Untitled

[quote="DJJIB-DJDCT" post="538415442"]
This is a problem with Trump Derangement Syndrome. Liberals have not been able to adequately explain why Trump is a threat, why he is "fascist" or what "fascism" is. Trump has been elected, held power, lost power, and yet... nothing more awful than usual happened. "Trumpism" is clearly not dictatorial, he barely used executive authority. So, no Fuhrer principle there. Trump did not dissolve cabinet, let alone whole ministries. Did a small group of extremists seize power and remake society against the popular will, or didn't they? If Trump is a fascist and this is how fascism worked, why the discrepancy? 

We have to ask, what are "fascism" "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism"? 

Well, the answer, on top of all the usual reasons liberals are delusional about politics and history, is that in this case they have very specific delusions. How they think the Soviet Union worked, and the Third Reich, and pretty much every state (including their own) function has been falsified. We don't have the time or space to go into all of the details, or even all of the how's and why's, but as you know liberalism exists to disguise class power, and neoliberalism takes it further by presenting the state as powerless. That's my simplification, others can expand on this if they want. The central problem is, they cannot reconcile how they believe these things work, based around historical examples, with any contemporary examples. This is compounded by the same liberals using historical comparison as a shorthand. Saddam Hussein is [I]just like[/I] Hitler, Trump is [I]just like[/I] Hitler, Putin is [I]just like[/I] Hitler [I]and[/I] Stalin. They obviously apply this to states as well as individuals, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, Iran, the Russian Federation, PRC and the even more nebulous "Islamofascism". 

Yet, despite these constant comparisons, if Nazism works as they suppose, and as these states are [I]just like[/I] the Third Reich, observation should bear that out, and it never has. I'll go further and say it never will. How they understand the Nazi Party took power, how they understand it used power, and how they understand the relationship between the use of that power and the German people, and on the German people, is central to their worldview. It's also never been replicated, anywhere, for what the greatest English historian of the Third Reich, Ian Kershaw, said was a very simple reason - it never happened. 

Liberals have been taught a specific false history of the Third Reich, which does not actually explain the mechanics of the government or how it related to the public. When this is kept in the domain of the mythologized, half remembered, and not seriously examined by the average person, past, this is not a problem. "Hitler" is a signifiant, like "Napoleon" was to liberals before 1939, and "Pharaoh" was to liberals before 1815.

 "Hitler" was capable of anything, and so the government of the Third Reich is not bound by what we agree are the usual limits of reality. Events could take place even though everyone opposed them, while everyone was at the same time totally unaware of them. A government could rule over 70 million people while being opposed by all of them, relying on an internal security service responsible for all of occupied Europe that peaked at 32 000 employees. The 523 000 Jews living in Germany in 1933 could disappear without anyone noticing or protesting. The Nazis won 37% of the vote in the last German election, yet they had 100% control of every aspect of public and private life, far beyond what we recognize governments are practically capable of in reality, immediately. In fact, the day to day function of this control has never been explained, nor does it have to be, because "Hitler" was capable of anything.  At the same time, despite nearly 40% of the vote, no Germans supported the Nazis. Despite running in several elections, making wide use of the media, and propaganda "everywhere", no Germans were aware of their policies, programmes, or beliefs. "Hitler" is a signifiant. 

You see, there is a problem with "Hitler". If "Hitler" is exceptional, which he must be, because everything above is not only an exception to the dynamics of any previous historical governments and societies, but also any examples since, how can "fascism" "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism" be defined almost exclusively through the rise of the Nazi Party and government of the Third Reich? The exception can't be the rule. You see the problem here.  The case for "fascism" "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism" is the allegation that it's possible for an unpopular government to seize power, do whatever they want, with no public awareness, at the same time opposed by the entire public, with no participation by the public. For 80 years, liberals have said "it can happen here", but never explained how, other than "it happened there", if you get my meaning. "It", I really want to hammer this home, is basically agreed to be outside any understanding of how politics and society actually function. 

Well, I won't bother picking apart the alleged models of "fascism" "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism", because they aren't really models. They are a myth. They do not exist to explain what actually happened in the Third Reich, nor are they expected to have any predictive ability. They exist to explain, in 1946, why business in Germany can carry on as normal. "Hitler" was a magical departure from normalcy, as I said, the explanation defies all reason, and therefore with "Hitler" gone, Germany is restored to a liberal democracy as if nothing had ever happened. Because it was just one man, you see. Or one man and his cabinet. Or one man, his cabinet, and government. Or one man... and the 32 000 Gestapo... or one man...and at most the 910 000 or so members the Waffen SS peaked at, many of whom weren't German. 

