General Politics Thread

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 22nd 2022 at 6:31:39 PM

Ah. I see. Good points.

With the first part, I think what I was trying to express is that all things being equal, political parties with support among various classes aren't going to be Marxist/Communist. And if a political party draws some of its base from business owners, it's particularly likely to be economically conservative.

With the other part, I'm honestly not that versed about Pinochet (other than vaguely being aware of his close ties to certain University of Chicago economists and the Reagan and Thatcher Administrations), so I'm not sure to what extent he was an ethnonationalist (definitely an authoritarian though).

But it does seem characteristic of Fascism that privatization was imposed in a "top down" way. And that it was combined with widespread murder and torture of perceived enemies, neither of which would be typical in democracies with the same economic policies. And I'd expect the same characteristics would be true of dictatorships (Fascist or otherwise) with any other type of economic policies.

Edited by Hodor2 on Jun 22nd 2022 at 9:45:48 AM

By the Pinochet part i was disagreeing with your claim that all authoritarian regimes practise economic intervention which Pinochet did not. In my opinion that makes him not fascist. Fascist regimes do economic intervention so they are not economically conservative.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 22nd 2022 at 7:05:31 PM

Understood. And I'm inclined to agree, especially since I'm not versed in any of his other policies (specifically whether he promoted any specific racial or ethnic group).

I guess my only counterargument would be that assuming he fit other criteria of Fascism, one could maybe handwave the laissez-faire economic policies by pointing to the interventionist way in which he implemented non-intervention in the economy.

For what it's worth, I understand Fascist parties/governments as having at least some economic interventionism and at least paying lip service to pro-worker policies, which fits with the type of political parties that Fascist parties are like the "evil version" of - you know, like a worker's party that has an ethnonationalist component and/or a sort of "third way" party that seeks a congenial relationship between workers and owners.

Edited by Hodor2 on Jun 22nd 2022 at 10:12:30 AM

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Edited by Risa123 on Jun 22nd 2022 at 7:21:14 PM

Actually, he kind of did to a degree when the "Chilean Miracle" turned out to be not quite as "miraculous" as hoped. Milton Friedman wasn't too happy about it.

Ok, what you are describing is a classic prototypical style category. Have we decided what the typical characteristics of Fascism are? Anything beyond "Right wing, authoritarian, populist, and ethno-nationalist"?

I should use the term economic statism it descibes what i mean better.

• right wing
• totalitarian
• ultranationalism
• militaristic
• economic statism
• I would also say agressive foreign policy, but that was disputed by Diana. IRC she belives that depends on the nation in question.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 22nd 2022 at 7:29:19 PM

Yeah, it does depend. Spain under Franco was pretty clearly fascist, but Franco was generally...not very interested in threatening anyone else. Not out of the goodness of his heart, but because he was always watching to see who would win. He almost sided with the Axis but backed out when the tide turned and in the Cold War, his approach was to leave his neighbors alone and take an active anti-Soviet stance. If he'd sabre-rattled against Portugal, France, Gibraltar or Morocco, he'd have likely just made Spain a big target.

There were plans to invade Portugal drawn up in 1940, but they never came to fruition and Franco himself never publicly stated any interest in possessing Portugal.

I think Spain under Franco also sent some brigade or battalion to the Eastern Front.

Either way, Spain was deeply underdeveloped economically compared to Germany and Italy and couldn't engage in the same level of aggression and militarism. It was a policy of pragmatism more than anything.

Portugal under Salazar was vaguely similar, but they had their own aggressive war in their African colonies (and their own weird racial bullshit). While Salazar gave some support to the fascists during the Spanish Civil War, he was too devoted to the longstanding alliance with Britain to ever support the Axis (and on a personal level, he deemed Mussolini's ideology "pagan").

Lots of good points. I'd personally say that what can be taken away from this is that there's fascists of all economic ideologies. National Bolshevism (Russia), National Communism (Romania), and Juche (Best Korea) all come to mind as socialist ideologies that are...well, rather National Socialist. Meanwhile, American fascism is hypercapitalist in orientation and denounces the idea that you should get paid for your work or that the rich should pay taxes as "socialism" and "government overreach."

The thing with the "National Socialism" as utilized by the NSDAP is that it wasn't *just* a tool to co-opt the labor movement. Hitler and company really did believe they were a *kind* of socialist...just not the socialism of Karl Marx and company.

Marx and Engels were very open about how their ideology was firmly materialist, while being rooted in a variation of Hegel's dialectic (hence why communism focuses heavily on "dialectical materialism"). They looked at the previous generation of socialists as being "utopian", while their socialism as "scientific" and sought to understand the how and why of capitalism's development.

Fascism, by contrast, opposed materialist philosophy. Fascism is about emotion, feelings, ideas...in other words, metaphysics. It is the ideal of the nation, of the almighty state, and the people, with no regard for class. In fact, fascism rebukes class struggle altogether.

