Please don’t correct your grammar. I believe it act as a deterrent against midwits. If the argument is good, legible, why do you give a shit? Hallmark sign of people who think they’re smart.
This is a online free blog being written by a purported catgirl. Some of you need to get ahold of yourselves 😉
It seems a little odd to claim no difference between Mussolini’s economic policy and Roosevelt’s, and jump from there to asserting no difference between the “systems” of 1930s America and European fascism. Let’s say you’re right about the economics -- I don’t know, really, and it doesn’t really matter -- there is more to a system than an economic policy, as the tenants of countless unmarked graves across Europe could tell you. To your point about people’s sense of what they were fighting for, maybe it was different for Americans, but I’d refer you to eg Evelyn Waugh’s Sword Of Honour Trilogy, or Tolkein’s letters to his son at the front, for a sense of the highly exalted, idealistic, non-nationalistic motives that animated at least some British. Very much a sense of totalitarianism (not Germany) as a monstrous behemoth that had to be stopped. Still not as simple as “protecting minorities,” I’d agree; but your framing of it as anti-German bigotry seems simplistic too.
So its very very hard to actually find a distinction between FDR's third way and the third way fasicsts envisioned...
Indeed they used basically the same term. In the 1920s there were 2 economic stystems Laissez Faire Capitalism, where you actually had freedom of contract basically no government regulation of the economy. no minimum wage, harsh restrictions on the federal govenment passing any economic law, basically no Income or other taxes... bakers working 16 hr days if they wanted... and you had Communism, everything owned by the state, all wages set by the state, everyone working for the state... etc.
FDR, Mussilini and Hitler all wanted basically a private economy... that was 100% unconditionally subservient to government. Subject to regulation and ad hoc "guidance", Subject to any taxation the state sees fit with the only limiting factor being the state's judgement of how much would be too much and its benevelence in not killing businesses and industries by taxing them to death... And if it took a hatred to a certain industry it absolutely could tax or regulate it to death as a matter of policy (see hitler's treatment of various shops, or even the modern green movement's approach to coal)
All of this would have been unthinkable, basically anywhere in the 1920s, and then Hitler and FDR came to power within one year of each other giving almost word for word the same speeches and both advocating a third way between capitalism and communism...
And of course both would eventually have squads of enforcers raiding private businesses and homes to check that certain economic activity wasn't being practicised both would prettymuch break their court systems and constitutional orders, and both would establish concentration camps for enemy aliens.
Like I'd go so far as to say that if the war in the pacific had gone badly and the Japanese had started landing in California, and America had a food shortage... probably all those interned Japanese wouldn't have been fed, their food alotment instead being directed to American Cviilians, and most wouldn't have survived to be liberated by Japanese forces,
Like its an absurd hypotheitical... but that's how close American progressivism, and just post-war norms and fascism are...
The average American would be shocked to try and live and work under 1920s or 1890s capitalism... just how free they'd be, and how ruthless the market would be in turn... And communism is completely alien... but fascism you really have to struggle and split hairs to see what's different between it American economics from the 30s onwards. hell Ameirca even adopted a federal racial quota and ethnic regulation system in the 60s
This is why American's can't stop calling each other fascist, and see fascism around every corner... America is basically the UR example of a capitalist nation that became a fascist nation... a country where almost no one interacted with the law or taxes, to one where whilst nominally free to conduct business and own property, you have to wade through hundreds of thousands of pages of law and bureaucrat made regulation to actual do, or merely continue owning anything
So drawing an equivalence between the Holocaust and a hypothetical failure to feed interned Japanese in the event of an invasion of California seems... a reach...? The Nazis didn’t murder all those people because they felt threatened or were short of food. They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do. They were already murdering quite a lot of people before the war even began; the key decisions concerning the systematic murder (not “allowing them to starve”) of European Jewry were made at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, at a time when Germany was very much still on the offensive, and the bulk of the slaughter was already over by the time Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad, let alone a single Allied soldier setting foot on German soil. Where were the gas chambers and corpse ovens in Roosevelt’s “concentration camps”? Look, I dislike government mandated paperwork as much as the next man, but it is not the most salient characteristic of Fascism...
By that standard we couldn't consider Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain facist since they didn't run death camps... By a similar measure we wouldn't be able to consider Castro's Cuba, or East Germany Communist, since in spite of the thousands of people they murdered there was no equivalent of Holomodor or the Great Leap forward...
