Thirty-five years ago I sat in history class, as one of my fellow classmates told Father O’Connell that Hitler must have been a liberal because he was a socialist. The old man smiled and said, “Then that would mean Teddy Roosevelt was an actual moose.” It took a minute, but eventually we got the joke. You can call yourself a leprechaun, but that does not make you a leprechaun.
Where to put fascism, especially Nazism, on the political spectrum is a big topic due to the use of Nazi iconography by some movements and the defensive position of most conservatives on the issue. It is also important because our rulers are making the claim that any resistance to their nation wrecking program is fascism. Everyone is now required to have an opinion about a political movement that stopped being relevant close to eighty years ago.
The first thing to note is that relying on a two-dimensional political spectrum cooked up by 18th century French radicals is not a good way to understand the world. Even the updated Cold War version that places internationalism at one end and nationalism at the other is of little value to our current age. Embracing the ahistorical Progressives worldview that insists history started when they synthesized their current worldview is equally foolish. It leads to nothing but error.
There is also the fact that there are no Nazis or fascists today. These movements were outliers that existed in the narrow space book-ended by the Great War on one end and the Second World War on the other. The late historian Ernst Nolte argued that fascism, broadly defined, was a reaction to the violence and mayhem created by the Russian Revolution and the spread of Bolshevism. It should be noted that Bolshevism was also an outlier movement that has long since died off.
This is a point that Paul Gottfried makes in his book on the history of fascism as a political concept. Note the difference between concept and ideology. An ideology has a tight, well defined set of rules, while a concept is vague. Progressives took the dead ideology of fascism and turned it into a political concept to include the set of people who oppose the Progressive project. As the opposition adjusted, the definition adjusted to meet the new threat. As a result, fascism is as meaningless as it is non-existent.
Any effort to connect modern political movements to fascism, therefore, is nothing more than rhetoric or cynicism. The conditions in which both fascism and Bolshevism were born no longer exist and are unlikely to exist again. To Western Europeans of the age, the excesses of communism were frightening. It is eastern origins appeared sinister. The ad-hoc and incoherent response called fascism, to what appeared to many people as a foreign conspiracy to bring down the West, was, in context, quite sensible.
Putting fascism on the right of your antiquated political scale probably makes sense, as it was opposed to what is on the left end of that scale. That means, of course, you are embracing a base assumption of Progressives. They argue that all opposition to them is reactionary and incoherent. Therefore, nothing on the Right can exist in isolation. It can only exist in opposition to the Left. In that regard, they are correct about fascism. It was a devil with an expiry date that has long passed.
A more reasonable argument, with regards to fascism and the Western Right, is that fascism was a rearguard action. It was a final last desperate gasp of the old culture before it was destroyed by liberalism. Fascism therefore is a grab bag of items from the ancien regime, bolted onto some modern industrial economics and sold to the public with modern public relations techniques. That would put fascism on the Right, but only when it is defined on a spectrum that has not had relevance for close to a century now.
The fact is, debating the place of fascism and the relevance of Nazism to our current age is a pointless waste of time. It lets grifters like Dinesh D’Souza peddle books to well-meaning normies and it lets internet pranksters generate some laughs, but otherwise, fascism, as a political force, has no relevance in our age. It is as salient as free silver or calls to restore the king of France. There will always be people clinging to the detritus of past failures, but there are people that believe they are space aliens too.
The great divide today is not over economics. It is demographics. The cultural struggle that is developing, therefore, will be how our people will thrive in a world of modern challenges and modern threats. What will drive politics in the West, in the coming decades, is what Steve Sailer calls the world’s most important graph. How to survive as a people in a world dominated by races unable to escape the Neolithic, is not something contemplated by Bolsheviks or fascists.
The debate itself underscores the fact that we are at the end of a cultural cycle, one born in the Great War, defined by the Second World War and formalized during the Cold War. Modernism as a cultural force has come to an end. Those in charge of the brittle husk that is the prevailing orthodoxy keep reaching into their past for villains to maintain support among the faithful. Those in opposition find themselves without fully formed alternatives in the present, so they look to the past.
Regardless, the place of fascism on the political spectrum then or now is as irrelevant as the spectrum itself. The arguments putting the fascists on the Right only make sense in the context of the long gone era in which they were born. Putting them on the Left only makes sense in the context of the dying era, if you are hoping to squeeze a few more bucks out of the rubes. Hitler is irrelevant to the current age and will have no more bearing on what comes next than Genghis Khan or Henry VIII.
Whatever points you have to make regarding fascism-which might include corporatism, authoritarianism and notions of racial superiority, which are still alive today in different forms, ding ding- I really don’t think the “world’s most important graph” is the problem. It is whites who have gone off the deep end, having rejected God. It is whites who have turned their back on their heritage, embraced post-modernity with its nihilism, materialism and perversions, grown cold in love, destroyed the family, twisted the concept of science and then what is left of it directed to evil aims, thrown away transcendence and ideals of… Read more »
The questions facing mankind are caused by advances in transportation and food production which are challenging historic demographics. there’s no putting that back how it was, and there is no sense blaming Chad and Stacey who did nothing to cause it.
Peter Turchin would argue that there IS a putting things back, but only catastrophically
The problem remains until we are able to deal with the elites who pushed it on us, it doesn’t matter what Sailer stated.
Because that’s dealing with the symptom not the origin of it. Until we confront and deal with the cloud people and the global business elites who perpetrated this horror upon us. The ethnic issue will just get worse.
As to how we stop these people, it really depends.
