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Which Fascist Said This?
Who said this?
Always before god and the world the stronger has the right to carry through what he wills. … The whole of nature is a mighty struggle between strength and weakness, an eternal victory of the strong over the weak.
Who is paraphrased here?
The first state to adopt evolutionary ethics would prevail over all others in the struggle for existence. … Extermination and war then became moral goods to eliminate the weak.
And who said this?
The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.
(scroll down)
Answers:
1. Adolph Hitler on April 13 1923 in Munich
2. Wilhelm Schallmayer, co-founder of the German eugenics movement in the early 20th century, paraphrased here.
3. Benjamin Netanyahoo on August 29 2018 at the Negev Nuclear Weapon Center (Also here.)
Also:
It is not just by chance that Netanyahoo sounds like Hitler. Both, Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and Adolph Hitler developed their political awareness around the turn of the century in imperial Vienna. Social Darwinism was the rage of that time. Fascists and Zionists drank from the same poisoned well.
Besides – did you know that Hitler did not want to exterminate the Jews? An Arab made him do that. A Muslim. That is according to one Benjamin Netanyahoo, currently prime minister of the Zionist entity in Palestine:
In a speech before the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem, Netanyahu described a meeting between Husseini and Hitler in November, 1941: "Hitler didn't want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jew. And Haj Amin al-Husseini went to Hitler and said, 'If you expel them, they'll all come here (to Palestine).' According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked: "What should I do with them?" and the mufti replied: "Burn them."
The account is, of course, historically nonsense.
Related:
The administration of the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi in India launched an arrest campaign to silence its critics. Its demonetization program, a first step to introduce a degressive bank transaction tax, did not achieve the desired results but created an economic mess. Modi's re-election is in danger. The accusations against the arrested people imply, correctly in my view, that the government of India is fascist:
Elgaar Parishad probe: Those held part of anti-fascist plot to overthrow govt, Pune police tells court
Wow! Quite a discussion…thanks
I want to discuss fascism but not yet
One of the things I find missing in the discussion so far is the anthropological perspective. A short version would be that with the rise of monotheistic religions came the rise of human hubris about humans place in the cosmos and limited variations of us/them proscriptions about how life should be led….and the belief that everyone should believe this way or be eliminated.
This arrangement was challenge during the (as yet finished) Enlightenment period that began with the start of the scientific revolution in 1620. This period was the birth of liberalism and the church and state came under increased scrutiny…..but not rejection….blind faith still lives on.
Fast forward to the present where we have ongoing elimination of any and all cultures not “Western” which is my biggest problem with our social order….it is reducing our genetic ability to survive by the monoculture focus…..as well as being a heinous form of social organization that favors the few over the many.
On to fascism….Fascism is not just defined by a single aspect but a combination that show the face of the beast. The best description of fascism is a list of 14 points written in 2004 by Dr. Laurence Britt, a political scientist. Dr. Britt studied the fascist regimes of: Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile). His points are as follows:
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism
From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights
The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism
Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism
Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.
6. A controlled mass media
Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.
7. Obsession with national security
Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together
Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and protofascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.
9. Power of corporations protected
Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated
Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts
Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment
Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption
Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.
14. Fraudulent elections
Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.
Posted by: psychohistorian | Sep 2 2018 1:47 utc | 141
@ Posted by: Charles R | Sep 2, 2018 12:49:09 AM | 145
Her book in question is The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Possibly her most famous book and the one which skyrocketed her career in the USA (and to the CIA, to which she was a collaborator).
Also, in an article about modernism (I don’t know how it was published in English), in the last paragraphs, she mentions her “research on totalitarianism”, and then goes on stating that what united nazism and communism was the adoption of a “grand narrative” (see the coincidence with post-modernism? Not a mere coincidence, for sure): the nazi adopting the “grand narrative” of race struggle and the communist the one of class struggle. That she equated the two is intellectually dishonest, but hey, it was the height of the Cold War, there was poetic license to lie in the academic world.