Hell you wouldn't be able to call Canada a North American Liberal democracy... since inspite of its crimes against its natives, there was no equivalent of the Trail of Tears or massacre at wounded knee.
These systems are defined by their economics... they're criticized for the crimes they commit, but you're constructing a reverse no true scotsman, where nothing can belong to a category except the most idealized reprehensible form of it...
Stalin wasn't real totalitarian communism... he didn't kill as many as Mao nor as high a percentage a Pol Pot.
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As for the Wannsee conference I really encourage you to read the minutes... there are good english translations... It does'nt refer to anything we'd recognize as the holocaust... it Refers to evacuation eastward. Now that could be Euphemistic, it could be everyone at the conference knew what was under discussion, it could be almost all of them knew except for 1 or 2 participants and their departments who were being kept in the dark, it could be a majority had no idea and thought they were being used for forced .labour equivalent to how the US used the interned Japanese, or Canadians had already used interned Ukrainains in ww1... indeed JUST the documentation of Wannsee would support the idea the SS went rogue and Himmler and Heydreich were even keeping Hitler in the dark... (not that that was the case just that the Wanssee minutes alone wouldn't conflict with that reading) It is very very difficult to tell exactly when the Holocaust was decided, who decided it, and who knew and how much, and to what extent... Its not even clear if Wanssee was the final decisive meeting or if indeed subsequent meetings were held with Hitler and Himmler that weren't recorded that activated certain parts of the process...
Notably European historians believe a big part of the decision at Wanssee (or rather Hitlers decision members of the bureaucracyy were informed at Wansee) was the result of the US entry into the war... that Hitler believed his own propaganda that "jewish finance" ran the US, and thus thought of the Jews of Europe as hostages to keep America out of the war. Its an interesting theory and matches some speeches he made and the timeline...
The US military made a big deal of having people tour the camps in 45 and 46... but this is kind of the equivalent of having Americans in neighboring towns touring prisons and seeing the prisoners in solitary after some horrific abuse has been exposed , you know its iffy and bad, but every society has iffy and bad stuff especially with prisoners and internees... but you don't actually know ( as a random citizen or even bureaucrat) to what extent deaths are the result of mal-treatment, disease, shortage, or conscious design until you actually get a look beyond the razor wire... which is there to prevent such looks...
.
Especially given the horrific state of US prisons and the torture programs maintained during peacetime (even after 9/11 there was only an authorization of the use of military force, no actual declaration of war) it is really very hard to know what the US would and wouldn't have done if it was staring down food shortages, or if its leaders were feeling vengeful towards an enemy they thought might defeat them... the British basically invented the concentration camp and used them to commit genocide against the Boer in South Africa in the 1890s... possibly by "accident" given all the deaths were diseases and starvation... If you think "Western Liberal Democracies" weren't capable of committing genocide against their interned populations... THEY DID!
thus Fascism is defined by its economics... not using internment, starvation and intentional massacre to commit genocide... otherwise we'd have to consider lincoln a Fascist for what he did against the Natives at the same time he was conducting the very first industrial war
Genocide by accident is a contradiction in terms, given the word “intentional” in the definition of the word. You can tell what was planned at Wannsee but what then ensued: an exceptionally well-coordinated and successful programme of mass murder. That (unlike what happened in the Boer War for instance) doesn’t happen by accident. And regardless of who was the prime original chooser of that course of action, which may indeed be unclear (although my understanding is that recent scholarship tends more towards Hitler being very much in the loop from the beginning) it’s clear from numerous, numerous primary sources that not only the upper leadership but the vast majority of the population knew what was going on once the ball got rolling in earnest. Eg ordinary Germans under Allied air bombardment rationalising what was happening to them as a response by the British/American representatives of World Jewry to what the Germans had done to “Our Jews”. Interestingly, this is almost the exact opposite of your “hostage” thesis that the Holocaust was a response to America’s entry into the war -- which would be more plausible were it not for the fact that Hitler declared war on the US, not the other way around.
