When I was at the Mencken Club conference, I was at Paul Gottfried’s table the first night and it occurred to me I should do a show on fascism. I don’t mean the cartoon fascism popular with some elements of the alt-right or the erotic fantasy version popular with the American Left. I mean historic fascism that actually thrived and existed in Europe during the interwar years. I got a lot of compliments on the shows covering libertarianism and democracy, so I thought I should try to do a big-brained show at least one a month.
What occurred to me at dinner that night is Paul’s book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept, would be a great skeleton key for a podcast. The book is a short, general survey of the topic and the academic arguments surrounding fascism. It’s also largely free of discussion of You Know Who. The Nazis were a crude implementation of fascism that lacked the intellectual depth you see in other fascist movements. They get all the attention for a a number of reasons, but they are anything but the exemplar of the movement.
The result this week is a very general introduction to the topic, along with a very general survey of the main themes. Because we don’t live in a serious age or a serious country, most people know nothing about one of the more important ideological movements of the last century. The goal here is to focus on the high points, without getting too far into the weeds. I have a bunch of links in the contents section for those interested in following up on the books and people mentioned. Obviously, this is a highly abbreviated survey.
Now, as an aside, Counter-Currents has been positing a history of the alt-right that is not entirely unrelated to the topic here. The alt-right has tried to imagine itself as the fascist alternative to the cult-Marx mobs of Antifa. They are wrong about that, but the back story of the movement makes for a fun read anyway, so I encourage people to read it. The four part post is here, here, here and here.There are a few things in there that were new to me and some things that I had forgot. Some of it is quite amusing, so give it a read,
This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.
This Week’s Show
Contents
- 00:00: Opening (Link)
- 02:00: What Is Fascism
- 07:00: Left-Wing Fascism (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
- 17:00: Right-Wing Fascism (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
- 27:00: International Fascism (Link) (Link)
- 37:00: The Fascist Utopia (Link) (Link)
- 47:00: Fascism In America
- 57:00: Closing
Full Show On Spreaker
Full Show On YouTube
https://youtu.be/YBpiWICxguQ
If I say that I have basically given up on politics because I don’t believe there is any way we are going to vote ourselves out of the coming, oh, lets say upheavals, am I being a defeatist or a pragmatist? Little of both?
I look at voting as setting up slightly more favorable conditions for whatever comes next.
Perhaps you are both.
You’re a realist. Even Trump has proven a disappointment in a lot of ways. The typical Republicans who run for office are only minutely superior to your standard Democrats. Often there is no substantive difference between the two. Here’s how I look at it: it appears that Democrats want to destroy the country today, whereas Republicans would rather hold off a year or two before destroying it. Perhaps it would be better to just get it over with,
Just being pragmatic. Trump has shown that voting doesn’t work. He’s morphed into a Cuck and can’t see his base is eroding big time.
The GOP as a whole is a corrupt body composed of people who are owned by businessmen who support policies that are killing the country. Others are just 80’s style Democrats.
And there is no way to fix this by voting. I can only hope Pelosi and her gang manages to blow it all up.
Perhaps Trump is not The Mule. If that is the case, I hope The Mule is just over the horizon somewhere.
He’s not. The Mule may be out there, but the system will not allow him into the halls of power after Trump;. We must not wait for a savior, it is foolish, it makes us passive and weak. We either become the resistance, disruptors and shitlords to the insane white elite, the man hating white feminists, etc. Or it doesn’t get done. I don’t care about the various hues of fascism, I don’t care about Buckely and his group of snob whites who hated the average white in this country. What I care about is that we’re facing a bunch… Read more »
Waiting for the savior though is what a good part of the “right” seems to be most amenable to. I’ve been arguing it out with people who call themselves conservative for a couple of decades now – that if you REALLY believed in what you claim to believe in when you wave that flag around – you wouldn’t be also arguing for any sort of savior. You’d actually be doing something about it. A few years back – when most of the right was all up in arms about going to war in the Mideast – and took any opposition… Read more »
This is because there is no agreed upon Conservative agenda even an abstract one. Leave me alone is not an ideology, Ain’t no one buying Christendom 2, minarachy disguised as Constitutionalism lasted till roughly 1790 or so with Marbury vs Madison and we don’t live in that kind of society anyway Until the Right in general can agree upon a a set of principles they won’t fight as they have no allies . A personal example here, as much as I loathe the left I won’t help the Deus Volt crowd take power since I can’t trust them not to… Read more »
We are, in effect, the Jews facing the Nazis. They are organized and have a common goal to obliterate us, using us as the excuse for what is wrong with everything, as they continue their establishment of their thousand year…whatever. We believe in what we believe in, but we are spread out and mostly leaderless, depending on the institutions of the culture for our own well being. Those same institutions that are being pulled out from under us like a worn out rug. So what we must do is take a lesson from the European Jews. Learn from their mistakes,… Read more »
Except that there really is a goal of exterminating us.
