gyrofry posted:
i remember you had a really interesting thread about fascism in either olde d&d or olde lf tsargon, do you happen to have a link to it

i have the link but im not sure if its still around, http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3330094

Groulxsmith posted:
this is probably a dumb question but what's the difference between national syndicalism and national corporatism

presumably that the first would be a government body assembled only out of syndical representatives recognizing no greater authority while the second would be a governmental body featuring syndical representatives, with the syndicates being subject to non-syndicate authority in the corporative structure mussolini / gentile were after.

Tsargon posted:

gyrofry posted:
i remember you had a really interesting thread about fascism in either olde d&d or olde lf tsargon, do you happen to have a link to it

i have the link but im not sure if its still around, http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3330094

its there, do you mind if i repost it here itt

Tsargon the Great posted:

"Of all the unanswered questions of our time, perhaps the most important is: ‘What is Fascism?’ One of the social survey organizations in America recently asked this question of a hundred different people, and got answers ranging from ‘pure democracy’ to ‘pure diabolism’. In this country if you ask the average thinking person to define Fascism, he usually answers by pointing to the German and Italian régimes. But this is very unsatisfactory, because even the major Fascist states differ from one another a good deal in structure and ideology. As used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. . . I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else." - George Orwell


"Fascism sees in the world not only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifice, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists. . . The Fascist conception of life is a religious one" - Benito Mussolini


"Fascism is a bunch of guys with small penises or something idk" - Umberto Eco

Ezra Pound, noted fascist, poet and crazy man, wrote extensively in the inter-war years about a grand, century spanning conspiracy by international elites to suppress, revise, and rewrite history as needed by whatever power structure was in fashion at the time. In shape, it went like this: politicians needed bankers' money to get elected so they persecuted those who spoke against capitalism. bankers needed everyone with a pen to love them to preserve their egos so they paid scholars to write about how great they were. And scholars needed money because jesus christ they majored in fucking classics man what the fuck are you supposed to do with that shit. As an example, visible in the cantos, Ezra wrote that as capitalism spun up, the parts of the bible and classic literature which speak against usury or violent accumulation got stealthily edited out in order to keep things running smoothly. And while such historical revisionism might be taken for granted as a tactic of the rich generally to the lfolk, we still only understand it in an extremely circumscribed way. It is taken for granted that the American media has been moving for decades against human kindness and empathy of course, but what if I were to tell you that for the past 90 years the entire world’s intellectual, cultural and political establishments have moved against fascism in the same way.

For almost a century fascism has been the target of a smear job unseen in breadth or ferocity since the black legend of Spain. Although we all, as enlightened internet intellectuals, naturally look down our noses at the proles, people like your average American can still generally successfully identify things like people working together and anti-capitalism with communism and corporate person-hood and THE DEATH TAX with capitalism, showing at least a rudimentary understanding of both systems. But if they were asked to characterize fascism they would inevitably come up with hates jazz / snappy uniforms / killed jews for some reason? And most intellectuals, I imagine, would not be able to do much better - something about blood and soil if they're smarter, something about Rush Limbaugh and the tea party if they're dumber.

The reasons for such ignorance and historical distortion are clear when looked for - today’s world order is run by the victors of world war 2, the single conflict which more than any other determined the fate of the modern world. The great power-blocs of the planet, America and her flunkies and ex-Russia and her ex-flunkies, look back to world war 2 as the traumatic moment when they entered the world stage as liberators and heroes, endowed with a cross-planet mission to spread the ideology that crushed fascism. And so the defeat of the Axis passed from historic event to creation myth, the cataclysm that birthed the contemporary world whole formed from Hitler’s leg.

Fascism’s defeat was utilized both positively (behold, the form of the conquering GI / Red Army!) and negatively by both cold war camps for propaganda purposes. For nearly a century communist intellectuals have looked to portray fascism as the ideology of the condemned capitalist, a last ditch effort to save the petty bourgeoisie from the ravening horde of poors destined to overtake them. A tactic which identified fascism as an abnormally violent and incoherent aberration of capitalism, cleanly demolishing not only fascism but also associating capitalism by proxy with the war crimes and excesses of Nazism. And the West in equal capacity has looked to identify fascism with the sort of state oppression and cultural drabness it saw in communism, as well as the bad kind of racism (the kind against rich white people).

In other words, and to bring us back to the initial analogy, just as the American Left has been squeezed out in recent decades because there are material incentives for the powerful to oppose it and no reasons for them to stand behind it, so too has fascism suffered. In geopolitical terms it is a dead ideology whose primary value is as a ghost for jews and disaffected rich kids to conjure up whenever they want to remind people of how awful antisemitism is / how much they hate George Bush, respectively. Thus no one who means anything has any interest in defending fascism, because it holds power only as a hobgoblin and all recent fascist scholarship, while a step forward in the sense that it’s more intellectually solid than a picture of a happy looking teenage girl fading into a picture of a bunch of emaciated skeleton guys behind barbed wire + a menacing a voice over, retains this same basic negative aspect. It is written by liberals for liberals, and seeks to illuminate fascism merely so that people can be more discriminating when constructing slogans for their misspelled protest signs. As such, to make the next step from accurate (anti-) fascist scholarship to actual pro-fascism, we need a guy who has no money and means nothing to the academic establishment.

This guy.

Alright so everyone's mean to fascism, cool, but what is fascism, really? Fascism is the theology of action, it is whatever is necessary, it is a book and a rifle, it is the cold hills outside of Madrid, it is the people’s state, and it is, above all, thought and action. It is the complete organization of society, the organic unification of state and nation. It gives Rousseau’s general will actual manifestation through the unity of the nation, making the people spiritually, economically, racially and culturally one. In modern society, which is to say Enlightenment society, civilization is atomized to the level of the individual, and then further quarkified as every individual is demanded to keep each aspect of his existence distinct and separate from each other. The modern man is political, but does not allow his religious or racial feelings to influence his political side, and vice versa. He is obsessed with money, the sole object of value in the modern world, but refrains from speaking outwardly of his earnings for fear of social alienation. He knows he too must grow old and die one day, but pushes away his dying parents because his reflection in them scares him.

In other words, the modern man exists primarily as a dismembered corpse.

Fascism builds upon Marxist economic analysis, following that capitalism is the most developed form of slavery yet devised for the poor by the rich. But rather than accepting that all non-material things in the world are the inventions of a millenia spanning bourgeoisie looking to give the poor reasons to hate each other, fascists believe that race, religion, and culture can be used in a positive way, to unite the nation against international capitalism, rather than all the workers of the world, in a phrase. Fascism treats individual men wholly, as people who only achieve true person-hood when interpolated as citizens in a greater body, a trans-generational unity of tradition.