But you see, this still doesn't work. You know the train tracks going to Auschwitz? Including pensioners and the employees’ families, some three million people belonged to the “Reichsbahn-family”—about five percent of the population. Mail was delivered to and sent from the concentration camps, albeit not by prisoners. 631 000 people worked for the Reichspost in 1945. Every notable industry in German employed slave labour of some kind, often concentration camp prisoners. And again, 523 000 German Jews had disappeared. This is very difficult to explain as not only the actions of one man, party, criminal organization, but knowledge confined to them. 

It is a magical belief. A fairy tale. I am being a hundred percent sincere.  In On Fairy Stories, JRR Tolkien tells us what we need to know about the genuine article, but for the purposes of this argument I'll use the definition he discounts: 

"What is a fairy-story? In this case you will turn to the Oxford English Dictionary in vain. It contains no reference to the combination fairy-story, and is unhelpful on the subject of fairies generally. In the Supplement, fairy-tale is recorded since the year 1750, and its leading sense is said to be (a) a tale about fairies, or generally a fairy legend; with developed senses, (b) [b]an unreal or incredible story, and (c) a falsehood.[/b]"

Do you know what the most popular theory for how the Third Reich functioned was before Arendt and company developed "totalitarianism", from whence the flowers of "fascism" and "authoritarianism" bloomed? Hypnotism. Read any book published before 1952 or so, and for many years after Arendt, incidentally, and you will see speculation that Adolf Hitler possessed hypnotic abilities that are attributed to either personal charisma, training in technique, or supernatural abilities. This appears almost constantly in denazification testimony as well. "Hitler had us under a spell", "we were mesmerized",  "he could hypnotize people". This was a belief in (b) an incredible story, and (c) a falsehood. A fairy tale. 

People took it seriously, of course. There are still pop writers who pay the bills by exploring Hitler's alleged magnetism. YouTube channels that explore his body language, or qualities of his voice. This was a good part of History Television's programming in the 1990's. For the lower brow, these magical properties are taken quite literally and so we have a cottage industry about the Nazis and the so-called occult. For the dateless and right wing, we have all sorts of treatises on Hitler's charismatic public speaking and dynamism and so on. The belief that Hitler and the Nazis had occult powers, or techniques that may as well be magical, or that there were crowd dynamics that transformed the individuals of the German public, who remained blameless and innocent, into something other than themselves, is a falsehood. 

All of this works backwards from a single point - communism must be opposed, the German public, and the employees of the railways, post office and military are needed to oppose communism, and so, an explanation was invented. It was a fairy tale. It was accepted, because it had to be. By accepting an explanation at odds with reality, contradictions were created. These contradictions were such an obvious departure from reality that they were attributed to magic. Hypnotism, the occult, "fascism" "totalitarianism" and "authoritarianism". 

This explanation, given those names, proved incredibly useful for other reasons after 1945. You do not have to understand, or try to understand any state given those names, because they are agreed to be magical. Men are fed to dogs. Mortars are used as a method of execution. The GULAG system only imprisons the innocent. Famines are intentional.  If a state is called "fascist" "totalitarian" or "authoritarian",  you can believe anything unreal or incredible said about them.  The words are incantations that can be cast to apply to any state the liberals wishes to condemn. They don't even have to demonstrably work the same way as the Third Reich, be organized around a similar ideology, in fact they could be drastically different, say a government formed by Cuban peasants rather than the German industrial middle class, and that comparison does not strain the definition because the workings of both states are magic. This is consistent with the definition Tolkien was more satisfied by:

"Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. 

I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. It has many ingredients, but analysis will not necessarily discover the secret of the whole."

States described as "fascist" "totalitarian" and "authoritarian" do not have to have any defined or shared qualities. The winds of magic blow in those lands, and so to the liberal, they are the leading European industrial power a generation after a devastating and humiliating war, with the industrialist class trying to contain worker unrest and allying with the aristocracy and middle class, even when they are Islamic scholars and students in the Hindu Kush, frustrated with the KSA and reading the works of Sayyid Qutb and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. They are the same thing because they possess "indescribable, though not imperceptible" qualities - chiefly that liberals don't like them. Secondarily, if apparent at all to liberals, that they were both instrumentalized to fight communism. 

Finally, the real magic of  "fascist" "totalitarian" and "authoritarian" is that the spells work outside of fairyland. They work in domestic politics too. Their names can be evoked, whenever required,  to be a signifiant for what liberals claim to oppose when they don't stand for anything. They do not need to bear any resemblance to any historical case, because it is not a historical model. It is a fairy story. So, it is the most important election of our lifetime, because we need to prevent fascism, led by the man who was already President. He will do things in his discontinuous second term that he did not, could not, do in his first term, because he is magic. His beliefs do not even superficially resemble the ideology of the Nazi Party, but they are the same thing, through magic. Examination and comparison holds no purchase here. Trump does not have to behave like Adolf Hitler, because "Hitler" will always be remembered as behaving like Donald Trump. And Vladimir Putin. And Osama Bin Ladin. That is the magic of it all.  