If you read some book-length treatments, rather than just the minutes of the Wannsee conference (which, yeah, of course they were euphemistic!), i think you’d find it as hard to believe as I do that the Holocaust was some rogue SS operation that happened without widespread knowledge. I’d recommend “The German War: A Nation Under Arms 1939-1945” by Nicholas Stargardt for its wonderful use of primary sources. I learned a lot about the mass starvation of Soviet prisoners in 1941, which did fit the sort of “genocide by accident” pattern you seem to want to map onto the Holocaust. And, like I say, on the Holocaust itself it’s pretty clear that this was different, deliberate, and widely known to be so.
As for the distinguishing features of Fascism, I agree that genocide isn’t one of them. It was you who brought the Holocaust into this. But no, as you say, Mussolini never committed genocide by my definition (although in your very broad definition, by which Lincoln apparently committed genocide in the Civil War, and the British in the Boer, we’d surely have to chalk up Abyssinia as a genocide!). Stalin did, but was no Fascist. I still find your determination to locate it in economics a little eccentric. Before the term was diluted almost to meaninglessness by overuse, by the Left, from the 60s onwards but increasing exponentially since social media, there was a fairly standard list of characteristics that went something like this: a cult of the strong leader; a mystic sense of the Nation; a glorification of Youth and purifying violence; an embrace of violence and other extra-legal means as a way of gaining and maintaining power. Now, it’s true that somewhere down the causal chain from this you do get a corporatist approach to economics; indeed, it’s well known that Mussolini started off as a socialist and saw Fascism as, among other things, a way of selling that vision to the masses. But you can also have (and criticise!) corporatism without all those other features. And reinventing the term to be primarily a description of an economic system just so you can call FDR “fascist” seems to me to be just another recapitulation of the tedious hyper-leftist trope whereby anyone we don’t like is one. It’s perfectly possible to attack FDR and the American prison system (loved your book review on that by the way) and be suspicious of the current order in all sorts of ways, without resorting to such a weak move.
I don't think defining facsism by it's economics is eccentric. That was how it was understood by its contemporaries and by most classical liberals and old school conservatives. Much of your list comes from Adorno and the 60's left who, looking around and seeing that communism did not in fact lead to Red Plenty, needed to sacrilize the Left and therefor needed a sacred enemy.
That’s interesting about Adorno, and also what classical liberals/old school conservatives at the time thought. I do think it’s also worth paying attention to what Fascists themselves thought they were about. Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism” focuses more on fascism as an explicitly totalitarian, spiritual expression of national will to which the individual is subordinate. That seems to be the core of it in his mind: the economic stuff about corporatism and trade unions comes later, and as a consequence of the “spiritual” essence of the movement.
NO genocide happens by "accident" that's why I used the scare quotes.
Even if there was no plan there was a failure to plan and guards who kept following orders to keep starving prisoners imprisoned as they starved to death and shooting any who resist or escape. Every single genocide involves extraordinary amounts of violence which is non-accidental.
This is why I don't see some great moral distinction between the holocaust and what was done during holomor or to the Boer... You kept them imprisoned without food... You consciously knew they were dying and chose to continue the process that was killing them. Whether or not the germans had gas chambers and in what numbers is really irrelevant to the fact that the Camp itself is the method of killing... This is why its important to have international norms and paranoia around never ever going to or tolerating camps. Debating intentionality in such a setting is like standing in a torture chamber and insisting "no no it wasn't murder, he died of infection!" As you stand over the disfigured body/
Every one of these would have been impossible if the guards, or any or their commanders on up to the nation's head had simply refused to shoot the starving as they tried to escape or feed themselves.
Lethal violence is the basis and core unit of every single one of these camps. And this is why I don't let FDR off the hook or act as if the Canadian treatment of Ukrainians is distinct (especially since the British empire had just killed the Boer 20 years earlier) what the fuck do you think the guards would have done if the food shipments didn't arrive and the prisoners tried to escape? They would have done what they did whenever a prisoner tried to resist or escape, they would have shot them
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I continue to see a great moral distinction between sitting down and planning the deliberate murder of c. 6 million people on deranged ethnic grounds, and then setting about it using the full apparatus of your industrialised state, versus interring large numbers of civilians in a callous and incompetent fashion, with the intention of making it easier for you to prevail in a guerrilla war that you are losing, with the result that c. 25,000 of them perish. You’re right, calling the latter an accident lets the British off the hook, but clearly their intention was not “eliminate the Boers from the face of the earth,” it was something more like “get the civilian population where we can see them so we can then tackle the guerrillas.” If the differences in scale, means and motive don’t strike you as significant, well, like I say: we disagree.
