/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.20583872]

What's some good books on fascism?

[Anonymous No.20583883]

>>20583872
I like Eco's novels. But he's just a smarter thriller writer with some neat ideas thrown in. However did he become the expert on Fascism for a lot of lefties? I also hate that pudgy, smug Nigel in the photo.

[Anonymous No.20583890]

>>20583872
>Mine Were of Trouble- Peter Kemp
>The Fourth Political Theory-Alexander Dugin
>For my Legionnaires- Codreanu
>Mein Kampf- Hitler
>Decline of the West- Oswald Spengler
>The Philosophic Basis of Fascism-Giovani Gentile
Disclaimer: I have yet to read any of these. I am trying to read books by both left wing and right wing theorists but books by fascists are incredibly difficult to find and are not published much.

It also doesn’t help that the allies burned a massive amount of books written by Nazis after they lost so a lot of the political theory on Nazism has been lost.

[Anonymous No.20583898]

>>20583890
Also Harassment Architecture by Mike Ma and Bronze Age Mindset are very popular in Neo-Fascist circles

[Anonymous No.20583910]

>>20583898
I think you mean "twitter faggot" circles

[Anonymous No.20583914]

>>20583883
Eco was a philosopher way before he started writing novels for fun you midwit.

[Anonymous No.20583916]

>>20583914
Semiotics isn't real philosophy.

[Anonymous No.20583917]

>>20583914
Yeah Semiotics and all that midwit stuff. But he is no fascism scholar or a real writer.

[Anonymous No.20583920]

>>20583872
>Astrology columns are authoritarian irrationalism and the masses can't stop reading them because they have repressed petite bourgeois consciousness.

[Anonymous No.20583921]

>>20583917
>>20583916
t. assblasted fascists

[Anonymous No.20583931]

>>20583914
Eco's philosophy is all on semiotics and the meanings of languages and words and shit, not on political philosophy. He made up "Ur fascism" which is literally just a simplistic mechanism for accusing people of being nazis.

[Anonymous No.20583941]

>>20583910
Whatever you say mang

[Anonymous No.20583967]

>>20583916
>>20583917
>Semiotics
>Charles Sanders Pierce
>isn’t real philosophy
>midwit

[Anonymous No.20583969]

start with the Greeks

[Anonymous No.20583970]

>>20583872
Carl Schmidt

[Anonymous No.20583972]

>>20583872
Start here:
(article) Versluis A. - A Conversation with Alain de Benoist (2014)

[Anonymous No.20583978]

Fascism is totally irrelevant. Reading about the ideology either to oppose it or adopt it is a complete waste of time.

[Anonymous No.20583984]

>>20583931

Eco is one of the greater thinkers and academics of the last century. Italians by default get to study the rise of fascism much more because a lot of their doctrine is to try to prevent it. There is nothing like first-hand accounts and Ur-fascism is an analysis that gives key insights into why fascism is dangerous and the way it is. Try to disprove it.

[Anonymous No.20583994]

>>20583984
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/more-disney-than-disney-world-semiotics-as-make-believe/
https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2015/05/25/more-disney-than-disney-world-semiotics-as-theoretical-make-believe-ii/

"Semiotics, I want to suggest, has managed to gull intellectuals into actively alienating the very culture they would reform, leading to the degeneration of social criticism into various forms of moral entertainment, a way for jargon-defined ingroups to transform interpretative expertise into demonstrations of manifest moral superiority. Piety, in effect. Semiotics, the study of signs in life, allows the humanities scholar to sit in judgment not just of books, but of text, which is to say, *the entire world of meaning*. It constitutes what might be called an* ideological Disney World*, only one that, unlike the real Disney World, cannot be distinguished from the real.

I know from experience the kind of incredulity these kinds of claim provoke from the semiotically minded. The illusion, as I know first-hand, is that complete. So let me invoke, for the benefit of those smirking down at these words, the same critical thinking mantra you train into your students, and remind you that all institutions are self-regarding, all institutions cultivate congratulatory myths, and to suggest that the notion of some institution set apart, some specialized cabal possessing practices inoculated against the universal human assumption of moral superiority, is implausible through and through. Or at least worth suspicion.

You are almost certainly deluded *in some respect*. What follows merely illustrates how. Nothing magical protects you from running afoul your cognitive shortcomings the same as the rest of humanity."