Aren’t those advances good things? Are we really so Darwinian we want people to die of starvation? I don’t blame Chad and Stacey, I am Chad and Stacey.
So the answer to our problems is to simply believe in Christ? Gee, I wonder what happened to 30 million Russian Orthodox Christians under Stalin? Did they simply stop believing?
“But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened. ”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Men Have Forgotten God,” The Templeton Address (1983).
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2012/12/men-have-forgotten-god.html
Oh, gee. I guess that is how 600,000 Christians died in our Civil War. They forgot about Christ. Doubtless that is also why 30 million Christian soldiers died in WWI. They also forgot about Christ. And that eight million who were ground to dust in the Thirty Years War…yep, they forgot about Christ, too. Keep it up, Bunny. You just keep getting more and more ridiculous.
You ain’t got nothing’ on Solzhenitsyn, Epaminondas.
White supremacy is real. Name an invention that has advanced human existence, such as the printing press or aircraft and Whites made them possible. Another example is courtesy of Steve Sailer:
http://www.unz.com/isteve/little-baltimore-will-have-more-murders-than-giant-new-york-in-2017/
The Baltimore Sun reports that for the first time Baltimore, with a population of less than 620,000, could record more murders in a single year than New York, which has a population of 8.5 million.
As of Sept. 3, Baltimore has recorded 238 homicides, while New York City has seen 182 murders.
It ain’t called ”Bodymore” for nothin’ dont’cha know.
I’ve been asking for years: show me the evidence that whites are not supreme.
When the spluttering starts I start on the 95% of modern life that were invented by whites (men of course).
My favorite is to point out that the modern tampon was invented by a white man.
If White people are supreme then why are we losing our countries? I reject this label as inaccurate.
The answer of course, is Jewish subversion of the white race.
This analysis is great but more complicated than it needs to be.
Those of us woke to the JQ can even more simply define what fascism means today.
Fascism is shorthand for white people doing things that they were not specifically instructed to do by Jews.
Studying racial differences? Fascism. Enforcing borders? Fascism. Prioritizing US economic interests? Fascism.
Protest against being demographically replaced? Fascism.
No historical or economic research needed. Just ask: Are white people doing it? And: Were they told to do it by the (((Universities))) & (((press)))?
If your answers are Yes & No, then its fascism.
Almost all of my professors were Jews, and they were always screaming about Trump’s fascism. For these people a fascist is anyone who’s taken a parking space they had their eyes on. It’s just a tourettes-like snipe that comes as naturally to Jews as blinking does to a normal person.
Some not insignificant number of the Jews voted for Trump. Starting with my mother, one brother, two uncles, myself and my (Mexican-born, Jewish) wife (yeah, Hillary went 0-for-3 with her, and that is a source of GREAT pride to me), and continuing with at least 40% of the voting-age members of my synogogue.
Don’t let your innate ignorance and hatred cause you to ignore facts.
The problem is not whether you and your kin voted for Trump. The problem is what you, the concepts in your religion, and kin have done to freedom and my country. The Federal Reserve Board was created by Paul Warberg, a jew (under the auspices of the Rothschild banking group). The gun control act of 1968 was created by Emmanual Cellar, a jew. Obama care was designed by a jew. You and yours are no smarter or better than my kith and kin yet we nurture freedom and yours destroy it. It is sad that powers within your religion have… Read more »
The Left is just about done beating the “fascist” thing into the ground. I suspect that most people under, say, 30 years old, couldn’t define any elements of fascism if their lives depended on it. “Fascists” are just those wrong-headed Trumpy white males who are racist and sexist and would like to see people dead.
I hope you’re right. Words can kill. When my dad was a missionary doctor he saw people die simply because a witch doctor put a curse on them. They would have nothing physically wrong and would die anyway. This happens to people and institutions today. I learned last night that some guys at a very conservative institution of higher learning had been texting each other thinking about forming a sort of alt-right club on campus. They were infiltrated by a libertarian (by the way, it is usually not a leftist that will subvert a conservative group on your campus, but… Read more »
Not quite. Margaret Sanger was a Nazi (in word, deed, and spirtit).
Her statue is in the Smithsonian.
Her temples slaughter over 300 each day in the USA.
Meanwhile, the “tar baby” says anyone who supports Trump is a KKK-Nazi.
So go make a placard saying Margaret Sanger was a Nazi and parade around town with it and see if it changes anyone’s mind. The effectiveness of words is not in the words themselves. It is how they affect the mind. A matter of conditioning. Imprinting, if you will. The incantation must be said in just the right way at the appropriate time. Why do you think the Roman auspices lasted so long? Look at how particular they were about them. Maybe if you join the college of augurs, like Cicero, you can get your head and hands nailed over… Read more »
People opining on “the Jewish Question” and bragging on how the Fuhrer could dance your pants off are Reason #1 why the Right never gets anywhere. There is no “desacralizing” the Holocaust for the simple reason that Normies can see that the victims were like them: urban or suburban, did nothing wrong, wanted merely to be left alone, and were herded into cattle cars before being gassed or machine gunned. So yes, oh Soros plant, opine away about how we need to “settle the Jewish Question” and “remove Jews” etc. I’m sure the Fuhrer could dance your pants off. ————————-… Read more »
Whiskey, this is actually insightful, but instead of writing blog entries in the comments section at Zman’s blog, can you put up some more material on your blog, preferably not about how the latest McDonald’s commercial is proof that white women want to cuckold and castrate their beta husbands whom they hate? Your saner blog entries are enjoyable, though and I’d be interested to see what you make of white females supporting Trump in the election (a lot of the MRA types got some ‘splaining to do, or at least analysis to perform and assumptions to rethink).