And if you’re really drawing an equivalence between the *mere hypothetical willingness* to use lethal force (as in, “What would the Canadians have done if the food shipments hadn’t arrived and the Ukrainians had tried to escape?”) and the Holocaust, I’m struggling to see how any state anywhere, ever, gets off the hook. Maybe that’s the point, I don’t know; it does rather make “x state is just like Fascism” a non-criticism though.
Ah, but the wokest of the woke are the universities, and they indoctrinate the elite.
And the universities are woke for a reason: to fail to please the federal DIE mandates is to lose EVERYTHING: guaranteed students loans and all federal research grants. This is why today's universities put quotas over education. And it trickles down to lower education, and all bureaucracies, both public and private.
In a future Rule I will propose a solution. It will make Republicans cry, but it would work: replace the federal student loan program with an unconditional CASH grant for all natural born citizens upon reaching the age of 19. Call it a Universal Inheritance. For the elite, it is a tax refund. For the previously persecuted it is Reparations.
But the key point is that it makes students, not the federal government, the main customers for universities. This is worth replacing student loan payments with general taxation. Universities will have to compete against trade schools, mortgage down payments, starting a business, or a bitchin sports car. (And yes, money wasted on a wrecked sports car is better spent than money spent on a Grievances Studies degree.)
do you sometimes listen to Blackpilled (Devon Stack) ? He is now mostly on Odyssey and has a Telegram channel...he covers extensively the propaganda used to push the USA into world war 2 and also the groups working behind the cultural changes during the 60's and 70's.
Okay, look. Your misspellings and grammatical errors ("undue" for "undo," for instance) are maybe cute, or at least tolerable. But your lack of proofreading is creating actual confusion and difficulty in reading. I had to read "This is why ideological control is so tantamount to the political left... Unlike the constitutionalist right, which no matter how far institutions venture of how weak they become" three times to realize that "of" was meant to be "or." So…proofread, please? I really want to read and enjoy your writing, because your *ideas* are often brilliant.
Go to grammarly.com and use the free version. Very cheap and easy because it's free. It will catch common punctuation mistakes.
Alternatively, run your copy through chatgpt by using an anon account not linked to your name. Use this prompt: "Rewrite this text to correct grammar and punctuation errors."
Back in 2012 I kept finding myself defending Ron Paul for rejecting the Civil Rights Act. I should have been saying "Good for him."
Anyway keep up the good work. I always looked for your posts on TheMotte and CultureWarRoundup before Reddit completely died. The debates that followed your comments- is he fed posting? is he serious? is he drunk? all of the above?- were always entertaining. Also saw you get a shoutout in the comments over at the dreaded jim. Our boy's movin up in the world.
Can you link the Dreaded Jim comment? That'd be very interesting.
Also TheMotte's still going. Its at TheMotte.org now.
I haven't been nearly as active, but it still has good discussion and I always read the quality contributions. Zorba, the head mod and maintainer is a great guy, its an incredible project... one of the best places on the web.
do you sometimes listen to Blackpilled (Devon Stack) ? He is now mostly on Odyssey and has a Telegram channel...he covers extensively the propaganda used to push the USA into world war 2 and also the groups working behind the cultural changes during the 60's and 70's.
Please don’t correct your grammar. I believe it act as a deterrent against midwits. If the argument is good, legible, why do you give a shit? Hallmark sign of people who think they’re smart.
This is a online free blog being written by a purported catgirl. Some of you need to get ahold of yourselves 😉
Honestly that's a big part of why I kept the CatGirl branding so long after I stopped making catgirl memes...
It seems a little odd to claim no difference between Mussolini’s economic policy and Roosevelt’s, and jump from there to asserting no difference between the “systems” of 1930s America and European fascism. Let’s say you’re right about the economics -- I don’t know, really, and it doesn’t really matter -- there is more to a system than an economic policy, as the tenants of countless unmarked graves across Europe could tell you. To your point about people’s sense of what they were fighting for, maybe it was different for Americans, but I’d refer you to eg Evelyn Waugh’s Sword Of Honour Trilogy, or Tolkein’s letters to his son at the front, for a sense of the highly exalted, idealistic, non-nationalistic motives that animated at least some British. Very much a sense of totalitarianism (not Germany) as a monstrous behemoth that had to be stopped. Still not as simple as “protecting minorities,” I’d agree; but your framing of it as anti-German bigotry seems simplistic too.
