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Comment by shadowtree | Hacker News Reader

It literally forced a bunch of peoples into a single entity run by a family (aka monarchy). It predates the nation state, it was blown up by the very desire of the peoples within it to get out.

Vienna was the center of this entity, not a part of "Austria". Stefan Zweig, being Jewish, also wasn't connected to the native Austrian population - just like most the persons mentioned in the article. Vienna was an unaligned entity, what New York became later.

The backlash against this amalgam fueled WW1 and WW2. It's still reverberating, as can be seen in various European issues today. Bolshevism and its reaction, fascism, geared up to eradicate the old Christian/Aristocratic structures across Europe. The Habsburg emperor wasn't just leading Austria/Hungary, but also the Holy Roman Empire (of German Nation). Christian god-given authority, verbatim.

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I have a slight quarrel with the first part of your statement. Nation states have been around for thousands of years in both the east and the west.

I suspect I am missing either an in-joke or a revision to geopolitical terminology.

Nations (in the western definition of the term) didn’t exist before the French Revolution.

Not sure I agree. China did by the Qin Dynasty. They have spent centuries defining the notion of centralized government right down to civil service exams (imperial examination system) for a thousand years. Rome was a pretty well-defined system of government, no?

I suspect the China issue was a carve out in the comment you replied too. Since they were referring to the west.

As for Rome, it was never a Nation in the modern sense. It started as a city state and became an empire.

My understanding is that nation states (where the rule and the border were defined nationality of the population) were born as a reaction against empire. Starting with the French Revolution, where the desire for the French to be ruled by French in France was new concept.

Thanks. A way to frame history I never encountered.

That really wasn't new. The Imperial Senate of the HRE was assigning rulers to fiefdoms also based on locality.

He's using the term "nation state" in the political science sense, not in the colloquial sense of a political entity that encompasses a people (nation). The very concept of a modern nation-state is, as tomcam stated, quite new. Before that, loyalty was primarily given to people (individuals or families) rather the state as an abstract concept. Empires like Rome touched on the concept as far as we can tell from historical sources, it was fairly different from the concepts of patriotism today.

The concept of "modern” nation-state is modern and therefore new, it cannot be otherwise.

The original comment remarked on nation-states, and that they have existed in the past. They are not new as far as I am aware.

> Bolshevism and its reaction, fascism

One might argue that fascism is a natural consequence of unfettered rabid capitalism, no need for Bolsheviks at all.

And one would be wrong, unless by fascism you mean "Italian fascism".

I think a reoccuring problem here is that there really isn't a consistent definition of 'facism'. The miriam-webster definition is basically just describing any authoritarian state, including the USSR, North Korea, or Uganda. Some people try to add a racialist component to it, but then struggle to apply that definition to governments traditionally understood to have been fascist, like Pinochet's Chile.

Eco's got about as rigorous a definition as you ever see, but it's pretty broad and could easily apply to any nostalgic / conservative movement. (Which is fairly common in authoritarian ones anyway.)

The people who apply a racialist component to it also then get uncomfortable when you point out that the PRC is basically a fascist state under Han Chinese dominion.

It can be both. The Bolshevik revolution scared the rulers of many European countries, and its capitalist class. People were very impressed that a regime as stable as that of the tsar could fall like that. This is a regime people invested in at the time because it was considered safe.

It is arguably as a consequence of this, that these rulers and capitalists supported more or less enthusiastically fascism as a way to contain the masses. Without that (implicit) support, it's hard to say whether fascism would have been anything more than a bizarre cult.

"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! Let the ruling classes tremble..."

They brought it off. In an era when most of Europe was ruled by weak, aging monarchs.[1] In 1917, most of Europe except for France and Portugal still had a monarch, most with real power.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_last_monarchs_in_E...

It is according to level-headed history.

facism is a consequence of unfettered rabid anything, including bolsheviks. And pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia was not an example of unfettered capitalism.

One might also argue that free market capitalism is the only cure against fascism that we have so far invented. You just need to actually do it instead of piling huge amounts of well-intending but ultimately malicious structures on it.

> One might also argue that free market capitalism is the only cure against fascism that we have so far invented.

Tell me you are American without telling me you are American!

By all means, name an alternative cure that doesn't also butcher and imprison people under a repressive regime of some sort while denying even basic personal freedoms.

Or would you like to claim that a large part of Europe was "cured" of fascism after WWII by Stalin's USSR and its system, or that Nationalist China was cured of its (essentially) fascistic government by the liberating beauty of Maoism?

The socially democratic, largely western capitalist model of mostly free markets has indeed been fairly good at resisting the kind of extreme governments and despotic states that most of history endured. It's not perfect, and authoritarian regimes do develop capitalist economies, but compared to any alternative we've seen so far, it's a winner hands down.

Such an argument is far removed from any simplistic bullshit about deriding Americans for their cultural values (which happen to be essentially not bad despite the nose sniffing they get from so many people in so many countries with their own bloody, turbulent histories of despotic and revolutionary violence.) For example, given most of Europe's history well into the 20th century, it's laughable to see Europeans in particular feeling superior to Americans.

I'm not American, but rather born and raised in a scandinavian democratic socialist paradise. And while I see it could be lot worse and really not at all fascist, I think there are places where we should use the free market more, not less. It's the best protection against fascism.

Is there some place this has been tried? How long has the experiment been going on? How long until we can definitively say that it worked?

One can argue this, but they would be incorrect.

Bolshevism and Fascism were both about hyper centralized governance. Essentially they were an extension of European monarchy.

Free markets (“unfettered rabid capitalism”) is about decentralization of power on to individuals (market participants). It’s the opposite of centralized governance, it’s the lack of governance.

Facists like Hitler and Mussolini were not the outcome of “unfettered capitalism.” If they were, both would have come to power by being wealthy industrialists. Neither did, and the fascist movement was only supported by certain industrialists at the time in the pragmatic sense (turns out if the fascist guy in power likes you, he’ll let you keep selling your stuff).

I think this take on history is a bit rough. Free markets are a fiction. Their ideal picture can only exist in a capitalist sense due to the force monopoly of the state. Otherwise, what is stopping me to shoot you to get your means of production? And is that really a free market, given that I skipped the laws of supply an demand by taking your life? So some governance is needed to keep things kind of orderly. Now the question becomes how much, but that is a political question.

As for your second point: One could indeed argue in turn that they were. In both countries WW2 was preceeded by extremely harsh economic conditions for most of the population, while industrialists prospered, leading to extremist voting shares previously unheard of. Big Industry in turn directly sponsored the NSDAP in many ways, big and small, to get them into power. Hitler especially preached terror to the masses and met with Krupp, Bormann et al. in the backrooms to talk policy. So the previous comment had a point, yours not so much I am afraid. one particular item of interest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler_Fund_of_German_Tr...

Mussolini: "Fascism is reaction".

That guy, a former Marxist, who invented fascism might be a more credible source than other opinions.

Fascism is as revolutionary as communism, focused on the collective vs. the individual. The only real difference is that fascism keeps capitalism intact.

Both are at odds with the aristocracy and liberal democracy.

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