Democracy, as today known, is antithetical to such an appreciation of the nature of man. In the modern world certain issues cannot be resolved through voting, through representative democracy - how can the super rich and the super poor be represented by the same man? By simple coincidence of geography people of contrary interests are asked to vote in the same elections on the same laws, and the result is, naturally, anarchy. Democracy, as formed by representative elections, is itself nonsense - how can a pluralistic society have a single leader, a single set of laws, single representatives for diverse communities? To avoid an endlessly recursive process of balkanization one would have to utilize such tricks of deception and propaganda to get anyone elected or anything done that democracy must, out of necessity, undo itself in order to function.

We as Americans, I trust, are familiar with both such phenomena.

And to take things a step further, to kick in the door of this whole rotten Enlightenment house and bring it down, we can easily see that the entire idea of the individual, with individual interests, is also nonsense. Each and every man is produced by an environment long ago developed for him, and even if he were not today bombarded on every side by such a noise of villainy and lies that he himself has no time to think, he would still be circling the problems of life in grooves long since worn-out by society’s earlier greats.

And how would individuals, should they ever exist, be capable of anything resembling comprehensible political thought? Surely such a man, untrammeled by civilization, representing himself and himself alone, would be incapable of civilized discourse, lacking any framework to place his discourse in or precedents to draw upon. He would speak gibberish both literally and generally, a barbarian in the truest sense of the world. Like Enkidu in the Epic of Gilgamesh before he is touched by the whore Shammat, or the darmok episode of Star-Trek before Picard fights the invisible monster.

Italian fascist thinkers believed that they were all products of the Risorgimento and Giuseppe Mazzini, to speak nothing of the trans-millennial Italian people, and as such owed their existence and person-hood in large portion to the dead. They were able to recognize that they were transient, as humans, but lived in a nation that was not - that Italy existed before them and would exist after them, and that it was to the dead and the unborn that they owed their true loyalty, rather than some temporal demagogue. Fascism, then, makes physical what is otherwise spiritual, it gives precedent to the culture, history, religion and race that, in capitalism or communism, are crushed underfoot as immaterial distractions from the true meaning of life: consumption.

And in doing away with voting, rather building a system entirely upon and for the people, fascism attains a level of popular rule impossible for either West or East. The Fascist leader is acclaimed by the crowd but not elected by it, and in the same way that scientists can never quite measure something, so too does the very act of measuring public sentiment by graph and chart demean and pervert it. Mussolini, Hitler, Codreanu, and Jose Antonio were all the people’s will made manifest, pure and singular expressions of a will that would otherwise only be understood as a certain dip in a gallup poll. Fascism, as an ideology that rejects the ballot box in favor of the rifle and cross, becomes the people greater than any organization seen since man left the garden.

As an aside, Fascism initially was strictly a social mode of organization, Mussolini claiming that it could be aligned with a heavily regulated and directed capitalist establishment to develop the nation. As time progressed, however, Mussolini took more and more of Italy’s capital and business under state control, especially after capitalism was discredited by the Great Depression, until finally, in the North Italian Republic, he socialized all labor and did away with capitalism entirely. By then the game was up of course and no one gave a shit, but still, you know, its the thought that counts.

Italian fascism then is the most pure and worthy of study amongst the several fascist-likes that sprung up in Europe post war, owing to its solid theoretical framework and intellectual development, although Spain, Romania, and naturally Germany will all be treated in the course of the thread. For now, suffice to say that just as in the Aliens movies, how the Alien took on the characteristics of whatever animal it incubated in, so too is each particular manifestation of fascism in history determined in form in large part by its native society. Which really should be expected given that it, as an ideology, lends such great emphasis to nationalism and patrimony. Anyway, let us now flesh out Italian fascism a bit:

A long time ago, in a world defined in the American consciousness by frilly wigs and wine coolers, WW1 happened. And amongst the casualty lists; the millions of dead young men, the industrial bases of the world, and a couple of Kings, a whole world had died as well: a world of hope. Before the great war republicanism seemed to work: the plight of the worker, while still awful, seemed to be generally improving as socialism either crawled sideways into the halls of power, as in England, or got co-opted by an otherwise disinterested elite, as in Germany. The middle classes generally grew ever more numerous and prosperous, and the rich, while perhaps having to exchange Absolute Power for Near-Absolute Power, were well compensated as everyday more expensive and complicated miracle machines were developed thanks to the invention of Steam. Capitalism was alternatively peaceably developing the world or peaceably exiting the world in favor of socialism, depending upon your net worth, but all of that changed with WW1. With parliamentary democracy dead in a trench, an entire culture, an entire way of thought died too, and Europe as such was left in the lurch between hyper-materialist American capitalism and hyper-materialist Soviet communism.

We, as Americans who were politically conscious during the 2008 elections, can of course emphasize with such a dramatic and unexpected destruction of all ones earthly Hopes.

Regardless, in 1919 the peoples of Europe, collectively realizing that they could never go back to parlimentarianism, but at the same time refusing to step forward into the red, or alternatively red white and blue future, were faced with an acute existentialist crisis. Elites of all stripes had lost their legitimacy: politicians for starting the war, financiers for furnishing the means, and cultural leaders for having endorsed war as a healthy outlet for young male aggression initially and then for being unable to shift gears into writing the epitaphs of a whole generation quick enough. A whole continent had lost its reason for living, and to evoke contemporary American politics again, in response to these massed crises the European middle classes collectively descended into self destructive madness. Stagnant, conservative military dictatorships, open urban warfare between communists and proto-nazis, and dead German women in the canals were the order of the day, and if you were Hemingway you started drinking, like, way more than you ever had before. So It Goes.

But eventually, just as dawn follows day, out of the economic and political distress of the post war years a far right revolution saved civilization. Fascism emerged as a potential third way, a system of thought which rejected such diverse ideologies as talmudic capitalism and judeo bolshevism. A deviation of Italian Marxism, as mentioned (most early fascist thinkers were ex-socialists, including Mussolini), Italian fascists theorized that there were not only proletarian and bourgeois classes, but also proletarian and bourgeois nations, wherein the nations with capital were able to oppress and exploit entire countries as they pleased. Italy was one of these proletarian nations, at the turn of the 20th century being mostly agrarian, illiterate, and being heir to a humiliating military history composed mostly, within the last hundred years or so, of being smashed apart by Ethiopians. Not only was Italia too poor to resist the great powers, who controlled its markets and curtailed its then in vogue impulse towards colonial expansion, but also so poor that our friends the fascists reckoned that a proletarian revolution wouldn't have done any good, as Italy's minuscule national bourgeoisie held such little wealth that any way you re-distributed it Italians would still be poor as hell.

