Liberalism and Anti-Fascism

[Flankerl]

Whenever an American(US) says or writes the words "Socialism" "Liberalism" or "Fascism" a puppy dies a horrible slow death.


You people and your epic battle of the more centrist Conservative Party vs the more rightist Conservative Party while calling each other names.

 

[Sunstone]

You people and your epic battle of the more centrist Conservative Party vs the more rightist Conservative Party while calling each other names.

Unfortunately, most Americans do not have the idle luxury of scorning the differences between a lousy party that would preserve at least some social programs they rely on for their survival, and an even lousier party that would dismantle those programs. But by all means, exercise your right to lofty indifference!

 

[buddhist]

The tu quoque fallacy only fools some people.

I'm not saying that it is false - or true. It is merely an observation.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

the origin of the term "totalitarianism" comes from Fascist Italy, where it was used to describe Mussolini's Ideal State. "The Doctorine of Fascism" was written by Gionvanni Gentile, who was a Fascist philosopher to fill the gap of a "fascist" theory. He borrowed from Hegel's concept of the state, which views the state in highly religious terms and specifically Anti-Marxist.

The origin of the term was a translation by Barbara Carter of Sturzo's Italy & Fascismo. More importantly:
"Even before Hitler came to power in 1933, some, recognizing that something new and unexpected was emerging, sought to devise a comparative framework that would encompass Fascist Italy and the developing Soviet regime. And the almost contemporaneous advent of Nazism and Stalinism by the early 1930s made the quest for new categories of understanding seem all the more pressing...
The advent of those regimes brought “totalitarianism” into our vocabulary. Coined by anti-Fascists in Italy in 1923, the term was quickly adopted by the Fascists themselves, becoming central to their self-understanding." (emphasis added)
Roberts, D. (2006). The Totalitarian Experiment in Twentieth Century Europe: Understanding the Poverty of Great Politics. Routledge.

Or, for the evolution of the use of term outside of mere political discourse:

"The terms “totalitarian” and “totalitarianism” entered political debate in the 1920s, primarily in reference to Italian fascism. They moved into academic debate in the late 1940s and 1950s with a distinct focus on Germany. They gained popular and academic currency during the Cold War, mostly in reference to the Soviet Union."
Geyer, M. (2009). "After Totalitarianism–Stalinism and Nazism Compared". In M. Geyer & S. Fitzpatrick (Eds.) Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (pp. 1-37). Cambridge University Press.

The applicability of the term "Totalitarianism" to Communism therefore does not logically follow.

True. Because
1) You weren't apparently aware of the first use of the term and confused B. B. Carter with President Carter
2) The applicability isn't based upon the initial use of the term in the 20s, but with what it came to mean (the same is true of fascism, after all, which was initially extremely limited in scope whilst the NAZI regime was explicitly socialist).
&
3) The logical connection is history:
"The twentieth century was a century of almost unremitting revolution, mass murder, and destruction...much of the justificatory rationale for revolution in the twentieth century found its origins in the nineteenth-century intellectual labors of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels."
Gregor, A. J. (2008). Marxism, fascism, and totalitarianism: chapters in the intellectual history of radicalism. Stanford University Press.

It describes the ideal concept of the enemy of Communism. Communist Ideology is MASSIVELY more complex than either Fascism or National Socialism.

Actually, it was originally a conception of history that secularized Christian teleology via economic theory. Marx's progressive economic theory relied heavily on traditional Christian eschatology, along the more traditional progressivism originating from the French revolution. Recall that Marx was not only fluent in French and thoroughly familiar with French political literature and thought (communism, after all, derives from French), but also personally knew Augustus Comte (whilst his Feuerbachian materialism came from books alone). The term bourgeoisie is French, and to find the origins of Marxist thought one needs to look at the French revolution and the development of notions of statehood out of "liberté, égalité, fraternité."
fraternité laid the foundations for the kind of tyranny found More to the point, Marxist thought and communism more generally places emphasis on the importance of the collective over-and-against the individual. We see this not only in Rousseau's rather inherently contradictory notion of "the liberty of the collective", but in that oh-so-forgot spokesperson of the French revolution and leftist thought, the Marquis de Sade. In the name of "brotherhood" and "liberty", the new regime carried out massacres and gave rise to tyranny. Also, let us not forget the intellectual debt Engels owed to Fourier.

On the latter, Fascism and National Socialism represent distinct ideologies, as National Socialism is essentially a form of biological determinism.

National Socialism's conception of race was almost universally held. It was the "science" of eugenics. Europe and the US had both developed programs, university departments and chairs, academic journals, and research devoted to the problem of the pollution of the gene pool. The NAZI's obsession with racial purity wasn't at all an identifying characteristic, they were just more efficient and progressive than other Western states/societies. Both Hitler and Mussolini were Times "man of the year" recipients, and everybody from presidents to prominent academics supported eugenic programs (Margaret Sanger, forced sterilization in the US, and so on; it's odd how much NAZI eugenics is now considered somehow isolated rather than simply the carrying out of programs more advanced than others in other countries that were almost universally supported regardless of political party).

