the largest fascists groups comprised of nationalist veterans and usually lead by pro-war political elements in ww1 i even remember some nazis claiming that fighting in war was akin to some kind of transcendental meditation and that the pointlessness of world war 1 was actually some kind of revolution so how much did the war play a part in creating fascism ?
>>2436659and we used to drill holes into our skulls so the demons could be released
maybe people in the past were just stupid about some things
>>2436251>the largest fascists groups comprised of nationalist veterans and usually lead by pro-war political elements in ww1Yep, fundamentally true. BM, at the time a high ranking member of the socialist party and the editor of its newspaper, made a quick shift from advocating for staying completely out of the war to joining it. We know he got money from French and British interests that wanted to throw another country at Austria-Hungary and Germany.
i even remember some nazis claiming that fighting in war was akin to some kind of transcendental meditation and that the pointlessness of world war 1 was actually some kind of revolution so how much did the war play a part in creating fascism ?
Maybe you're referring to Evola, a fake "baron" that later became an intellectual reference point for "esoteric" and more edgy forms of fascism, especially after ww2.
>>2436255LatAm fascists are the direct continuation of landlords and oligarchs goon squads, basically.
>>2436267They should be squized like lemons in hard labour camps and when they become unproductive… You get my drift…
>>2436269This.
>>2436659Yes, in part it's cultural conditioning. An adult homosexual that engages only in consensual activities with other adults is not, by any rational metric, dangerous to himself or others. Someone that hears voices telling him to strangle some person because those voices claim the person is a demonic entity or someone that has visions commanding him to drink bleach because that's a youth elixir or throwing a CRT tv set down the window because that would be fun, well, I guess you'll agree that even by the most liberal and permissive standards they are a dangerous to others and themselves.
>>2436953There is surely truth to this. Fascism is the first real reactionary and rightwing mass movement. Without modern mass media, it's hard to think it would have existed or at least be so successful.
>>2436967Drilling skulls goes back to the paleolithic, apparently. And many undergoing the procedure survived, as attested by a regrowth of bone tissue on top the hole. Not saying it makes sense, tho!
>>2436985National states were in large parte already formed at that point. Surely the ones where fascism would have more success - Italy, Germany, Portugal, Spain - had already existed for decades if not for centuries at that point. Also, in Italy fascism coexisted and was in fact legitimised by the established monarchy, which allowed it to swallow up the pre-existing liberal regime.
There are two unexamined factors that I think could stand to be considered when talking about the rise of classical Fascism, that I think are alluded to in the Marxist text “Why Fascism?” And Lawrence Dennis’ “the coming American fascism” which kind of sheds light on things from the Fascist perspective.
>Action and Inaction.
I’ve kind of alluded to this before with the phrase “Fascism is Socialism past its expiration date”; which pissed a lot of people off. But in “Why Fascism?” The authors basically state straight up that there were plenty of moments the Italian Socialists had an opportunity to do a revolution, but they fundamentally failed to lead the working class. They waffled on taking action, were too slow during huge strike waves, no one wanted to take the next step. This fostered an immense kind of disappointment among large swathes of people. In Sorelian terms I think it can be seen as the curators of the class war myth undermining the myth itself. It’d be like some preacher telling people: “hey guys, Jesus probably isn’t coming back.”
And people can only handle so much disappointment before they start looking at other options. The Fascists seized the initiative where the Socialists squandered it. You’ve got Communists in exile in the USSR brooding that the Fascists took their best fighters, for example. Apparently the Italian Socialists kept some distance between their labor unions and their political party, while the Fascists just subordinated their unions to the party and would direct it towards their ends. All in all it created this image that Fascists would do shit while socialists would talk.
>The catastrophic revolution and the middle classes
This is something you see in “why fascism” as well as “the coming American fascism” but it’s mostly the respective authors reacting to the consequences of the Russian Revolution, and in the case of Lawrence Dennis he just says outright it’s not worth it. Like the world saw the mass deaths and famines in Russia, just this complete horrifying loss of human life, and it made revolution look unappealing. In this case I can’t entirely blame them, like there was this article I read ages ago where some Libyans reflected on life after Gaddafi, and the ones that were the most enthusiastic still about the revolution lived safely in the West. Like it’s really easy to say “no regrets” when you don’t have to live in the bombed out ruins of your former home. But if people had to consider the possibility that a revolution would do to their homes what it did to Russia, they temper their enthusiasm.