#1. Yes …. ref “… the system will not let him in the halls of power after Trump.” It’s like the scene from the movie The Hunt for Red October, where the Soviet torpedoes have just been destroyed without detonating by contact with their target — the defecting Soviet admiral (Sean Connery) remarks of the pursuing Soviet attack boat captain that: Captain Tupolev (sp) will not make that mistake again; right now he is removing the safeties …. and this is what the LEFT and their infected elite followers in the governing class are doing right now. Their mission is… Read more »
#2. I think this really is a key comment (Rod1963’s). No criticism implied of the Z-Man’s post or overall project. I admire his abilities, intelligence and daily brilliance. This is an essential function and he has done more than most to de-mystify, educate and set the discussion. But we in the minion ranks have to accept at some level that we know enough — that these people and their program are an existential threat, by design, stated intent and demonstrated actions. At the operational level we don’t have an effective project, as many have noted — Republican party still, anyone?… Read more »
Candidate Trump was great. Sadly his daughter married into a family renowned for their $upport of Hillary. Unless Javanka goes back to NYC (but they wont, because this is their job now) we’ll never get MAGA.
I thought Trump was the man until he groveled before AIPAC before he got the nomination. The night befor Hillary did the same.
Trump was always a cuck. His opening speech channeled Coulter, but his policy proposal was Touchback Deportation.
I supported him because everyone else was worse, but he isn’t just now becoming a squish.
Completely cutting one’s self off from our government’s politics seems, to me, to amount to a “worse is better” position. To me, that is far too optimistic. People need to be instructed, led, and emboldened, for a critical mass of “woke” whites to develop. That means preserving the First and Second Amendments. We need a fundamental overthrow in a critical mass of whites, a la a Nietzsche or a Heidegger. This is not going to happen without very intelligent people instructing/leading/inspiring us, and they need access to us, as easy access as possible, for this to happen.
Yes. And this force we face — this human madness “em-bodied” in our elites and their footsoldiers — has as one of the major tasks in their war plan a massive, multi functional effort (sub task or subordinate objective) to identify any who demonstrate that creativity, charisma and power, block any potential means for idea dissemination, destroy them and punish those who listen and follow. It is war by other, relentlessly applied means. The task we face is sobering. They are so good at softening the apparent threat, or distracting us with lots of sex, legal pot and access to… Read more »
It is my observation that most people that use the term “fascism” are doing so without any sense of the historical context in which it first appeared. I doubt 1 in 100 people hurling fascism around as a pejorative know who Mussolini was, much less Oswald Mosley.
It generally is as simplistic as “I heard a teacher say fascism was bad. Orange man also bad. Therefore orange man fascist.”. Unfortunately the people that most need to listen to this podcast are the least likely people to listen to it.
When I read about the Frankfurt School, what comes across to me is people building a new identity for themselves, which has turned into a secular religion now. Instead of it being a positive identity, it is an entirely negative one. I forget the name, but one member of the Frankfurt School came close to breaking with them over their obsession with antisemitism and fascism. What we call Cultural Marxism became an elaborate model to explain why Jews did not fight back against the Nazis. In other words, an electorate ruse to shift their focus from central defects within the… Read more »
My favorite Frankfurt School work is Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom. It’s supposed to be a psychological portrait of the typical Nazi. Instead, it’s a perfect psychological self-portrait of a Frankfurt School Marxist. You’d think a trained psychologist would be able to recognize “projection” when he’s writing 300 pages of it, but there it is. Like I always say, if they could spot the obvious, they wouldn’t be Leftists.
I was born into a family that was a product of the Frankfurt School even though none of them could tell you what that was. Up until a couple years ago I didn’t either.