So its very very hard to actually find a distinction between FDR's third way and the third way fasicsts envisioned...
Indeed they used basically the same term. In the 1920s there were 2 economic stystems Laissez Faire Capitalism, where you actually had freedom of contract basically no government regulation of the economy. no minimum wage, harsh restrictions on the federal govenment passing any economic law, basically no Income or other taxes... bakers working 16 hr days if they wanted... and you had Communism, everything owned by the state, all wages set by the state, everyone working for the state... etc.
FDR, Mussilini and Hitler all wanted basically a private economy... that was 100% unconditionally subservient to government. Subject to regulation and ad hoc "guidance", Subject to any taxation the state sees fit with the only limiting factor being the state's judgement of how much would be too much and its benevelence in not killing businesses and industries by taxing them to death... And if it took a hatred to a certain industry it absolutely could tax or regulate it to death as a matter of policy (see hitler's treatment of various shops, or even the modern green movement's approach to coal)
All of this would have been unthinkable, basically anywhere in the 1920s, and then Hitler and FDR came to power within one year of each other giving almost word for word the same speeches and both advocating a third way between capitalism and communism...
And of course both would eventually have squads of enforcers raiding private businesses and homes to check that certain economic activity wasn't being practicised both would prettymuch break their court systems and constitutional orders, and both would establish concentration camps for enemy aliens.
Like I'd go so far as to say that if the war in the pacific had gone badly and the Japanese had started landing in California, and America had a food shortage... probably all those interned Japanese wouldn't have been fed, their food alotment instead being directed to American Cviilians, and most wouldn't have survived to be liberated by Japanese forces,
Like its an absurd hypotheitical... but that's how close American progressivism, and just post-war norms and fascism are...
The average American would be shocked to try and live and work under 1920s or 1890s capitalism... just how free they'd be, and how ruthless the market would be in turn... And communism is completely alien... but fascism you really have to struggle and split hairs to see what's different between it American economics from the 30s onwards. hell Ameirca even adopted a federal racial quota and ethnic regulation system in the 60s
This is why American's can't stop calling each other fascist, and see fascism around every corner... America is basically the UR example of a capitalist nation that became a fascist nation... a country where almost no one interacted with the law or taxes, to one where whilst nominally free to conduct business and own property, you have to wade through hundreds of thousands of pages of law and bureaucrat made regulation to actual do, or merely continue owning anything
So drawing an equivalence between the Holocaust and a hypothetical failure to feed interned Japanese in the event of an invasion of California seems... a reach...? The Nazis didn’t murder all those people because they felt threatened or were short of food. They did it because they felt it was the right thing to do. They were already murdering quite a lot of people before the war even began; the key decisions concerning the systematic murder (not “allowing them to starve”) of European Jewry were made at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, at a time when Germany was very much still on the offensive, and the bulk of the slaughter was already over by the time Paulus surrendered at Stalingrad, let alone a single Allied soldier setting foot on German soil. Where were the gas chambers and corpse ovens in Roosevelt’s “concentration camps”? Look, I dislike government mandated paperwork as much as the next man, but it is not the most salient characteristic of Fascism...
By that standard we couldn't consider Mussolini's Italy or Franco's Spain facist since they didn't run death camps... By a similar measure we wouldn't be able to consider Castro's Cuba, or East Germany Communist, since in spite of the thousands of people they murdered there was no equivalent of Holomodor or the Great Leap forward...
Hell you wouldn't be able to call Canada a North American Liberal democracy... since inspite of its crimes against its natives, there was no equivalent of the Trail of Tears or massacre at wounded knee.
These systems are defined by their economics... they're criticized for the crimes they commit, but you're constructing a reverse no true scotsman, where nothing can belong to a category except the most idealized reprehensible form of it...
Stalin wasn't real totalitarian communism... he didn't kill as many as Mao nor as high a percentage a Pol Pot.