AS SUCH the time was ripe for a revolution that would not consume the nations energy, wealth and youth in acrimonious civil war, as was then ravaging Russia, but rather a revolution that united all Italians as one, into a unified whole which could resist financial, military, and cultural imperialism. A revolution which would acknowledge the totality of human life by constructing a totalitarian system, whereby all aspects of the nation, and the people, could be embodied and exemplified by all at once! A revolution which would unite all Italians in purpose, drive, and spirit; that would make all Italians workers, all Italians soldiers, all Italians scholars, and all Italians free! And so in 1922, the March on Rome put Benito Mussolini, tribune of the people and father of the Italian nation, into power, and so fascism was born!

Yeah! YEAH!!! Look for some more posts coming soon: Nazism - like fascism, but way more exciting. The Legion of the Archangel Michael - God’s fascism. And the Falange - a really great bunch of guys that got hijacked by Franco and turned into just another retarded junta.

Big ups to all yall what helped also

Tsargon the Great posted:
So there are going to be at least two more portions to this Effort post, at least as planned: this one, a brief overview of international fascism, which is to say the Falange, the Iron Guard, and Hitlerism, in order to showcase just how beautiful and diverse the master races of the world truly are. And a brief treatment of fascist impulses in American politics (spoiler:

Spoiler!

none at all, although Jackson, T. Roosevelt and Nixon all had some of the blood and soil spirit going

). But before we start talking about the Axis at large, allow me to say that I do not know as much about Romania or Spain as I know about Italy, as there was never a very strong fascist network in Spain such that there’s just plain less material and the vast majority of the Romanian documents never got translated. As regards Germany there’s probably some dumbass Paradox nerd in the forum who knows more about what divisions and ministers went where than I, although I reckon I can still put out a pretty good couple of paragraphs. SO THEN!

Una Espana, Grande y Libre! Machismo y Fascismo en España



While Spain did not participate in WW1, and thus missed out on the social destruction which gave fascism the ultimately successful angle of attack it had in Italy and Germany, it was a tremendously poor nation with a recent history of being smashed apart by richer countries and a further back history of rigid clericalism, xenophobia, and martial glory - a pretty good recipe for fascism all told. In the 20s Spain was run by Miguel Primo De Rivera, one of the stagnant dictatorships mentioned in the op. He was the classic fascist, in the liberal sense - a tool of the banking and moneyed classes whose opponents, a small but growing socialist movement, he kept under tight control. In 1930 that nigga died though, and the republic which proceeded from his death was, like all European republics at the time, horribly put together and dominated by left wing interests, which although they were unable to accomplish much (democracy woot) agitated the hell out of the banking and middle classes, who, as Stalin famously formulated, are the same everywhere, and this meant touchy as hell to any suggestion that they should not wield complete control over everything.

In response to the republican threat the rich dropped a ton of money into CEDA’s, the right wing coalition, coffers. And when CEDA failed to gain a majority in the 1936 elections, Franco and a good portion of the other Spanish generals announced that Democracy Doesn’t Work (it doesn’t, of course, just not for the reason they thought) and started up the Spanish civil war, primarily known in American circles as the starting point for like every goddamn ww2 strategy videogame and also the inspiration for some books nobody’s ever read.

But where’s the fascism? Well, here’s the trick of it: the Falange, Spain’s fascist party, was not important at all to this succession of events and as such were not mentioned. The Falange was founded by the lawyer son of Miguel Primo De Rivera, Jose Antonio Primo De Rivera, which honestly is a really great name for a fascist. Jose Antonio founded the Falange because, like Mussolini, Hitler, and Codreanu, he believed he was seeing, in the 20’s under his father and then in the 30’s under the Republic, the death of Spanish tradition in exchange for a venal and soulless oligarchy, should the right win, or a venal and soulless Soviet, should the left win. As such, in 1933 he founded the Falange, Spanish for Phalanx, with the arrows and yolk of the Catholic Kings as his symbol. United with a number of alienated and disaffected far right Spanish intellectuals, Jose Antonio formulated a party platform of clericalism, Spanish culture, spiritual self-renewal, and economic equity and modernization.

Jose Antonio was an artist and a poet, you see, and had an artistic distaste for the members of the upper-crust of Spanish society whom he had spent his life around - feeling them to be overtly materialistic and greedy, separate and detached from the great Spanish poetical, literary, and spiritual tradition which my sophomore Spanish Imperial History professor told me is actually very significant and powerful. As such he was one of those bourgeois judas’ that Marx wrote about who detach from their class in order to side with the proletariat, in this case by insisting that any new regime focus on closing the gap between the rich and the poor, land reform, establishing a syndical system of labor representation, and reconciling class differences.

The Falange did all the shit fascist parties generally do - skirmish with socialists, sell newspapers, ask for donations from captains of industry, etc. but whereas in Germany and Italy, where mainstream conservative parties had been de-legitimized by the war, and fascism was funded by the rich in proportion to how desperate they were to have anyone in power but a Bolshevik, in Spain the bankers were pretty pleased to keep dropping money and support into CEDA’s paunchy lap instead giving to the more violent and radical Jose Antonio, who they viewed as a class traitor and weirdo. So when the civil war kicked off, the Falange, although claiming a significant membership, lacked any actual influence, most of those members being worthless college students, and having such little money that they the party had to use Jose Antonio’s law office as a HQ for awhile.

Also, when the civil war kicked off Jose Antonio was in jail, imprisoned on some bullshit firearms count. Having happened to be in a jail in what ended up as Republican territory, Jose Antonio was shortly shot by a detachment of soldiers and the movement which had grown up around him, fascism being generally a notoriously personality driven type of movement and the Falange membership being entirely bereft of anyone comparable in intellect or prestige to Jose in particular, mostly collapsed. But now here is the important bit: even though the Falange as a movement was dead, its leaders minus Antonio being flat and un-inspiring, its membership immature and killed off almost entirely by a collection of Nationalist generals who used them as shock troops, Francisco Franco, acclaimed bastard and opportunist, used the Falange as a decorative cover for his young government, which was otherwise just a run of the mill junta. Franco needed German and Italian support to win the war, if you remember your Hearts of Iron 2 history, and also wanted to win over at least some of the Spanish proletariat, who responded generally fairly favorably to Falange propaganda and agitation, and as such Franco used the Falange as the outward representation of his regime. And so Franco rode the brief, blessed fascist wave until 1943, with the Falange until then maintaining an officially fairly important position in Franco’s government, controlling propaganda and some other token ministries, although being in reality a broken organization entirely subject to Franco’s whims. But once world war 2 turned against the Axis he pretty promptly moved against them and by 1945 the Falangists were out entirely, as Franco did not have to be a weatherman to see which way the wind was blowing.