However the "mainstream" usage of the term comes from the Libertarian Right, notably Fredrich Hayke's "The Road to Serfdom" in which he describes how socialism "naturally" becomes a totalitarian state. To make this work, you have to ignore the existence of sustained periods of democratic socialism in the west and treat them instead as the "enemy within".

Or realize how close democratic socialism and tyranny have, historically, been.

Hayek's definition represents a major overhaul in how we define the political spectrum.

“Not really. Apart from anything else, Hayek’s thought was heavily influenced by von Mises, not only via their personal relationship but, from von Mises’ Socialism, about which Hayek wrote “When Socialism first appeared in 1922, its impact was profound. It gradually but fundamentally altered the outlook of many of the young idealists returning to their university studies after World War I. I know, for I was one of them.”

So the originator of your “major overhaul” was mostly reiterating what his mentor wrote in 1922, over two decades before The Road to Serfdom. In this work, which predates the 3rd Reich, we find connections between socialist though and socialist action and race, between socialism and militant action, between socialism and NAZI-type “Darwinism”, and socialism and totalitarian dynamics: “It is the history of Marxian Socialism which shows most clearly that every socialist policy must turn to destructionism.”

The value of Totalitarianism as a concept is purely in terms of propaganda and not in terms of it's accuracy or it's relationship to how the concept was originally defined. It is Cold War propaganda tactic.

On this we agree!

Historians in using the concept have largely swallowed, unthinkingly, this definition of Totalitarianism

Actually, most historians are either very vague and careful about what totalitarianism is or simply define it as extremely right-wing government. Others simply use the term to mean any type of regime akin to Hitler's.

The Nazis killed Jews based on racial distinctions

Again, this is anachronistic. First, it mistakes the widespread acceptance of eugenics with something particular to the NAZIs. Second, it mistakes widespread anti-Semitism with something particular to the NAZIs (see e.g.,
Brustein, W. (2003). Roots of hate: Anti-semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Cambridge University Press.
.

There goal was extermination.

...which started in Britain with Galton and proceeded from their to spread across Europe and the US. Germany was kind of a latecomer to the game (which was viewed as a "science").

There was never any hesitation about it. Communists, whilst still mass murderers, did not believe that their enemies were intrinsically so.

“Mention of the topic of human genetics in Germany and Russia in the early twentieth century automatically brings to mind the issues of National Socialist racial theories in Germany and Lysenko's theories of heredity in Soviet Russia. In the period covered here, however, National Socialism had not yet come to power in Germany and scientists of greatly differing political views including Marxists, socialists of various sorts, Catholics, liberals, and conservatives- discussed human genetics. In Soviet Russia in the same years no one had yet heard of Lysenko, and the spectrum of debate about human genetics was surprisingly broad; there were Marxists who were also eugenists and saw no contradiction in their respective positions, and there were anti-Marxists who were Lamarckians”
Graham, L. R. (1977). Science and values: The eugenics movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s. The American historical review, 82(5), 1133-1164.
(I tried to upload this for you but the file size was to large).

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

This is going to be long. bear with me.

I should have read this before writing my last post. I think I will refrain from commenting much upon what you've written until you have a chance to respond to what I have, lest you make my mistake and respond to things in one post that are already (to some extent) dealt with in another. Plus, I have found that it is unwise to respond to posts like this when anger still plays a role in both the nature and content of a response. What you've written deserves more than mere dismissal and outrage.
However, some quick points:

If you mean President Jimmy Carter

I think I covered this.

I care little about the books you've cited, only whether you have read them.

I don't cite what I haven't read, and rarely even cite what I don't own, just to be sure.

It is releveant when Hegel's conception of the state is one that takes precdence over the rights of the individual

It is only relevant to the extent that it was the influence of Hegel that provided such a conception to Marx and other founders of communist, socialist, fascist, etc., thought, and to what extent we should in fact credit Hegel with such conceptions rather than his forebears.

"The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its conception of the State

I would largely agree. But as you've read Hayek and I would assume Plato, you know that this keystone a much longer tradition in Western thought.

If you read the primary sources...

I have. It was this in particular that incited no small degree of (admittedly irrational, or at least unjustifiable) anger. I've studied many languages, but I placed particular emphasis on some (even adding a second major in classical languages) precisely because I wanted to read primary sources and believe this to be impossible to do by reading translations. Admittedly, my Italian leaves something to be desired, but I have read the "primary sources" from the pre-Socratics to Marx and well-beyond in the original Greek, Latin, German, French, and Italian (as the case may be; with Italian, reading e.g., Gramsci required no small amount of consulting with translations, so perhaps this shouldn't count).

the similarities between Marxism and religion are superficial at best

They are deep and extreme. Necessarily so: it would have been (and indeed, largely still is) impossible to escape the influence of Christian worldviews on Western thought. I do not assert that this influence was conscious.