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As for the Wannsee conference I really encourage you to read the minutes... there are good english translations... It does'nt refer to anything we'd recognize as the holocaust... it Refers to evacuation eastward. Now that could be Euphemistic, it could be everyone at the conference knew what was under discussion, it could be almost all of them knew except for 1 or 2 participants and their departments who were being kept in the dark, it could be a majority had no idea and thought they were being used for forced .labour equivalent to how the US used the interned Japanese, or Canadians had already used interned Ukrainains in ww1... indeed JUST the documentation of Wannsee would support the idea the SS went rogue and Himmler and Heydreich were even keeping Hitler in the dark... (not that that was the case just that the Wanssee minutes alone wouldn't conflict with that reading) It is very very difficult to tell exactly when the Holocaust was decided, who decided it, and who knew and how much, and to what extent... Its not even clear if Wanssee was the final decisive meeting or if indeed subsequent meetings were held with Hitler and Himmler that weren't recorded that activated certain parts of the process...
Notably European historians believe a big part of the decision at Wanssee (or rather Hitlers decision members of the bureaucracyy were informed at Wansee) was the result of the US entry into the war... that Hitler believed his own propaganda that "jewish finance" ran the US, and thus thought of the Jews of Europe as hostages to keep America out of the war. Its an interesting theory and matches some speeches he made and the timeline...
The US military made a big deal of having people tour the camps in 45 and 46... but this is kind of the equivalent of having Americans in neighboring towns touring prisons and seeing the prisoners in solitary after some horrific abuse has been exposed , you know its iffy and bad, but every society has iffy and bad stuff especially with prisoners and internees... but you don't actually know ( as a random citizen or even bureaucrat) to what extent deaths are the result of mal-treatment, disease, shortage, or conscious design until you actually get a look beyond the razor wire... which is there to prevent such looks...
.
Especially given the horrific state of US prisons and the torture programs maintained during peacetime (even after 9/11 there was only an authorization of the use of military force, no actual declaration of war) it is really very hard to know what the US would and wouldn't have done if it was staring down food shortages, or if its leaders were feeling vengeful towards an enemy they thought might defeat them... the British basically invented the concentration camp and used them to commit genocide against the Boer in South Africa in the 1890s... possibly by "accident" given all the deaths were diseases and starvation... If you think "Western Liberal Democracies" weren't capable of committing genocide against their interned populations... THEY DID!
thus Fascism is defined by its economics... not using internment, starvation and intentional massacre to commit genocide... otherwise we'd have to consider lincoln a Fascist for what he did against the Natives at the same time he was conducting the very first industrial war
Genocide by accident is a contradiction in terms, given the word “intentional” in the definition of the word. You can tell what was planned at Wannsee but what then ensued: an exceptionally well-coordinated and successful programme of mass murder. That (unlike what happened in the Boer War for instance) doesn’t happen by accident. And regardless of who was the prime original chooser of that course of action, which may indeed be unclear (although my understanding is that recent scholarship tends more towards Hitler being very much in the loop from the beginning) it’s clear from numerous, numerous primary sources that not only the upper leadership but the vast majority of the population knew what was going on once the ball got rolling in earnest. Eg ordinary Germans under Allied air bombardment rationalising what was happening to them as a response by the British/American representatives of World Jewry to what the Germans had done to “Our Jews”. Interestingly, this is almost the exact opposite of your “hostage” thesis that the Holocaust was a response to America’s entry into the war -- which would be more plausible were it not for the fact that Hitler declared war on the US, not the other way around.
If you read some book-length treatments, rather than just the minutes of the Wannsee conference (which, yeah, of course they were euphemistic!), i think you’d find it as hard to believe as I do that the Holocaust was some rogue SS operation that happened without widespread knowledge. I’d recommend “The German War: A Nation Under Arms 1939-1945” by Nicholas Stargardt for its wonderful use of primary sources. I learned a lot about the mass starvation of Soviet prisoners in 1941, which did fit the sort of “genocide by accident” pattern you seem to want to map onto the Holocaust. And, like I say, on the Holocaust itself it’s pretty clear that this was different, deliberate, and widely known to be so.