In summary, Spanish fascism had potential, but by an unfortunate fluke of history was cut down early. This isn’t to say that had Jose Antonio not been shot and left in a ditch by some God Damned Reds then Spain would have been heil - heil - heiling right in El Jefe’s face, as Franco was a cagey son of a bitch who probably could have resolved things pretty quickly had the Falange attempted to cause any trouble, but damn if history books wouldn’t be more interesting at least. The last important thing to note was that Jose Antonio famously once said in an interview that he wanted a friendly, short skirted Spain, suggesting that while he still fucking loved the Catholic Church, as all true Spaniards do, Falangist Spain probably would have ended up as a pretty socially liberal, albeit fiscally fascist, state. Also, in the whole mess of the civil war one of the Falange’s lieutenants was a man named Ramón de Carranza Gómez Pablo, Marques de Villapesadilla, translated by baby finland for me as the Marquis of the Town of Nightmares, which also owns pretty hard. More on fascist demon magic later.

The Legion of the Archangel Michael - All within the state, nothing outside the state, Judea delende est



( That’s our guy middle front, ain’t he a dreamboat also maybe Romanian Jason Lee in the background???)

WW1 Hit Romania pretty hard - joining late, in 1916 with the Allies against the Central Powers, they were in just long enough to see Russia collapse and then get invaded by a shitload of Jerries, Ostjerries, and Turkomans. And although Romania later got a sweet ass deal at Versailles - all of the lands it had seceded in the earlier separate peace back + a bunch of Hungary, it was still in a bad way. Right next to Communist Russia, chronically poor and chronically full of Jews, post war Romania was extremely politically unstable, a result of widespread Bolshevik agitation, wide scale destruction from the war and a population made up of an unwieldy mass of ethnic minorities welded together by Versailles. Into this mess stepped Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Chief Bro and leader of the Legion of the Archangel Michael, and later the Iron Guard. Combining a revolutionary understanding of the trans-generational Romanian spirit, a violent and zealous Orthodox faith, a stern belief in the Romanian worker and the sort of extreme anti-semitism only Slavs are capable of, Codreanu, although like Jose Antonio in that he was never able to form a fascist government, instead being strangled by a soldier of the King’s, is significant because he represents another form of fascism, another expression of fascism’s great capability for adaption to any environment, provided that environment be poor, menaced on every side, and have a strong, violent left.

Codreanu and his Legion engaged in the normal socialist agitation and street fighting that all fascists do, but also showed his fanaticism off by staging violent raids of Romanian ghettos and attempting to assassinate a number of ministers and politicians who were believed to be in league with the Jews. Codreanu believed that Romania, as a nation on the cross-roads of the three great religions of the world, Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Roman Catholicism, was uniquely suited to generate a spiritual and religious revolution which could regenerate all of Christendom, clearing from the earth the twin tines of Satan’s fork - Bolshevism and Judaism. Empowered with the mission to throw both Atheists and Jews down the well of history, the Legion of the Arch Angel Michael lived a brief, violent existence, tolerated by King Carol only barely until, fearing that they were planning a coup in concert with Nazi Germany’s thrusts into Austria and Czechoslovakia, he ordered Codreanu arrested and then strangled. The Iron Guard, as the Legion turned into somewhere in there, I told you I don’t really know shit about Romania, later half-ran a pro-Nazi government in 1941 when Carol took off and, in contrast to Hitler’s cold, mechanized holocaust, just ran out into the streets and rounded up all the Jews of Bucharest into a slaughterhouse and killed them the way Jewish butchers are supposed to kill cattle to make them kosher.

I told u guys fascism is hardcore.

The Iron Guard then got deposed by the other half of the government and the Guardsmen ran off every which way and Hitler didn’t give a shit because the new government promised to stay in the war. The Iron Guard, in conclusion, was a pretty standard fascist party except far more violent and far more anti-semitic, as even the Nazis tried to keep their genocide hidden from view for appearance’s sake while the Romanians simply did not give a fuck. Theirs was a less sophisticated anti-semitism, hearkening back to a simpler time, when Jews were dark sorcerers with a racial weakness to clubs and long knives. Codreanu himself is also exception, as although he did not serve in ww1, as Hitler and Mussolini did, he was far and away the most violent of the leaders, leading pogroms and storming ghettos himself. Additionally, whereas the other leaders understood the power of religion, they did not seem to be all that keen on personal faith, believing more in the Church than God, so to speak. Codreanu is a great exception to this, believing that the Angel Michael himself had come to him when he was in prison and giving him his mission to create Romania anew, hence the whole name of the thing. Also Evola evidently loved the guy, the importance of which I will mention later, suffice to say for now that Baron Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola was as close to a real life warlock that This Gay Earth will ever see.

Hitlerism - As a shorty, playin in the front yard of the crib, I fell down and I bumped my head. Somebody helped me up and asked me if I bumped my head, and I said yeah. So then they said oh, so that means you goin, you’re going to switch it on them. And I said yeah flipmode, flipmode is the greatest. Knowing as a shorty, I was always told that, if I wasn’t going to be part of the greatest, I would have to be the greatest mys-*invades Poland*



Alright so as everyone knows the basic facts of Nazism: 1923 putsch, 1933 people’s state, program of re-armament and public works etc. SO instead I’d like to talk about Hitler’s aberrations from the fascist line. It is important, then, to establish that the Nazis never called themselves fascists, and Italian Fascists never called the Nazis fascists either. Their own separate ideologies just influenced each other as time progressed and came from very similar starting points. Me calling Nazism a form of fascism is itself weird, not only because they’re genuinely different things but also because the study of fascism as an academic field is pretty much founded on professors slowly explaining why fascism is not at all connected to Hitler and the spiritual evil which flows forth from his tomb under the mountain. I am calling it fascism because I think it fulfills most of the criteria and that which it deviates on is easily explained away by the fact that every fascism is very dependent on its native context. So let’s rap ~

1 - To speak generally, there’s a reason why fascism is so hard to pin down in modern discourse, beyond the fact of the intellectual conspiracy against serious treatment and circulation of fascist texts: fascism, in the public consciousness, is Hitlerism, and Hitlerism is itself really hard to define. Whereas the Falange and the Iron Guard never really developed beyond over-grown terrorist cells, operating as such even when they eventually got into sort-of-power, never having to ever actually rule anything and thus never having to dirty their ideological purity with action (I trust LF is familiar with this phenomenon), and Italy was an extremely intellectually centralized state, Hitler barely squeaked into power and constantly had to politic in order to stay there. Additionally, the size and depth of the NSDAP state was such that many different policies and programs were active at the same time without any more rhyme or reason to them than that they happened to work. Whereas Italian Fascism adopted the Mazzinean slogan of Thought and Action as its watchwords, Nazi Germany was much more practical and utilitarian - winning, that’s the thing.

2 - There was never any marxism in Nazism, although Hitler was to an extent anti-capitalist. Nazism never had the theoretical background or intellectual foundations that Italian Fascism did, Hitler (pbuh) was a genius, certainly, but an erratic genius, who, as mentioned, was much more about Doin Thangs than figuring out a bunch of dumbass egg-head explanations and formulas for why he should be allowed to save Germany. Schmitt, Haushofer, and Heidegger were all great men in their own rights, but none of them embodied Nazism in the same way that men like Gentile or Mussolini embodied Fascism. The really crazy theoretical shit that showed up, like the breeding programs, the cripple killings, the neo-Nordicism, Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, etc. were all of diverse origins and un-coordinated in any but the most rudimentary type of general scheme for a new society. Maybe things could have gone somewhere after the war, but


well




you know.