Whiskey- venerable veteran of the blogosphere, still spoken of in hushed whispers- has a blog? Gee, thanks!
Regardless, the place of fascism on the political spectrum then or now is as irreverent as the spectrum itself. I think you mean irrelevant. As a young person in the 1970s I read works by Marx, Lenin, and a large part of Mein Kampf. It was too much of a struggle to finish, pun intended, but I did learn that Hitler loathed traditional authority, the aristocracy, the church, et cetera. He was in no sense a man of the right. I wish this stuff was as irrelevant as you posit it to be, but unfortunately a lot of the modern… Read more »
Not real big on WWII history, but I think you may be wrong about the Ukrainians. Didn’t a bunch of them join in the offensive against USSR?
Not really, there was one SS waffen division that incorporated Ukrainian “resistors” In 1943, a Ukrainian SS unit was formed, which later became a part of the Waffen-SS as the SS Division “Galizien” and then the 14. Waffen-Grenadier-Division der SS
So how many Polish divisions were the Germans able to raise?
One of your best pieces ever. Thank you.
Just like the axiom that generals are always fighting the last war, we have the same with our political leaders and strategists.
Some event or movement will blindside side them, maybe Trump’s blitzkreig was the start.
Better, Zman. Your writings since the Amren conference have evinced a feistiness I didn’t see before. You tended to write in academic mode, I thought, but now you are letting it rip. Is that just my imagination or have you reached a new plateau in your writing career?
It is really the magical power of the words which is important, not the words themselves. All of them are starting to wear thin, including the king of them all, racism (except, of course among Republicans and Cucks.)
Zman, I’m sure you’ve seen that graph of the voting habits of Generation Z. The left’s narrative that all the old racists are dying off is contradicted by the explicit racial consciousness of young whites. I’m only in my thirties, but I’m already old in terms of trying to understand the weltanschaaung and internet-rerouted dendrites of the young memers. As Boris Karloff said in Peter Bogdonavich’s “Targets,” “The world belongs to the young, now. Let them have it.” I hear where you’re coming from talking about Anglin and the irrelevance of the Nazis, but you have to understand that your… Read more »
You mention Paul Gottfrieds book “Fascism: The Career of a Concept”. Tom Woods has a 45.min interview with him here about the misuse of fascism; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshvHgcOnVg&t=2019s
IMO, positing a political spectrum with internationalism as the left side, and nationalism on the right, has always been incorrect. Internationalism vs. nationalism is simply a matter of “how grand is your vision?” I’ve always thought that a more logical spectrum would have increasing government control as you move left and increasing individual liberty as you move right. I would label the extreme left end-point as “state-run totalitarianism” and the right as “absolute personal responsibility” (i.e., almost no government at all). The left side includes many historical flavors, including Soviet Communism, German Naziism, and Italian Fascism. There is also room… Read more »
Good luck on trying to redefine the left-right spectrum. I see where you are coming from, but trying to redefine decades of indoctrination is not so easy. Especially given the entrenched interests committed to perpetuating the game.
Scratch a Progressive deeply enough, and you’ll get a version of “where’s my free stuff?” every time.
So, we should keep letting the Left define the terms of the discussion? I think it would be a good idea to proffer a different model, and let the Left defend the old one. The model I described does what Z-Man described in his article. It puts Naziism squarely on the left of the spectrum where it really belongs, right next to the other variations of socialism. And positing that the right of the spectrum is about increased individual liberty is something I think the Right ought to be emphasizing. A liberty-vs-statism debate is the discussion we should really be… Read more »
it’s an easy question to answer if you look at Benito Mussolini’s career. He was a member of the Italian Socialist Party. He was expelled from the party during WWI for his position on the war. he and Hitler both spoke the Socialist language and believed in a big government controlling the economy.
They fell out with their fellow Communists and Socialists when it came to foreign policies and nationalism rather than internationalism. The National Socialist Party was very accurately named.
And the Dems are the real racists.
The Muss evolved from Bolshevik to Communist to Socialist to Fascist. If he’d made wiser choices he’d have made it to Corporatist, but it was a tough neighborhood.
Two observations. First, when I read Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism” in college, her “scaling” of political movements was the first one that felt correct and had the advantage of someone that experienced them first hand. But try to explain that to anyone under 45 who gets their politics from Twitter and Colbert and you realize what a complete waste of time the discussion is. Second, the 1919-25 period is hugely understudied, both US and Europe. There is little appreciation for how close Bolshevism (and variants) came to winning the day in much of Europe. Nor the the correct observation by… Read more »
Sam; Bingo on your second point_! How many today know that Germany had repeated Communist uprisings right after the war and that it was not at all clear that they could be stopped. Or who know that Hungary had a bloody Bolshevik ruler for six months or that Trotsky had a Red Army targeting Berlin (to cement the German Communists in power) marching to unite Germany and Russia under a vastly expanded USSR_? The idea of Russian numbers equipped by German industry under the direction of German officers absolutely terrified the Brits, but, as you say, they were in little… Read more »
Okay, I admit it: I don’t get the Teddy Roosevelt line. In my defense I am Australian, so I hope that this protects me somewhat from the awfulness of my ignorance.
Shorter answer: Teddy Roosevelt went for another term as a third party called the “Bull Moose” party. Longer answer: After President and all around bad ass Teddy Roosevelt declared Taft to be his successor as president, he went off to get out of politics. During Taft’s presidency, Roosevelt became upset at Taft for being a corrupt piece of shit and so ran against him, but couldn’t grab the Republican nomination. In a move which some argue put that murderer Wilson into power and threw us into World War 1, Teddy started the Bull Moose party specifically to run for president… Read more »
Yes, it does. Much appreciated.
