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Comment by mturmon | Hacker News Reader

What an insightful piece. It is interwoven with Eco's experience as a kid in Fascist Italy, but written 50 years later. At the end is a little listicle of typical characteristics of a Fascist movement, with a careful indication that not all will be present.

Being written in 1995, the training set is independent of the test set, and one is thus free to find parallels in the current moment:

"Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation."

"Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders."

"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."

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> Thinking is a form of emasculation.

In particular, I've observed that one hallmark of fascistic movements is an obsession with "emasculation" and condemnation of any society or part of society deemed "effeminate".

You can see it in the writings of Julius Evola. While Evola never described himself as a "fascist", it was only because he felt that Mussolini and the Fascist Party didn't go far enough. He was an extreme right-wing nationalist, and it's not uncommon for modern Neo-Nazi groups to quote his writing as if it were scripture. Evola was obsessed with the idea that healthy societies are masculine and degenerate societies are effeminate, and he wrote at length about how he felt that Jewish culture is both degenerate and effeminate.

It's also common in modern far-right white nationalist groups. You'll notice that many such communities describe men they don't like as "betas" and "cucks", and they blame society's problems on women becoming more and more prominent in society (and on feminist men, too, for letting women in; they especially get called "cucks").

And it's not just the white supremacists; I've observed the same obsession with "emasculation" in extremist Asian identity groups, which are typically dominated by unsuccessful Asian men blaming the fact that they can't get laid on a conspiracy of Asian women and white men to emasculate Asian men.

It would seem then, that if these people had an outlet for the self-expression of their masculinity, they wouldn't need to fall into fascist politics.

To go further, it would seem that, in the current social environment, these people aren't successful at expressing their masculinity as much as they wish. And they want to blame somebody else rather than their own ability to function in society as it currently is.

To put it bluntly: They feel like losers, and they think it's their right to feel like winners.

And to bring it back to amyjess's point: An environment that values thinking seems to make them feel like losers.

>"Ur-Fascism grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders."

>"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."

Yep, the birth of fascism, ie. Italian fascism, was a final act of the Italian national independence process which started in the first half of 19th century. The independence from Austrian empire and from Catholic Church - Mussolini in particular finalized the relationships with papal states/Vatican.

Interesting that Mussolini started as Socialist and split with them on very similar grounds as the "bolsheviks"/Lenin split from Socialists in Russia around the same time - push for more forceful action, for unchecked power (dictatorship) - the difference being that in Russia Lenin was pushing for dictatorship of the working class while Mussolini was for dictatorship of the national state. While one may say that whose ideologies are of different colors, structurally they are the same and thus produced similar results - totalitarian states.

As an example, just replace national dimension with the "aristocracy - capitalists - worker class/peasants" dimension in the 2 quotes above and you'll get the socialist/communist principle of the "class war" and that idea that just by being of "working class" makes people intrinsically good and thus gives them moral power and entitles them to [dictatorially] rule and decide the fate of others.

> push for more forceful action, for unchecked power

Is this something like Barack Obama carrying out drone strikes? Or Madeleine Albright approving the starving of 500,000 Iraqi children? Or Hilary Clinton getting a knife stuck up Gaddafi's rectum? Or the invasion of Iran on a pretext?

Or does it have to be something in dim and distant past which we can tut about as it was done by "those other ones"?

None of the contemporary things you mention are examples of unchecked power. The fact that you can mention them in public without fear of being whisked away tonight by secret police illustrates this. Unchecked power does not permit criticism, or admit room for opposition.

I think the rules are that you're allowed to criticize things as long as it makes no actual difference.

> None of the contemporary things you mention are examples of unchecked power.

That's easy to say, it's proven by putting a whole lot of war criminals at least on trial. By actually having done that.

> The fact that you can mention them in public without fear of being whisked away tonight by secret police illustrates this.

How so? This just illustrates that you can say this because nobody cares all that much, because it will not do anything. It doesn't put power in check, it's just someone saying something on HN. Power remains unchecked, and the hundreds of thousands or even millions of people who got murdered and the families they left behind continue to get no justice.

That's just because today mentioning them in public doesn't have much (if any) effect.

Back in the day when there were powerful alternative fractions for the power (e.g. socialists, communists in Europe etc), mentioning such staff in public against the established powers brought support to them, and advanced their cause.

Now people know all about them and still elect e.g. Bush Jr. a second term, Obama 2 terms, now Trump etc. It's not like there's any credible threat to anything.

And when there's not, freedom of speech is free, because it's almost worthless.