[Anonymous No.20584003]

Mises' Omnipotent Government, though it suffers from a naive liberal framing, does a good job of outlining the economic catch-22.
Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism + Banality of Evil captures the human dimension, answering the question 'who are these people and what drives them'.
Similarly, Dostoyevsky's Demons offers as vivid a portrait of the totalitarian revolutionary psyche as I've seen anywhere, though he's looking more generally at socialism, which is understandable given his historical place.
Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle might be the best 'entry point' into thinking about fascism.

[Anonymous No.20584005]

>>20583994
Yes, congratulations, things are relative. Now use your own brain to take on the statements and show that they are not dangerous and do not lead to fascism. The entire idea of the essay is to try to see what is that which becomes fascist, which it does. Semiotics is just one phase of Eco's thinking.

[Anonymous No.20584011]

>>20584005
Show me how the average socialist can be distinguished from Eco's definition of fascism without arbitrarily putting a stake in the ground and maybe I'll take you seriously.

[Anonymous No.20584025]

>>20583921
You're the one losing your sleep over fascists coming to rape you in the ass buddy. We just say that Eco is nobody to give any attention to with regards to Fascism. He's a mere thriller writer and well, good job with his Semiotics work, Nobody really literate cares what he or say, Tom Clancy has to say about political theory.

[Anonymous No.20584036]

>>20583872
Zeev Sternhell

[Anonymous No.20584049]

>>20584011
This happened recently.
A tranny accused a Marxist of being a fascist using Umberto Eco
https://twitter.com/ThoughtSlime/status/1523776248412917760

[Anonymous No.20584052]

>>20584049
Wowie that's so wacky.

[Anonymous No.20584054]

>>20584025
It was decent bait but you went overboard when you compared him to Clancy.

[Anonymous No.20584059]

>>20584011
There is no average socialist. There are points on which some denominations perform worse than others - focus on illumination of key texts instead of new ideas, treating ideological disagreement as actual treason, general militancy.
But on the other points socialism is the direct opposite of fascism - it embraces modernity and all the changes it brings with it, it loves the weak and recognizes their weakness for the socially defined circumstance that it is, it treasures life in general instead of one race. I think this shows most clearly in rejecting the cult of death - martyrdom is no longer desired because it is clear that it is only effective when the ruling ideology approves of it.
Socialism is a better reflection of reality, at least to me, since it is based on concrete factors like political, cultural and economic power. Fascist analyses of the world take a narrative and then apply it, creating an enemy. It is much more likely that certain systemic factors benefit a group that is higher up on a hierarchy more than that abstract and hard to grasps factors like morality are in decline or that there is some outside group that unanimously works to weaken another without some institutional power.

[Anonymous No.20584061]

I'd actually suggest Princes of the Yen by Richard Werner. It's pretty much restricted to the economic component (i.e. corporatism), but it shows the potential of a one-party stated with a clear national vision (Japan then, China now etc.). Combine that with Faces of Janus by A. James Gregor, and you'll be left with a decent understanding of both fascism and those who would vehemently oppose it.

[Anonymous No.20584067]

>>20584049
The Marxist in question being picrel, whose own "org" is chock full of trannies and weirdos, if this is Fascism, I'm 100% against it
https://twitter.com/CPIUSA/status/1504934319206244352

[Anonymous No.20584073]

>>20584067
what in the world
is this some kind of performance art?

[Anonymous No.20584077]

Are Marx's lumpen comments 'contempt for the weak' and 'selective populism'?

[Anonymous No.20584078]

>>20584077
nah dude, it's different when we do it

[Anonymous No.20584098]

>>20584059
>Fascist analyses of the world take a narrative and then apply it, creating an enemy
Have you never read socialist propaganda? Historical materialism is a gigantic narrative which makes an entire group of people at as an a priori enemy of the proletariat. You're clearly ideologically biased so there's not much point even bothering here.

[Anonymous No.20584102]

>>20584049
Most of those qualities could be applied to modern leftist and progressive movements. Were progressives the real fascists all along?

[Anonymous No.20584105]

>>20584059
>There is no average socialist
And there is no average fascist either.
>it embraces modernity and all the changes it brings with it
No, it embraces some of the changes, not the changes which enhance capitalism or whatever it sees as bad, just like fascism. Socialism even has its own primordial myth just like fascism ("primitive communism" - Engels).
>it treasures life in general instead of one race.
USSR begs to differ.

[Anonymous No.20584106]

>>20584098
Nuh-uh brah that's different lmao. Historical Materialism is a Science, Fascism is demagogery.