What both Why Fascism and Lawrence Dennis point to is the fears of the middle classes, yknow high earning engineers and managers and all that. And the fervor with which communists acted to seize the means of production convinced these people that communism was anything from an existential threat to an obtrusive burden. Say you studied in school and got a decent job as the foreman of some factory; best case scenario is you got a new boss who’s entirely a political promotion—and if you know anything about inexperienced and poorly trained management, it may mean you’re given unrealistic tasks, or getting barked at by some asshole to “work harder” when you just want to do your job. Worse case you get functionally demoted to the bottom of the totem pole, worst is you getting shot because of some mix of revolutionary fervor and cynical pursuits of old grudges. This rendered the Bolshevik’s style of revolution deeply unpopular to all but the most desperate classes; it gives the impression of totally destroying civilization in one’s country while simultaneously punishing those who weren’t on the absolute bottom of the economic ladder. Think of how /leftypol/ talks about Libya post-Gadaffi and that’s kind of how people saw the situation in Russia.
Fascism by contrast looked less “scary.” There wasn’t a highly destructive civil war following ᴉuᴉlossnW’s seizure of power. Yeah there were secret police and repression, but it gave the appearance of something more “mild” than the USSR. And to the middle class and some workers, it gave the appearance of finding some “third way”, that you could have a social revolution without mass death or destruction.
Sun Tzu once said, essentially, you want to leave gaps for your enemy to escape through. Why? Because if he thinks there’s a chance he’ll survive by running, he’ll run. If the only way to survive is to kill you, because you backed him into a wall, he’ll kill you or die trying. Again, Lawrence Dennis is a good insight into this thinking because he says all throughout his book: the Great Depression proves Capitalism doesn’t work, it’s a system on the way out, it’s totally failed, it’s unworkable, it’s time to dump this thing; but he ultimately came to the conclusion that Fascism was the way out because it was “less extreme”. Like the dude legitimately thought Fascism could overcome capitalism, that it could resolve social crises like racism, so on. While ultimately incorrect it goes to show how Fascism was seen from certain segments of society.
“Why Fascism” touched on this too. That part of the failures or defeat of German Communists is they became totally subordinated to the image of the USSR when, to many people, the Soviet Union looked like a failed state in its first few years.
While PTSD may play a role in some individual fascists, I don’t think it totally explains it.
>>2437325>Middle classPetite bourgeoisie.
This is how I know your post was retarded.
>>2437325why do you keep posting this random child gaming at a computer
is this a selfie?
>>2436251Fascism appealed to some Rambo types yeah. A lot of people who experience war are disgusted by it, but there are others who get something out of it. It's hard to explain, but wars attract these people. If you ever read about foreign volunteers who join the Ukrainian and Russian armies in that war, they're people searching for something.
It's like they view the "normal" world back home as fake and mediocre, while the war-world is this very abnormal world of heightened sensations which seems MORE real than the "normal" world they came from. This might be delusional in some sense, but there's an intense yearning to want to go back to it among some veterans.
Then you have the bonds formed among soldiers, which are very real.
BTW, Master & Commander is having a revival. The movie is more than 20 years old but it's also hugely popular U.S. naval circles. It has the spectacle war but it depicts a well-functioning team. Everybody has a place to be and a job to do.
>>2437326>a part of the middle classes were (thing) so (thing) caused fascism or whatever instead of simply saying what the actual factor wasjust take the L you fucking moron, ever heard of the lowest common denominator when critically assesing things?
also an extension of
>>2437075. what an insipid and useless discussion overall. fuck it maybe lets talk about how bakers "played a part" in fascism too while we are at it
>>2437343yeah its almost like theyre interchangeable you freaking genius. read marx and engels first before calling others retards :)
>>2437325Virtually every adult male in Europe in the interwar period was a war veteran.
