17 ms·

Ur-Fascism By Umberto Eco (1995) [pdf]

238 points by monort 5y ago

kkfx 5y ago
[flagged]
- michannne 5y ago
  >"The puppet master of them was the classic capitalism that deeply fear a thing: socialism. Those regimes ware created just to stop socialism, for the sake of big capitals" I think this is a sorely misguided view, and if we had the ability to pull a Nazi, Hitler included, directly from the 30s/40s, they would disagree with this
  - xtian 5y ago
    Regardless of whether a Nazi would disagree for ideological reasons, these facts are part of the historical record: 1) big capitalists within Germany and abroad funded and supported Hitler 2) capitalist countries rejected repeated requests from the USSR to form an anti-fascist alliance before WWII
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      > 1) big capitalists within Germany and abroad funded and supported Hitler of course, big capitals funded the leader of Germany that by creating a giant war machine, was filling their pockets with bags of money. > 2) capitalist countries rejected repeated requests from the USSR to form an anti-fascist alliance before WWII But also Stalin provided substantial support to the nazis, until 1941... I'm not saying you are wrong, but cherry picking facts doesn't magically become history.
      - kkfx 5y ago
        Just try reading IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black or if you can read french "Libres d'obéir: Le management, du nazisme à aujourd'hui" by Johann Chapoutot to start. From recent web resources I suggest: - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/nazis-based-their-elite-schools-on-top-british-private-schools https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/nazis-based-th... - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/uks-propaganda-leaflets-inspired-1960s-massacre-of-indonesian-communists https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/uks-propaganda... - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/31/louis-de-bernieres-reveals-extreme-cruelty-he-suffered-at-prep-school https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/31/louis-de-berni... - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-... Just to pick the first I've read recently. The history not cherry-picked say a thing: when nazism and fascism born their idea was common in all western countries from their élites to some not-so-small cohort of their populations. Just like today's populism. BTW, yes Stalin (one who took money from UK Crown, with the excuse of reliefs for Ukraine famine, via some formal "NGOs" ante-litteram) have signed an agreement with the nazi, but only after he understand that the western countries will never be partners. And future development have proved he have had good points, just read about "Operation Unthinkable" and "Operation Dropshot"...
        peoplefromibiza 5y ago
        > Just try reading IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporati That's a well know fact. It is also a well know fact that USA went to the Moon thanks to a nazi high ranking member, Wernher Von Braun. Of course the west was aligned with the "WASP" west and not with the "commie" Russia, just like today: we side with Ukraine and not with Putin's Russia mainly because we wanna keep the western propaganda on "democracy and freedom and the best lifestyle ever" alive and kicking, not because we really believe that we share the same values in the end. And because if we don't, the World will say that we're helping Putin. Same thing happened in 1939, but reversed. Everyone was afraid of being infected by the "communist revolution", not only the politicians, but the public opinion too! It was a people's choice too, that lasted 70 years and still nowadays you can hear people saying that "x is bad because it's chinese and chinese are communists, so they must be bad!". It's the tragedy of tribalism: us and them, good vs evil, that kind of propaganda that we still endure today! > have signed an agreement with the nazi, but only after he understand that the western countries will never be partners. I love Stalin's mustache like everybody else, but history is history: Stalin actually helped the nazis, they didn't simply sign an agreement, with that pact they encouraged Hitler to invade Poland, since there was no more opposition on the east: Germany took the most of it, Stalin invaded the eastern part. Also they gave ton of raw materials to Germany, for example they contributed a lot to "Operation Barbarossa".
        kkfx 5y ago
        > history is history: Stalin actually helped the nazis Yes, history is history: stalin was a dictator, probably the murderer of Lenin (witch was a dictator too, but at least with far less blood in his hands) BUT stalin help the nazi only to protect Soviet Union, because he know he can't sustain a war having just emerged from a nth turn of civil wars AND he understand the the rest of the west will not help him. He first propose to stop hitler but UK say "no, just wait, he only invade a bit of nearby countries for good reasons", they keep waiting, they send diplomats without any decision power to Russia etc. hitler on contrary have sent a plenipotentiary and sign a clear agreement. That's is. Just like today China: Russian was no friends of Germans like we are no friends of China but we need a reliable partner, at