TL;DR; Modern-day unchecked power can permit criticism just fine: when the waters due to media pollution are so muddle that the signal is lost in the noise, and/or when few people care about it anyway.

I take it you believe that socialism and communism are better than liberalism.

That isn't remotely what the OP said.

edit: - unnecessary 2nd sentence

But coldtea confirmed I was right that he is a socialist.

The reason I was able to correctly infer he is a socialist is he was following a familiar socialist-marxist position. This is that democracy in capitalist countries is a shame, everything that happens is decided in secret by the rich people, who control the media to trick the population to go along. According to this view, true freedom of speech and democracy are possible only under socialism.

Attaching a label to someone is the most significant act in analysis.

Let me add that you seem to be taking the standard marxist position that fascism is capitalism taken to its logical conclusion, so every non-socialist country is fascist or on its way there.

Let me agree with tunap and say that that isn't remotely what coldtea said either.

I inferred it from what he said. But I re-read the comment, and he did say the US is more socialist than liberal (a very strange set of meanings for the two terms), so maybe I am wrong. Perhaps coldtea could say if I was right or wrong.

That's orthogonal to what I said, which is that freedom of speech can be easily permitted if speech doesn't really have any consequences, e.g. if there aren't actually any popular movements that speech could stir up.

That's so whether those movements are against some right wing regime or some left wing regime (or generally left/right government establishment).

That said, I do believe that socialism is better than liberalism.

At least the former is an actual form of government, with a legacy and original thinkers going back to centuries, and practiced e.g. in Sweden, Denmark, Switcherland, Canada etc. for half a century or so (and with policies adopted all over the world in some form or another).

The latter is just some abstract doctrines based on protestant ideas that time after time lead to bad results (corporatism, every man for himself, broken social contracts, etc.) where it's overly practiced. Even U.S. itself in fact has been much more socialist than liberal for the most part.

Except if you mean "really existing socialism" a la Eastern Bloc, which where mostly post-war "colonies" of USSR.

two points

First, the idea that freedom of speech is completely suppressed whenever it has a chance to stir up a popular movement, that is simply nonsense. For instance, the UK Labour party was voted into power after WWII and nationalized much of the economy. You seem to be taking the Marxist position that real change is possible only through the violent overthrow of the government.

Secondly, you seem to be for social democracy, a political philosophy for which I have some positive feelings, and which I wish Americans knew more about. But I think you can be more effective in arguing for it if you avoid labelng it as "socialism." That is because the term has no standard meaning, and different groups have different meanings for it.

In fact, even self-identified socialists can't agree. Social democrats call themselves socialists, but orthodox marxists say it is not socialism, but a form of capitalism. And Soviet communists called themselves socialists, but many social democrats said it wasn't socialism because it wasn't democratic and was for the benefit of a small, powerful elite.

I think it is much better as a persuasion technique to stick with the term social democracy, because everyone agrees on it, and focus on describing how it works, what are its benefits, and so on.

>The latter is just some abstract doctrines based on protestant ideas that time after time lead to bad results (corporatism, every man for himself, broken social contracts, etc.) where it's overly practiced. Even U.S. itself in fact has been much more socialist than liberal for the most part.

Boy, I have never heard the US described as more socialist than liberal. Normally it is taken as the model of a liberal country. Could you describe any nation in the world today that is mainly liberal, as you are using the term?

If that criticism manifests itself into a real threat perhaps we would see if power is unchecked. Recall Saddam Hussein, our best buddy in the Middle East until he decided to go rogue... and tried to off Papa Bush. An illegal war got rid of him.

PS: No WMDs? Yeah, well, that's what the News said. However, Rummsfeld has the receipts.

> The fact that you can mention them in public without fear of being whisked away tonight by secret police illustrates this.

This is plain wrong historically. The nazists, fascists and the stasi all used more manipulative and less blatant methods than dragging away every dissenter.

All of those are international actions. While the people in other countries impacted by these actions had no direct method to prevent the US government actions, the people making these choices do not have unchecked power.

All of these actions were subject to all the constitutional checks and balances of the US system. Obama's drone strikes is an election issue. Albright's actions were overseen directly and indirectly by Congress. Same with Clinton (or did you not notice the amount of time Congress spent on Benghazi). There's also been judicial review of many of these elements.

There is no real method of international check on power other than a threat of power in return. The UN, NATO, and international diplomacy tries to forge a method to ensure that war is less commonly used, but ultimately, as the invasion in Iraq showed, if the US wants to do something it can do it. Same with Russia choosing to take a chunk of the Ukraine.