The symbol of his party was the Bull Moose Party, aka the Progrssive Party.
As opposed to the Republican (Elephants) and Democrats (Jackasses, er, Donkeys).
I think the bulk of the dissenting comments here illustrates why the Nazi is such an effective Tar Baby and why whites brawl endlessly in the briar patch while the world burns. At bottom, Europeans manager their identity at a moral level and this moral community impulse appears powerful enough to override biological self-defense. I take heart from the fact that Zman seems to understand why this is folly. Biology assign you your first loyalty, abandon it at your own expense. Nobody in the world of tomorrow will care if you opposed or supported “nazis.” They will simply cut you… Read more »
The anti-white ideology held by American and European white leftists isn’t what I’d call biological. Neither is all the trans bullshit.
You may want to consider that it is biological, if only because Caucasians are the only ones to exhibit this type of behavior–that is, self-denigrating and alien worshiping–possibly a product of unprecedented out breeding. It can be seen as far back as Tacitus, and then beginning in the Middle Ages exogamous mating became the rule to the level of fifth cousins. To find the fault in a thing go to it’s extreme, and the SJW is that. The opposite of extreme out breeding is extreme inbreeding where the Moslem exists in clans, related by first cousin, and nothing is trusted… Read more »
Hurricane Progressive Windbag chainsaws its way across the nation, leaving a pile of rubble in its wake, mostly in inner cities. It has one job – annihilation. The dirt people will go about the task of rebuilding a sane country with realistic expectations for normal people. The house of cards pasted together with the spittle of SJW’s has already collapsed. MSM and left-wing Hollywood has been ghosted by the public, but still doesn’t know it. We’re in charge now, but that’s ok. All the snowflakes really want to do is go back to their mom’s basement. The LARP’s over, they’re… Read more »
The debate here in the U.S. is kind of silly. I find these debates in Europe depressing. Their political spectrum extends from Communist to Socialist to National Socialist. They have their choice of big government statists and no other choices.
Another reminder of the wave of demographic change that is sweeping across the landscape.
http://www.denverpost.com/2017/09/11/fewer-white-students-enrolling-in-colorado-colleges/
Demographics are not on our side. This is simple math. We will not vote our way out of this, nor will a republican (small “r”) form of government survive these demographic changes.
Evict California and we have a shot at maintaining the Republic.
“We will not vote our way out of this”
Agreed. The real danger is the delusion that we are going to talk our way back to a sane society that rights the ship before we hit the iceberg. This mindset just provides false hope that keeps people in stasis until the numbers are overwhelmingly tilted toward the hive-minded. Treading water is not a substitute for working the problem.
I’m not sure it’s possible to debate the core phenomenon that is ailing us in this current age in which genuine hardship is nearly extinct. All of the pathologies that afflict our species at present have their genesis in the transformation of the tradition evolutionary selection mechanism (which favored robustness) to a model that now favors hive traits and behaviors (conformity and drone actions). Of what use is it to debate instantaneous politics when the underlying disease is consumptive?
Z says – “Progressive took the dead ideology of fascism and turned into a political concept to include the set of people who oppose the Progressive project. As the opposition adjusted, the definition adjusted to meet the new threat.” Spot on. The Regressive (they are not Progressive) definition of Fascism is like computer technology, a model created a few years ago is already obsolete as the newer models are always evolving. Who in their right mind would have thought a few years ago that to object to having a 40 year old male pervert share the Woman’s restroom with 8… Read more »
Oh, yeah? You try telling that to my Normie Conservative Twitter timeline. I’ll wait… 🙂 I tried to explain that National Socialism under Uncle A was a synthesis, so it could not be considered “left wing” or “right wing” using our current paradigm. Then I left Twitter for a week, because it’s just not worth it.
Seems a bit early in this war to put hard labels on ourselves or the enemy. Feel like I’ve read that these are bad ideas.
Two things: I think John Lukacs said something like “We’re all fascists now” somewhere along the line, meaning that bits and pieces of what made up fascism can be found in any system.
Also that clear lines of demarcation can be difficult to maintain in political analysis. I’ve felt for some time that the Jacobins in France were basically right wing, and I’ve finally found an historian that agreed with me. Gwynne Lewis in The French Revolution, Rethinking the Debate published in 2004.
All these movements using different names
(marxism, fascism, socialism, progressivism and YES islam) amount to violating 3 Commandments: don’t covet, don’t steal, don’t murder.
Granted, Progs and Euro socialist didn’t reach murder stage (yet). They “only” steal thru taxation.
Islam and bolshevism started with murder in order to steal.
Thats why all these numerous movements have anti-semitism in common: why or why do the Jews have more than some others do?
“How to survive as a people in a world dominated by races unable to escape the neolithic without white people, is not something contemplated by Bolsheviks or fascists.” Wrong. “Fascists,” aka anyone who embraced the truth of eugenics, which obviously included the Nazis, as well as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant, were concerned with this thing exactly – the racial, biological degeneration of humanity. The only difference is that now it’s not just Northwestern European whites against the whole world, but probably some alliance of all Eurasian whites with Ashkenazim and East-Asians, and even that is far from certain, and… Read more »
Wrong. Paul Gottfried has read Benito Mussolis motivations to invade Ethiopia and Somalia and it was to develop them and bring civilisation. I have meet a somali here in Denmark. He lived as a criminal in Italy and got asylum in Denmark. He has a wife and 4.children,- both boy has a criminal record. But, his father was young under the italian invasion of somalia and was adopted by the italian post-master in Mogadishu that thought him italian and other things. The italian fascists was do-gooders too.