I was born right at the end of the Cold War. I probably belong to the first generation of historians born “post-Cold-War”. And the first thing that amazed me was the sheer quantity of pure lies and myths that pervaded Cold War era thought and science. It wasn’t some “conspiracy theory” level lies — those very carefully crafted lies, extremely difficult to debunk — no, it was pure ideology, lies that can be easily debunked with a first look at primary sources or with five minutes in internet research. Future historians (of the 22nd Century) will probably see the Cold War era until today as a dark age for science. Even Marxist production of this era suffered a lot: Marx must have had spinned in his tomb like never before during the post-war era.
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@ Posted by: les7 | Sep 2, 2018 3:36:39 AM | 149
Since then there has been a lot of evidence from evolutionary biology that suggests the human predisposition to organize itself under some form of “authority structure” is hard-wired into us.
The homo sapiens is an apex superpredator, a species of the fifth trophic level (level 5). To top it off, we are also omnivorous, which makes us even more deadly and voracious.
Apex predators are not cannibal (the higher the trophic level, the lower the energy level, so it wouldn’t be energetically advantageous for apex predators to eat/hunt themselves. The meat of apex predators have very low nutrition levels and are usually full of parasites and other poisonous residues (e.g. dolphin meat is full of mercury, not edible for humans).
However, apex predator can and do kill themselves in territorial disputes — be it among themselves, be it with another apex predator species.
So, it is only natural that humans kill themselves for resources. It is in our nature.
However, there’s a situation where apex predators stop killing themselves: when the environment has enough for everybody. It will not be Teletubbies, where everybody will hug and love themselves, but they would tolerate themselves. For example, you may want to kill a stranger in the street — but if that stranger is your children’s doctor, then you’ll think twice, you’ll tolerate his existence just because it is in your economic interest to keep him alive.
That’s what Marx was all about: capitalism increased interdependency, so are now, relative to total population, killing ourselves less. The only reason the USA just don’t nuke everybody is that it depends on the rest of the world for trade. If we develop the productive forces further, we could have a situation were the excedent would be so big that nobody would have to exploit nobody (a fully-automated society). Again, Marx never stated communism would be a hippie utopia: humans would still get happy, sad, anger, grief, violence for passional motives would still happen, people would still cry when a parent would die etc. etc. What he envisaged was a society without class.
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Now, the last time about liberalism.
Liberalism is an umbrella term (although not as umbrella as illuminism) to designate the legitimation of capitalism over four centuries. Liberalism was not just philosophy: it was an economic theory etc.
What unites liberals of all sorts of kinds is the fact that, ultimately, the acted to preserve or advocate for capitalism.
Liberalism can be better described thus as the way of life of capitalism; the way capitalism perceives itself over time.
The separation we do nowadays between liberalism and nazifascism comes from neoliberal propaganda.
Neoliberalism (new liberalism) was born in the 40s, in Mont Pelerin, and its doctrine stated that 1) post-war social-democracy in Western Europe = socialism and should be combated and 2) what happened between the WWI (1914) and WWII (1945) was an abortion of History, and the world should continue from where it stopped (i.e. with the old liberalism).
That’s why I consider neoliberalism more like the “return of the liberals” than “the new liberalism”, albeit it, I confess, from the point of view of the economists, the latter definition suits better. New liberalism because they conceded liberalism collapsed in 1914 and needed to be updated (this happened with Friedman’s monetarism); Return of the liberals because, albeit it was born in the 40s, it was just in 1979, with the election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, that it would really come to power in a worldwide level (there was already a neoliberal experiment in Pinochet’s Chile, some years before).
But I think the definite empirical proof totalitarianism is a Cold War myth and that nazifascism is really liberalism is that this new rise of the “far-right/alt-right” is not comming from socialist countries (North Korea, Cuba, China and Vietnam), but from capitalist, Western Democracies (Italy, France, USA, UK, Australia, Japan — albeit Japan never gave up fascism to begin with –, Sweden, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Austria and Ukraine). It was from the liberals’ womb that fascism was (re)born, not “communism”. This is a fact, a fact we can observe today, with our own senses.