>>2437551>a part of the middle classes were (thing) so (thing) caused fascism or whatever instead of simply saying what the actual factor wasThe fact that countries which had fought no major wars had fascist governments (e.g. Cold War Latin American juntas) shows that clearly this element is not necessary for fascism to exist. However it seems a lot more likely that the experience of mass military mobilization played a large role in the specific form European fascism took during this period, i.e. as a populist mass movement with the active participation of the middle classes.
>>2437551Oh it's this fucking retarded autistic uyghur.
>Look at these Marx quotes where he species that middle class is a umbrella term for multiple classes and chooses to specify them all to justify me using the word as a catch all term now!>VALIDATE MY RETARDATION AND LAZINESS!!!No, go fuck yourself.
>>2437780you are being tautological:
- thing exists, therefore it is validly considered as a social force
this is how you fall into illusion: "if person believes in X, then X is true for them". how about truth stands above opinion?
>>2437560>However it seems a lot more likely that the experience of mass military mobilization played a large role in the specific form European fascism took during this period, i.e. as a populist mass movement with the active participation of the middle classes.Kind of random on the soldier thing, you know in the U.S. there's this band Five Finger Death Punch. It sounds silly to mention this, but they're huge in the military and among veterans. The music is like a poppier Slipknot but the message is like "aaargh I'm traumatized and coping and have been betrayed and I wanna die" and there's often themes of the military lying to soldiers and dicking them over. But the fascinating thing is how closely embedded they are within the U.S. military itself – they perform a lot at USO shows. They're firmly anti-communist (one of their early albums is called "American Capitalist"). Then the conclusion to all of this nihilism can be to double down in cathartic violence and DEATH. This kind of stuff captures the spirit of Johnny Rico at the end of Starship Troopers shouting "come on you apes, you wanna live forever?"
Fascism is kind of like an active nihilism. There's no positive vision but you can revel in power, myths, and destruction. This theme comes up a lot in writings about it in the 1950s.
>>2436251>remember some nazis claiming that fighting in war was akin to some kind of transcendental meditation Ernst Junger was mentioned earlier but I think he expressed this attraction well.
<"The modern battlefield is like a huge, sleeping machine with innumerable eyes and ears and arms, lying hidden and inactive, ambushed for the one moment on which all depends. Then from some hole in the ground a single red light ascends in fiery orelude. A thousand guns roar out on the instant, and at a touch, driven by innumerable levers, the work of annihilation goes pounding on its way. Orders fly like sparks and flashes over a close network, spurring on to heightened destruction in front and bringing up from behind a steady stream of fresh men and fresh materials to fling into the flames. Every one feels that he is caught in a vortex which draws him on and on and thrusts him with unrelenting precision over the brink of death.”[…]
<“The horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew us into the war. A long period of law and order, such as our generation had behind it, produces a real craving for the abnormal, a craving that literature stimulates. Among other questions that occupied us was this ; what does it look like when there are dead lying about ? And we never for a moment dreamt that in this war the dead would be left month after month to the mercy of wind and weather, as once the bodies on the gallows were.”[…]
>“I looked left and right. The moment before the engagement was an unforgettable picture. In shell craters against the enemy line, which was still being forked over and over by the fire-storm, lay the battalions of attackers, clumped together by company. At the sight of the dammed-up masses of men, the breakthrough appeared certain to me. But did we have the strength and the stamina to splinter also the enemy reserves and rend them apart? I was confident. The decisive battle, the last charge, was here. Here the fates of nations would be decided, what was at stake was the future of the world. I sensed the weight of the hour, and I think everyone felt the individual in them dissolve, and fear depart.”[…]
>“I supposed I'd been hit in the heart, but the prospect of death neither hurt nor frightened me. As I fell, I saw the smooth, white pebbles in the muddy road; their arrangement made sense, it was as necessary as that of the stars, and certainly great wisdom was hidden in it. That concerned me, and mattered more than the slaughter that was going on all round me.” Unique IPs: 39