3 - Nazi spiritualism is also difficult to pin down, as it was mostly a product of Alfred Rosenberg’s 4 year degree in fungineering. Fascism in every non-Nazi context had a strong tradition of organized religion to build itself around, but Nazism had no such thing: a historical product of Luther and his heroic struggle against Charles V. As such Hitler was confronted with a multi-religious state, the support of every religious faction of which he had to maintain in order to keep that critical middle class pleased with things. The weird, anti-Christian cult of German blood which showed up later on then and which Adolf Eichmann famously subscribed to was mostly restricted to the upper levels of National Socialist society, and never had any major support from either the state or the public. It’s not really worth talking about then, beyond as another STRANGE FACT that NAZIS ACTUALLY BELIEVED.


European fascism as a phenomena then has a very definite set of emergence parameters, like a monster in Dungeon Keeper 2. The nation in question has to be poor, and even better be politically and socially unstable, such that general discontent is in the air and more radical parties can move to the center. The nation has to have a strong and violent left, such that traditionally conservative classes have to embrace the sort of far-right militias which fascist organizations generally begin as for safety from the mob. Ideally the mob includes dangerous minorities, also. Finally, the nation needs a sick ass native culture for the fascists to latch onto and glorify, ideally including spiritual themes and a strong history of dictatorship and military chiefs so that the party in question can rhetorically cast themselves as one of the heroes of old. If you have noticed that America lacks all of these except for the sick ass native culture sans organized religion and Caesars, congratulations, you’ve seen a preview of the next post: FASCISM IN AMERICA!

Look forward to it! (ups to friends)

Tsargon the Great posted:
Alright, part 3, the final battle: FASCISM IN AMERICA. Now while we of course all know that every movement in America is a fascist movement by nature, there were two actual fascist movements in America, neither of which had much success. I will discuss them later, as for now I want to go back over all of the historical emergence parameters for fascism such that we can clearly see why America is essentially the least fascist nation in existence.

FIRSTLY, the most obvious requirement for the emergence of a powerful fascist movement is a de-legitimized political center, as this is the primary requirement for the emergence of any powerful politically radical movement. The death of any given nation’s political center can be achieved through any number of means, from a failed war and economy as in Tsarist Russia or a decade of parliamentary deadlock and failure as in Germany. And while wide-scale poverty, social dislocation and demographic crises are frequently understood to be indicative of a dead or at least deathly ill political establishment, there must be a widespread understanding that traditional politics have failed for radicalism to move stage center from stage right or stage left, which are two very different things.

As we can clearly see in America and mainland Europe, although we certainly have widespread poverty and social dislocation, political radicalism remains marginal and alienated - because main-stream political parties have not been discredited. Until actual people, as opposed to internet radicals and jew professors, become convinced that something other than kkkapitali$m / $o¢ial demo¢ra¢y must be the answer, neither fascism nor communism will ever get a foothold.

In America such a thing is obviously impossible because of the pervasiveness of the MSM and elite sponsored opinion shaping. The depression has if anything further cemented their power, as the only new impulse in American politics is the Tea Party, which seems mostly to be working towards Capitalism 3.0. The power of the elite in America is so thorough, as compared to the weak and ill-organized class power wielded by the elites of the nations which experienced successful revolutions, that for their power to be shaken such a massive reorganization of capital and influence must occur that we probably would not even be able to recognize the resulting America, making speculation about it pointless.

Tangentially, the Tea Party is not fascist, but just some weird outgrowth of America’s love affair with capitalism and racism - a strictly provincial phenomena . Soz m8s.

SECONDLY, and connected with the first point, fascism requires a strong and violent left to scare the petty and regular sized bourgeoisie into supporting them. This is not an emergence parameter, as fascism can show up without a violent left, but it is definitely a success parameter, as no fascist movement has ever succeeded without one. In Italy, Germany, Spain and Romania fascists first rose to notoriety by forming combat squads and cracking socialist heads - breaking up unions, putting down strikes and assassinating prominent communists. Through this they each were able to attain elite support (less so in the cases of the Falange and the Iron Guard, but they still followed the strategy) and thus put themselves on the tracks to power. Remember that Hitler was only given 8 months in a comfortable and lightly guarded prison for attempting to seize control of Germany in the beer hall putsch - a sentence which was only possible thanks to elite sympathy for freebooter causes and readiness to forgive any sins committed in the defense of Germany from the red menace. Without systemic support for both the legal fronts of fascism, which is to say the parties and candidates, and the extra-legal, which is to say combat squads like the black shirts and the SA, fascism simply cannot succeed.

A fascist movement rising to prominence in America on the prestige of killing a whole bunch of unarmed socialists is of course very possible in and of itself, but such a scenario naturally presupposes that there are socialists in America. Additionally, the American government itself has historically functioned as a great big brigade of strike-breakers, from using the Pinkertons and the National Guard in the late 19th century to deputizing Klansmen and American Legionaries in the battle against Bolshevism in the 1920s and finally Lord Reagan himself plunging his blade JellyBane deep into the heart of the dragon FafniReasonableWagesForWorkers in the 80s. The American government, by working at every angle to cut down socialism, also cuts down any potential fascist movement, in a move not dissimilar from the historical dialectic, wherein the first stage is necessary for the development of the other.

THIRDLY, fascism, as the most inward looking ideology to ever develop, requires a verdant natural setting of myth and tradition to graze on to grow up big and strong. Martial glory, dictatorship, martyrdom and empire are the bright and blazing stars in the fascist’s otherwise dark cosmology, and the more stars there are and the more prominent they are in the history of the nation the greater the impulse towards the ‘ism will be in any given society’s weird and alienated lumpenrole caste, the traditional fascist recruiting ground. Just then as fascists protect present society from present communists, so too do they work to protect their cultural and historical patrimony from revision, their ferocity in this task being in proportion to the ferocity of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism they work to defend.

Thus, being that fascists must cast themselves as the paladins of the Ye Olde Days, they obviously need something about the old days to protect. In America there is no history of dictatorship, martyrdom or empire, beyond some scatterbrained and poorly focused recollections of the war of independence and, ironically, a million movies about defeating fascism. So while American culture is unquestionably valuable, being a rich tapestry of turpentine and dandelion wine, in contemporary terms it is completely dead, being materially useless to this most capitalist of nations beyond as inspiration for commercials or settings for romantic comedies and thus having passed away long ago.

And while what we have today is obviously not democracy, fascism requires something a little more explicit about its monopoly on power to function. And being that nothing is more unrealistic today than the prospect of a party revoking the franchise and not passing the nation into civil war, fascism is especially far off on this requirement.