It's not unchecked. The Republican congress has had plenty of opportunities to stop it and has declined. The National Defense Authorization Act is passed every year. The 2001 AUMF that authorized the "war on terror" was passed bypartisanly without any sunset provision, nobody of either party has proposed repealing it.

> the difference being that in Russia Lenin was pushing for dictatorship of the working class

Lenin was pushing for a dictatorship of the Bolshevik vanguard, notionally on behalf of the working class -- Leninist vanguardism features what might more accurately be called a dictatorship for the proletariat as opposed to the earlier Marxist dictatorship of the proletariat.

> Lenin was pushing for dictatorship of the working class ... While one may say that whose ideologies are of different colors, structurally they are the same and thus produced similar results - totalitarian states.

Lenin was born into a "totalitarian" state - Czarist Russia. The czarist government murdered his brother, which probably was an impetus for him into anti-czarist politics.

Czarist Russia wasn't totalitarian in that it didn't try to become paternalistic Alpha and Omega for its citizens. It was a typical XIX century monarchial state.

On related note, Soviet Communists on a good day murdered more civilians than Czarist Russia did in a decade.

I highly recommend reading: http://w3.salemstate.edu/~cmauriello/pdfEuropean/Paxton_Five...

Its not particularly long, but is one of the more eye opening things I ever read on the subject

The three items you list -- anti-intellectualism and love of physical action; xenophobia and fear of subversion; national or tribal supremacism -- remind me of the Scotch-Irish, especially the lowland Scotch-Irish who've traded in their dulcimers, moonshine, and family feuds for NASCAR, OxyContin, and Christian Dominionism.

How does one convince a society, especially a very xenophobic society, to abandon characteristics that make it unusually vulnerable to fascism?

You integrate it. You integrate the economy throughout the country so that the economic interests of West Virginians are aligned with Silicon Valley and Manhattan and Alabama. This means decentralization and access to opportunity for all, not a winner-take-all system.

You allow for differences, as well. Cultural differences such as a rural/urban divide should not be exacerbated by smarmy elitism in either direction. You do this not by highlighting differences (extreme PCism or racism/bigotry) but by fostering an attitude among our peoples of love towards their fellow person. That our differences are there, but that they don't ultimately matter.

-----

Obviously our country (and others) have a long way to go with a lot of hard work ahead of us.

To expand upon your last sentence, " That our differences are there, but that they don't ultimately matter." I thik that we can in fact, we can celebrate our differences as they make us unique. However, with regards love towards our fellow person, as you said, the differences shouldn't hinder that.

I think you may have the Scotch-Irish, at least the ones living around Scotland and Ireland wrong. They have never been particularly fascist and I have not noticed them being unusually xenophobic. In the recent Brexit vote it was the English who voted out, not the Scots or Irish.

Presumbly it is the American ones (such as myself) being referred to - separated from their relatives by more than a century and a half https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans

Exactly. For some reason, colonies preserve the cultures that settled them, while their homeland counterparts continue to change. The Scotch-Irish of 300 years ago, who still live in the US today, are profoundly different from the modern Scotch-Irish -- and for some reason have never adapted to an environment of peace and security.

(Possibly because the US is less peaceful and secure... but part of that is perception, and/or a product of people expecting it to be.)

He's referring to the ones who settled in the US Appalachian region in the 1800s.

> Being written in 1995, the training set is independent of the test set

There is an important bias effect in play. OF the books written in the past about the rise of tyranny, not all are brought up equally in discussions. It is easy to observe that people upvote articles that support their ideology and flag articles (concrete example: the recent terror attacks were flagkilled off the front page) that go against it.

The articles that make it though this filter are not independent of the test set.

Well said - that's a point worth making.

But not necessarily a big worry with this particular article - Eco's fame as a novelist and the sheer strength of his prose will tend to bust through filters regardless.

It's pretty trivial to apply these signals to nearly any collectivist social movement.

1. Action for action's sake - Black Lives Matter protests to block highways.

2. Exploit the fear of difference - Those horrible racist uneducated people are nothing like us, we can't let them take the country! This is basic tribalism and it applies to every major social movement.

3. Rewritten: "To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Anti-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be good, moral egalitarians. This is the origin of anti-fascism."

Here I've applied them to Western progressivism, but if you deny the basic assumptions of any collectivist social movement you could apply them. Scientology, communism, socialism, fascism. Switch a few unimportant words and there you are with the same meaningless parallels.

The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives.

EDIT: It's important to remember when comparing Trump to old fascists that the people who defeated those fascists enacted Trump's policies. For example, in 1945, immigration policy in all western countries was effectively, "whites only".