Benito is far from the whole of fascism. Remember, “diversity is a strength,” and there was a lot of ideological diversity within fascism.
“HITLER WAS A SOCIALIST ” “Now that more than 60 years have passed since the military defeat of Nazi Germany, one might have thought that the name of its leader would be all but forgotten. This is far from the case, however. Even in the popular press, references to Hitler are incessant and the trickle of TV documentaries on the Germany of his era would seem to be unceasing. Hitler even featured on the cover of a 1995 Time magazine. This finds its counterpart in the academic literature too. Scholarly works on Hitler’s deeds continue to emerge many years after… Read more »
“Hitler” and “fascism” are simply verbal cudgels to be used against alpha white males. Any direct response leads to the “are you still beating your wife?” routine. The only shot we have is to let them wear out the verbal game, and they are working hard to do that right now. Al added a voice to my thinking that “fascism” is no longer a political/social/economic philosophy or system to the young, but simply a stink bomb that gets thrown around on occasion.
You can leave out the “alpha.”
One of the great questions this leads to is The west will never outbreed the “r” selected hordes of Africa and south/central America. To survive in competition with “r” populations the west, “k” populations must be highly territorial, as “r”‘s take over not by strength but by numbers, as a parasitic population, a parasitic “infection” in you will. The only way to prevent that is to never allow them into a “k” society, to treat them as a disease. The other major aspect of that is economic. The modern debt based economic system is inherently an “r” based economic system… Read more »
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the study of fascism, Communism, or Hitler and the Nazis as irrelevant in today’s ideological context. That just isn’t so, speaking as a historian. We are in the last 14 months of the centennial of the First World War, a war that redefined everything. The labels change, but the impulses behind them generally do not. However, those same ideologies born of Marx were the driving force behind Barack Hussein Obama’s entire life. The’ man’s conception and birth was literally a political act, and he was President less than a year ago. So… Read more »
This is why I have no patience with this stuff. Progressives scream at the B team, “You only oppose us because you’re a bunch of racist, sexist Hitler fascists!” The B team shouts back, “Oh yeah? You’re Marxists!” Obama probably could not spell Marx, much less talk in any detail about economics. Marxism never had much of a purchase in the US. The aesthetic and the language were popular for a spell in the 60’s and 70’s, but otherwise, Marx cast no shadow in the US. What we call the Left has its roots in Puritanism and the social gospel,… Read more »
Bingo. We HAD a Marxist movement in the US — it was the “Old Left,” they had some moderate influence in the Gilded Age, but it quickly devolved into cranky professors at Columbia and NYU naming their red diaper babies “Melsor” (Marx Engels Lenin Stalin October Revolution, and no, I’m not making that up). The closest thing we ever had to a genuine Marxist public figure was Eugene V. Debs, and as for how close he got, well, imagine Bernie Sanders getting drunk and raving about Haymarket Square. The New Left is Calvin, Marcuse, and Mao, pretty much in that… Read more »
What has made American Progressives so adaptive is their fundamental rejection of materialism. Theirs is a spiritual movement that wears whatever ideology is convenient. When you think of Progressivism as a religion, it makes a lot more sense. It also explains why the opposition has never been effective. In time, those in opposition convert and become warriors of the Left.
Which is the one thing the Nazis got right. You fight religion with religion. Lenin said Bolshevism was “soviet power plus electrification;” Hitler wasn’t that pithy, but he could’ve said Nazism is “feudalism plus autobahns.” They’re both weird, curdled versions of Romanticism, and while they both look like kitsch now, they had very clear aesthetics that highlighted the mystical, religious nature of their movements — by design. Of course, we HAD a perfectly good religion that could’ve squashed the Left back in the days, but whaddaya gonna do? “Love thy neighbor as thyself” has less appeal than “screw your neighbor,… Read more »
That’s always been the great divide between American and Europe. The Europeans intellectuals have always been looking for a replacement for the Church. America started out with a handy civic religion that was an outgrowth of Puritanism. The explicit references to the Christian God have been dropped, but it retains all of the spiritualism and mystery of a religion. Go back and read Progressive in the FDR era and they are still reliant on Christianity for moral authority.
This secular version of Progressivism is fairly new and prone to fits of lunacy.
Zman, I have been reading your description of prog-from-Puritan for the past couple of years without tumbling to your essential point: we are not struggling against the Marxism that threatened to consume Europe in the 20th century as much as we are struggling against home-grown Calvinists/Matherism.
It’s not Red Square we have to worry about; it’s Oak Bluffs.
I have a left-wing neighbor. He has been very helpful to myself, and other neighbors, a good guy. He is not capable, nor desirous, of seizing my property, nor my freedoms. We often go fishing and discuss our differing points of view calmly while waiting for a fish to bite. The only threat to me he offers is his single vote for policies I find distasteful. According to Gilens and Page, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy his vote has little effect on governance, and neither does mine. The oligarchs set the agenda. They are the threat both to my neighbor’s property and freedom, and… Read more »
All that changed in the North East is that their God changed.
It went from the Almighty to the State.