It’s just another glitch in the matrix or rabbit hole that leads here.
Even as a child I was suspicious of the nazi bogeyman that I was supposed to be afraid of.
Sure, they were no saints, but look at your average American Donk these days… history doesn’t repeat, but it certainly rhymes…
My understanding of the nazis came from Hogan’s Heroes. Sure they are a little dense and easy to put one over on, but evil? no.
It’s interesting how the holocaust and the cold war really shaped our education on socialism, communism, and fascism. While we learned about the Axis powers in a very surface level way, Mussolini and Putin were hardly given the same kind of breadth and depth that Nazi Germany was afforded.
Basically, my only takeaway was Mussolini was fascist. But that hardly says anything. As you say, chain of bad: Hitler bad, Mussolini allied with Hitler, Mussolini fascist, fascist bad.
Hats off to Z for providing a careful and thoughtful taxonomy of this dead-letter phenomenon called “fascism”, which no longer exists, and which, from a structural POV, cannot any longer exist. I suppose it’s useful to have a well-reasoned “short organon” of a long-dead phenomenon for intellectual and historiographical usages. And for countering intellectual and historiographical MIS-uses. It doesn’t much change the present landscape, however, I fear. In modern-day (read “functional”) parlance, the term “fascism” effectively reduces to “whatever the Jews and their zombies/dupes don’t like, any time they say so. Which is all the time.” Fascism, like Racism, exists… Read more »
Thanks for the heads-up on the Shaw plays. I read a tiny bit of him as a teen and thought this guy’s cool as hell and gets it. Then a few years later found out he was a socialist etc, and I just didn’t get how he could be so kick ass, yet such a dweeb politically. I recall seeing his photo for the first time and thinking “THAT’S the guy with all the awesome lines? How?!” Gonna read A&M Act 1 for sure. Hope I get time for the others some day.
One aspect that people tend to forget or ignore is how much the rise of fascism was due to communism and the Red Terror. The Russian revolution(s) followed by numerous atrocities, the civil war, the invasion of Poland, the Spartacist uprising, various assassinations, etc.: all of that was deeply (and rightfully) frightening. And like communism, fascism was another “modern” response to what were seen as the flaws of traditional systems. But of course the left wants to ignore all of that. They want people to think that a bunch of Germans suddenly decided to go over to the side of… Read more »
The Left wants everyone to also think that a bunch of people simply decided to go over to the side of evil and vote Trump. Everything is situational with the Left, including history and historical context. When simply inventing your reality out of thin air is a thing, then it all makes perfect logical sense for them. “Reality based” and all.
Fascism originated and had its greatest success in Catholic Southern European countries. Germany is the only Protestant country that went fascist by consent rather than collaboration. Greece was quasi-fascist during the Colonels dictatorship. And fascism lived on the longest in the Middle East under the names “Nasser, Kemal and Ba’athism”.
That was certainly one major aspect, but there were other major aspects as well, which I find much more interesting. Much of the driving force of the interwar right were former WW1 soldiers. These men, having left behind bourgeois individualism and norms of peace, security, comfort, and consumerism, and experienced an unabashedly violent, mannerbund existence in the “socialistic” military, believed they had experienced a higher, more authentic existence, and sought to recreate it in the world at large, via annihilating all liberalism (classical included) and building a society of fundamentally old values, under new forms. These men captured the hearts… Read more »
Agree. Fascism was a response to Communism. A “third way” that avoided Socialism AND Capitalism. It was obvious in 1919, that Monarchists and Capitalists (the dumb bourgeois) couldn’t defeat Communism – they were obsolete in Europe. So Mussolini came up with fascism and Hitler copy catted it, added some antisemitism and gave Germany NatSoc. Without the Bolshevik Revolution – no Nazi Germany and no Fascist Italy.
The outro is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” by Saga:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYldM7lOkn4
Great discussion. What about Salazar and Portugal? No words on this front. Salazar was a fascist who led what I understand to have been a fairly stable and modern Portugal until the 70s. I think this sort of underscores another theme that zman discussed before. Within wide boundaries, ethnically homogenous Europeans states can prosper within wide bounds of political and economic systems. Portugal is a small peripheral country, which like the Scandinavian countries or perhaps Uruguay, does not attract the attention of international powers. (International powers being Marxist revolutionaries during these periods.) It would be more or less the same… Read more »
Another example is Sinagpore, that can be (loosely) interpreted as the greatest exemplar of the main currents of fascism: corporatism, militarism, class collaboration, nationalism, futurism in design, and even eugenics(!) That there are nominal elections means little in what is an efficient, incorruptible police state. Look at the PAP logo, and try to deny its BUF inspiration. And in the ultimate shaming of the left, only under an authoritarian state has diversity been made to work, of course noting that the PAP has maintained the Chinese supermajority.