[Anonymous No.20584108]

at least we can all agree that totalitarianism is no good

[Anonymous No.20584116]

>>20584108
https://youtu.be/43vRoD8GnIY?t=164

[Anonymous No.20584119]

>>20584108
Fascist totalitarianism has nothing to do with the vulgar conception that people believe

[Anonymous No.20584129]

>>20583984
>first hand accounts
I'm sure Eco had a very valuable and grounded first-hand account to share having been a teenager during the war
Teenagers are known for their good judgement :)

[Anonymous No.20584135]

>>20584119
>real fascism hasn't been tried
just fuck off

[Anonymous No.20584138]

>>20584135
Not an argument.

[Anonymous No.20584141]

>>20584106
>Historical Materialism is a Science
loool

[Anonymous No.20584149]

>>20584129
Utterly retarded reply delivered with palpable smugness. There’s only one thing left to do: go back.

[Anonymous No.20584155]

>>20584102
I don't understand why some Marxists support this shit, when it can be used against them.
Lipset took Adorno's F scale and applied it to USSR, then he said that the working classes are authoritarian and support for them can lead to fascism. Adorno afer the student activists humiliated him was talking about left fascism.

[Anonymous No.20584159]

>>20584098
everything is propaganda, but you can decide what to believe. Historical materialism is just one facet of socialism, moreso of Marxism even, and it has been developed and changed. I refered earlier to the "all truth has already been revealed" trope of fascism - this is where it reappears. But that does not stop us from taking the truth further and changing it. Hence infighting between leftists - at least they are honest that the world is too complicated to explain simply.

[Anonymous No.20584172]

>>20584105
These are not arguments, but cherry-picking. You cannot say it does not embrace change which favours capitalism - no change favours something or other, its application to a problem does. For example, automatisation is used to reduce numbers of workers in the workplace, leading to shortage of those specific jobs. If the workers had a say in the running of the company, automatisation would mean they own (in some sense) the machines that replace them - vacation time instead of losing one's job.
"Average fascist" and the USSR point make no sense, they do not argue against my points about current day socialims.

[Anonymous No.20584174]

>>20584159
>everything is propaganda
the fact that you believe this should be a glaring red flag that you've been gaslit into supporting a lie.
>everyone is a liar ;)

[Anonymous No.20584183]

>>20584174
either explain what things are not relative or how I am gaslit or do not bother

[Anonymous No.20584189]

>>20583978
>t.

[Anonymous No.20584190]

>porkie is stealing muh surplus value
>this is oppression!
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it

[Anonymous No.20584194]

>>20584135
It was, and it was great

[Anonymous No.20584200]

>>20583872
the Doctrine of Fascism - Mussolini
report on Fascism - Bordiga

[Anonymous No.20584202]

>>20583872
Does anyone have the left fascism reading chart?

[Anonymous No.20584204]

>>20584189
Picrel would not think fascism is irrelevant.

[Anonymous No.20584205]

>>20583872
https://www.international-communist-party.org/BasicTexts/English/22Fascis.htm
https://www.international-communist-party.org/BasicTexts/English/24Fascis.htm
https://www.international-communist-party.org/Englis/Document/69TheOnl.htm
http://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/fascismtheses.htm

[Anonymous No.20584209]

>>20584183
NTA
If everything is propaganda and things are relative then you cannot rationally argue for why socialism is better than even the strawman of slavering brutal bloodthirsty fascism; you can't claim your ideology is better than following impulses like tribalism; because in that case your rational arguments are not valuable in themselves but rather as expressions of an aesthetic, they are rationalizations of an irrational emotionally-grounded ideology as all humans have and in your case Marxism, which would lose all credibility if you were shot for example.

[Anonymous No.20584215]

>>20584200
>report on Fascism - Bordiga
Holy shit that is some copium about losing.

[Anonymous No.20584234]

>>20584183
first of all, if you were serious about your position you should be a postmodernist, not a commie. you should be aware that you have no reason to believe that your perspective is any more likely to be accurate than any other, that your ideological outlook is the product of circumstances outside your control, and that your only move toward liberation from dogma would be radical deconstructivism or negative dialectics or whatever.
And then, there clearly are different kinds of discourses that don't function the same in terms of when they consider something 'true' and what they take 'being true' to mean. The scientific method is not propaganda in the same way agitprop is. There is such a thing as an honest practice of truth-seeking, trying in an infinite motion to figure out which map correspond to the territory of the real, and there are traditions that practice this and traditions that try to build dogmas that can't be called into question by new evidence.
Scientific socialism has, from its point of genesis, been of the second kind, as you can plainly see from the circular reasoning that allows for only a single valid level of analysis, namely class struggle. For an ideal communist, there would nothing you can do to convince them that the reason you disagree with them isn't due to the material conditions that have shaped your consciousness, so in other words it's an unfalsifiable axiom.

