On the utility of “Fascist”

The Spring issue of the Claremont Review of Books has a really fine esay on Mussolini and Fascism by Angelo Codevilla.

The Original Fascist

From movement to epithet

Today, the adjective fascist is an epithet -- often mixed promiscuously with white supremacist, sexist, etc.that the ruling class uses to besmirch whoever challenges them, and to provide emotional fuel for cowering, marginalizing, and disempowering conservatives.

This maneuver consists of defining fascism in terms of unpopular ideas, political practices, and personality traits observable in many times and places; then, having cited Hitler’s Nazi movement as fascism’s quintessence, of pinning those deplorable characteristics on the intended targets. This reductio ad Hitlerum aims at no less than to outlaw conservatives. As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin exclaimed: “these people are not fit for polite society…. I think it’s absolutely abhorrent that any institution of higher learning, any news organization, or any entertainment organization that has a news outlet would hire these people.”

Codevilla demonstrates that their “argument” is worse than wrong: it is self-serving and betrays a totalitarian mindset.

It is wrong to say that “Antifa are the real Fascists”; they are much worse. They are the idiot spawn of Stalin and his progeny.

Communists in general and Joseph Stalin in particular are responsible for turning the words fascism and fascist into mere negative epithets. They did this as a result of a major tactical decision regarding the political wars of the 1920s and ’30s, which pitted the Communists against the rump of the socialist movement as well as against various nationalist and conservative movements. For the Communists, the practical, tactical question was whether to seek power alone or to ally against the conservatives and nationalists with the socialists or whomever. Early experiences had been equivocal. Hungary’s Béla Kun had taken power alone but had been overthrown quickly. In Italy the Fascists, led by a socialist, had swept the Communists from the streets while the socialist party stood by. In 1922-23, Germany was the big question. Its socialist party was really the only big nationwide force other than the Christians. The two did not get along. Stalin judged that the Communists could defeat them both, and the National Socialists, too, acting alone. Perhaps most of all he feared that if Communists were to ally with movements not under his control, he might lose control of the Communists.

Hence, Stalin elaborated the doctrine of social fascism which, verbiage aside, meant that Communists should consider all to the right of them-- essentially all who were not under Communist discipline-- as fascists.

Codevilla explains why the fascist straw man remains useful to our mandarin class:

But what is the point of repeating from society’s commanding heights that the ruling class’s opponents are fascists, fascistizing, near-fascists, Nazis, white supremacists, racists, and so forth?

Today, those words mean simply that those so indicted have no right to challenge the ruling class. Whatever they do in that regard is illegitimate.

Again, this echoes the Stalinist's playbook from the 1930s. During the Spanish Civil War, Arthur Koestler was tutored in the dark arts of propaganda by Willi Munzenberg – one of Stalin's most talented agents:

'Don't argue with them,' he kept repeating. 'Make them stink in the nose of the world. make people curse and abominate them, make them shudder with horror.'

This form of debate, now so prevalent from cable “news” to prestige print journalism, is fundamentally totalitarian and un-American to its core.

Sir Isiah Berlin was an often astute observer who spent time in FDR's Washington and in the Soviet Union during the peak of Stalin's Terror. As historian John Lewis Gaddis notes the contrast was stark and immediately discernible:

America and Russia differed, he could now see, not just in geographies, histories, cultures, and capabilities, but also, critically, in necessary ecologies. One thrived on cacophony. The other demanded silence

As Bari Weiss can tell you, there is a growing contingent of activists (including journalists and professors) who hate the cacophony and align, enthusiastically, with the silencers.

Related:

Mediated democracy and the temptations of Leninism

#ad #ad