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Post by Eugene 2.0 on Jun 8, 2022 6:48:33 GMT
We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist Fascism was never defeated as an idea.
As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as Nazi Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that fascism was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a fascist war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, fascists around the world will be comforted.
We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. Fascism was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where fascists were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.
Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.
It’s not the first time Ukraine has been the object of fascist war. The conquest of the country was Hitler’s main war aim in 1941. Hitler thought that the Soviet Union, which then ruled Ukraine, was a Jewish state: He planned to replace Soviet rule with his own and claim Ukraine’s fertile agricultural soil. The Soviet Union would be starved, and Germany would become an empire. He imagined that this would be easy because the Soviet Union, to his mind, was an artificial creation and the Ukrainians a colonial people.
The similarities to Mr. Putin’s war are striking. The Kremlin defines Ukraine as an artificial state, whose Jewish president proves it cannot be real. After the elimination of a small elite, the thinking goes, the inchoate masses would happily accept Russian dominion. Today it is Russia that is denying Ukrainian food to the world, threatening famine in the global south.
Many hesitate to see today’s Russia as fascist because Stalin’s Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist. But that usage did not help to define what fascism is — and is worse than confusing today. With the help of American, British and other allies, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and its allies in 1945. Its opposition to fascism, however, was inconsistent.
www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/opinion/russia-fascism-ukraine-putin.html
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Post by jonbain on Jun 8, 2022 9:43:03 GMT
What made Mussolini's fascism different to other forms of authoritarian Government, was that Mussolini came to power via the newspaper that he owned. Fascism's primary means of tyranny is thus propaganda.
Much like the Nazi's. In today's world of mass communication, we can hardly imagine what it must have been like to hear the booming powerful voice of mass broadcasting for the first time?
The majority of people then, had no idea how radio or film worked. It must have seemed God-like in its magical power.
Are people today just as ignorant of modern communication? So much so, that they can be duped into believing the narrative that speaks loudest?
Or is it just a simple fear of death that makes them susceptible to whomsoever threatens them most?
Or both...
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