that time the nazi was ones, these days China is one. Oh, BTW the propaganda stating Russian bear rape a democratic country can't be swallowed by anyone who just read news: we all know that Ukrainian gov was as "democratic" as Xi or Putin and is a puppet regime planted by the west, the west who actually have financed, formed and armed local nazis to keep up the eastward expansion of NATO keeping the EU away from a partnership with Russia. At that point for us EU Citizens our own government are responsible for high treason just because they made choices for USA and UK interests against our own interests and they have financed and armed as well nazis, witch is a crime in most EU after WWII... There is no tribalism, it's just a game of interest, BUT one thing is the interest of their own country another is the interest of a foreign one.
    - michannne 5y ago
      You are conflating the alignment based on a subset of shared goals with shared origins. Capitalists supported "some" of the things early Nazi Germany was doing, that doesn't mean the Nazi purpose was to combat socialism (although, if combatting socialism furthered their other goals, then they wasted no time in doing that)
    - csee 5y ago
      2) This has nothing to do with capitalism. The reason Britain didn't form a coalition with the USSR was because they were petrified of getting Stalin's troops out of central Europe after a war. And for good reason given who Stalin was. So they wrongly chose appeasement in the hope that Hitler wouldn't do more. A big mistake, but one you can sympathize with to at least some small extent, and it'd be disingenuous to try to link it to capitalism somehow.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  > (I'm Italian, I know well what happen) You might be Italian, yet you fail to mention any notable Italian family name, but I am Italian for real and this sentence > Italy loose it's status of II grade European power, now reduced to a corruptocracy mostly controlled by anglophone neoliberals and local criminals doesn't make any sense at all. Historically, for starters. Your "essay" read mostly like some truth (capitalism in Italy sided with fascism because, at laest at the beginning, their interests were aligned - for example they both hated worker unions and both feared the Bolshevik Revolution), but coated in zeitgeit-ism (sorry for the bad neologism) Also the XVII Congress of the Italian Socialist Party that took place in 1921 in Livorno ended up with the split between socialists and communists in Italy, something that did not really help the socialist cause in Italy. You produced what we call "populism" nowadays, even if yours seems like coming from the left, it's still populism. If you are really Italian, you probably voted for the five star movement, which means you are (big) part of the problem, not of the solution.
  - kkfx 5y ago
    > You might be Italian, yet you fail to mention any notable Italian family name The first name is Agnelli, the ones who say being fascist in Rome and socialist in Turin, Pirelli, FIMM (Magneti Marelli), Piaggio just to name few that still exists today. > If you are really Italian, you probably voted for the five star movement I'm Italian, and no I do not voted M5S because coming from a Partisans family I was trained to recognize fascism. The original PNF and it's successors (I might know "Partito dell'Uomo Qualunque" for instance) have started as the 5S, apparently a left-ish, young and innovating party, but in reality a PR engine to elicit consent. If you know Italian history a bit you might know that Giorgio Bocca (one of the famous Partisans commander) when young was one who took PNF card with just two digit number, he learn after. The same have happened in Germany, original nazism appear as a kind of "moderated socialism". Actually in Italy there is exactly ZERO party I can vote, and exactly no left parties. The most left-ish read that three time are Fratelli d'Italia (YES, I'm not joking) and Lega, of course not because their are really left-ish, they are actually fascist, but they present themselves to the masses with left-wing ideas speech and that's why they grab consensus from "poor" working classes replacing historical PC-derived parties like PD witch it's correct name should be Partito Democristiano not Partito Democratico. I suggest a relatively modern song from what it left from the real political left: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=61641 https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=61641 perhaps together with https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=219 https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=219 and a small history of how songs from Resistenza have been pushed into oblivion substituting them with Bella Ciao almost no one have chanted except perhaps some small white militia in Tuscany or why in France famous song like "Le déserteur" changing the last part from Prévenez vos gendarmes Que j'emporte des armes Et que je sais tirer to Que je n'aurai pas d'armes Et qu'ils pourront tirer just to give few examples of the slow push toward a new dictatorial society.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  "Stop socialism"? Crony capitalism is just socialism that happens to benefit a corrupt elite. (Most real-world socialism, historically, was not very different. Even "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" - quite popular among some in the present-day U.S. - owes much of its success to the way it enables a smoothly functioning market to provide consistently good outcomes.)