Its also a “no children” state with a 1.16 per couple fertility rate despite heavy immigration from highly natal countries and government intervention in ways that would cause a lot of non NrX Right wingers to have an apoplexy attack if they studied in depth I thinking we on the Right spend too much time on political minutia and not enough on how do we get people in mostly urban societies to have children. Religion doesn’t work in any manageable time frame we can’t seem to distribute enough wealth to make up for the cost of urban living and lack… Read more »
Society in our current age has made having children into an undue burden – instead of a benefit. At least for white people with half of a brain in their head.
The exact details could be argued endlessly – but that’s the problem in a nutshell.
And ……….. “distribute enough wealth”. ??
So what – you’re argument is that we don’t have enough welfare? This seems like yet another comment that goes into my “the right is full of too many leftists” circular storage bin.
Wealth is MADE – it’s not “distributed”.
Mr. Zuckerberg did not “make” hundreds of billions of dollars. There is something called “rent seeking”.
The problem with the Right is that too many refuse to admit that their bootstrapping advice is the lost item of a bygone era in which the US had no economic competitors. We need both protectionism from Chinese rapacity, and protectionism from billionaire rapacity.
You’re point is what again? ” In public choice theory and in economics, rent-seeking involves seeking to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth” I stand by what I said : TRUE wealth is made – it’s not distributed. This is an all too typical conversation I’ve had dozens of times with leftists who yell and scream about “distributing wealth” – but when you ask them where wealth comes from – and how it’s made – they start yelling and screaming and waving their arms around and start changing the topic. Correct – Zuckerberg didn’t “make” hundreds… Read more »
Sometimes I think we need an outright wealth cap tied to minimum wage. Anyone making more than I don’t know 25x minimum pays 99% taxes on everything else and benefits count as income too. A flatter wealth curve means less opting out of policy choices by the elite There are risks to that but given we have hardly been innovating I think we can live with less growth and innovation but a flatter distribution, like we had back in Peak America 53’s and 73 or so That said getting the cultural left out of power and repatriation comes before anything… Read more »
Wealth isn’t made without demand for labor at decent wages. And while anyone with a basic grasp of economics knows the labor theory is nonsense, without good wages you have no wealth Given US wages as percentage GDP have dropped by 55% or so since 1973 for the vast majority of workers this tells me we are half as rich as we would be otherwise More importantly fertility rates have been below replacement for nearly 50 years in the US with a single year slightly above (2007) and the system has been propped up with immigration . That too is… Read more »
Again – leftist arguments based on a complete lack of understanding – or a WILLFULLY wrong portrayal of what wealth is. Wealth is CREATED by work input . That means if you dump me out in the middle of the woods with a bucket full of tools and I cut down trees , roll rocks into place – and build a home to live in – I have created wealth. The “demand for labor at decent wages” is completely irrelevant to that fact. A home that is now able to house my family – can shield them from nature –… Read more »
A small family in the woods is not a modern society or a society at all. Just in case you haven’t noticed we live in cities now with 80% of the US population qualifying as urban Dropping Mr Pioneer off in any city in any part of history and he dies That said no one here is suggesting the abolition of all private property , total state control over industry or any of the other shibboleths beloved of libertarian types What is being said is that modernity has a high cost and if you want that modernity, you are going… Read more »
Urbanization and technology not social choices by society made children a cost. In an age where people work mostly for someone else and in an office children as labor is superfluous Only 3% of people are farmers and that work is heavily automated as well so no go there. As of 2014 no more than 1 in 10 are self employed and this counts many kinds of contract jobs, gig work and the like where juniors labor is useless. Also we don’t need our kids to spend hours cleaning the house or frankly have much for them to do and… Read more »
Fair enough that some help should be given by the state to families who work too long and earn too little to raise children without becoming enslaved to debt and consumerism. However, raising wages by itself will do nothing but encourage the current consumer patterns, which are wasteful and antifamily. Other changes I’d institute instead: -family leave (even if not too paid), some of the stuff Orban and Putin are trying (limited results, but it’s something), -an optional but open to anyone healthcare option managed by state authority rather than fed (thus ending all other present bureaucare systems!), -an end… Read more »
Couple of fixes: -When I mentioned ending the Fed, I know that would take us to pre-Wilson gold (or silver if you prefer) standard and not to 50s-60s Bretton Woods. However, the latter may be at least a mid step, if not a compromise. -The wage thing could also be dealt with by keeping wages low but with enough benefits/safety net, either: -provided directly as subsidies by gov (side effect-increased budgets and bureaucracy, therefore oligarchy ensues), -by enforced union membership (side effect-leaders can be bought or on the other hand make exaggerate demands) -or by the gov making a national… Read more »
“corporatism, militarism, class collaboration, nationalism, futurism in design, and even eugenics(!)” Just a quick question. Are we on the Dissident Right supposed to be against eugenics?
