usually associated with some form of racial purity (and often deeply religious and family oriented), which includes some degree of private, corporate ownership in service to the “volk”, however that is defined.
The nazis were NOT socialist, they just appropriated the term. LITERALLY the first people they locked up were the communists and socialist, while also destroying independent labor unions. This ahistorical claptrap needs to die in a fire. People need to stop equating ALL BAD THINGS with communism and socialism, because it’s ahistorical to do so.