I hope I have sufficiently demonstrated that my knowedge on this subject is not simply "assumed"

the term "socialism" wasn't coined until the 19th century

If you are going to suggest I be more familiar with primary sources, you might want to check your etymological histories without biasing them by restricting yourself to English, given the 18th century origins of "socialism" in Italian, French & German (admittedly, other than in Italian, the 18th century terms were "socialist' not "socialism", but the lack of the suffix should hardly be relevant to the origins of the conception itself within political discourse).

 

[MARCELLO]

Liberalism does not need anti fascism to produce anything. Liberalism is a kind of worshiping cash notes. Liberalism makes the rich richer whilst the poor ,poorer.

On the other hand, sorry to say but; socialism is only able make the poor,poorer.

While socialism seems the best ,it cannot function among regular people since average people are nothing but beasts .

People may claim that they are socialist but who believes? We perfectly know that they will turn out to be bloody capitalist if they have had chance to.

 

[LuisDantas]

Excuse me?

 

[MARCELLO]

Excuse me?

Was it for me?

 

[LuisDantas]

Yes. Do you really take such an extreme, hopeless view of people and of socialism?

 

[Laika]

I should have read this before writing my last post. I think I will refrain from commenting much upon what you've written until you have a chance to respond to what I have, lest you make my mistake and respond to things in one post that are already (to some extent) dealt with in another. Plus, I have found that it is unwise to respond to posts like this when anger still plays a role in both the nature and content of a response. What you've written deserves more than mere dismissal and outrage.

My two-post reply was because I haven't been quite that angry in a long while. What I wrote was the most constructive way of dealing with thinly veiled rage. In another context it may be good reading, but I wouldn't ask you to reply to it and really it was an intellectual tantrum.

Basically I'm someone knee deep in communist sympathies and knowing that it smells like ****. Even when I try to clean myself up from it, I can't get rid of the metaphorical "smell" of atrocity. it just hangs there and you feel like Lady Macbeth: "will my hands ever be clean?". the "totalitarian" debate is therefore one that arouses strong passions and hits on a nerve. rightly or wrongly, I take it personally as its not an abstraction to me but was part of my life for a long time and still is in many ways.

I'm more than happy to discuss De Sade, the Soviet Eugenics movement and the darwinian undertones of Marxism. But I hope you'll understand why I get defensive when the "T" word is dropped.

 

[Estro Felino]

With the death of conservatism, a huge gap has been created on the topic of immigration and other social issues, a gap that can easily be filled by right-wing populists like Trump and Marine Le Pen.

With all due respect...I don't think we should compare (or mix up) European politics with American politics. Or European politicians with American ones. It deals with two completely different realities, both historically and structurally.
I think we Europeans should understand that the EU has been destroying our Europeism, instead of strengthening it. Not to mention the damages created by the ECB (and that's why the UK, or Sweden didn't enter the Eurozone and they did very well). It doesn't really matter what party Marine Le Pen is president of. She could have been a leftist. All that matters is that she cares about her nation and its economy.

 

[Sultan Of Swing]

With all due respect...I don't think we should compare (or mix up) European politics with American politics. Or European politicians with American ones. It deals with two completely different realities, both historically and structurally.
I think we Europeans should understand that the EU has been destroying our Europeism, instead of strengthening it. Not to mention the damages created by the ECB (and that's why the UK, or Sweden didn't enter the Eurozone and they did very well). It doesn't really matter the party Marine Le Pen is president of. She could have been a leftist. All that matters is that she cares about her nation and its economy.

If good old conservative principles still existed in any one party, countries wouldn't sacrifice their sovereignty to the EU and people like Marine Le Pen wouldn't even exist, she wouldn't gain popularity if there was already a patriotic conservative party available.

 

[Jeremy Taylor]

I think it is silly to consider Trump's rise some sort of crisis. He is just a buffoon who has made a few off-colour statements. I'd be more worried he does something stupid as president more than he does something evil or fascist.

I can sort of see the general point of the OP, but it would be good if the argument could be presented more concisely and less rhetorically. At the moment the impression I'm getting is the author wishes us to accept radical leftwing views about what constitutes freedom, equality, the good and just state, but is hiding these behind a rhetorical denunciation of the right and liberalism. The most obvious objection is that, actually, if one doesn't accept these leftwing views, then the entire critique in the OP is undermined. Yet the OP gives no argument for these essential premises.

 

[icehorse]

First - wow! I lot of thought has gone into this thread!

Back to the OP: Here's my take, lacking in depth perhaps, but parsimonious:

The right plays on fear.
The left plays on hope.

People in the west are correct to be afraid of what their astonishingly corrupt governments are doing. The right knows how to spin that fear to promote their agenda. Selling fear is easy.