Buffoonish authoritarianism
Posted on 04/19/2017 1:08:22 PM PDT by TBP
Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini have become, for many of us today, mere Hollywood villains – generic personifications of evil or (in Mussolini's case) buffoonish authoritarianism. Yet their ideologies were rooted in specific philosophical ideas – ideas which had many respectable adherents in their day.
Dictator Fanboys
One person who understands this is Jonah Goldberg, author of the 2007 book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. Ten years on, the book still holds up. Goldberg argues, provocatively, that fascism shared roots in common with what we call modern liberalism or progressivism.
People often argue over whether Hitler and Mussolini were “right wing” or “left wing.” More to the point is that both men's ideologies had roots in the Progressive movement of the turn of the 20th century.
The Progressive movement was closely tied to the philosophy of Pragmatism: the belief that thought is a tool for action and change. In contrast to the ancient and medieval philosophers, for whom philosophy was the contemplation of reality, the Progressives were animated by the desire to mold reality and to harness knowledge for social betterment. Many in the vanguard of progressive thought initially were enamored of Mussolini and even Hitler, considering their dictatorships a useful “social experiment.”
H.G. Wells, the popular science fiction writer, was one. In a number of speeches and books he praised the militaristic social mobilization in the new fascist regimes: an entire society moving as a single unit under the rule of a Nietzschean superman.
Complete state control of all aspects of life was seen as highly pragmatic and scientific by many. Nationalism and militarism – elements commonly associated with the Right – were actually key components of the Progressive Era, flourishing in particular under President Woodrow Wilson, as Goldberg documents.
Ideological Twins
Popular wisdom holds that Fascism and Communism were diametrical opposites. Actually, the two ideologies were (and are) so similar that they had to define themselves in opposition to each other in order to survive. At the very least, both were socialistic in origin: Mussolini was immersed in socialism by his father, and the name of Hitler's party – National Socialist German Workers' Party – speaks for itself.
These regimes fostered hostility to traditional religious beliefs and morality (both men despised Christianity), “salvation by science” (as shown, for example, in the Nazi's racist eugenics movement), and state-controlled health and environmental projects (as shown in a Nazi slogan, “Nutrition is not a private matter!”).
All of these elements grew out of the “scientific” progressivism of the early 20th century. Even the Nazis' vÖlkisch ideology—with its nationalist and traditionalist overtones – was at heart a secular religion-substitute which enshrined the Will of the People, a concept which Goldberg traces to the French Revolution.
It would seem undeniable that Hitler and Mussolini, like the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin, were revolutionaries and in no sense conservatives or traditionalists. Their ideologies grew out of the avant-garde positivist, progressive, and pragmatic philosophies of the late 19th century.
A Progressive Moment
The point here is not to engage in “left wing”/“right wing” name calling. Rather, it is to realize that all these political movements were tied up in a historical moment – Goldberg calls it the “fascist moment” of Western history – which originated in the French Revolution and came to fruition in the 20th century.
This moment was “progressive” in that it signaled the abandonment of the West's moral and philosophical traditions. And it was embodied, philosophically, in the turn away from the contemplation of truth to “action, action, action.”
All the *isms are just spokes on a wheel where the hub is a nightmarish police state.
Fascism is the implementation of communism.
Buffoonish authoritarianism
Fascism was Totalitarianism based on Race War.
Communism was Totalitarianism based on Class War.
Their political techniques were virtually identical.
The prerequisite to their success was suppression of opposition. Stalin used the Gulags, Hitler the Concentration Camps.
Mussolini was the editor of the Italian socialist party newspaper until he saw WW I as a chance for Italy to take ethnically Italian areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire while the policy of the socialist party was to avoid the fight between capitalists. He left the party for foreign policy differences, not economic policy ones.
The standard spectrum in the classroom with Fascism on one side and Communism on the other as the extremes of “left” and “right” is totally bogus!!
This misappropriation of terminology was embraced by leftist academics in order to smear those that they deemed to be “right” wing. In order to demonstrate the correctness of the standard spectrum, they would point out that Hitler and Stalin were mortal enemies during WWII.
That observation is flawed on two fronts. It ignores the fact that Hitler and Stalin were actually partners in starting WWII and turned on each other later. The observation is also flawed since it would lead to the conclusion that Stalin and Trotsky must be on opposite ends of the political spectrum,since they were also mortal enemies.
A much more meaningful spectrum is one which places statism at one extreme; i.e., the left edge, and anarchy (total lack of state) at the other extreme.
Once one embraces this paradigm, then it is plain that Fascism and Communism belong in the same camp. They are both faces of statism.
The fundamental question which should be posed to ideologues is whether the “state” exists for the benefit of individuals, or do individuals exist for the benefit of the “state”.