jancsika 5y ago
> During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called "premature anti-fascists" – meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. . . Just to troll a bit-- if you fought too early on the side of the lower-case "other leftists" in, say, Barcelona you may have gotten in a gunfight with a group of communists[1]. Turns out the world is a complex place. Speaking of which (and continuing to troll)-- anyone know why the lower-case "other leftists" in Barcelona boxed up the photographic evidence of their existence and sent it to the UK instead of the USSR for safekeeping[2]? I mean if the forces against fascism were "Communists, Etcetera" why not send them there? 1: https://medium.com/@umawrnkl/the-anarcho-communist-dream-of-barcelona-1936-a83b8a79c7f3 https://medium.com/@umawrnkl/the-anarcho-communist-dream-of-... 2: https://autonomies.org/2019/12/the-lost-images-of-anarchist-barcelona/ https://autonomies.org/2019/12/the-lost-images-of-anarchist-...
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  I think you might be too strongly associating 'USSR' and 'communist'. They're intertwined but not identical.
  - Smoosh 5y ago
    The same thing happens with Fascism and the Nazis.
- sorokod 5y ago
  Well, Orwell was one of those "leftist" and did write "Animal Farm". BTW the photos in your second link are fantastic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...
  - memonkey 5y ago
    Isaac Asimov wrote a great critique on 1984 which includes a few thoughts on Animal Farm: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
lebubule 5y ago
"even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement." "Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy." "The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."
- popilewiz 5y ago
- usrusr 5y ago
  "The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death." Sounds like a perfect match for atomics...
praptak 5y ago
To complement this I recommend Five Stages of Fascism by Robert Paxton. He takes a temporal view of fascism rather than ideological, reasoning that unlike most other -isms, fascism does not have a body of works that define the ideology. On the contrary, fascist movements despise coherent philosophies. So his focus is on development of fascist movements in time.
- api 5y ago
  Fascism strikes me as the politics of the brain stem. To the extent that it has an ideology at all it tends to be explicitly anti-rational and obsessed with power, hierarchy, and mystical destiny. I wonder if it's kind of a postmodern version of the old school militant theocratic monarchy. Like a theocracy without god, or without a coherent religious doctrine. I know that postmodernist thought post-dated fascism but the fascist aesthetic strikes me as very postmodern. Ideas are tools for power. Nothing is true, only power.
  - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    IMO Nietzsche was proto-Pomo and Heidegger was definitely even closer, the latter being coterminous with classical fascism (and an initially enthusiastic card carrying member of that German party) in addition to being somewhat rehabilitated by Satre after the war.
  - michannne 5y ago
    I liken far left extremism to descending from obsessive generalization, and far right extremism descending from obsessive categorization - from the latter of which emerges hierarchies, divisions based on things like race or genetics, and pissing contests based on labels.
    - donatj 5y ago
      > pissing contests based on labels I'm getting a lot of that from both sides.
      - 5y ago
motohagiography 5y ago
While I think Eco is generally a muddled thinker with moments of profound lucidity, I really don't think we're ever going to separate fascism from being a euphemism for evil, and Eco's essay elevated it from the woo of theology to something secular critics can tilt at. There's not much to defend about it, it's that the quality of interpretation and criticism of it is never more than an arbitrary litany of its sins. (though he gave it a more than fair treatment before deconstructing it) He's accurate that Mussolini's fascism was something different from Nazi'ism (which just adopted and co-opted the italian aestheitcs, directly), but it was more of a kind of secular anti-clerical republicanism but with all the awe of divinely appointed monarchs. The crux of fascism was the unity of corporate and state power together - where Eco takes it in a few other directions, which I think its disingenuous to de-emphasize this core property of it, because I think he's also an elitist who would be glad to have the reins of a unified corporate state. He's freighted an obsolete political system with the countercases to his own ideology and branded it evil. I was going to suggest Eco should have stuck to fiction, but in this case he has. It was a peculiar reactionary artifact of the nation state, which itself is a modern(ist) post-enlightenment phenomenon as monarchies gave way to republics. It's different from totalitarianism (as Eco notes) in that Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar lacked the imperialist and colonial urges that would