FOURTHLY, fascism needs a homogeneous population in order to have wide-scale appeal. Spain, Italy and Germany were all almost completely absent of minorities, Spain having gotten on the hijab and minaret banning train centuries before it was cool. And while Romania did have a lot of different types of folks when Codreanu began moving around, like David Duke in 1991, he had a well identified and revenge minded constituency which had historically been extremely homogeneous and was still able to act effectively as such within that circle. As fascism looks to unite the immanent racial and racial community of the nation, which has been historically obscured by class war and Jewish magic, there needs to be at least the foundation of such a thing within the nation for them to build on.

A genuinely existing spiritual and ethnic unity obviously does not exist in America. Our dear homeland is an appalling jumbo of genotypes and lapsed spiritualities, and as such American fascists would not only have to develop a historical narrative of American dictatorship and divinity out of whole cloth, but they would then have to pitch it to a country whose shared past is mostly a list of reasons why it is great to not have a shared past. Additionally, whereas European fascists just had to fight socialists and liberals, American fascists would have to fight socialists, liberals, and minorities, whose numbers are everyday replenished by the trans-border nydus canals which thrive on ditch weed creep. Should rahowa break out I naturally have complete faith in my brothers in the herrenvolk, but the simply overwhelming number of browns in America ensures that American fascism will never be able to attain the critical threshold of mass neutrality / apathy to their system which allows them to sneak into power.

As a tangent, although DontDoThat raised the point that Fascism, that is Mussolini’s Fascism, recognizes that race and ethnicity are creations of social consciousness rather than biology, and as such the fascist community of nation could potentially interpolate all humans geographically present as citizens, I personally believe such thought to be a historical contrivance of Italy’s position and not widely applicable. Pre-ww2 Italy was primarily ethnically divided between north and south, and this division all thinking people could clearly recognize was a relic of classism rather than anything solid.

In America, by contrast, we are presented with many different communities with very solid social differences between them - Mexicans, Americans, Blacks, and other sundry Browns are only able to all call themselves Americans all at once because the word American has lost all meaning. Arab Muslims can be American, Chinese Atheists can be American, Irish Catholics can be American; the word American means absolutely nothing and as such people can throw it around as much as they please without any danger. Should the word American begin to have meaning - should it mean a specific spirituality, a specific cultural endowment, a specific historical narrative, as fascism naturally aims to develop - American blacks and browns of all hues would immediately discard the term. How could Mexicans celebrate the conquest and dispossession of their people by American guns? Or blacks a solid 200 year stretch of history where it was taken for granted that Africans were pseudo-people? Modern America has avoided this issue through historical revisionism and the hollowing out of our cultural heritage, should things be set as they should, race war (finally!) would be the product.

Lastly, as discussed in the OP fascism is, more than anything else, the negation of Enlightenment values and thought, which is to say liberalism. America, disappointingly enough, is itself more than anything else the embodiment of Enlightenment thought, our nation having been founded on the philosophical products of a bunch of French guys smoking opium and publishing whatever long strings of gibberish emerged from the Ouija board tattooed above Maria Antoinette’s ass crack. Core fascist values like anti-democracy, community before the individual, and shared spiritual experience and participation are simply completely counter to traditional American understandings of the world, and barring the sort of massive education and propaganda campaigns which fascist governments are so fond of this will never change. Which leaves us with the deeply despairing paradox of needing a fascist government to be in power to affect the sort of social changes which would enable fascists to take power. Liberalism must be weak in the hearts of the people for fascism to succeed - every nation that did go fascist had only had a very brief and unsuccessful period of democratic politics - and any nation wherein people expect to be able to vote every so often and for their votes to, at least superficially, matter, is naturally very resistant to fascist rhetoric.

Well, alright then, America’s collective face will never know the joy of being crushed beneath fascism’s collective heel. But there have been American fascist parties, albeit unsuccessful ones, so let’s talk.

THE SILVER LEGION



The Silver Legion was a Depression era movement of Christian fascists which claimed that atheists and jews were in conspiracy to strangle America.

As members of a nation endowed with a completely depraved and godless culture and besieged by financiers and the enemies of Israel on every side, who is willing to nuke both the Middle East and all of America should we end our suicidal support of their genocide of a defenseless people, we can of course recognize this statement as insane rambling of a madman.

Anyhow William Pelley, the Silver Shirts’ great leader (and the guy pictured) was a Christian spiritualist and fundamentalist, who, like Codreanu, believed God had contacted him directly and also wrote a couple of books I really should read some day. Suffice to say that Pelley followed the fascist mold, which is to say anti-socialism, patriotism, race baiting and agitation against Franklin “The American Stalin” Roosevelt in a period where socialism was as popular as it ever would be, patriotism was still critically wounded from the first world war, race war had lost all of its appeal as there were no longer any jobs to protect from blacks anyhow and FDR was overwhelmingly popular.

Like Romania, I ain’t read shit about this (I did my great depression seminar paper on the influence of communists on the Washington state legislation from 1936-1945. Did you know that Washington state actually elected a communist to the US congress from 1944 to 1946? Fascinating and true) but suffice to say that the party collapsed and Pelley was arrested by a proto-FBI trying to meet its political prisoner diversity quota before Q2 1940. The program failed for the reasons outlined above, and historically speaking had to. However, the other fascist movement did not have to fail, and in fact, the other fascist movement could revive at any time!

One God! One Aim! One Destiny! Negro-Fascism on America’s Shores!



THATS RIGHT LF

MARCUS FUCKING GARVEY WAS A FASCIST

YEAH, I’M FUCKING DOING IT, THE FATHER OF BLACK NATIONALISM AND LIBERATION WAS A GODDAMN JAMAICAN FASCIST, BELIEVE IT

Alright, so Marcus Garvey is a fascist. Don’t take my word for it though, “We were the first fascists. . .when we had 100,000 disciplined men, and were training children, Mussolini was still an unknown. Mussolini copied our fascism.” When you think about it makes sense, of course - only because of Western myopia has fascism become the ideology du jour of white supremacy, as a system of values it could be applied to any oppressed and dispossessed racial and spiritual community with a shared history. Marcus Garvey then, in founding the United Negro Improvement Association and seeing that the future of Africans anywhere depended upon African success and strength everywhere, utilized a sort of proto-fascism to organize and unite a black diaspora which had previously been characterized by internal fraction and strife.

By emphasizing the ancient strength of Africa by talking up the Kingdom of Ethiopia and by emphasizing the spiritual nature of the African community by talking up the biblical origins of the Ethiopian Kingship, Garvey developed the origin myth and call-to-past-glories which are so typical of fascism. And by emphasizing the importance of success in all fields, including business, as opposed to the then in vogue vague-socialism of black intellectuals, he worked to divert black energies from what were of course completely pointless and lethargic complaints against the class component of their oppression and into the productive development of the United Negro Improvement Association, which developed black business interests and social and political organizations across the country.

