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





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

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


How so, my articulate, ironic, intellectual mohammedan?

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

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.

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.

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

you could apply these things to almost anything

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


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.

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.