define totalitarian movements of Hitler and Stalin (even though the latter two inherited colonial territories). Post war, the word fascism became just a secular version of evil as defined by largely marxist/socialist thinkers, and fascist has become a kind of a catch-all slur against those who assert people should be accountable to principles. It didn't really matter before, as there was nothing to defend about its vague and myriad definitions, and the people who spat the word fascist at others didn't have enough control of institutions for anyone to care what they meant by it. Today, that it is a euphemism for Evil matters because the people wielding it now are still only as sophisticated as a mob of superstitious villagers, but its nebulous definition has come to envelop some things I think regular people actually value, and instead of Evil being presented as witchcraft, it's wrapped in layers of critical theory, but the mob mentality is just the same. Fascism doesn't have much going for it today as it was a moment of 19th century nation states adopting 20th century technology, but I'd say the people indexed on it now are just as much of a mob as they ever were, and whatever they dress it up in, they're the same people, still just hunting witches.
mrjangles 5y ago
In case it isn't clear, this article is not someone who was there talking about the history of fascism. There are plenty of history books for that. The whole point of this article is to give a different perspective on fascism and to rewrite history in a new and original way that just so happens to be more convenient to them. This whole thing can be summarized simply as "Everything I dislike is fascism, even things that have absolutely nothing to do with fascism, and everything that actually is fascism and has a lot in common with my ideology, wasn't really fascism, and certainly wasn't socialism, even though they all called themselves Marxists" or to quote the article specifically: >The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini in other words, sure it was developed by Marxists (Giovanni Gentile, and everyone else behind fascism were all Marxists philosopher), but it "wasn't real socialism". It is exactly the same "not real socialism" that all defenders of socialism always use when their ideology goes down the drain.
wrp 5y ago
A good quick critique of the overuse of "fascism" is Antifascism Without Fascism by Stanley G. Payne. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583319) Payne has written several books on the history of fascism and Francoist Spain. I find his approach to analyzing fascism more systematic and thorough than Paxton's.
ianwehba 5y ago
> 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.
unpopularopp 5y ago
Interestingly the listed conditions make both Ukraine and Russia Ur-Fascist states
- paleotrope 5y ago
  While well written, I've never found Ur-Fascism to be useful in any real way. What he describes is sufficiently general to cover almost any political movement.
- agapon 5y ago
  You probably don't know much about Ukraine then.
maxbendick 5y ago
I can't help but feel too old for this piece post-Trump. Eco succeeds in helping us identify fascism, but this is not the problem. The story of Eco's friendship with African American soldiers is odd to me. Eco sees them as cultured human beings who brought freedom to Italy. And yet he neglects to bring up the racial unfreedom they faced at home, including their future exclusion from the GI Bill. Is this irrelevant because the US is not strictly fascist? I mean to say we should not ignore the real psychological and economic forces that fascism is composed of. Eco touches on these forces. But it's not enough to stop at classifying whether a state is fascist or not. The forces that compose fascism are always present in liberal democracy, even if they don't crystallize into a mass movement. What's most disturbing is that the German and Italian masses were not tricked: they desired fascism (even if it was against their material interests). Infantilizing the masses gets us nowhere in our understanding. [1] I may be critical, but this is still a great piece from Eco. It's full of insights about fascism, and it succeeds at what it says on the tin. For further reading I highly recommend Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism [1] Ripped this paragraph almost word-for-word from Anti-Oedipus
twangist 5y ago
Thank you, this is not easy to find in its entirety.
coldtea 5y ago
This basically dumps together many non-Whig, non-progressivism ideas as "proto-fascism, including along with some key signs of fasism things that have nothing to do with what made historical fascism bad (which was: leadership cult, corporatism, uber race, antisemitism, german expansionism, etc). It's also white-washing Stalinism and western colonialism, to which as many (or more) casulaties can be attributed to (and equally nefarious ideologies, the "white man's burden", slavery, gulags for dissidents, etc weren't invented by Hitler), but which were not "conservative" in nature, so they get a pass. I'd rather we stop using the silly catch-all phrase "fascism" for things that don't have the attributes of historical fascism (which was a specific, time limited, historical movement), and even more so expand it loosely to mean anything and everything that's not pure liberalism.

