Horse said to Platt:
...When will you stop with the propaganda and bluster? The Nazis, whatever the
nickname, were right-wing, not left-wing and all your blustering to avoid your
own right-wing bias won't hide that fact. A couple of groups you conveniently
left out below are the capitalists and corporatists which, as Steve pointed out
via Mussolini, are the beneficiaries of the fascist legacy.
dmb says:
I think that's right. As Pirsig paints it, fascism is essentially a rejection
of intellectual values and a glorification of social level values. And as just
about any political scientist or historian will tell you, political positions
just don't get any more right wing than fascism (except maybe a Monarchist) and
fascists hate leftists more than anything.
There are some differences between the various kinds of fascism; Italian,
German, Spanish or whatever. But, unless you are tone-deaf to cultural
attitudes, the affinities and similarities are pretty darn obvious. As I
mentioned the other day, for example, the right-wing Dutch politician (Geert
Wilders) joined several of our own right-wing politicians at ground zero in
Manhattan and they all made the same anti-Islamic noises for the same
right-wing reasons. And there is the right-wing radio preacher from Royal Oak,
Michigan who supported and admired Hitler and Mussolini back in the 1930's. Pat
Buchanan (no relation) ran for President as a Republican a few cycles ago. He
grew up in a house where Mussolini was admired and Mussolini's portrait was
proudly hung on the walls.
As Pirsig pointed out, fascism in America was not so intense as in Europe. They
didn't have to resist full-blown communism either. In the U.S., social level
anti-intellectualism manifest itself as opposition to FDR's New Deal. And when
you look at today's political situation, it's quite obvious that the Liberals
want to protect and build upon the New Deal while the Republicans have been
doing everything they can to dismantle it. I mean, just look at who's afraid of
Health Insurance Reform. Who thinks such programs are scary, scary, socialism?
Who is running against it as we speak? In this country, right-wingers have
always opposed these things. There is an 80 year track record that makes
fascist attitudes and positions pretty easy to spot.
For our "low information" friends, here's a little Wiki on the European strain:
Fascism is a radical and authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists
seek to organize a nation according to corporatist perspectives, values, and
systems, including the political system and the economy. Fascism was originally
founded by Italian national syndicalists in World War I who combined left-wing
and right-wing political views, but it gravitated to the political right in the
early 1920s. Scholars generally consider fascism to be on the far right of the
conventional left-right political spectrum.
Fascists believe that a nation is an organic community that requires strong
leadership, singular collective identity, and the will and ability to commit
violence and wage war in order to keep the nation strong. They claim that
culture is created by the collective national society and its state, that
cultural ideas are what give individuals identity, and thus they reject
individualism. Viewing the nation as an integrated collective community, they
see pluralism as a dysfunctional aspect of society, and justify a totalitarian
state as a means to represent the nation in its entirety.
They advocate the creation of a single-party state. Fascists reject and resist
the autonomy of cultural or ethnic groups who are not considered part of the
fascists' nation and who refuse to assimilate or are unable to be assimilated.
They consider attempts to create such autonomy as an affront and a threat to
the nation. Fascist governments forbid and suppress opposition to the fascist
state and the fascist movement. They identify violence and war as actions that
create national regeneration, spirit and vitality.
Fascism rejects the concepts of egalitarianism, materialism, and rationalism in
favor of action, discipline, hierarchy, spirit, and will. They oppose
liberalism (as a bourgeois movement) and Marxism (as a proletarian movement)
for being exclusive economic class-based movements. Fascists present their
ideology as that of an economically trans-class movement that promotes ending
economic class conflict to secure national solidarity.
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