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From How to Spot A Fascist: “Ur-Fascism“

I’m going to move some of these points around in terms of priority and distort some of it.

Fascism springs from frustration, fear of loss, or actual loss, often loss of economic security or social status. Possibly with people who have seen prosperity being replaced by precarity, or siphoned off to some elites, and there is no solution being proposed by anyone that they know about. They rightly feel ignored, uneasy, slighted and resentful. The leader appears to recognise them and their problems and frustration, and channels it. He promises change.

• Consequently, fascists can emerge from the middle class who fear loss of status, or fear being relegated to worker status.

Fascism promotes unity by denouncing difference and diversity. It attacks ‘intruders’ or those defined as foreign, and those who seem different. ‘We’ become valuable because we share ‘race’, religion, tradition, or nationality. These are matters of kinship.

• People who differ from fascist views are evil or corrupt – non-kin. They need to be rooted out as they potentially destroy unity, national tradition and the advancement that is rightly ‘ours’. Dissent from fascism is betrayal.

• Again unity is ensured by condemnation of diversity and finding scapegoats who are ‘different’ in some way, and who can be blamed for the ‘national failure’, ‘national frustration’ etc.

• The scapegoats should be apparently strong but in reality quite socially weak; intellectuals, people of a minor religion, some kind of relatively poor minority. The enemy should be denounceable as both too strong and too weak or contemptable… certainly they should be easy to beat up, as that shows fascist masculinity in action.

To keep the fascist loyal, their belief in the movement is not abstract, it is deeply emotional and intuitive. It is sacred and beyond mere words.

• People who cannot accept the fascist beliefs or who think those beliefs are incoherent, are too weak, and unspiritual, to apprehend fascism’s glory.

• The different are spiritually inferior. Loathsome even. Or they are evil, trying to take faith away from the faithful.

Fascism generally supports an incoherent and imagined tradition. Italians are Romans. Germans are blond Aryans, both civilized and savage. Fascist Americans defend the constitution while ignoring it. Tradition must embrace contradiction, to point at its real glory.

• Putting contradictory traditions together (‘Syncretism’) helps people bridge their differences, as well as hinder logical rather than symbolic thinking.

• Tradition has to reject ‘the modern’ and the things fascism is fighting against, like difference. Differences, such as those recognised by ‘multiculturalism’, ‘gender variation,’ sexual expression, lack of artistic realism, and so on, are not considered part of the tradition that is worshiped. However, difference such as social status and command must be recognised as they express the party elite, and post-agricultural tradition always involves hierarchy.

• The tradition usually imagines that men are the rulers and women are obedient breeders and supporters of male glory.

Fascism is expressed in action, in doing, not in thinking. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Intellectuals are effeminate and evil, unless they denounce the enemy, help action to occur, or justify the mystical strength of fascism.

• The active principle is that life is struggle. Life is war. Peace is death. Enemies are needed, and must be overcome. The problem is what happens after total victory, after the final solution? The need is to find more enemies, more people to fight against, and that can be internal to the nation, and destroy the nation.

• In fascism every fascist is a potential hero. Someone who will lay down their life for the party, for the nation etc. Death is the aim. Fascism is the dark side of the hero archetype in action.

The leader is the person who can express, or divine, the true spiritual will of the people, and guide the people to satisfy that spiritual will.

• Multiple people cannot express that will. Parliaments are corrupt because they don’t express that will, they express argument, or sometimes loss for the leader.

• The only real Parliament, for a fascist, is completely obedient to the leader and his expression of the people’s will. Everything else is illegitimate.

Dominant groups in society, tend to think they can support fascism, as it recognises their position in the hierarchy. Because of fascisms love of tradition, they can think fascists are conservatives, and will support their place. They also tend to think the leader can remove obstacles, and get rid of worker disobedience. They may even think they can control and placate the leader. Therefore the dominant groups will generally accept and support fascism, in an effort to protect themselves from peril.

Tags: fascism

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