The Fascism Hysteria among the Technocrats

Brendan O'Neill has a thoughtful piece up about the ubiquitous abuse and misuse of the words "fascism" and "fascist." I think he hits several nails on the head here:

The wise thing to do would be to accept that the term fascist is beyond repair. It’s a dead word. It now means bastard. It’s an emotional insult, expressing a sense of powerlessness on the part of the person making it, whose belief that he faces a fascist threat grows in direct proportion to his own inability to make sense of political developments. The insult of ‘fascist’ speaks far more to the insulter’s own sensation of impotence than it does to the insulted’s actual power, or ideology, or ambition. And yet, let’s have one more try. Let’s make a likely forlorn stab at saying what fascism is. Not to be pedantic, but to differentiate between historic periods; to clarify what happened back then as a way of illustrating that it simply isn’t happening today. For fascism does not exist now.

I admire his devotion to meaningful language, something sorely lacking in this age diseased with post-modernist sound and fury, and I am similarly fatalistic about the endeavor. Back to O'Neill:

... Orwell was worried that the word would lose its ‘last vestige of meaning’ if people insisted on applying it to everyone they disagreed with — and that has happened. The word is now used with an ahistoricism and thoughtlessness that are genuinely alarming. And among the upper echelons of society, not merely by scruffy protesters or online blowhards. The Archbishop of Canterbury says Trump is part of the ‘fascist tradition’. Prince Charles has warned darkly of a return of the atmosphere of the 1930s, and we all know what that means. ‘Yes, Donald Trump is a fascist’, says New Republic, a magazine that once considered itself a voice of reason among the paranoid style of American political life. But everyone’s paranoid now. Everyone now sees fascists.

...

It is no accident that the technocratic elites have reached for the fascism spectre to describe recent events, or at least to express their terror at these events. Because it was fundamentally the experience of fascism that convinced much of the political class in Europe that it should insulate the political process from the excesses of popular and public opinion. These elites drew precisely the wrong lesson from the experience of the 1930s and 40s: not that concentrating power and militarising the state and dismantling law and liberty were wicked and dangerous things to do, but rather that ordinary people’s passions, their apparently authoritarian impulses, were ill-suited to political life and would only nurture more Nazi-style horrors. 

...

And of course, what they describe as ‘fascism’ — Brexit, people worried about immigration, Trump — is nothing of the sort. These things don’t even come close to fascism. As Weismann argued, even ‘dictatorship, mass neurosis, anti-Semitism, the power of unscrupulous propaganda, the hypnotic effect of a mad-genius orator on the masses, and so on’ do not necessarily constitute fascism. Fascism, he said, was something different to all that, something more than all that. Fascism, in essence, is a mass, paramilitary movement that acts as a stand-in for normal politics and normal statehood when that politics and statehood cannot deal with a threat it faces ...
Something interesting here is that O'Neill uses Communist sources to define fascism, and I think in the end he misses the correct definition because of that. However, he seems to understand the historical realities better than most, and I think he is absolutely right about the elites learning the wrong lessons from history. Fascism to them is the people taking control of government. We the people call that something different.

16 comments:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

"...uses Communist sources to define fascism..."

Yes, exactly. The far left has been skilled in getting the center-left to take over its language and framing of issues over the last century. Very few leftists, even in Europe, are committed communists. They are mild, and draw back from such. But they have unconsciously (and stupidly) accepted the framing of the farther left. They cannot see things any other way. Their definitions are the only real definitions.

When I used to study up on religious cults in order to teach adult Sunday School, I saw the same pattern. The first task of the cult is to redefine words and concepts. Once you have that in place you can do just about anything. People don't even have to agree with you all that much at that point. They only know that they disagree with your opposition, who are clearly Badname#1, Badname#2, or Badname#3 people.

E Hines said...

...ordinary people’s passions, their apparently authoritarian impulses, were ill-suited to political life....

And yet, predating those 30s and 40s by a generation, this is a very tight paraphrase of Herb Croly's view of ordinary Americans' ability to handle what he viewed as true democracy. A view expressed not quite sotto voce by TRRoosevelt and explicitly, in amongst his overt racism, by Woodrow Wilson.

Eric Hines

jaed said...

Progressivism (speaking here of the early 20th-century movement) may not have been fascistic in itself, but it led an awful lot of people toward sympathy with Nazism, at least early on.

Eric Blair said...

Orwell wrote about this in 1946 already.

Tom said...