So if you're gonna notice parallels between Trump and Hitler, you have to notice even closer parallels between Trump and the people who defeated Hitler. You should also notice the differences: Trump is an isolationist who wants to start wars less than Hillary - a lot like pre-WW2 America.

I agree: "The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives."

But, I think you have stripped the context from the quotes you offer, and in so doing, made them applicable to anything.

For instance, regarding point (1), you're stereotyping the BLM protests. Read their website and it's all about intersectionality and inclusion and a bunch of other academic buzzwords. It's not really about protest for protest's sake: specific demands have been given. And it's not anti-intellectual, which is the context you removed from point 1.

You have done a similar thing with the next point. The original point is about fear of intruders from outside the nation

I would agree that there are parallels of certain parts of, say, the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests) with this synopsis of fascism. A lot of that was action for action's sake: dress up in black and break store windows.

But take, on the other hand, the OWS protests. It was partly because of the authoritarian tendencies of other protest movements that OWS adopted various egalitarian habits - not addressing crowds with bullhorns, the consensus process, etc. (For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Main_organi...).

In sum, I think you're not being careful about your reasoning, and you are reasoning backward from the answer you want ("a pox on both their houses"). We're not talking about mere groupthink, smug activists, or misguided protesters. We're talking about actual fascism.

> The original point is about fear of intruders from outside the nation

It doesn't have to mean physical intruders though, that certainly wasn't what the Nazis were mainly concerned about.

> We're talking about actual fascism.

Which is, I would argue, on a spectrum. Groupthink isn't really benign IMHO.

> 1. Action for action's sake - Black Lives Matter protests to block highways.

But that isn't "action for action's sake," it's action that is derived from one particular theory of change. BLM blocks highways because they believe that by doing so they can effectively draw attention to both their issues and their movement. The action is deliberately chosen to advance decided-upon strategic goals, not simply a reflexive flexing of muscle.

Eco also highlights part of "action for action's sake" as a deliberate repudiation of intellectualism, which is an odd thing to say about a movement like BLM which emerged in large part from universities. Intellectuals can find a role to play in BLM that they could never find in a fascist movement.

Nice attempt, but:

1. I won't speak for BLM, but protesting in a visible way is not action for action's sake.

2. this is just an old joke. No, those who oppose racism don't think racists are an inferior race. Also, they oppose racism, not racists.

3. Anti-fascists lacked many things, but identity was rarely one of them. Anti-fascists were communists, anarchists, catholics, jews, monarchists... I don't think that there ever was such a thing as an "anti-fascist identity" during the relevant years, and even now, I don't know of anybody who identifies themselves purely as anti-fascist without other connotations.

Your points are valid, but that kind misses the major thrust of the argument... which is that facism isn't based on a shared set of common principles or political thought, facism is in the authors opinion not linked to specific beliefs...

as for trump being a facist, i think the primary reason he wouldnt be a facist is he doesnt really seem to have any strong interest in athoratarian centralized power... in fact if anything unless kaisich is actually just flat out lying, he is pretty open about wanting to minimize his day to day control and be more of a symbol for the movement... thats extremely un-facist

Another article was posted in one of these threads about phases or stages of fascism. Authoritarian/dictatorial regimes are one of them. The nationalism, xenophobism, and other traits of the Trump campaign have fascist elements. That doesn't mean he would be a fascist leader but it paves the way for it down the road.

Actually, the Kasich offer makes his fascist tendencies clearer to me. Trump is not interested in actually governing or implementing policies, he's interested in having a massive adoring audience.

Like historical fascists, he doesn't care what policies get him that power and adoration. He'd be happy running an isolationist government, but just as happy militantly dropping nuclear bombs in the Middle East.

The one consistent in Trump's political "career" is a worship of power. He's obsessed with winners and losers, and if you're winning he likes you. If you criticize him, he hates you and will try to destroy you, whether it's legal or not. I don't think he could, as president, tolerate a free press.

It's pretty trivial to apply these signals to nearly any collectivist social movement.

It's certainly trivial when you cherry-pick three phrases out of a 5000+ word essay.

You're missing the central point of the article, which is that Ur-Fascism is not an ideology or even a set of policies. It's a method of discourse and a political aesthetic.

Every political party and movement has supporters who feel this way. The problem is when they control the party.

BLM certainly emphasizes action for its own sake, but they don't run the Democratic party. Likewise, individual liberals might speak to a fear of "horrible racist uneducated people are nothing like us," but if you watched the DNC the message is one of unity: reach out to those people, don't drive them away.

You can dispute and justify all you want, but there's a reason that apolitical historians are coming out to point out current fascist threat.

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