[Anonymous No.20584239]

>>20584190
Easily defeat any communist by pointing out how jewish all the "porkies" surnames are

[Anonymous No.20584241]

>>20584189
He is right and it is the only thing Dems have going on for them

[Anonymous No.20584248]

>>20584241
He isn't right, Trump is not a fascist. He's just a right-liberal

[Anonymous No.20584363]

>>20584209
>>20584234

Not a communist, not a socialist. These are things I am arguing against fascism, which takes the relative position and uses it to impose absoluteness through power. That is what I am against.
I already said it is about choosing what to believe, which is a good litmus test for what beliefs are sensible and which are not (where this comes from does not matter too much - but it is basically about what we as brains in bodies can agree on and comprehend and what is incomprehensible). Therefore, a position that says "I (or my race, denomination, whatever) is superior and others need to be gone" is not sensible whereas "I am as valuable as others and are more like me than not" is.
Concerning the scientific method, it is a tool - like anything, it can (has to) become narrative-ish and propagandy in order to make sense within a system. The results of the method tell us little by themselves. You can argue that even talking about "forces" and "atoms" in physics is ideology (and has been shown to, at least a little bit, be - the universe does not cleanly divide into atoms) that are created in order for us to make sense of the abstractions with the language that we have.
All of your arguments miss the point that, while politically everything is very suspect and everyone is implicated, practically the policies that need to be enacted are not so controversial to lead to authoritarianism or gulags.
Fascism does not make sense without the ideological worldview to back it up.

[Anonymous No.20584378]

>>20584363
>"I (or my race, denomination, whatever) is superior and others need to be gone" is not sensible whereas "I am as valuable as others and are more like me than not" is.
This is just your ideology. It has no basis in defining what is or isn't fascism. There is nothing inherently more truthful about "X is better than Y" or "X is equal to Y."
>which takes the relative position and uses it to impose absoluteness through power
That's what literally every ideology and political philosophy does. By your logic, now everything is fascism.

[Anonymous No.20584379]

>>20584363
Not sure what you're trying to get at here, yeah fascism is retarded and contradictory, the question in this replychain was whether socialism is any different. A fascist wouldn't be talking to you like this, they'd just call you a troon child-grooming puppet of jewry or whatever. I'll go ahead and press x to doubt regarding your not being a commie, though.
>"I am as valuable as others and are more like me than not"
>practically the policies that need to be enacted are not so controversial to lead to authoritarianism or gulags.
are fairly strong indicators that you're actually convinced that some kind of "pragmatic" radical egalitarianism is the common sense way to go in the objective, natural interests of humanity, etc.

[Anonymous No.20584396]

>>20583890
>The Fourth Political Theory- Dugin
Russian imperialism book with a sprinkle of conspiracy. It's hardly fascist.
>For my Legionnaires- Codreanu
Better read his "Nest Leader's Manual" because it's more directly describing fascist ways of life.
>Mein Kampf- Hitler
More valuable for its historical context than an understanding of fascism. Probably the only book so far on the list that's directly relevant.
>Decline of the West- Spengler
Spengler opposes fascism and national socialism as well as anti-semitism, and he distances himself from those movements explicitly in his essays. Instead, his "Man and Technics", while not directly supporting fascist views, displays a cold and mechanical, social darwinian perception of reality that is very common among fascists. (less so in neo-fascist movements)
>The Philosophic Basis of Fascism- Gentile
The best book on this topic, period.
>Harassment Architecture- Ma
A joke of a book written by a person who doesn't understand fascism. Nonetheless gives insight into the modern mindset of neo-fascists, who often have no idea what they're even advocating for.
>Bronze Age Mindset- BAP
Same as above, but even more delusional. This one fits better in the 'redpilled' MGOTW movement than in fascism.