As for the distinguishing features of Fascism, I agree that genocide isn’t one of them. It was you who brought the Holocaust into this. But no, as you say, Mussolini never committed genocide by my definition (although in your very broad definition, by which Lincoln apparently committed genocide in the Civil War, and the British in the Boer, we’d surely have to chalk up Abyssinia as a genocide!). Stalin did, but was no Fascist. I still find your determination to locate it in economics a little eccentric. Before the term was diluted almost to meaninglessness by overuse, by the Left, from the 60s onwards but increasing exponentially since social media, there was a fairly standard list of characteristics that went something like this: a cult of the strong leader; a mystic sense of the Nation; a glorification of Youth and purifying violence; an embrace of violence and other extra-legal means as a way of gaining and maintaining power. Now, it’s true that somewhere down the causal chain from this you do get a corporatist approach to economics; indeed, it’s well known that Mussolini started off as a socialist and saw Fascism as, among other things, a way of selling that vision to the masses. But you can also have (and criticise!) corporatism without all those other features. And reinventing the term to be primarily a description of an economic system just so you can call FDR “fascist” seems to me to be just another recapitulation of the tedious hyper-leftist trope whereby anyone we don’t like is one. It’s perfectly possible to attack FDR and the American prison system (loved your book review on that by the way) and be suspicious of the current order in all sorts of ways, without resorting to such a weak move.
I don't think defining facsism by it's economics is eccentric. That was how it was understood by its contemporaries and by most classical liberals and old school conservatives. Much of your list comes from Adorno and the 60's left who, looking around and seeing that communism did not in fact lead to Red Plenty, needed to sacrilize the Left and therefor needed a sacred enemy.
A good read on the Italian fascists and Mises:
https://mises.org/library/mises-fascism-democracy-and-other-questions
A good bit on antifascism:
https://im1776.com/2021/01/26/ur-antifascism/
That’s interesting about Adorno, and also what classical liberals/old school conservatives at the time thought. I do think it’s also worth paying attention to what Fascists themselves thought they were about. Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism” focuses more on fascism as an explicitly totalitarian, spiritual expression of national will to which the individual is subordinate. That seems to be the core of it in his mind: the economic stuff about corporatism and trade unions comes later, and as a consequence of the “spiritual” essence of the movement.
NO genocide happens by "accident" that's why I used the scare quotes.
Even if there was no plan there was a failure to plan and guards who kept following orders to keep starving prisoners imprisoned as they starved to death and shooting any who resist or escape. Every single genocide involves extraordinary amounts of violence which is non-accidental.
This is why I don't see some great moral distinction between the holocaust and what was done during holomor or to the Boer... You kept them imprisoned without food... You consciously knew they were dying and chose to continue the process that was killing them. Whether or not the germans had gas chambers and in what numbers is really irrelevant to the fact that the Camp itself is the method of killing... This is why its important to have international norms and paranoia around never ever going to or tolerating camps. Debating intentionality in such a setting is like standing in a torture chamber and insisting "no no it wasn't murder, he died of infection!" As you stand over the disfigured body/
Every one of these would have been impossible if the guards, or any or their commanders on up to the nation's head had simply refused to shoot the starving as they tried to escape or feed themselves.
Lethal violence is the basis and core unit of every single one of these camps. And this is why I don't let FDR off the hook or act as if the Canadian treatment of Ukrainians is distinct (especially since the British empire had just killed the Boer 20 years earlier) what the fuck do you think the guards would have done if the food shipments didn't arrive and the prisoners tried to escape? They would have done what they did whenever a prisoner tried to resist or escape, they would have shot them
I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I continue to see a great moral distinction between sitting down and planning the deliberate murder of c. 6 million people on deranged ethnic grounds, and then setting about it using the full apparatus of your industrialised state, versus interring large numbers of civilians in a callous and incompetent fashion, with the intention of making it easier for you to prevail in a guerrilla war that you are losing, with the result that c. 25,000 of them perish. You’re right, calling the latter an accident lets the British off the hook, but clearly their intention was not “eliminate the Boers from the face of the earth,” it was something more like “get the civilian population where we can see them so we can then tackle the guerrillas.” If the differences in scale, means and motive don’t strike you as significant, well, like I say: we disagree.
And if you’re really drawing an equivalence between the *mere hypothetical willingness* to use lethal force (as in, “What would the Canadians have done if the food shipments hadn’t arrived and the Ukrainians had tried to escape?”) and the Holocaust, I’m struggling to see how any state anywhere, ever, gets off the hook. Maybe that’s the point, I don’t know; it does rather make “x state is just like Fascism” a non-criticism though.