Z Man; An even more excellent and meaty post. FWIW, I entirely agree that progressivism now is best thought of as a religion. Lots of their insane sounding, magical, voodoo-like babbling, such as the dogma of ‘white privilege’, for example, fall into place if ‘Progism’ is really a religion. But are Progs actually intelligent enough to have thought about materialism and then rejected it in favor of skin-color, dirt-location voodoo_? After all, they also claim to ‘f**king love science, where materialism is the default setting. And they do this on the internet which relies on lots non-material things such as… Read more »
While traditional Marxism may not be Obama’s thing, I see something different than the Puritanical scold. I see a guy personifying the “gimme some of that” attitude. From the “you didn’t build that” declaration to the “in your face” vacations, it was all about helping himself to the fruits of the labors of others. And doing so with an “up yours” attitude because he could get away with it. Just a fundamentally angry guy.
I’ve never taken Obama seriously, so I’m not going to pretend to know his mind. He was nothing more than a novelty act. The Progs found a black guy they could claim was the fulfillment of prophecy, one who would follow the script and not misbehave. Exactly no one cared what Obama had to say about anything. It’s why no one ever quoted him. Even that mush-mouthed moron, George Bush, said some things his fans would quote in public. Obama is the least quoted President because he was always just an ornament. I would argue that he is more proof… Read more »
I dunno, I quote Obama all the time. Didn’t he say “we are the change we hope to see”? He definitely said that his election was “the moment the planet begins to heal.” Incoherent, self-contradictory grandiosity… those two quotes are the perfect summary of the modern Left, and I’ll always love President Sort-of-God (another wonderful quote, though not by Obama Himself) a little bit for that.
It takes a special kind of tone deafness to be able to quote Obama without irony. His words could never stand on their own, without the magic of the theater. I can make Reagan’s words my own, and repeat them in my own voice without blushing, something not possible with Obama’s. He was Hamlet rendered President.
Following your train of thought, then Jimmeh Carter is the real face of Progressivism in this country. The Dems have never truly recovered from him. Their presidential candidates have been circus sideshows ever since.
Like Carter, Team Obama gamed the primary system, exploiting rule changes before the establishment knew what was happening. Carter racked up delegates in the early primaries and caucuses, that were traditionally just for show. By the time the field figured it out, he had a big lead. The same thing happened in 2008. Team Clinton was unaware of the change in rules to award delegates proportionately by district. Obama could lose a state, but get the same number of delegates, as long as he won some districts. It was not until Super Tuesday that Team Clinton discovered their error. By… Read more »
I’d give you that Obama’s Marxism is more along the Maoist line than Marxism/Leninism, as his revolutionary tendencies are wrapped up in his racial animosities, as was his father’s, although the same could be said about Lenin and Trotsky as non-Russians as well to a extent. That’s why I was careful to write “born of Marx”. Every revolutionary brings his own flavor, which of course explains why Hitler isn’t a conservative any more than Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Leibknicht were. he was no less bound and determined to bring about a social revolution as they, just based based on race… Read more »
I’d say there were two waves of Marxism in America. The traditional Marxism that guys like Whitaker Chambers, Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss and Henry Wallace joined, and the later Frankfort School which gave us the cultural Marxism. The first wave was sort of killed off by the post-Stalin speech of Kruschev, the second is obviously still with us.
It would be worthwhile to explore the ties that the early hippie movement had with nascent, Progressive Christianity, traces of which can be seen in the lyrics of popular music during a brief window of the early 60’s. People were searching to fill a void, and the aesthetic of the beatniks was hardly spiritually fulfilling. This tryst between hippy and Christian was fleeting, and the 60’s would find much more material diversion to fill those empty spaces for people desperate to find themselves. More likely, most realized that losing oneself entirely in the haze was less work than “finding oneself.”… Read more »
Tam; To follow along your and Sam Adams thought trend. Could one answer be to produce an outline history of the last 120 years that accurately but succinctly sorts out where commies, fascists, progs. came from and what they thought they were trying to do. You know, one purged of the leftist poison but not grossly tilted to ‘the right’ (whatever that means). Getting the truth out ‘no lables’ might help to remove the rhetorical power of the ‘natzi’ accusation. In my own, very limited discussions with normies on the subject, when somebody brings up the accusation, I say, “You… Read more »
The Left-Right Political Spectrum didn’t even survive the French Revolution when it was replaced by “the mountain”. Various 2D schemes to replace the political spectrum have been suggested over the decades. I like Jerry Pournelle’s best. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle_chart
Sadly he passed away this September 8th. They all have their flaws though.
If you’re alluding to that the “Vox Day tantrum” thing, bear in mind that we all get it, people who LARPed as Nazis and shit were covert agents, Charlottesville was a trap.
We just need three things now:
1. Retake White Countries for White people only
2. Implement the American System of Economics in every country
3. Remove Jews from positions of power.
Did you bother to read the post?
Another spectacular post, Z. Ya knocked that one right outta the park! (And as you took your victory lap around the bases you tripped over that tar baby somewhere between 3rd base and the home plate). And- because proggie umpires can’t tell the difference between fascism and anti-semitism…Team Dissident Right forfeits. In any fight, whether it’s key airplanes or martial arts or even a street fight, the outcome is not determined by speed or strength or agility – the victory goes to the faster thinker. He wins by getting inside your decision loop, and forcing you to react to his… Read more »
This is why the Alt-Right are called Nazis. Idiot posters like you who blame everything on the Joooooooooooooooz!!!!!!
The rise of NS and Fascism was a answer to the rise of Marxism/Bolshevism, it was about uniting the working class, corporations, state, clergy, military, against the Soviet Union.
You’re right, Fascism, Communism, and Nazism are all dead, the only thing today is the slow march towards e Globalized future that our Neoliberal elite wants so much.