The Deus Volt wing is, NrX is fine with it as far as I can tell and the rest are mixed.
I’m personally in favor of it and like NrX think its inevitable
I personally don’t believe Salazar, or Franco, or Engelbert Dollfuss should be classified as fascists. They were authoritarian Catholic traditionalists, explicitly drawing of Catholic social teachings. Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortes would also have to be classified as fascists (yes, they’ve been called proto-fascists). From there, why not call Medieval Christendom fascist? I certainly don’t think Catholic corporatist theorists like François-René de La Tour du Pin, Catholic Distributists like Hilaire Belloc, Catholic Guild Socialists like Arthur J. Penty, etc. should be qualified as fascist either. The issue of Charles Maurras (who loathed Germany by the way, especially the… Read more »
Salazar, Franco and Dollfuss were Catholic Integralists. As Catholic Integralists they were violently opposed to the “Left” but could never go all the way with the Fascists. Their “method” was the same in many ways as the Fascists but their Catholicism stopped them from accepting the Modernist assumptions which underlies both Fascism and Socialism/Communism. Eric VonKL, in my opinion, correctly defined Fascism as of the Left. But unfortunately this terminology has confused rather than cleared thought. Fascism, Communism and modern Liberalism need to be recognised as Left, Right and Centre Modernisms. Roger Griffin has some excellent books on the subject… Read more »
One problem with Kuehnelt-Leddihn is that his conception of the Right means there has been no Right for well over a hundred years. All political and meta-political debate has been on the Left for over a century. This of course means all of us reading this are on the Left. Even if that is true, it makes the Left-Right construction entirely worthless. It’s a passive-aggressive way of attacking the premise in order to avoid the argument. The other problem with Kuehnelt-Leddihn, in my opinion, is he just assumes inherited rule is the only legitimate form of rule. That is the… Read more »
“One problem with Kuehnelt-Leddihn is that his conception of the Right means there has been no Right for well over a hundred years. ” Bingo! That was Chambers’s point exactly. It was also why he was so despondent in his writings. As you correctly pointed out by the early part of the 20th everyone intellectual was socialist. The issue at stake was not how to revive the Old World but what version of the New World were we going to choose. Fascism, Communism or American New Deal Liberalism. Chamber’s understood that they were all different versions of the same thing… Read more »
I will. Thanks for the great comments.
I’m thinking there is a few more podcasts in this material. Maybe even a book.
In case interested I wrote more about this on my blog a while ago. (Feel free to delete this comment.)