238 points by monort 5y ago

kkfx 5y ago

[flagged]

michannne 5y ago
>"The puppet master of them was the classic capitalism that deeply fear a thing: socialism. Those regimes ware created just to stop socialism, for the sake of big capitals" I think this is a sorely misguided view, and if we had the ability to pull a Nazi, Hitler included, directly from the 30s/40s, they would disagree with this
- xtian 5y ago
  Regardless of whether a Nazi would disagree for ideological reasons, these facts are part of the historical record: 1) big capitalists within Germany and abroad funded and supported Hitler 2) capitalist countries rejected repeated requests from the USSR to form an anti-fascist alliance before WWII
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    > 1) big capitalists within Germany and abroad funded and supported Hitler of course, big capitals funded the leader of Germany that by creating a giant war machine, was filling their pockets with bags of money. > 2) capitalist countries rejected repeated requests from the USSR to form an anti-fascist alliance before WWII But also Stalin provided substantial support to the nazis, until 1941... I'm not saying you are wrong, but cherry picking facts doesn't magically become history.
    - kkfx 5y ago
      Just try reading IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation by Edwin Black or if you can read french "Libres d'obéir: Le management, du nazisme à aujourd'hui" by Johann Chapoutot to start. From recent web resources I suggest: - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/nazis-based-their-elite-schools-on-top-british-private-schools https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/17/nazis-based-th... - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/uks-propaganda-leaflets-inspired-1960s-massacre-of-indonesian-communists https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/23/uks-propaganda... - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/31/louis-de-bernieres-reveals-extreme-cruelty-he-suffered-at-prep-school https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/mar/31/louis-de-berni... - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-fdr-roosevelt-coup-attempt-1930s https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/11/trump-... Just to pick the first I've read recently. The history not cherry-picked say a thing: when nazism and fascism born their idea was common in all western countries from their élites to some not-so-small cohort of their populations. Just like today's populism. BTW, yes Stalin (one who took money from UK Crown, with the excuse of reliefs for Ukraine famine, via some formal "NGOs" ante-litteram) have signed an agreement with the nazi, but only after he understand that the western countries will never be partners. And future development have proved he have had good points, just read about "Operation Unthinkable" and "Operation Dropshot"...
      - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
        > Just try reading IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporati That's a well know fact. It is also a well know fact that USA went to the Moon thanks to a nazi high ranking member, Wernher Von Braun. Of course the west was aligned with the "WASP" west and not with the "commie" Russia, just like today: we side with Ukraine and not with Putin's Russia mainly because we wanna keep the western propaganda on "democracy and freedom and the best lifestyle ever" alive and kicking, not because we really believe that we share the same values in the end. And because if we don't, the World will say that we're helping Putin. Same thing happened in 1939, but reversed. Everyone was afraid of being infected by the "communist revolution", not only the politicians, but the public opinion too! It was a people's choice too, that lasted 70 years and still nowadays you can hear people saying that "x is bad because it's chinese and chinese are communists, so they must be bad!". It's the tragedy of tribalism: us and them, good vs evil, that kind of propaganda that we still endure today! > have signed an agreement with the nazi, but only after he understand that the western countries will never be partners. I love Stalin's mustache like everybody else, but history is history: Stalin actually helped the nazis, they didn't simply sign an agreement, with that pact they encouraged Hitler to invade Poland, since there was no more opposition on the east: Germany took the most of it, Stalin invaded the eastern part. Also they gave ton of raw materials to Germany, for example they contributed a lot to "Operation Barbarossa".
        kkfx 5y ago
        > history is history: Stalin actually helped the nazis Yes, history is history: stalin was a dictator, probably the murderer of Lenin (witch was a dictator too, but at least with far less blood in his hands) BUT stalin help the nazi only to protect Soviet Union, because he know he can't sustain a war having just emerged from a nth turn of civil wars AND he understand the the rest of the west will not help him. He first propose to stop hitler but UK say "no, just wait, he only invade a bit of nearby countries for good reasons", they keep waiting, they send diplomats without any decision power to Russia etc. hitler on contrary have sent a plenipotentiary and sign a clear agreement. That's is. Just like today China: Russian was no friends of Germans like we are no friends of China but we need a reliable partner, at that time the nazi was ones, these days China is one. Oh, BTW the propaganda stating Russian bear rape a democratic country can't be swallowed by anyone who just read news: we all know that Ukrainian gov was as "democratic" as Xi or Putin and is a puppet regime planted by the west, the west who actually have financed, formed and armed local nazis to keep up the eastward expansion of NATO keeping the EU away from a partnership with Russia. At that point for us EU Citizens our own government are responsible for high treason just because they made choices for USA and UK interests against our own interests and they have financed and armed as well nazis, witch is a crime in most EU after WWII... There is no tribalism, it's just a game of interest, BUT one thing is the interest of their own country another is the interest of a foreign one.
