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ballisticbaylor 's review for:
Fascism: A Very Short Introduction
by Kevin Passmore
“Observers, domestic and foreign, felt that something unprecedented had happened in [1922] Italy but they were uncertain what it was.”
Eerie words that ring true to earlier this month. Trump’s reelection is a harbinger of something, but what it is, that’s yet to be seen. Kamala ended her campaign, which started in joy, with proclamations of doom. The words fascist and dictator have been thrown around a lot and not without grounds. The guardrails are off, they say. But how much will he abuse that? If we’re honest, we don’t yet know if her proclamations were prophecies. Much depends on how we define fascism:
“How many individuals and regimes we categorize as fascist depends on definition. If we define fascism simply as a desire to manipulate the mass or as dictatorship, then a great many would qualify. If we add the criteria of racism and/or antisemitism a different set would be included.”
Even that minimum definition has not seen evidence of complete fulfillment. I realize I’m thinking too much of the present as I judge this 2002 book, but it’s obvious why I listened to it right? The many similarities to our own moment were too close for comfort:
“They hoped that Mussolini would establish order and that normalization would follow. They wanted a more authoritarian version of the old system in which their own social and political power would be guaranteed, but they believed parliamentary government and a degree of political liberty to be essential to the maintenance of their influence.”
“Mussolini did not side clearly with any tendency. However, he did alter the electoral law so that fascist won a parliamentary majority in 1924.”
“Hitler did not speak explicitly of extermination, but the language he used to describe Jews — leaches, parasites — legitimated mass murder.”
“In pursuit of respectability, the contemporary far right denies that it is racist. Like the new right, it claims that the real racists are architects of globalization and multiculturalism, who undermine national differences.”
“At first sight, fascism is quintessentially male. It evokes the uniformed street fighter of the interwar years and skin head of modern times. Fascism dislikes feminism as much as it does socialism and sees women’s primary function as domestic and reproductive. While the modern far right claims that the sexes, like races, are equal but different, fascist nearly always categorize themselves as not feminist, but their attempts to refute feminism drag them into implicit dialogue with it in spite of themselves. Consequently, relations between the sexes repersent another form of disagreement among fascists.”
The whole sale deconstruction of the establishment, the norm-violations, the dehumanizing rhetoric, the ironic war on multiculturalism (they call it Woke now), and the gender wars. It’s all too familiar, huh?
But! Let us not jump the gun, as even Moore does not in his concluding words:
“We cannot oppose the far right by defining it as fascist, however many similarities there undoubtedly are. We must focus, rather, on the dangers that it represents in the present and indeed on the recognition that non-fascist movements, including groups that play by democratic rules, can also threaten decent values.”
As tempting as the fascist label is to use right now, it’s too backwards looking to be productive. In the rise of Mussolini and Hitler they didn’t yet have the phrases Fascist or National Socialist. Some critics of the time compared the men to Caesar or Napoleon, but the truth was that they were something new. So if you feel some resistance necessary as I do, we’d be better to continue defining what Trumpism and MAGA are and treat them as the unique threat that they are in history.
Eerie words that ring true to earlier this month. Trump’s reelection is a harbinger of something, but what it is, that’s yet to be seen. Kamala ended her campaign, which started in joy, with proclamations of doom. The words fascist and dictator have been thrown around a lot and not without grounds. The guardrails are off, they say. But how much will he abuse that? If we’re honest, we don’t yet know if her proclamations were prophecies. Much depends on how we define fascism:
“How many individuals and regimes we categorize as fascist depends on definition. If we define fascism simply as a desire to manipulate the mass or as dictatorship, then a great many would qualify. If we add the criteria of racism and/or antisemitism a different set would be included.”
Even that minimum definition has not seen evidence of complete fulfillment. I realize I’m thinking too much of the present as I judge this 2002 book, but it’s obvious why I listened to it right? The many similarities to our own moment were too close for comfort:
“They hoped that Mussolini would establish order and that normalization would follow. They wanted a more authoritarian version of the old system in which their own social and political power would be guaranteed, but they believed parliamentary government and a degree of political liberty to be essential to the maintenance of their influence.”
“Mussolini did not side clearly with any tendency. However, he did alter the electoral law so that fascist won a parliamentary majority in 1924.”
“Hitler did not speak explicitly of extermination, but the language he used to describe Jews — leaches, parasites — legitimated mass murder.”
“In pursuit of respectability, the contemporary far right denies that it is racist. Like the new right, it claims that the real racists are architects of globalization and multiculturalism, who undermine national differences.”
“At first sight, fascism is quintessentially male. It evokes the uniformed street fighter of the interwar years and skin head of modern times. Fascism dislikes feminism as much as it does socialism and sees women’s primary function as domestic and reproductive. While the modern far right claims that the sexes, like races, are equal but different, fascist nearly always categorize themselves as not feminist, but their attempts to refute feminism drag them into implicit dialogue with it in spite of themselves. Consequently, relations between the sexes repersent another form of disagreement among fascists.”
The whole sale deconstruction of the establishment, the norm-violations, the dehumanizing rhetoric, the ironic war on multiculturalism (they call it Woke now), and the gender wars. It’s all too familiar, huh?
But! Let us not jump the gun, as even Moore does not in his concluding words:
“We cannot oppose the far right by defining it as fascist, however many similarities there undoubtedly are. We must focus, rather, on the dangers that it represents in the present and indeed on the recognition that non-fascist movements, including groups that play by democratic rules, can also threaten decent values.”
As tempting as the fascist label is to use right now, it’s too backwards looking to be productive. In the rise of Mussolini and Hitler they didn’t yet have the phrases Fascist or National Socialist. Some critics of the time compared the men to Caesar or Napoleon, but the truth was that they were something new. So if you feel some resistance necessary as I do, we’d be better to continue defining what Trumpism and MAGA are and treat them as the unique threat that they are in history.