https://socialpathology.blogspot.com/2016/06/francis-on-chambers.html
Are the fascists modern in that they’re generally a-religious? Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Germanic Paganism, etc. were heavily appealed to, though of course they weren’t proposing directly resuscitating belief in the pagan gods. It’s notable that Himmler demanded deism, if I remember correctly, from SS men. Julius Evola, Perennial Traditionalist, viewed Fascism, NS, and Falangism as a step in the right direction, toward Tradition. His focus on the kshatriya side of Tradition, and his critical views of Christianity (he softened on traditional Catholicism as he aged, but correctly saw, well before Vatican II, the Church’s rapid degeneration from Pope Pius… Read more »
Roger Griffin deals with this at length. Think of Fascism as being akin to steampunk. The modernism being the “punk” the aesthetics being the “steam” Fascism is simply a different way of dressing up Modernism. (And by Modernism I mean the rationalistic rejection of the Christian conception of reality.) There’s still even place for “religious practice/Mysticism” in this schema as long as it is a rejection of the Christian God. Comte, for instance, set up a “Religion of Humanity” while expressively rejecting Christianity. The French revolutionaries wanted to see up cultic practices to liberty and reason if I remember correctly.… Read more »
After clicking your link above, I realized that I’ve read your blog in the past. I forget what led me to it (I was traveling through NRx I believe), but a year ago, perhaps, I read through many of your posts, going back through the history of your blog. You’re an extremely intelligent and learned man, and I respect your position, but I just don’t see what this radically anti-modern/traditional, yet still very new and reformed variant of Christianity would amount to. I don’t know how one can accomplish this, given the constraints of the binding acts of the magisterium… Read more »
“The traditional Christian God, on the other hand, put limits on what you could and could not do.” There is wild disagreement among Christians on what precisely these “limits” amount to, even among Roman Catholics. I don’t see any method of resolving the issue outside of logic, since gnostic claims of knowing Truth have been used for virtually every position under the sun, and since I don’t see incontestable miracles coming to the rescue. I’ve come to believe that the most logically coherent strain of Christianity (especially post-Vatican II), is Eastern Orthodoxy. If Christianity binds me to allow the West… Read more »
I agree the modern Christianity has problems, Europeans have been fighting about them for years but an analysis of them is for a different time and place. However, the important thing to realise is the the Christian conception of man, and reality, were foundational principles of the West and no man can be for the West if he rejects them.
I’m only about ten minutes into this latest Podcast. However, I’ll go ahead and state that one of my favorite things about Zman is how he mocks mainstream conservatives for embracing too many of our culture’s politically correct pieties. Nobody should fall for nonsense such as “Leftists are the real racists” because “racism” itself is not even objectively definable. Nor should anyone automatically assume that anything labeled “racist” is necessarily pernicious. Standard-issue right-wingers have adopted way too much of the moral code of their rivals. The mainstream Right is therefore a paper tiger compared to the Left. Only something considerably… Read more »
Very helpful review. Thanks. But your take on Americans as too anti-authoritarian to go fascist is a half truth. Current Prog/Democrat Social Justice movement (from the death of White freedom of assembly, etc. since Brown Vs BofE) is highly authoritarian, invasive, controlling and punitive. The trick is to dress it up as care for “victims”. Then half of Americans will embrace it orgasmically.
Here’s a little of Alain de Benoist on “left versus right”: “…the specialists of political science never managed to agree on a notion that could serve as the common denominator for the entire Right (or the entire Left). Multiple propositions have been advanced (liberty or equality, conservatism or progressivism, order or change, perfectibility or imperfectibility of human nature, etc.), but whatever the criteria, there are always exceptions. “In the historical scheme, we have the habit of dating the Left-Right cleavage to the French Revolution, but in reality – in France at least – these terms only spread into the public… Read more »
It is a bit amusing, as you pointed out, that in the old days literal communists were capable of debating real literal fascists without getting apoplectic, whereas now leftists just start foaming and playing “Pin the Label” on whoever they don’t like in sight. Think about this, to see how much America has changed for the worst in just a few short generations: Men who had literally fought Germans in a brutal war understood that George Lincoln Rockwell and his other American Nazi cohorts had a right to assemble, distribute literature, etc.(though of course the organized Jewish community tried to… Read more »
Irish and Scots seem to be very keen on authoritarianism in their own countries. If you judge tribes by how they’ve behaved in the last couple of decades ,rather than how they’re meant to have behaved historically, thing start to make a lot more sense.Celts really seem to like the Leviathan.
You guys should see Hail Caesar. A sort of dimwitted movie star is kidnapped and held for ransom by Frankfurt School types. Here’s the scenes after he wakes up then finds himself in a room of them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evYK2AmxFLU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YQZMbgpmIo
I see the vaunted buffoon is playing himself very well.
It’s not the best Coen brothers film, but the subplot with Hollywood Communists is pure gold for anyone here who’s familiar with the period.