  - michannne 5y ago
    You are conflating the alignment based on a subset of shared goals with shared origins. Capitalists supported "some" of the things early Nazi Germany was doing, that doesn't mean the Nazi purpose was to combat socialism (although, if combatting socialism furthered their other goals, then they wasted no time in doing that)
  - csee 5y ago
    2) This has nothing to do with capitalism. The reason Britain didn't form a coalition with the USSR was because they were petrified of getting Stalin's troops out of central Europe after a war. And for good reason given who Stalin was. So they wrongly chose appeasement in the hope that Hitler wouldn't do more. A big mistake, but one you can sympathize with to at least some small extent, and it'd be disingenuous to try to link it to capitalism somehow.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
> (I'm Italian, I know well what happen) You might be Italian, yet you fail to mention any notable Italian family name, but I am Italian for real and this sentence > Italy loose it's status of II grade European power, now reduced to a corruptocracy mostly controlled by anglophone neoliberals and local criminals doesn't make any sense at all. Historically, for starters. Your "essay" read mostly like some truth (capitalism in Italy sided with fascism because, at laest at the beginning, their interests were aligned - for example they both hated worker unions and both feared the Bolshevik Revolution), but coated in zeitgeit-ism (sorry for the bad neologism) Also the XVII Congress of the Italian Socialist Party that took place in 1921 in Livorno ended up with the split between socialists and communists in Italy, something that did not really help the socialist cause in Italy. You produced what we call "populism" nowadays, even if yours seems like coming from the left, it's still populism. If you are really Italian, you probably voted for the five star movement, which means you are (big) part of the problem, not of the solution.
- kkfx 5y ago
  > You might be Italian, yet you fail to mention any notable Italian family name The first name is Agnelli, the ones who say being fascist in Rome and socialist in Turin, Pirelli, FIMM (Magneti Marelli), Piaggio just to name few that still exists today. > If you are really Italian, you probably voted for the five star movement I'm Italian, and no I do not voted M5S because coming from a Partisans family I was trained to recognize fascism. The original PNF and it's successors (I might know "Partito dell'Uomo Qualunque" for instance) have started as the 5S, apparently a left-ish, young and innovating party, but in reality a PR engine to elicit consent. If you know Italian history a bit you might know that Giorgio Bocca (one of the famous Partisans commander) when young was one who took PNF card with just two digit number, he learn after. The same have happened in Germany, original nazism appear as a kind of "moderated socialism". Actually in Italy there is exactly ZERO party I can vote, and exactly no left parties. The most left-ish read that three time are Fratelli d'Italia (YES, I'm not joking) and Lega, of course not because their are really left-ish, they are actually fascist, but they present themselves to the masses with left-wing ideas speech and that's why they grab consensus from "poor" working classes replacing historical PC-derived parties like PD witch it's correct name should be Partito Democristiano not Partito Democratico. I suggest a relatively modern song from what it left from the real political left: https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=61641 https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=61641 perhaps together with https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=219 https://www.antiwarsongs.org/canzone.php?lang=it&id=219 and a small history of how songs from Resistenza have been pushed into oblivion substituting them with Bella Ciao almost no one have chanted except perhaps some small white militia in Tuscany or why in France famous song like "Le déserteur" changing the last part from Prévenez vos gendarmes Que j'emporte des armes Et que je sais tirer to Que je n'aurai pas d'armes Et qu'ils pourront tirer just to give few examples of the slow push toward a new dictatorial society.
zozbot234 5y ago
"Stop socialism"? Crony capitalism is just socialism that happens to benefit a corrupt elite. (Most real-world socialism, historically, was not very different. Even "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" - quite popular among some in the present-day U.S. - owes much of its success to the way it enables a smoothly functioning market to provide consistently good outcomes.)

