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What an insightful piece. It is interwoven with Eco's experience as a kid in Fascist Italy, but written 50 years later. At the end is a little listicle of typ

• ep103 10y ago
  I highly recommend reading: http://w3.salemstate.edu/~cmauriello/pdfEuropean/Paxton_Five%20Stages%20of%20Fascism.pdf http://w3.salemstate.edu/~cmauriello/pdfEuropean/Paxton_Five... Its not particularly long, but is one of the more eye opening things I ever read on the subject
  • deleted 10y ago
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• trhway 10y ago
  >"Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders." >"To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country. This is the origin of nationalism." Yep, the birth of fascism, ie. Italian fascism, was a final act of the Italian national independence process which started in the first half of 19th century. The independence from Austrian empire and from Catholic Church - Mussolini in particular finalized the relationships with papal states/Vatican. Interesting that Mussolini started as Socialist and split with them on very similar grounds as the "bolsheviks"/Lenin split from Socialists in Russia around the same time - push for more forceful action, for unchecked power (dictatorship) - the difference being that in Russia Lenin was pushing for dictatorship of the working class while Mussolini was for dictatorship of the national state. While one may say that whose ideologies are of different colors, structurally they are the same and thus produced similar results - totalitarian states. As an example, just replace national dimension with the "aristocracy - capitalists - worker class/peasants" dimension in the 2 quotes above and you'll get the socialist/communist principle of the "class war" and that idea that just by being of "working class" makes people intrinsically good and thus gives them moral power and entitles them to [dictatorially] rule and decide the fate of others.
  • frabbit 10y ago
    > push for more forceful action, for unchecked power Is this something like Barack Obama carrying out drone strikes? Or Madeleine Albright approving the starving of 500,000 Iraqi children? Or Hilary Clinton getting a knife stuck up Gaddafi's rectum? Or the invasion of Iran on a pretext? Or does it have to be something in dim and distant past which we can tut about as it was done by "those other ones"?
    • smacktoward 10y ago
      None of the contemporary things you mention are examples of unchecked power. The fact that you can mention them in public without fear of being whisked away tonight by secret police illustrates this. Unchecked power does not permit criticism, or admit room for opposition.
      • frabbit 10y ago
        I think the rules are that you're allowed to criticize things as long as it makes no actual difference.
      • PavlovsCat 10y ago
        > None of the contemporary things you mention are examples of unchecked power. That's easy to say, it's proven by putting a whole lot of war criminals at least on trial. By actually having done that. > The fact that you can mention them in public without fear of being whisked away tonight by secret police illustrates this. How so? This just illustrates that you can say this because nobody cares all that much, because it will not do anything. It doesn't put power in check, it's just someone saying something on HN. Power remains unchecked, and the hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who got murdered and the families they left behind continue to get no justice.
      • coldtea 10y ago
        That's just because today mentioning them in public doesn't have much (if any) effect. Back in the day when there were powerful alternative fractions for the power (e.g. socialists, communists in Europe etc), mentioning such staff in public against the established powers brought support to them, and advanced their cause. Now people know all about them and still elect e.g. Bush Jr. a second term, Obama 2 terms, now Trump etc. It's not like there's any credible threat to anything. And when there's not, freedom of speech is free, because it's almost worthless. TL;DR; Modern-day unchecked power can permit criticism just fine: when the waters due to media pollution are so muddle that the signal is lost in the noise, and/or when few people care about it anyway.
• clock_tower 10y ago
  The three items you list -- anti-intellectualism and love of physical action; xenophobia and fear of subversion; national or tribal supremacism -- remind me of the Scotch-Irish, especially the lowland Scotch-Irish who've traded in their dulcimers, moonshine, and family feuds for NASCAR, OxyContin, and Christian Dominionism. How does one convince a society, especially a very xenophobic society, to abandon characteristics that make it unusually vulnerable to fascism?
  • wavefunction 10y ago
    You integrate it. You integrate the economy throughout the country so that the economic interests of West Virginians are aligned with Silicon Valley and Manhattan and Alabama. This means decentralization and access to opportunity for all, not a winner-take-all system. You allow for differences, as well. Cultural differences such as a rural/urban divide should not be exacerbated by smarmy elitism in either direction. You do this not by highlighting differences (extreme PCism or racism/bigotry) but by fostering an attitude among our peoples of love towards their fellow person. That our differences are there, but that they don't ultimately matter. ----- Obviously our country (and others) have a long way to go with a lot of hard work ahead of us.
    • noobermin 10y ago
      To expand upon your last sentence, " That our differences are there, but that they don't ultimately matter." I thik that we can in fact, we can celebrate our differences as they make us unique. However, with regards love towards our fellow person, as you said, the differences shouldn't hinder that.