How the Left understands Fascism is irrelevant, how the Right understands it is vitally important. Part of the reason why the Right has been on a losing streak for the two hundred years is because it hasn’t been able to distinguish friend from foe, and ultimately ends up supporting the causes that undercut it. Fascism, may be dead, but it was one head of the hydra of Modernism which still lurks with us today. To understand Fascism as a rearguard action is to totally misunderstand it. Roger Griffin, convincingly in my opinion, shows that it was an attempt to build… Read more »
Which is why the Founding Fathers rejected biology, among other metrics, and, at root philosophy at least, sought freedom for everyone. The lefties have twisted it around to mandate quotas and set-asides for favored groups, and also to try to prohibit the recognition of biology as one of the determining factors in people’s lives. Their genius has been to label things the opposite of what they truly are, and actually have people buy in to their fiction. Orwell nailed it.
Equality of each individual before the law is a good thing to aim for. Equality of life success, guaranteed by the law, is not so good.
“Which is why the Founding Fathers rejected biology, among other metrics, and, at root philosophy at least, sought freedom for everyone.” I’m not sure what you mean here. I think there had only been about 4 literary references to the “science of biology” when the American Revolution began. So I don’t think they thought of things in terms of “biology”. But, I don’t want to split hairs. The Founding Fathers were very cognizant of Natural History. They were also aware of race. They did not pretend to seek freedom for everyone. They didn’t even allow women the vote. They certainly… Read more »
There was what the Founding Fathers were trying to do, and what could actually get done amongst the fractious states in the late 18th century. The restrictions and limits were definitely based on race and gender, but the basic idea was that God created man to live his life freely (but with serious responsibilities). You do make a good argument, though, so I will backtrack a bit, and say that some Founding Fathers did not seek to sharply restrict the basic idea of American freedom by applying a series of tests, based on biological factors such as intelligence, appearance, or… Read more »
OT but Buppert’s site ZeroGov is gone. Did dey get google’d?
Your point seems so obvious but discourse in the Twitter era requires divisive labels to keep within the word limits. It’s much easier and lazier to label someone or something fascist than to try and discredit them with a label. A label worth a hundred words?
“Fascism” is a term that was originally coined by the Italian dictator Mussolini to describe his adaptation of Marxism to the conditions of Italy after World War I. Lenin in Russia made somewhat different adaptations of Marxism to the conditions in Russia during the same period and his adaptations came to be called Marxism/Leninism. Mussolini stayed closer to Marx in that he felt that Italy had to go through a capitalist stage before it could reach socialism whereas Lenin attempted to push Russia straight from semi-feudalism into socialism. Mussolini’s principal modification of Marxism was his rejection of the notion of… Read more »
The alt-white movement in many ways is fascism packaged in a neat marketing slogan. The alt-white accepts and celebrates every single racial and social argument of the white supremacists. Fascism is not dead, just living under an alias as this blog proves.
Every time I read one of your posts, UpYours, I wonder why your resentment of white people compels you to comment on this blog…it’s a bit sad. This isn’t the only blog you do this on either, is it?
He’s resentful because the moyel took too much.
The section of the country most opposed to the Kaiser and the Fuhrer was the South the people of Jim Crow.
Evidently, my comment wasn’t as sarcastically amusing as I thought it was, and I’m not sure what Southern opposition to the Kaiser & Dolphie H have to do with anything, but I appreciate the information, nonetheless, Philip.
It was not particularly ideological since Hitler and the Kaiser had little in common. It was a fight and they wanted in on it.
Why would the South want to fight in wars that only benefited their Northern masters? The South has been providing a disproportionate amount of soldiers for America’s empire building adventures for decades. Maybe their commonsense makes them realize that a larger number of their sons are going to be the ones coming on in body bags. Plus, many Southerners recognize that America’s wars are merely money making opportunities for our (((masters))) and protect us from nothing.
Go read James Webb and it will make some sense:
https://www.amazon.com/Born-Fighting-Scots-Irish-Shaped-America/dp/0767916891
What you say may or may not be true now, but the situation described above happened 2 + generations ago for the Fuehrer and 3 + generations ago for the Kaiser. (If a generation = 30 years).
Actually, the South has always had a disproportionate number of their population that served in war. I can’t find any demographic data for WWI and WWII. Apparently, many records were lost, but I have read this in more than one book. When I did a search (with 3 different search engines), I found some many references to “African American” soldiers, which, of course, is laughable. This is what Wikipedia says. There are only two references there. “It is often described that the Southern United States as a whole have a military tradition, which is represented in the much higher representation… Read more »
[…] We find this hard to understand, because all of our modern thinking is strictly ideological: […]
Why would current Chinese communism not be considered fascism?
China has long since stopped with most communist dogma and has embraced capitalism.
ZMan, you have the leftist habit of ad hominem attacks on people who should be your allies. Why the hostility and contempt for Dinesh D’Souza? He’s far and away the hardest-hitting critic of Progressivism and the Democrats and has convincingly shown the authoritarian, propagandizing nature of both. In the past you’ve also had ‘mal mots’ for Gavin McInnes and others. It’s the one weak aspect of your writing.
Actually, the Left has always been pretty good about not attacking their allies. It is where the alt-right picked up the idea “no enemies on the right.” There’s your first error. Your second error is you have fallen prey to that grifter DiNnesh D’Souza, a man who will attack anyone for a buck. In the 90’s he was perfectly happy to take money from liberals to attack conservatives.
You should stop making so many mistakes. It is a bad look.
Fascism is being reborn as a reaction to the same forces that spawned it. It was always an immune response to a certain (((infection))). The (((infection))) won and, like AIDS, destroyed the immune system of the host. Now that the secondary infections are reaching critical mass, whatever is left of the immune system is trying to mount a response.