AVI, I think the left has been incredibly effective at getting everyone else to use their terms and ideas. In part, that's because the left controls the educational establishment and dominates the academic and media establishments. However, it's also because politeness is a conservative value and people on the left make it clear you will hurt their feelings if you use certain words. And then those on the right just keep using them, even when talking amongst themselves.

That's a very interesting insight about cults and language.

Grim said...

...you will hurt their feelings if you use certain words. And then those on the right just keep using them, even when talking amongst themselves.

It's a good point. I notice this has happened with, for example, "illegal aliens." A perfectly accurate description, it was first revised to "illegal immigrants," which was still too powerful; so, "undocumented immigrants," which was still too powerful; so, "undocumented migrants."

Now the important facts -- that it is illegal, that they do not belong here, that their children will be citizens under the 14th Amendment and will thus become permanent immigrants in defiance of the laws -- are completely obscured. They're just migratory workers who didn't go through the usual documentation process. No issues.

Tom said...

And then those on the right just keep using them,

That sounds like an insistence on being rude, which is the opposite of what I meant.

I should have made it clear that I think those on the right change their language to be polite and then retain the changes no matter who they are talking to.

raven said...

What was it Alinsky said? "push it hard enough and break through? "

"Undocumented workers" is gonna turn into "wetbacks" again.

Chide people enough, for any minor breach of PC mind control, and they start not giving a damn about any language at all. Nobody likes to be nagged, pushed and chided- for a while they will go along, especially if the impression is given they are alone, but after a while, the dam will break.


Anonymous said...

Jaed, the Italian Fascists and Futurists (the two had significant overlap)drew fairly heavily on the theoretical ideas of American and British Progressive thinkers and writers, including John Dewy and Woodrow Wilson. In turn, American Progressives were quite impressed with Mussolini's thinking and writings, and borrowed the Fascists' style. As did the NSDAP's propaganda arm, without entirely taking on the Fascists' philosophy.

LittleRed1

E Hines said...

And then those on the right just keep using them,

That sounds like an insistence on being rude, which is the opposite of what I meant.


No, it isn't rude, at all, and it didn't sound like insistence on it. It's a refusal to surrender the language. The...discourtesy...is by the Left with their insistence on distorting and disguising the facts through their cynical euphemisms. And why the race so earnestly to change their euphemisms as illustrated by their attempt to evolve "illegal aliens" and their insistence that anything other than black lives mattering is racism.

It's why some of us, for instance, still talk and write about illegal aliens, even in impolite company.

Eric Hines

Tom said...

Ya know, this bit makes more and more sense to me:

These elites drew precisely the wrong lesson from the experience of the 1930s and 40s ... that ordinary people’s passions, their apparently authoritarian impulses, were ill-suited to political life and would only nurture more Nazi-style horrors.

That really seems to make sense of the opposition of the Deep State and all of the technocrats and elitists and all of their sympathizers. They believe the passions of the common people created the horrors of Nazi Germany.

Now, today, they are seeing passions in the common people that they can not control. How could they not think we're in danger of a new fascism rising up and taking over the state?

Is that really what they believe?

Grim said...

Psychology/psychiatry in the early period fueled the development of elite fear about the ordinary person. You should watch this 2002 documentary, which is quite fascinating and on point, called The Century of the Self.

One of the things it details is how the fear produced by the implications of Freud's theories spurred government research into ways of secretly controlling the mob. Much of this is rooted there, I think; the 1930s and 1940s were taken to justify the talk that started in the late 19th century about the dangerous forces lurking below the mind.

Texan99 said...

Two of the formative experiences of my life were, first, reading 1984 when I was quite young, and concluding that a people could be subjugated permanently, and second, watching the Berlin Wall fall and the Soviet Union collapse peacefully.

Grim said...

Did those things work against each other?

I have a philosophy professor friend who says he thinks Brave New World is really the more likely terror. But also Fahrenheit 451: in both books, the tyranny is chosen by the people, in return for a kind of comfort or safety from troubling things.

That sort of thing is no danger to me, but I sometimes wonder if it's a danger to others.

Tom said...

Thanks for the reference, Grim. I'll have to watch that.

Me, too, Tex.

I also think BNW is where we seem to be heading. Although, Orwell never could have guessed the actual capabilities of our current surveillance tech. BNW with some aspects of 1984, then.

Ymar Sakar said...

Germans=Jain=Aryans=giants=occult=Lucifer worship=angelic derived technologies.

I half think the Left continues to use the Nazi fascist propaganda not only because it is useful, but because it generates smoke and mirrors to the true story of the day.