  • tim333 10y ago
    I think you may have the Scotch-Irish, at least the ones living around Scotland and Ireland wrong. They have never been particularly fascist and I have not noticed them being unusually xenophobic. In the recent Brexit vote it was the English who voted out, not the Scots or Irish.
    • 10y ago
• Snargorf 10y ago
  It's pretty trivial to apply these signals to nearly any collectivist social movement. 1. Action for action's sake - Black Lives Matter protests to block highways. 2. Exploit the fear of difference - Those horrible racist uneducated people are nothing like us, we can't let them take the country! This is basic tribalism and it applies to every major social movement. 3. Rewritten: "To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Anti-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be good, moral egalitarians. This is the origin of anti-fascism." Here I've applied them to Western progressivism, but if you deny the basic assumptions of any collectivist social movement you could apply them. Scientology, communism, socialism, fascism. Switch a few unimportant words and there you are with the same meaningless parallels. The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives. EDIT: It's important to remember when comparing Trump to old fascists that the people who defeated those fascists enacted Trump's policies. For example, in 1945, immigration policy in all western countries was effectively, "whites only". So if you're gonna notice parallels between Trump and Hitler, you have to notice even closer parallels between Trump and the people who defeated Hitler. You should also notice the differences: Trump is an isolationist who wants to start wars less than Hillary - a lot like pre-WW2 America.
  • mturmon 10y ago
    I agree: "The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives." But, I think you have stripped the context from the quotes you offer, and in so doing, made them applicable to anything. For instance, regarding point (1), you're stereotyping the BLM protests. Read their website and it's all about intersectionality and inclusion and a bunch of other academic buzzwords. It's not really about protest for protest's sake: specific demands have been given. And it's not anti-intellectual, which is the context you removed from point 1. You have done a similar thing with the next point. The original point is about fear of intruders from outside the nation I would agree that there are parallels of certain parts of, say, the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests) with this synopsis of fascism. A lot of that was action for action's sake: dress up in black and break store windows. But take, on the other hand, the OWS protests. It was partly because of the authoritarian tendencies of other protest movements that OWS adopted various egalitarian habits - not addressing crowds with bullhorns, the consensus process, etc. (For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Main_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Main_organi...). In sum, I think you're not being careful about your reasoning, and you are reasoning backward from the answer you want ("a pox on both their houses"). We're not talking about mere groupthink, smug activists, or misguided protesters. We're talking about actual fascism.
• amyjess 10y ago
  > Thinking is a form of emasculation. In particular, I've observed that one hallmark of fascistic movements is an obsession with "emasculation" and condemnation of any society or part of society deemed "effeminate". You can see it in the writings of Julius Evola. While Evola never described himself as a "fascist", it was only because he felt that Mussolini and the Fascist Party didn't go far enough. He was an extreme right-wing nationalist, and it's not uncommon for modern Neo-Nazi groups to quote his writing as if it were scripture. Evola was obsessed with the idea that healthy societies are masculine and degenerate societies are effeminate, and he wrote at length about how he felt that Jewish culture is both degenerate and effeminate. It's also common in modern far-right white nationalist groups. You'll notice that many such communities describe men they don't like as "betas" and "cucks", and they blame society's problems on women becoming more and more prominent in society (and on feminist men, too, for letting women in; they especially get called "cucks"). And it's not just the white supremacists; I've observed the same obsession with "emasculation" in extremist Asian identity groups, which are typically dominated by unsuccessful Asian men blaming the fact that they can't get laid on a conspiracy of Asian women and white men to emasculate Asian men.
  • ambicapter 10y ago
    It would seem then, that if these people had an outlet for the self-expression of their masculinity, they wouldn't need to fall into fascist politics.
    • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      To go further, it would seem that, in the current social environment, these people aren't successful at expressing their masculinity as much as they wish. And they want to blame somebody else rather than their own ability to function in society as it currently is. To put it bluntly: They feel like losers, and they think it's their right to feel like winners. And to bring it back to amyjess's point: An environment that values thinking seems to make them feel like losers.
• im4w1l 10y ago
  > Being written in 1995, the training set is independent of the test set There is an important bias effect in play. OF the books written in the past about the rise of tyranny, not all are brought up equally in discussions. It is easy to observe that people upvote articles that support their ideology and flag articles (concrete example: the recent terror attacks were flagkilled off the front page) that go against it. The articles that make it though this filter are not independent of the test set.
  • rm445 10y ago
    Well said - that's a point worth making. But not necessarily a big worry with this particular article - Eco's fame as a novelist and the sheer strength of his prose will tend to bust through filters regardless.