Of course in strange aeons all niggas must die, and so too did Garvey in 1940 and holy crap who could have known the UNIA fell into internal conflict and nowadays the association don’t matter a shit. Garvey did have a massive impact on black nationalism afterwards though as an example of a guy who actually succeeded at what he aimed at. Also Malcom X’s mom and dad apparently met at a UNIA meeting and MLK jr. gave him him credit for starting the whole black liberation “thing”.

So you see LF, fascism is not only not All That Shit You Hate, but rather a defined and historically identifiable movement as well as potentially a positive, even from the sort of pathetic, emasculated white liberal point of view most of you fuckshits probably are looking at things from.

In all honesty, I personally would not be that disappointed with world revolution and international communism, being that capitalism seems poised to literally, literally, destroy civilization in a suicidal frenzy should it not achieve 8% growth every year. But I sincerely consider fascism to be the backstop of human development, the highest point of possible human organization and society. That is of course a statement contingent upon our current level of technological and social development, though, as further progress naturally mandates more and more complex systems, like the Federation of Planets.

The crux of the thing is materialism, and just as I said in the op that a core part of the fascist program is that certain things cannot be compromised and voted upon, so too can fascists never bend on the issues of God and Country. The idea that we are alone on this earth, that there is no higher calling than the development of yourself as an individual through the temporary and intermediary steps of helping the development of others, that history is a cabal of rich people working to endlessly fuck the poor - these ideas are simply wrong, and there can be no compromise on them. Fascism has nothing to say to Communism then, the differences between the two being fundamental and unalterable, and as such the only possible resolution between the two possible is achievable only through long knives and pistols and einsatzgruppen.

So remember, lf, that our place is out in the clear air, beneath a moonlit sky, cradling a rifle, and the stars overhead. Let the others party on. We—outside—in tense vigil; earnest and self-confident, we divine the sunrise in the joy of our hearts. Death to America.

tpaine posted:

Impper posted:
Avamt gard, 4 loko is the true avant gardme

i'm drunkin a tall ca of red four loko right freakin now imper

i drank a red one last night

The Philosophic Basis of Fascism
By Giovanni Gentile
January 1928

In the definition of Fascism, the first point to grasp is the comprehensive, or as Fascists say, the "totalitarian" scope of its doctrine, which concerns itself not only with political organization and political tendency, but with the whole will and thought and feeling of the nation.

There is a second and equally important point. Fascism is not a philosophy. Much less is it a religion. It is not even a political theory which may be stated in a series of formulæ. The significance of Fascism is not to be grasped in the special theses which it from time to time assumes. When on occasion it has announced a program, a goal, a concept to be realized in action, Fascism has not hesitated to abandon them when in practice these were found to be inadequate or inconsistent with the principle of Fascism. Fascism has never been willing to compromise its future. Mussolini has boasted that he is a tempista, that his real pride is in "good timing." He makes decisions and acts on them at the precise moment when all the conditions and considerations which make them feasible and opportune are properly matured. This is a way of saying that Fascism returns to the most rigorous meaning of Mazzini's "Thought and Action," whereby the two terms are so perfectly coincident that no thought has value which is not already expressed in action. The real "views" of the Duce are those which he formulates and executes at one and the same time.

Is Fascism therefore "anti-intellectual," as has been so often charged? It is eminently anti-intellectual, eminently Mazzinian, that is, if by intellectualism we mean the divorce of thought from action, of knowledge from life, of brain from heart, of theory from practice. Fascism is hostile to all Utopian systems which are destined never to face the test of reality. It is hostile to all science and all philosophy which remain matters of mere fancy or intelligence. It is not that Fascism denies value to culture, to the higher intellectual pursuits by which thought is invigorated as a source of action. Fascist anti-intellectualism holds in scorn a product peculiarly typical of the educated classes in Italy: the leterato -- the man who plays with knowledge and with thought without any sense of responsibility for the practical world. It is hostile not so much to culture as to bad culture, the culture which does not educate, which does not make men, but rather creates pedants and aesthetes, egotists in a word, men morally and politically indifferent. It has no use, for instance, for the man who is "above the conflict" when his country or its important interests are at stake.

By virtue of its repugnance for "intellectualism," Fascism prefers not to waste time constructing abstract theories about itself. But when we say that it is not a system or a doctrine we must not conclude that it is a blind praxis or a purely instinctive method. If by system or philosophy we mean a living thought, a principle of universal character daily revealing its inner fertility and significance, then Fascism is a perfect system, with a solidly established foundation and with a rigorous logic in its development; and all who feel the truth and the vitality of the principle work day by day for its development, now doing, now undoing, now going forward, now retracing their steps, according as the things they do prove to be in harmony with the principle or to deviate from it.

And we come finally to a third point.

The Fascist system is not a political system, but it has its center of gravity in politics. Fascism came into being to meet serious problems of politics in post-war Italy. And it presents itself as a political method. But in confronting and solving political problems it is carried by its very nature, that is to say by its method, to consider moral, religious, and philosophical questions and to unfold and demonstrate the comprehensive totalitarian character peculiar to it. It is only after we have grasped the political character of the Fascist principle that we are able adequately to appreciate the deeper concept of life which underlies that principle and from which the principle springs. The political doctrine of Fascism is not the whole of Fascism. It is rather its more prominent aspect and in general its most interesting one.

VII

The politic of Fascism revolves wholly about the concept of the national State; and accordingly it has points of contact with nationalist doctrines, along with distinctions from the latter which it is important to bear in mind.

Both Fascism and nationalism regard the State as the foundation of all rights and the source of all values in the individuals composing it. For the one as for the other the State is not a consequence -- it is a principle. But in the case of nationalism, the relation which individualistic liberalism, and for that matter socialism also, assumed between individual and State is inverted. Since the State is a principle, the individual becomes a consequence -- he is something which finds an antecedent in the State: the State limits him and determines his manner of existence, restricting his freedom, binding him to a piece of ground whereon he was born, whereon he must live and will die. In the case of Fascism, State and individual are one and the same things, or rather, they are inseparable terms of a necessary synthesis.

Nationalism, in fact, founds the State on the concept of nation, the nation being an entity which transcends the will and the life of the individual because it is conceived as objectively existing apart from the consciousness of individuals, existing even if the individual does nothing to bring it into being. For the nationalist, the nation exists not by virtue of the citizen's will, but as datum, a fact, of nature.

For Fascism, on the contrary, the State is a wholly spiritual creation. It is a national State, because, from the Fascist point of view, the nation itself is a creation of the mind and is not a material presupposition, is not a datum of nature. The nation, says the Fascist, is never really made; neither, therefore, can the State attain an absolute form, since it is merely the nation in the latter's concrete, political manifestation. For the Fascist, the State is always in fieri. It is in our hands, wholly; whence our very serious responsibility towards it.