Fascism is based on the Spartan system. It’s basically a purified and stripped down version of Western Civilization mobilized against a threat. Franco’s Spain is an example of fascism successfully fighting off an infection.
I take “the world’s most important graph” with a grain of salt. Trends are affected by events; war, disease, natural disasters, etc and Africa of all places is subject to all of them.
A billion people dying in Africa, which is what it will take to alter that graph, is unlikely to happen without altering the human arrangements here on earth.
Perhaps the Chinese will run their new continent less irrationally than the West has. They are certainly unsentimental enough.
given their total dependence on shipped in food, medicine, technology, etc I don’t see how africa doesn’t lose a billion people.
In my mind, left vs. right is pretty simple: Right: The individual is the prime unit of society; free markets are the best and usually the only means of delivering high quality goods and services; liberty is more important than equality of outcome. Left: The state is the prime unit of society; free markets are often corrupt; equality of outcome in the near term is paramount; your personal liberty, such as it exists, is secondary to the needs of the collective. Where does that leave Nazism? Sounds more like Left to me. Just because it opposed communism doesn’t mean it’s… Read more »
Well in my mind, the Left is people who wear spinach on their head, while the Right is not. So, Karl Marx was a right winger!
What you’re doing is accepting the hive minded world view of Progressives and then trying to cast yourself as the good guy.
“Left” and “right” may be worn-out terms. That’s hard for me, because I use them a lot. Unfortunately, they mean different things to different people — and different things to the same person at different times.
Sometimes we can get along fine with this kind of verbal ambiguity. But these two terms are adding to the confusion, not clarifying it.
It’s time to find something more precise.
“because the communists defeated the Nazis in WW2, they successfully defined themselves as being anti-fascist, and the left has been dining on this lie ever since. Communism was (and still is) the original Antifa movement.”
– One Cʘsmos
Communism versus Fascism was a family fight. It’s unfortunate that we got pulled into it.
In high school I used to call the left-right spectrum a circle, and the left and the right met on the far side. It became a little personal shit-test for my teachers, to see which ones were worthy of engagement.
I too consider this one of your best-reasoned posts. Personally, I’m less inclined to accept 100% the biological determinant, putting it at about 75% and giving 25% to intellectual/cultural, thus leaving room for outliers from non-100%-European descent. I strongly doubt miscegenation will stop or even slow down and in some cases hybridization isn’t always a bad idea. Perhaps I’d believe differently if my grandsons weren’t 1/16th Guaraní, but they are, though they’re both very NW European in appearance and their upbringing will be 100% within that tradition, save for the annual occasions when they dress up in Spanish colonial or… Read more »
Yes, but how does this help us eject the nazis from our important movement?
My point is that the Nazis and Fascists will always be baggage associated with the right. The left will never let go of this because it gives them entry to shut up specific people and groups. This gives them enormous power and advantage in the political marketplace. Almost a monopoly. This is also why we see Republicans doing fealty to Jews and Israel in such a pitiful manner. It is the only way they can gain access to the single tiny political walkway available to them. Straying off this path one millimeter gets the inevitable accusation and banishment. The only… Read more »
Exactly. As long as anything white men want to do can be stopped by mentally linking it to the Nazis & the Holocaust then white men are constrained. There are several places to break that linking process. We can desacralize the Holocaust, we can detoxify the Nazis, we can create an alternative information source that overwhelms the (((current))) one, we can take away resources & status from anti-white propagandists, we can physically remove anti-white propagandists. My vote is for all of the above. But first, pro-white people must understand the power of the Holocaust & Nazi trick being played on… Read more »
Doc;
An outstanding exposition. But wouldn’t it be enough if those attacked using nazi rhetoric felt empowered to reject it outright_?
I would say that to accept the current narrative of the Nazis & Holocaust makes it impossible for someone getting attacked by it to effectively reject it. The premises are: 1) The Holocaust is the worst thing that has happened in the world, the only Absolute Evil ever. 2) The Jews are perpetual & innocent victims who need special care & respect. 3) White people’s nationalism & self-interest automatically leads to Nazism & the Holocaust. 4) White people cannot be trusted to know (or admit) whether or not their actions will lead to Nazism & the Holocaust, so must be… Read more »
Observer; Well, you’re right about the rhetorical trouble you’d find yourself in if you accept Prog premises and got down into the weeds arguing point-by-point that they were’t true in your particular case. But why do this_? When it comes to political discussion, the vast majority of Progs are basically poo-fliging monkeys on two legs. Pick any normal subject; They have no idea what they’re talking about. So I’d recommend making *them* defend their premises. Even forcing them to state in the open such premises as you outline above moves the ball, I’d say. For example, when accused you might… Read more »
That might work one-on-one, though I doubt it. I mean imagine for yourself how effective it would be to give a precise historical definition of fascism to a screeching SJW. On a larger, societal, level white men have to defeat the malignant mind-hack completely. Over the centuries, the White men’s psychology has been thoroughly mapped & analyzed for weaknesses by competitors who live among us but aren’t us. They’ve figured out our weakness: White men will do just about anything we are convinced is the most moral & virtuous act. And will NOT do what we are convinced is immoral.… Read more »
They don’t care about defending premises. All they care about is shutting the other side up.
They are the rhetorical equivalents of Patton. What we need to be.
And we can’t be that as long as we are content to wear shackles.
This is a classic example of the “kafkatrap”. The only cure is to not buy into it, tell them to fuck off and quit lying.