Do you recognise any of these markers in your own or others'  thinking, outlook, attitudes and actions?



Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt
By Umberto Eco (The New York Review of Books 1995)

1. The first feature of Ur-Fascism is the cult of tradition.

2. Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism.

3. Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action's sake.
Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes.

4. The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism.
In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge. For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason.

5. Besides, disagreement is a sign of diversity.
Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference.

6. Ur-Fascism derives from individual or social frustration.

7. To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in the same country.
This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.

8. The followers must feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies.
However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.

9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.
Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare.

10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party.

11. In such a perspective everybody is educated to become a hero.
In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death….The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.

12. Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.
This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons -- doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say.
For Ur-Fascism…individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Because of its qualitative populism, Ur-Fascism must be against "rotten" parliamentary governments.

14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak.


Full article is reproduced here:
www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html

Actually yes...YOU!

Ironic huh.

Lestat wrote on Oct 11^th, 2008 at 8:48pm:

[quote]Actually yes...YOU! Ironic huh.

How so, my articulate, ironic, intellectual mohammedan?

Soren wrote on Oct 11^th, 2008 at 9:04pm:

How so, my articulate, ironic, intellectual mohammedan?

Points 1 -14 pretty much covers it.

You are frighteningly articulate. Is it a cultural or a personal trait?

Soren wrote on Oct 11^th, 2008 at 10:10pm:

You are frighteningly artculate. Is it a cultural or a personal trait?

artculate? Is that a word? I'd expect better from a grammar nazi.

A typo, not a muddle-headed misunderstanding. The former is easily corrected. The latter will take longer for you to shed, unless it is a personal or cultural trait and so is for you to keep and rejoice in to the end.

I can see distinct elements of fascism in militant, political islam, among those who who dream of world domination by Islam, the Ummah. I underlined the most glaring ones above.

Hamas, like Baathists, use the nazi salute at their rallies. There is an acknowledged ideologiocal paternity. Fascism is not exclusive to the Islamists but they seem to be the standard bearers of it today.

Soren wrote on Oct 12^th, 2008 at 11:42am:

A typo, not a muddle-headed misunderstanding. The former is easily corrected. The latter will take longer for you to shed, unless it is a personal or cultural trait and so is for you to keep and rejoice in to the end.

It appears that you make quite a few typo's. But thats ok..I understand what  you are trying to say which is whats important.

I understand that quite often when ignorant people cannot respond or do not want to address a point made, they will revert to childish games and highlighting 'grammer' to discredit a posters view. And quite often (as in your case) their grammar is not to crash hot themselves.

If you truly don't understand my posts, then I suggest it is you, not I that struggles with the english language.


Soren wrote on Oct 12^th, 2008 at 11:42am:

I can see distinct elements of fascism in militant, political islam, among those who who dream of world domination by Islam, the Ummah. I underlined the most glaring ones above.

Thats ok, because given your knowledge of political Islam (or lack of) your opinion is really irrelevant. And once again, you've shot yourself in the foot and highlighted this ignorance in your quote below.  ;D


Soren wrote on Oct 12^th, 2008 at 11:42am:

Hamas, like Baathists, use the nazi salute at their rallies. There is an acknowledged ideologiocal paternity. Fascism is not exclusive to the Islamists but they seem to be the standard bearers of it today.

Baathists are not Islamic, they are actually a secular socialist organisation which by its very nature is very much opposed to political Islam.

As I said, given your lack of knowledge...really, your opinions are quite irrelevant.

And given that in another thread you have already clearly stated that you support the torture of civilians (a clearly facist act), this would suggest that it is you who is in fact a supporter of facism.

It's mostly likely just a military salute. Anyway a salute says absolutely nothing about the ideology of a group. If that's the best you've got, it's pretty pathetic.

Besides Hamas are hardly considered hardcore Islamists, obviously to you they are because all Islamists are in the same basket. But amongst Islamic groups they're considered quite 'mild' and even compromising. As is seen by their adoption of Palestinian nationalism rather than the original Ikhwani call for Caliphate, and by their relationship with Iran and Syria, the two Shi'a states.

So Hamas does not use the nazi salute, then? There is no political links between the baathist, the suicide bombers in Iraq, Hamas and Iran, Hezbollah and baathist Syria - they are all unrelated, unlinked, each acting in its own little bubble? Theocratic Iran and baathist Syria arre not allies, then? Saddam, baathist fascist that he was, did not stoke the fire of Islamist glory? Even old Nasser babbled on about muslim glory even though he was a nationalist.

So the Ummah is not about bringing the whole world under islam and Abu Rahid's Hizb ul tahrir is not banned in many European countries and watched here and the UK and US because of its fascistoid ideology?

Islam has learned fascism from the Europeans. Maybe it would be time to learn the last outstandding lesson, democracy and gvernment for the betterment of the people.  Do you think it could happen? Do you think theocracy (sharia) and democracy can exist in the same country?
Me neither. So where are the islamists heading politically? Back to the future of the good old days centuries ago. How will they get there? Not by popular acclaim, that's for sure.

BTW, remind me where I supported civilian torture, would you?

this sounds a lot like australia to me. or any other national culture.

you could apply these things to almost anything

What sounds like Australian culture to you? And how do you tell the difference between things if they all sound the same to you?  

Soren wrote on Oct 12^th, 2008 at 1:19pm:

What sounds like Australian culture to you? And how do you tell the difference between things if they all sound the same to you?

many of these points could be applied to australian society. if you wish me to delineate I will

I didn't say things all sound the same- I said you could take these points and apply them to many different individual things. such is the flexibility of language and abstract ideas.

ISLAM AS TOTALITARIANISM
by Ibn Warraq (Jan. 2009)


Charles Watson, and G.-H. Bousquet refer to Islam as a totalitarian system tout court, while Bertrand Russell, Jules Monnerot, and Czeslaw Milosz compare Islam to various aspects of communism, and finally, among others, Carl Jung, Karl Barth, Adolf Hitler, Said Amir Arjomand, Maxime Rodinson and Manfred Halpern note Islam's similarities to fascism or nazism (the latter two terms often used synonymously).


The rest is here
http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/30778/sec_id/30778

Every philosophy ever exhibits several of these traits.

I can relate to 9, 10, and 11. But not so much I have a desire to control, as I have a sneaking suspicion everyone is out to control me. So I think in terms of kill or be killed.