What is?
Ah, but the wokest of the woke are the universities, and they indoctrinate the elite.
And the universities are woke for a reason: to fail to please the federal DIE mandates is to lose EVERYTHING: guaranteed students loans and all federal research grants. This is why today's universities put quotas over education. And it trickles down to lower education, and all bureaucracies, both public and private.
In a future Rule I will propose a solution. It will make Republicans cry, but it would work: replace the federal student loan program with an unconditional CASH grant for all natural born citizens upon reaching the age of 19. Call it a Universal Inheritance. For the elite, it is a tax refund. For the previously persecuted it is Reparations.
But the key point is that it makes students, not the federal government, the main customers for universities. This is worth replacing student loan payments with general taxation. Universities will have to compete against trade schools, mortgage down payments, starting a business, or a bitchin sports car. (And yes, money wasted on a wrecked sports car is better spent than money spent on a Grievances Studies degree.)
"No member of the greatest generation thought they were fighting gays, gypsies, and people who rejected Christ."
I hope there's a missing "for" in that sentence.
do you sometimes listen to Blackpilled (Devon Stack) ? He is now mostly on Odyssey and has a Telegram channel...he covers extensively the propaganda used to push the USA into world war 2 and also the groups working behind the cultural changes during the 60's and 70's.
No. Never heard of him.
link what you think is his best single thing
Okay, look. Your misspellings and grammatical errors ("undue" for "undo," for instance) are maybe cute, or at least tolerable. But your lack of proofreading is creating actual confusion and difficulty in reading. I had to read "This is why ideological control is so tantamount to the political left... Unlike the constitutionalist right, which no matter how far institutions venture of how weak they become" three times to realize that "of" was meant to be "or." So…proofread, please? I really want to read and enjoy your writing, because your *ideas* are often brilliant.
Strong agree. Our Catgirl Kulak could benefit enormously from the services of a competent copyeditor.
I'd have to paywall way more stuff If i were to hire a copy editor.
Maybe; they're pretty cheap on Fiver or whatever. Or maybe ChatGPT can do it.
Or, really, just read the thing over before you post it.
Or maybe even just the grammar checker in a word processor!
Go to grammarly.com and use the free version. Very cheap and easy because it's free. It will catch common punctuation mistakes.
Alternatively, run your copy through chatgpt by using an anon account not linked to your name. Use this prompt: "Rewrite this text to correct grammar and punctuation errors."
Just quote the entire article or chunks of paragraphs at a time on a chatGPT prompt and tell ChatGPT to proofread.
No need for that. Just use a text editor with some decent AI. :-)
As a beekeper, he has some interesting reflexions on society inspired form his beekeeping, but it's spread here and there.
According to me, the two best recent ones which will give an idea of the man's character are :
1) Pat-con (https://odysee.com/@Blackpilled:b/patcon1:a) following his work on Waco, about the 70's
2) Burn Libel (https://odysee.com/@Blackpilled:b/burnslibel1:8) : about the beginning of WW2
+
one among his many film propaganda analysis (https://www.bitchute.com/video/MZP3YntbJi9f)
Back in 2012 I kept finding myself defending Ron Paul for rejecting the Civil Rights Act. I should have been saying "Good for him."
Anyway keep up the good work. I always looked for your posts on TheMotte and CultureWarRoundup before Reddit completely died. The debates that followed your comments- is he fed posting? is he serious? is he drunk? all of the above?- were always entertaining. Also saw you get a shoutout in the comments over at the dreaded jim. Our boy's movin up in the world.
Can you link the Dreaded Jim comment? That'd be very interesting.
Also TheMotte's still going. Its at TheMotte.org now.
I haven't been nearly as active, but it still has good discussion and I always read the quality contributions. Zorba, the head mod and maintainer is a great guy, its an incredible project... one of the best places on the web.
Thanks for that link, somehow I missed that.
Comment from Cloudswrest a little way down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230515170921/https://blog.reaction.la/faith/the-logos/
do you sometimes listen to Blackpilled (Devon Stack) ? He is now mostly on Odyssey and has a Telegram channel...he covers extensively the propaganda used to push the USA into world war 2 and also the groups working behind the cultural changes during the 60's and 70's.
sorry for the repost