Other recommendations: DeMaistre, Carl Schmitt, Yockey's Imperium

[Anonymous No.20584406]

>>20584378
>>20584379
>>20584378
>>20584379
yes I have no clue how to justify one thing over another, it is simply, to be truthful, what I want. My goal would then be to show that there is no need to justify it - it is non-contradictory and inclusive, therefore, there is little to say against it. Unopposable because obvious - unscientific, yes, but science is about what the world is, whereas society is about how we put it together, right? within the limitations of our brains, however.
I can also add that what fascism does is also create some goal outside of reality - there is greatness or honour or whatever, it can be achieved by giving up what you have or even your life.
I would be very suspicious of any leftist movement that claimed to work for the good of the followers while depriving their actual livelihoods or something or forcing them to go to war.

[Anonymous No.20584417]

>>20584406
>I would be very suspicious of any leftist movement that claimed to work for the good of the followers while depriving their actual livelihoods
Reminds me of what Nabokov once wrote:
>Another horrible paradox about Leninism is that these materialists found it possible to squander the lives of millions of real people for the sake of the hypothetical millions that would be happy some day.

[Anonymous No.20584500]

>>20584406
>non-contradictory and inclusive
What do you do with the objective contradictions, then? Crime, political radicalism, the incommensurability of viewpoints where non of the alternatives can lay a claim on being objectively better than their alternatives?
The world isn't a solved problem, hence no such thing as pure non-contradictive inclusivity is possible. You have to either accept other people's freedom to, if not do then at least say, advocate for, viewpoints you would consider irrational and counter-productive (what communists call false consciousness, since they believe that they can't be wrong, so when someone disagrees with them there can only be one explanation), or you have to force them to be free in the Rousseauean sense. This reasoning is exactly why the revolution that claims to bring freedom, justice and equality to all inverts itself into the reign of terror - because the 'shared, pragmatic interests of humanity' it takes for granted aren't actually that rational and self-explanatory. Conflict in the form of the struggle over how to draw boundaries to describe a fuzzy and multi-perspectival moral landscape are necessary to any functioning discourse. You can either have that struggle take on the shape of free discourse or do your part to let it degenerate into a pure striving for power by any means available. Those are the choices.

[Anonymous No.20584548]

>>20583916
>>20583917
No u

[Anonymous No.20584751]

>>20583872
George Lucas

[Anonymous No.20584826]

>>20583872
To understand what Fascism is, as a political philosophy, you literally only need to read Gentile's "the origins and doctrine of fascism,". He came up with this stuff. Now whether you understand those ideas depends on your philosophical background, though I think Gentile made it pretty accessible.

Everything else on the subject is either a polemic, pragmatic history, or an instantiation of Fascism. There is a difference between the concept and the implementation, hence Franco and Mussolini's respective states were so different.

I dont think fasicsm is a tenable political organization, but once you overcome the taboo you'll find it really is fascinating. What's more you'll find people who use the term Fascist as a pejorative dont know what fascism is, and actually just mean a use of authority that isnt their own.

[Anonymous No.20584868]

>>20583872
Read Gentile.
/thread

[Anonymous No.20584880]

>>20583984
The concept of an 'Ur-fascism', an intellectual paranoia over the substance of fascism, just leads to more fascism.

[Anonymous No.20584885]

>>20584396
Only good post ITT and I know it without reading the thread. But Mike Ma's book is entertaining. BAP's philosophy is contrary to Fascism. Did Spengler oppose antisemitism that strongly? I know he disliked the Nazis but later on voted for them.

[Anonymous No.20584937]

>>20584885
There is nothing in Untergang from what I can recall that would be classified as a fascistic view on semitic people. Spengler reveals a circular understanding of history which is often populair among Traditionalist circles.

As mentioned earlier in this thread, you should probably read Gentile.

[Anonymous No.20584962]

>>20584885
For what it's worth, John Farrenkopf - a "scholar on Spengler" - wrote that Spengler essentially portrayed anti-semitism to be rooted in jealousy/envy of competence, saying that such attitudes are idiotic and dangerous to the nation. Nonetheless, we see that Spengler perceives in Judaism a force of decomposition, which reduces reality to the purely material and financial. So while he did separate himself from anti-semitism formally, it's hard to tell how much he exactly shares with it.

As for his main work, the Decline of the West, it's really more of a history book from an unorthodox perspective than anything else. It is permeated with views that fascists often adopt, but isn't inherently political in its endeavour or goal.

[Anonymous No.20585028]

Is anyone interested in making a fas chart with me? Like we have this and ww2 thread every week