Mussolini was a Communist at one point.
Then he was a socialist.
When he ruled Italy, he did so as a Socialist.
All those ideas are the same.
Communist Russia - the USSR? The United Soviet Socialist Republic?
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn beat Jonah Goldberg to this by decades.
UC Berkeley is a training center .
I understand your argument however it would not be convincing for a socialist.
A socialist would argue that the state does exist for the individual. That the state exist to ensure that every individual has all of his needs secured to that individual.
Hitler and Stalin both believed in the supremacy of the state and that the individual must serve the needs of the state.
However the Progressives of today have hidden their true motives in propagandistic fluff of phrases of “rights to health care” and “rights to healthy food”.
The Progressives turn everything upside down by telling their adherents that the state serves the individual by forcing the individual surrender their rights to the state and to serve the state.
Yes!
Please read Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn in his Leftism... He destroys the leftist lie about the fascism being rightist.
You are absolutely right: The spectrum is statism versus anarchy.
However, I think Communism is more honest about who owned or controlled what.
bkmk
Well said, I like it, and will probably steal it. With proper credit to the author of course.
Antifa is fascist. It demands absolute obedience to progressive ideology. It is founded upon the Trotsky permanent revolution. Its adherents are unfranchised youth. It is fundamentally anti-proletariat, opposing the interests of the working class. It is rigidly authoritarian, hence fascist. Antifa is atheist, communist, amoral and cultic. It suffers all the maladies of youth with none of the benefits.
correct
Trotskyism … mixes continuous violence and anarchy with communism … the left-wing atheist version of radical Islam.
Communism is, at its base, a perversion of the principles of capitalism, the investment of profits from the application of labor to the raw materials, to produce articles or services of value. However, one essential ingredient was stripped out - the granting of enterprising individuals the right to profit personally from the fruit of his ingenuity or highly motivated efforts. All fruits were to be shared for the common good. The exceptional person was thus thwarted in gaining rightful reward, and sank back to mediocrity.
The Fascist model was a little different, in that the illusion of private ownership of the fruits of ingenuity and motivated effort were permitted, but only so long as the recipient of these rewards remained a good and obedient servant of the State, or more precisely, the Syndicate that was an element of the State. This is crony capitalism at its worst, that locked out new candidates for advancement into these positions unless the previous holder was stripped of his position and sent into some kind of exile or imprisonment, if not executed outright.
The Nationalist Socialism as practiced in Germany differed still further, in that the laboring class, the actual workers, were invested with partial ownership of the enterprises at which they worked, stockholders, whose earnings were tied to the relative success of the corporate entity, and the management level was just a higher-paid member of this same corporate ownership.
All three variations on this statist principle of ownership of the means of capital generation relied on the ultimate use of force to control any dissidents or rebels that would try to contradict the rulings of the elite, until the hopelessness of the situation grew to too great a level to still be controlled any longer, then an internal or external enemy had to be “found”, either resulting in purges or making war on neighboring countries, to steal their wealth for continued nurturing of the State.
Works great until you run out of other people’s money.
Although our modern socialists' promise of greater freedom is genuine and sincere, in recent years observer after observer has been impressed by the unforeseen consequences of socialism, the extraordinary similarity in many respects of the conditions under 'communism' and 'fascism'. As the writer Peter Drucker expressed it in 1939,'the complete collapse of the belief in the attainability of freedom and equality through Marxism has forced Russia to travel the same road toward a totalitarian society of unfreedom and inequality which Germany has been following. Not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and [already in 1939!] it has proved as much an illusion in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.’No less significant is the intellectual outlook of the rank and file in the communist and fascist movements in Germany before 1933. The relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa was well known, best of all to the propagandists of the two parties. The communists and Nazis clashed more frequently with each other than with other parties simply because they competed for the same type of mind and reserved for each other the hatred of the heretic. Their practice showed how closely they are related. To both, the real enemy, the man with whom they had nothing in common, was the liberal of the old type. While to the Nazi the communist and to the communist the Nazi, and to both the socialist, are potential recruits made of the right timber, they both know that there can be no compromise between them and those who really believe in individual freedom.What is promised to us as the Road to Freedom is in fact the Highroad to Servitude. For it is not difficult to see what must be the consequences when democracy embarks upon a course of planning. The goal of the planning will be described by some such vague term as 'the general welfare'. There will be no real agreement as to the ends to be attained, and the effect of the people's agreeing that there must be central planning, without agreeing on the ends, will be rather as if a group of people were to commit themselves to take a journey together without agreeing where they want to go: with the result that they may all have to make a journey which most of them do not want at all. ____________— F A Hayek
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