Liberals need to believe that Trump could be elected tomorrow, be however unpopular, not even hold both chambers of the legislature,  and still deport people to death camps. This would not reflect what anyone wanted, or supported, or participated in. It could happen by rail, either without the knowledge and participation of the 138 800 employees of the railway industry, or by casting them under his spell, because that is the fairy tale they told themselves about the employees of the German railway industry. That's the beauty of it. Trump is all of the bad words, and so he will do all of the bad things through magic. The impossibility of this happening the way they say it will does not diminish their belief that this has happened or will happen, because just like the Once and Future king is spirited away to the fairyland of Avalon, "fascist" "totalitarian" and "authoritarian" was and will be (whatever they them need to be. German society relieved of guilt and returning to work, YBNMW). 

The one good liberal historian to write on Fascism and provide a materially grounded definition, Paxton, who wrote The Anatomy of Fascism, made the mistake of providing a coherent model on a country by country basis. Every movement from Romania, to Croatia, to Italy. Germany was included, of course, but Paxton was not trying to define fascism by working backwards from a justification for placing Wehrmacht officers on the NATO General Staff. The problem with Paxton's model, and well reviewed book, was that a coherent and grounded book, as Tolkien said, is not a satisfying fairy story. Specifically, by defining fascism as a process, like any other political process, in terms of class, economic interests, power, and so on, and not an evil spell falling over the land, Paxton stripped Hitler, or "Hitler" rather, of his uniqueness, because Horia Sima in Romania and Ferenc Szálasi in Hungary both led similar movements, and with the emigres dead and communism defeated, it was safe to admit, committed similar crimes. Hitler could be a uniquely hypnotic and charismatic speaker, or occult magician, if he was a lone figure in world history, but when there were several leaders, in rinky dink countries like Latvia, and who people had never heard of, it was harder to believe in a dark magician commanding a nation. Still, liberals could dispense with this for the time being, because after 1991, there was really no need. The story had served its purpose and outlasted the DDR and USSR. 

Liberals accepted Paxton's work. It made them a bit uncomfortable, particularly where New Europe was concerned. They expressed [I]liking[/I] Arendt's story better, and of course who doesn't prefer reading about Prince Hal and Falstaff compared to tax records of the court of Henry V? They also liked showing their command of middlebrow history and openness to historical revisionism, so the book sold well. Think of it a bit like if liberals kept a book by Reza Aslan on "The Historical Hitler" on their coffee table. "Did you know that fascism actually involved the enthusiastic participation of the middle class?" "No, I didn't. Fascinating!" The model was fine because they had no [I]use[/I] for it. The emigres were dead, the Soviets were gone, there was only one Germany. 

Well, along comes 2016. Here is the problem, in brief, if you've read this far: Donald Trump, and his voters, whatever you see on MSNBC are clearly not fascist, in a meaningful sense. They're "bad", "scary", whatever, but [I]fascism is not a synonym for "thing I don't like"[/I]. Not a surprise to this thread, which was called "Rascist" or told "Tankies" and "Fascists" are the same thing. Which is a great example of the magic, by the way. The people deploying tanks to suppress Arrow Cross veterans rising up to lynch Jews and communists (but I repeat myself) and the Arrow Cross members doing it are the same. The winds of magic blew in Hungary in 1956, so the actual reason for intervention is unknown and unknowable. Trump sucks, but Paxton's definition showed, with alarming clarity, what he was not, could not be, fascist. He didn't use state authority, and had no theory of its use, so authoritarian was out too. Trump made no effort to totalize American society, aside from spectacle and culture war, politics has never been less important to American life. Paxton compounded his error by explaining himself in interviews, as overnight he was in extremely high demand.  The media wanted to hear from him 11 years after his book was published, every author's dream. Specifically, they wanted to hear that Trump was a fascist, Trump voters the Nazi Party (despite not being a party, not being organized, not being a mass movement of any kind etc.) Well, Paxton listed all of the reasons this was not true, because he thought the people asking wanted to know about the historical political movements from 1919-1946. They did not, they wanted to hear the fairy story about "fascism" again, so that the signifiant could be invoked - what liberals claim to oppose when they don't stand for anything. 

Eventually, Paxton gave in, and started saying that, [I]yes[/I], actually, come to think of it, Trump [I]was[/I] a fascist. This ruined the coherence and explanatory power of his own work but it made him very popular. This brings us full circle to why Trump Derangement Syndrome and the lie we encouraged Germans to tell in 1946 coexist in a sort of unreality. If Trump is Hitler, and the Trump presidency, which has already happened and will happen again, is the Third Reich, the events of the Second World War can only be understood to have happened through magic. 

Orange Man Bad quondam, Orange Man Bad futurus.