jancsika 5y ago

> During World War II, the Americans who took part in the Spanish war were called "premature anti-fascists" – meaning that fighting against Hitler in the Forties was a moral duty for every good American, but fighting against Franco too early, in the Thirties, smelled sour because it was mainly done by Communists and other leftists. . . Just to troll a bit-- if you fought too early on the side of the lower-case "other leftists" in, say, Barcelona you may have gotten in a gunfight with a group of communists[1]. Turns out the world is a complex place. Speaking of which (and continuing to troll)-- anyone know why the lower-case "other leftists" in Barcelona boxed up the photographic evidence of their existence and sent it to the UK instead of the USSR for safekeeping[2]? I mean if the forces against fascism were "Communists, Etcetera" why not send them there? 1: https://medium.com/@umawrnkl/the-anarcho-communist-dream-of-barcelona-1936-a83b8a79c7f3 https://medium.com/@umawrnkl/the-anarcho-communist-dream-of-... 2: https://autonomies.org/2019/12/the-lost-images-of-anarchist-barcelona/ https://autonomies.org/2019/12/the-lost-images-of-anarchist-...

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
I think you might be too strongly associating 'USSR' and 'communist'. They're intertwined but not identical.
- Smoosh 5y ago
  The same thing happens with Fascism and the Nazis.
sorokod 5y ago
Well, Orwell was one of those "leftist" and did write "Animal Farm". BTW the photos in your second link are fantastic! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Orwell#Spanish_Civil_Wa...
- memonkey 5y ago
  Isaac Asimov wrote a great critique on 1984 which includes a few thoughts on Animal Farm: http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

lebubule 5y ago

"even though I am much concerned about the various Nazi-like movements that have arisen here and there in Europe, including Russia, I do not think that Nazism, in its original form, is about to reappear as a nationwide movement." "Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy." "The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death."

popilewiz 5y ago
usrusr 5y ago
"The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death." Sounds like a perfect match for atomics...

praptak 5y ago

To complement this I recommend Five Stages of Fascism by Robert Paxton. He takes a temporal view of fascism rather than ideological, reasoning that unlike most other -isms, fascism does not have a body of works that define the ideology. On the contrary, fascist movements despise coherent philosophies. So his focus is on development of fascist movements in time.

api 5y ago
Fascism strikes me as the politics of the brain stem. To the extent that it has an ideology at all it tends to be explicitly anti-rational and obsessed with power, hierarchy, and mystical destiny. I wonder if it's kind of a postmodern version of the old school militant theocratic monarchy. Like a theocracy without god, or without a coherent religious doctrine. I know that postmodernist thought post-dated fascism but the fascist aesthetic strikes me as very postmodern. Ideas are tools for power. Nothing is true, only power.
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  IMO Nietzsche was proto-Pomo and Heidegger was definitely even closer, the latter being coterminous with classical fascism (and an initially enthusiastic card carrying member of that German party) in addition to being somewhat rehabilitated by Satre after the war.
- michannne 5y ago
  I liken far left extremism to descending from obsessive generalization, and far right extremism descending from obsessive categorization - from the latter of which emerges hierarchies, divisions based on things like race or genetics, and pissing contests based on labels.
  - donatj 5y ago
    > pissing contests based on labels I'm getting a lot of that from both sides.
    - 5y ago

motohagiography 5y ago

While I think Eco is generally a muddled thinker with moments of profound lucidity, I really don't think we're ever going to separate fascism from being a euphemism for evil, and Eco's essay elevated it from the woo of theology to something secular critics can tilt at. There's not much to defend about it, it's that the quality of interpretation and criticism of it is never more than an arbitrary litany of its sins. (though he gave it a more than fair treatment before deconstructing it) He's accurate that Mussolini's fascism was something different from Nazi'ism (which just adopted and co-opted the italian aestheitcs, directly), but it was more of a kind of secular anti-clerical republicanism but with all the awe of divinely appointed monarchs. The crux of fascism was the unity of corporate and state power together - where Eco takes it in a few other directions, which I think its disingenuous to de-emphasize this core property of it, because I think he's also an elitist who would be glad to have the reins of a unified corporate state. He's freighted an obsolete political system with the countercases to his own ideology and branded it evil. I was going to suggest Eco should have stuck to fiction, but in this case he has. It was a peculiar reactionary artifact of the nation state, which itself is a modern(ist) post-enlightenment phenomenon as monarchies gave way to republics. It's different from totalitarianism (as Eco notes) in that Mussolini, Franco, and Salazar lacked the imperialist and colonial urges that would define totalitarian movements of Hitler and Stalin (even though the latter two inherited colonial territories). Post war, the word fascism became just a secular version of evil as defined by largely marxist/socialist thinkers, and fascist has become a kind of a catch-all slur against those who assert people should be accountable to principles. It didn't really matter before, as there was nothing to defend about its vague and myriad definitions, and the people who spat the word fascist at others didn't have enough control of institutions for anyone to care what they meant by it. Today, that it is a euphemism for Evil matters because the people wielding it now are still only as sophisticated as a mob of superstitious villagers, but its nebulous definition has come to envelop some things I think regular people actually value, and instead of Evil being presented as witchcraft, it's wrapped in layers of critical theory, but the mob mentality is just the same. Fascism doesn't have much going for it today as it was a moment of 19th century nation states adopting 20th century technology, but I'd say the people indexed on it now are just as much of a mob as they ever were, and whatever they dress it up in, they're the same people, still just hunting witches.