Papaya, agree. I’d give the movie 3 stars. 3.5 if you’ve nothing better to do. Here’s another good (((scene))).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJEiDRi4Itc&start_radio=1&list=RDKJEiDRi4Itc
“Does the depiction of Christ Jesus cut the mustard?” LOL, but still, I can’t abide the Frankfurt School being humanized. There is a good chance we are not going to get out of this. That only leaves the Chinese as a mass of high-IQ people (though they are sick, evil bastards), as Richard Lynn has predicted, or perhaps humanity as we know it will cease to exist via gene-editing and the like. The Frankfurt School are Demonic. Justice demands that they be hated at the very highest, deepest level. Have the Coen brothers caught any flack along the lines of… Read more »
I still think the Nazis are exactly what the name on the box says – National Socialists.
Mussolini was kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party for his stance on foreign policies – not his economics. Does his socialistic economic policy make him a leftist? Or does the nationalistic policies make him right wing? Sure.
That’s really the problem. The Left has convinced everyone that everything boils down to two economic theories.
There is an economic divergence between various levels of redistribution, but also another divergence between mercantilism/free trade. In historical context, mercantilism is the “right wing” position. Of course, that begs the question as to whether or not Xi Jinping is a fascist. But fascism by its nature is revolutionary, which is why you get oddly named parties like the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) which governed like a secularist version of Franco.
It is my position that any effort to construct a universal political spectrum is a failure of imagination. It’s an effort to either defend or attack the present, by making false comparison to the past, or simply ignorance of history. If you want to employ a dialectical method for examining the past, then do so within the context of the past. Otherwise it devolved into arguments about whether Lincoln would have been a democrat or a republican today.
“Waving the bloody shirt” has a long efficacy of working, not just from the Radicals where it originated. The timeline from “bloody shirt” to “rum, romanism and rebellion” is inexact, but of high importance.
Not just the Left, Z-Man, but also the Merchant Right. Metaphysics, not economic theory, is where it’s at. Eric VonKL may have had a thing for the aristocratic systems of societal management but the guts of his argument was the what united the Fascists and the Socialists was a rejection of the Christian conception of man.
Trying to compress things down to a socialism vs not socialism dichotomy is not that useful at this time, when virtually every country on earth (certainly including the United States) has a mixed economy combining elements of public and private ownership, free enterprise and regulation. If you want to use the term socialist in an over-broad way, like American Conservatarians do, then yes, Nationalism IS philosophically “socialist”, in the sense that it believes the economic interests of the individual may have to, in some cases, be a lower priority than the economic interests of the nation as a whole. (But… Read more »
“Bolt Vanderhuge”, “Hack Blowfist”, “Fridge Largemeat”, “Big McLarge Huge”, “Buff Drinklots”, “Stomp Beefknob”, “Flint Ironstag”, “Blast Hardcheese” and “Punt Speedchunk”.
Space Mutiny was the first MST3K episode I saw. A top five episode of all time for sure. The Netflix reboot was an abomination.
I quite liked the two Wizard of the Lost Kingdom movies
I was gonna be good and not go out tonight to listen to Z at the bar. But I log on again and see “We need to talk about fascism.” I’m like, OK! Let me get my coat!
Yes – You hit the basic misunderstanding here. I think there are two different political spectrum lines. In Europe people think of a line with Hitler and Mussolini on the far right and Lenin on the far left. It’s stupid because as you said, there is no space on it for Libertarians or even regular economic conservatives. Things like race, religion, traditions, and order are part of formula on where you fall on the spectrum. In the U.S., most of us think of the line as least government to most. On one end is the Libertarians, then the actual small-government… Read more »
The key is to understanding that the political system works in terms of “multiple axes”, or what the small brain calls “4D chess”. The average voter is barely able to grasp “fiscal conservative but social liberal”, which even socialists like Ocasio-Cortez could conceivably identify with. In Western Europe, the stain of the fascists is a permanent weight on the right-wing parties, as their ancestors were collaborators. Even in the never occupied UK, the Daily Mail was briefly sympathetic to the BUF, and the left will never let them forget it. In the rest of Europe, the impact of decades of… Read more »
It’s like people are trying to play 4D chess in two dimensions!
Several years ago I started referring to the inevitable collapse and civil war as “the coming unpleasantness” which I think I saw Kunstler use in print sometime later.
I just hope we get the right kind of authoritarian strong man to lead us out of the abyss.
We need to get our own payment processor first.