Hitler's conception of "national socialism" was rooted in right-wing "Prussian socialism" akin to Oswald Spengler. Spengler was not a fan of the Nazis (he was a fan of Mussolini though) but his works were part of the rising right-wing current in the Weimar Republic that birthed the NSDAP, and I'd argue are openly fascistic. Spengler's idea of "Prussian socialism" was in direct opposition to Marxist socialism and instead was linked to Prussian figures like Frederick William I and Otto Von Bismarck. His idea was of the strong nation-state that would regulate, but not control, society, without care for class divide. To quote Spengler:

Hitler took this and would brag about how Marx's socialism was a bastardization and how he was bringing "true" socialism to Germany (I remember reading a quote from Hitler on this but I'd need to dig it up), in a conception rooted deeply in Spengler's own view. Some people try to say Hitler was actually socialist by pointing out the Nazi regime had frequent state intervention in the economy, but that falls into that nonsensical "socialism is when the government does stuff" argument. The truth seems to be that the Nazi regime believed in the tightly-clenched fist of a state that would regulate the economy but, if you were a good little business and loved the Nazis and worked for the great Reich, you wouldn't be in the crosshairs of the SS.

Oswald Mosely also talks about this:

The best description of Nazi economic policy that I've heard once is that the Nazis basically ran the German economy like a crime syndicate.

Pretty good metaphor there.

You do good for the Reich and do whatever favors they demand, you're in good hands. If not, you get your legs broken.

EDIT: Okay, FINALLY found the quote I was looking for, it's Hitler being interviewed in 1923 and he gives his definition of "socialism" in the Nazi sense:

Edited by Diana1969 on Jun 23rd 2022 at 12:23:12 AM

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 23rd 2022 at 2:51:09 PM

Wow, Hitler was really good at bullshitting.

Oh, what Hitler said was total bullshit. But it was bullshit he earnestly believed.

In principle, anyway. "I decide who is or is not a Jew" is a fair example of Nazi race science, after all.

Going back a bit, another thing I wanna bring up along these lines is how fascists constantly love to engage in myths to downplay their actions or shift the blame. After WWII, lots of former Nazis were allowed to publish works that absolved the Wehrmacht of blame in war crimes and genocide, when, y'know, they absolutely *did* hold responsibility. And hell, some of this was promoted by the United States government when they let Franz Halder work as a consultant with the US Army Historical Division (a LOT of Nazis worked with the U.S. and NATO after WWII, it's fucking absurd and incredibly grotesque). The myth of the "clean Wehrmacht", the myth of Barbarossa being a pre-emptive strike, the myth of Erwin Rommel being the "honorable" and "good" Nazi, all the blaming against Hitler as being the sole reason for the German loss and not, y'know, the socioeconomic chaos of managing the German war machine and the incompetence of German army leaders, and that's not even getting into the Wehraboo morons who fixate on Nazi weaponry and tanks and shit (and I had to deal with a LOT of these people when I attended university, let me tell you).

Dan Olson from Folding Ideas once made a video about Triumph of the Will, the infamous Nazi propaganda film, and he made a point that it is kind of odd that our biggest perception of the Nazis, of the marches and rallies and over-the-top theatrics, comes directly from a film meant to show the Nazis as they *wanted* to be perceived. And that bleeds into more shit too...Nazi propaganda films are used so often in documentaries on WWII (mostly because it's about what we have on hand for the Nazis in action) that our perception of the German military is of this big war machine of iron tanks, when the truth is...it wasn't *entirely* like that, but they wanted to present this image for a reason. It's taken decades for some of these myths to be properly challenged by historians, and yet a lot of them *still* have heavy prevalence. I *still* see a lot of apologia towards Rommel, for example, and that's not even getting into the nauseating hyperfocus many people have towards Nazi weaponry.

When fascists are at a loss, they will shift the blame, dig their heels in the sand, and scream incoherently. They'll defend the Wehrmacht and blame it all on Hitler, or they'll go as far as to say the Holocaust wasn't real and deny there was any plan to exterminate the Jews. And this is not limited to Nazis. There's plenty of apologia for other fascist regimes. Japan still has a lot of apologists for the Imperial regime and war crimes committed in China and Korea, among other places.

I've encountered apologia for Franco's Spain more than once. It tends to be the kind of person who thinks that non-literal art is a scourge on humanity and they all praised Franco's decision to basically...purge the artists and a lot of the scientists. It's always really creepy.

Yeah wehraboos suck. I mean that some people are going to focused on wermacht hardware more is quite ok everbody has favorits, but the apologia for its personel is where i draw the line. They also contribute to spread of various misconceptions so as a person who is interested in tanks it personally pisses me off. Now the nazi apologia is obviously more concerning. What is non-literal art.

Edited by Risa123 on Jun 24th 2022 at 4:17:30 PM

Literal art is "I painted a landscape as close to reality as I could manage in this medium."

Not literal art is like, surreal art, cubism, basically any form of art that isn't intended to be literal and accurate representations of real things. Most fascist movements fucking hate modern and post-modern art because it's generally designed to make the viewer think about it, while classical literal art can easily get a reaction of "yes, that is a nice painting of a tree."

Edited by Zendervai on Jun 24th 2022 at 10:30:11 AM

I think it less about "it makes people think" and more that it is modern so fascist who are culturaly conservative hate modern culture.

No, a lot of it really is a hatred of anything that encourages free thinking. If you let people think freely, they might start to wonder what the boogieman of the day actually did or wonder why this supposedly amazing regime seems to be doing such a bad job of keeping everything together.

The American right is like this too, with the weird caveat that anything that's been around long enough to be considered classic art gets a pass. The Art Deco movement was a huge deal from around 1910 up to WWII, and the Nazis fucking hated it, but the modern fascists tend to like it because they're a little...fuzzy on who actually liked it and when it was popular.

Edited by Zendervai on Jun 24th 2022 at 10:40:33 AM

Perhaps, but hatered of modern things is part of it too. It should be noted that that i dont belive that non-literal art makes people think.