mrjangles 5y ago

In case it isn't clear, this article is not someone who was there talking about the history of fascism. There are plenty of history books for that. The whole point of this article is to give a different perspective on fascism and to rewrite history in a new and original way that just so happens to be more convenient to them. This whole thing can be summarized simply as "Everything I dislike is fascism, even things that have absolutely nothing to do with fascism, and everything that actually is fascism and has a lot in common with my ideology, wasn't really fascism, and certainly wasn't socialism, even though they all called themselves Marxists" or to quote the article specifically: >The article on fascism signed by Mussolini in the Treccani Encyclopedia was written or basically inspired by Giovanni Gentile, but it reflected a late-Hegelian notion of the Absolute and Ethical State which was never fully realized by Mussolini in other words, sure it was developed by Marxists (Giovanni Gentile, and everyone else behind fascism were all Marxists philosopher), but it "wasn't real socialism". It is exactly the same "not real socialism" that all defenders of socialism always use when their ideology goes down the drain.

wrp 5y ago

A good quick critique of the overuse of "fascism" is Antifascism Without Fascism by Stanley G. Payne. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30583319) Payne has written several books on the history of fascism and Francoist Spain. I find his approach to analyzing fascism more systematic and thorough than Paxton's.

ianwehba 5y ago

> 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.

unpopularopp 5y ago

Interestingly the listed conditions make both Ukraine and Russia Ur-Fascist states

paleotrope 5y ago
While well written, I've never found Ur-Fascism to be useful in any real way. What he describes is sufficiently general to cover almost any political movement.
agapon 5y ago
You probably don't know much about Ukraine then.

maxbendick 5y ago

I can't help but feel too old for this piece post-Trump. Eco succeeds in helping us identify fascism, but this is not the problem. The story of Eco's friendship with African American soldiers is odd to me. Eco sees them as cultured human beings who brought freedom to Italy. And yet he neglects to bring up the racial unfreedom they faced at home, including their future exclusion from the GI Bill. Is this irrelevant because the US is not strictly fascist? I mean to say we should not ignore the real psychological and economic forces that fascism is composed of. Eco touches on these forces. But it's not enough to stop at classifying whether a state is fascist or not. The forces that compose fascism are always present in liberal democracy, even if they don't crystallize into a mass movement. What's most disturbing is that the German and Italian masses were not tricked: they desired fascism (even if it was against their material interests). Infantilizing the masses gets us nowhere in our understanding. [1] I may be critical, but this is still a great piece from Eco. It's full of insights about fascism, and it succeeds at what it says on the tin. For further reading I highly recommend Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism [1] Ripped this paragraph almost word-for-word from Anti-Oedipus

twangist 5y ago

Thank you, this is not easy to find in its entirety.

coldtea 5y ago

This basically dumps together many non-Whig, non-progressivism ideas as "proto-fascism, including along with some key signs of fasism things that have nothing to do with what made historical fascism bad (which was: leadership cult, corporatism, uber race, antisemitism, german expansionism, etc). It's also white-washing Stalinism and western colonialism, to which as many (or more) casulaties can be attributed to (and equally nefarious ideologies, the "white man's burden", slavery, gulags for dissidents, etc weren't invented by Hitler), but which were not "conservative" in nature, so they get a pass. I'd rather we stop using the silly catch-all phrase "fascism" for things that don't have the attributes of historical fascism (which was a specific, time limited, historical movement), and even more so expand it loosely to mean anything and everything that's not pure liberalism.