Now, you can rationalized that many of these countries are from the ex-Iron Curtain. But 1) it only happened after they turned capitalist, not while they were under the USSR and 2) those Iron Curtain countries were actually full-fledged Nazi countries before the USSR liberated them in 1945, so they had a nazi past and culture as a nationalist narrative against USSR hegemony; the Ukraine has a sui generis history, that involved a triple side civil war (White, Black and Red Armies), so, albeit they were part of the USSR, they too had a Nazi past.
Posted by: vk | Sep 2 2018 14:11 utc | 155
Mexico’s experience might contribute to this fascinating discussion
regarding “liberalism” possibly being the original parent of “fascism”:
Since the War of Independence, Mexico did not follow the classic liberalism left by the French Revolution and the independence of the United States; in fact, the insurgents, the heroes of the Reformation and the Revolution of 1910, overcame that liberalism and bequeathed us a revolutionary liberalism that sought the liberation of our people, the defense of national sovereignty, the dismantling of the apparatus of the despotic power, the creation of a state of well-being with a mixed economy. That is to say: the way to recover the left from the subsoil as patrimony of the nation is to end corruption; to moderate opulence and indigence, as Morelos said*, and so on. These are leftist demands. Thus, we are clear that current liberalism should have nothing to do with what is identified as neoliberalism, a totally right ideology. Guerrero y Álvarez The Imposition of Neoliberalism p. 254. Alejo García Jiménez (my translation)
* The now-famous appeal for the moderation of opulence and indigence was pronounced by the single foremost Mexican political hero, José Maria Morelos, in the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption, in Chilpancingo, Guerrero. This singular political declaration is titled “Sentiments of the Nation”.
In the context of Mexico’s struggle for independence from the Spanish colonial regime,
what was important then was not only the development of an effective armed struggle against the royalist army, yet also it was to lay the theoretical, political and ideological bases of the insurrection, so as to advance the construction of an original model of Mexican Republic, conditioned by the romantic ideas of the nineteenth century and by the example of our neighbor to the North, the then model revolutionary nation, the United States of America.
In response to that historical imperative, representatives of the independence forces arrived with the investiture of deputies to the First Congress of Anáhuac that was installed in the temple of the Virgin of the Assumption in Chilpancingo.
There, The Feelings of the Nation were read aloud to the full Congress on September 13, 1813, by the General in Chief, Morelos. These became the political-philosophical guidelines of the independence movement by fulfilling the need to justify resistance and inspiring Mexicans to struggle for individual liberty and the rights of free citizens.
Class struggle between conservatives and republicans persisted during the eighteenth-century throughout Latin America.
Reactionaries attached to the viceroyal regime consistently clashed with Mexican thinkers, exponents of the European romantic philosophy, that is: idealists expecting much of humanity.
The sun of the United States had risen over all America, with its twin stars, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights as shining indicators of a good future for humanity; both documents appealed to the idea of an inherent nobility of the human being, and the capacity of free citizens to govern themselves.
Audacious intellectuals of the time, with their lofty ideas, dreamed of becoming gifted modernizers of society; perhaps on account of having read romantic literary novels, men and women of the time imagined themselves as charismatic real-world heroes.
In the colonial regime, youth training was in the hands of priestly functionaries. Instruction was restricted. Education was lucrative for the institutions of the church.
This caused enormous rage in Mexican republicans; it offended them to the marrow that the clergy had the people subjected to an irrational dogma, and calling this “education”.
The Plan of Ayutla, proclaimed 1 of March of 1854,
was the formal expression of a movement to take away the patent
of education held by the Roman church and its conqueror cronies.
In the end, liberal and federalist forces triumphed
when they forcefully ended the dictatorship of Antonio López de Santa Anna.
Afterwards, Benito Juárez led the War of Reformation, which lasted three years culminating on January 1, 1861, with the defeat of the reactionary faction that sought to restore courtly privileges to the church and to elitist military officers. It was a rebellion promoted by land owners, merchants, moneylenders and imperialist foreigners, the organic enemies of the Mexican republic.
Juárez served as President of Mexico between 1858 and 1872.
He consolidated the Mexican Republic and was at the head of the fight against the interventionist army and the absurd puppet emperor Maximilian of Habsburg,
singing final victory over the foreign invaders by the national forces in 1867.
Posted by: Guerrero | Sep 2 2018 14:55 utc | 158
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