But this State of the Fascists which is created by the consciousness and the will of the citizen, and is not a force descending on the citizen from above or from without, cannot have toward the mass of the population the relationship which was presumed by nationalism.

Nationalism identified State with Nation, and made of the nation an entity preëxisting, which needed not to be created but merely to be recognized or known. The nationalists, therefore, required a ruling class of an intellectual character, which was conscious of the nation and could understand, appreciate and exalt it. The authority of the State, furthermore, was not a product but a presupposition. It could not depend on the people -- rather the people depended on the State and on the State's authority as the source of the life which they lived and apart from which they could not live. The nationalistic State was, therefore, an aristocratic State, enforcing itself upon the masses through the power conferred upon it by its origins.

The Fascist State, on the contrary, is a people's state, and, as such, the democratic State par excellence. The relationship between State and citizen (not this or that citizen, but all citizens) is accordingly so intimate that the State exists only as, and in so far as, the citizen causes it to exist. Its formation therefore is the formation of a consciousness of it in individuals, in the masses. Hence the need of the Party, and of all the instruments of propaganda and education which Fascism uses to make the thought and will of the Duce the thought and will of the masses. Hence the enormous task which Fascism sets itself in trying to bring the whole mass of the people, beginning with the little children, inside the fold of the Party.

On the popular character of the Fascist State likewise depends its greatest social and constitutional reform -- the foundation of the Corporations of Syndicates. In this reform Fascism took over from syndicalism the notion of the moral and educational function of the syndicate. But the Corporations of Syndicates were necessary in order to reduce the syndicates to State discipline and make them an expression of the State's organism from within. The Corporation of Syndicates are a device through which the Fascist State goes looking for the individual in order to create itself through the individual's will. But the individual it seeks is not the abstract political individual whom the old liberalism took for granted. He is the only individual who can ever be found, the individual who exists as a specialized productive force, and who, by the fact of his specialization, is brought to unite with other individuals of his same category and comes to belong with them to the one great economic unit which is none other than the nation.

This great reform is already well under way. Toward it nationalism, syndicalism, and even liberalism itself, were already tending in the past. For even liberalism was beginning to criticize the older forms of political representation, seeking some system of organic representation which would correspond to the structural reality of the State.

The Fascist conception of liberty merits passing notice. The Duce of Fascism once chose to discuss the theme of "Force or Consent?;" and he concluded that the two terms are inseparable, that the one implies the other and cannot exist apart from the other; that, in other words, the authority of the State and the freedom of the citizen constitute a continuous circle wherein authority presupposes liberty and liberty authority. For freedom can exist only within the State, and the State means authority. But the State is not an entity hovering in the air over the heads of its citizens. It is one with the personality of the citizen. Fascism, indeed, envisages the contrast not as between liberty and authority, but as between a true, a concrete liberty which exists, and an abstract, illusory liberty which cannot exist.

Liberalism broke the circle above referred to, setting the individual against the State and liberty against authority. What the liberal desired was liberty as against the State, a liberty which was a limitation of the State; though the liberal had to resign himself, as the lesser of the evils, to a State which was a limitation on liberty. The absurdities inherent in the liberal concept of freedom were apparent to liberals themselves early in the Nineteenth Century. It is no merit of Fascism to have again indicated them. Fascism has its own solution of the paradox of liberty and authority. The authority of the State is absolute. It does not compromise, it does not bargain, it does not surrender any portion of its field to other moral or religious principles which may interfere with the individual conscience. But on the other hand, the State becomes a reality only in the consciousness of its individuals. And the Fascist corporative State supplies a representative system more sincere and more in touch with realities than any other previously devised and is therefore freer than the old liberal State.

I think libertarianism fits within this tradition. But where the older theorists thought warfare would be the proving ground, you see in the late 19th and early 20th century a new idea that the marketplace will be the proving ground. That’s critical to Schumpeter’s theory of rising and declining family dynasties; it plays a big role in von Mises’s book on Socialism (where he praises the first man who seized property for himself; such a man was a genius of violent transgression; yes, it was theft, but so imaginative was that theft that it validates its own actions); it also plays a role in Hayek’s theories of consumption and taste; and it plays a huge role in Ayn Rand’s theories of the industrialist and the genius (again, in her novels, there’s always a strong element of the outsider being this kind of criminal transgressor who bring a new measure of energy to the defense of capitalism, which the insiders cannot provide).

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that in the conservative imagination – whether it’s French counterrevolutionary or the Southern slaveholder or the American libertarian – inequality is a condition of greatness and excellence, but to really secure that greatness, it must be a dynamic inequality, in which old and established classes are constantly being injected with new elements, and in which their power and privilege should never be too secure or assured.

that's why the revolutionary is the true conservative imo, conserving and building anew. they go into that a little later, robin doesnt agree, but i agree with Benjamin! i think corey historicizes this emergency break/conservation, and i dont think 'applying the emergency break' has to do with a desire to retreat into the past

Crow posted:
that's why the revolutionary is the true conservative imo, conserving and building anew.

thats what im talking about

How much respect a noble man already has for his enemies!—and such a respect is already a bridge to love. . . . In fact, he demands his enemy for himself, as his mark of honour. Indeed, he has no enemy other than one in whom there is nothing to despise and a great deal to respect!

Crow posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

Maybe I'm biased but Heidegger is the fascist philosopher and Nietzsche is the revolutionary. Not to denigrate Heidegger, fascism is the great enemy of communism, I respect it unlike liberalism which is just lamesauce.

As Nietzsche says:

How much respect a noble man already has for his enemies!—and such a respect is already a bridge to love. . . . In fact, he demands his enemy for himself, as his mark of honour. Indeed, he has no enemy other than one in whom there is nothing to despise and a great deal to respect!

I read some research that suggests Nietzsche was pretty familiar with some of Marx's ideas

Wouldn't surprise me in the least, anyone familiar with Darwin surely was familiar with Marx. What's really interesting to me is how little Nietzsche has to say about socialism, only a few lines here and there in his entire works. And what he does have to say is a criticism of democracy, he has nothing to say about Marxism.

A seriously under-explored area imo, considering Deleuze and others spent so much time synthesizing the two philosophies. You'd think there would be more investigation of the history. I'm interested in that research for shiz

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

I dunno if I agree with that, it seems to be privileging intellectualism a bit too much, I’m not sure why they need an academic grounding in thinking of philosophers. Millions upon millions of people in the 30s were fascist and I doubt that most of them had read Hegel. The leaders might have sure, but for the average person the message of fascism resonated in their gut, that’s what makes it so powerful

what i was trying to say was that the fascism of the 20s and 30s was a total ideology of which nationalism was an aspect; the edl's entire programme can be reduced to 'pakis out'