Apart from the fact that it would have been much better to have a text document than a speech, this is a rather deceiving and shallow analysis of fascism. One of the main reasons for this is that the author uses the wrong coordinate system: left-vs-right. Trying desperately to argue/counter-argue with the left/right paradigm in one hand is making sure to miss the central points. So the author comes to some strange conclusions like “not much difference how the country is ruled between communism and Nazism” (13:15), “its hard to see the differences, there are certainly aesthetic differences” (13:20) You… Read more »
Thanks for the “Old House” model for Utopia. It finally put enough things together that resonated for me. Gave me a model to understand the Prog Chaos system. You can just blow everything up and start Forward Fresh…er. Reinvent the wheel so to speak. Or you can make logical required repairs in a thoughtful order. Fix the foundation, guts, systems and then do the cosmetics/esthetics. Progs want to remove all signs of the failure past… I like that line (as I recall it..) It speaks to their ever present Utopian Emotion. Which absent Common Sense (always..) Opposes any sense of… Read more »
Will there be an awakening in time that is the question…Oh and I don’t mean the normies I mean those that read here and are sort of lucid…Or is there just not enough pain yet?
I’m quite a new reader to the blog, and very much enjoyed this podcast on fascism.
Two things stuck in my mind. Firstly, as British, I learned a lot about Oswald Mosley that I had been unaware of, and didn’t know of his desire for a European State.
The second thing that’ll stick in my mind is the analogy regarding renovating an old house vs sweeping it away and building anew in connection with fascism vs communism.
I’d alway thought of fascism as simply a deviant of left wing ideology prior to this podcast.
Many thanks, And.
You have a very nice voice. Better than most I’ve heard doing amateur podcasts. First one I’ve listened to here.
I’m only 10 minutes in, but I appreciate the observation of how we treat politics vs what it is (here) (economics).
If fascism is predominantly an economic governing philosophy around corporatism with emphasis on ethnic identity, then I can see how both left & right embody economic fascism. I’m looking forward to finishing the cast.
Brilliant. I distributed this to every thinking human I know.
It’s pronounced COIN-elt Leh-DEEN. He used to write for National Review.
Not quite. It would be pronounced “COIN” if the diphthong “ue” were reversed…”eu”. But because it is spelled “Kuehnelt”, the German pronunciation is “CUE-nelt”. The other name is correct as you have it, thus “Cue-nelt Luh-DEEN”.
See this…
https://www.google.com/search?q=german+english&oq=german+english&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i65l2j0l3.4677j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Buckley said he always saw Erik with a sack of books. Even on planes. Said when talking with him you had to resign yourself to not get to talk, as Erik was arrogant and voluminous. (I’m going on memory, he put it softer than that. Though he probably did use the word voluminous.) Whenever I see Churchill’s quote, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on,” I always think of Erik’s funny little painting, “Stupidity Races Through the World”. Seen here, 4th picture down:
https://phillysoc.org/erik-ritter-von-kuehnelt-leddihn-art-gallery/
Excellent podcast, Zman. I know you may not want to hear this but I believe you touched on a perspective that Jordan Peterson shares. It’s using the terms “openness” standing in opposition to “conscientiousness” when viewing the (yes, arbitrary) right-left spectrum in terms of human behavior.
Is someone going to quote Chesterton on openness or what?
You mention several times that Mosley wasn’t an anti-Semite.
What about the Battle of Cable St?
For those of you following current events, and perhaps still tethered to the notion that we are going to talk our way out of the mess we are in, I would suggest reading the article at American Thinker about the mob persecution of Richard Morrisett. This is a real world example of the hive mob playing for keeps and being aided by the tacit complicity of social institutions that should be a firewall against this type of organized criminal assault. In the throes of extremis, Morrisett used his skill set to make an early exit, which is sad and regrettable.… Read more »
Great episode Z. A musing: On the topic of “the American progressives were fascists,” it seems to me that is a (possibly honest) interpretation of the historical record. At the end of WWI, as you described in the podcast, European civilization was in rubble. the fascists attempted to rebuild with the remaining pieces whereas the communists wanted to rebuild from scratch. Hence fascism was right/conservative and communism was (as it always is) WAY left. In America, however, (as well as the rest of the Anglosphere) the institutions of the civilization were intact, so when the progressives began to tinker with… Read more »