i like the "reading, watching" and "fascism watch" pieces but I signed up on the strength of the Dreyfus affair pieces, so I definitely would enjoy more multi-part historical narratives on any topic.
Great summary of an epic political mess. Extremely minor contribution: the surrendering babushkas were probably cleaners stuck in the building. If Soviet and early-post-Soviet Moscow had a surplus of anything, it was elderly ladies with cheap corn brooms.
One of the reasons I use the term fashoid instead of fascist is to avoid the pitfall of the original term: It has been overused, misused and abused to the point of being rendered meaningless.
Why -oid instead of -ism? The analogue comes from drugs. You have opium, and you have opioids. Opium is an organic plant that can be rendered into something intoxicating. Opioids are chemicals synthesized to produce the same effects as opium without the need for organic material.
The best scholarly treatments of fascism come from Robert Paxton and Roger Griffin. So, to answer the question "What is fascism," you'd have to read thousands of pages of their texts, check their bibliographies, and then you can go, "Oh, *that's* fascism." Who has time for that, especially when mass culture demands, "Explain it to me in memes."
Definitional fascism says one of its elements is nationalism -- a community with a shared language, religion, history, etc., and often with aspirations of their own government (stateless people) or to separate from an existing government (e.g., nations who lost a war and became subordinate to an empire).
Fascism is resurgent in the first quarter of the 21st century, after a latency of about 80 years. This time, though, it's not manifesting itself among nationhoods. They do synthesize the historic arc of fascism -- the death event, appeal to an idealized and mythologized past, syncretism and eclecticism, veneration of pain and death, aesthetic fetishism, to name a few. The group-based threats now are theocracy, White supremacy (treating European nations and their settler state descendants in the Americas and Down Under as a colorized unitary entity as is done in the U.S.) and masculinism.
Because these are not nations per se, and other more precise words exist for these groupings -- religions, races (the American definition) and men -- they can not be fascism by description. However, because they are not nations yet exhibit the same traits and behaviors of 20th century palingenetic ultranationalism, they are synthetic. So, fashoid.
Can't know if it's something that autocorrect is doing but it's certainly closer to 'Dyen' than 'Deyn' if you really need to flag that palatalization of 'd' sound (or, imo, you can eschew the 'y' altogether, although writing about a newspaper called 'Den' may appear funny).
i like the "reading, watching" and "fascism watch" pieces but I signed up on the strength of the Dreyfus affair pieces, so I definitely would enjoy more multi-part historical narratives on any topic.
Great summary of an epic political mess. Extremely minor contribution: the surrendering babushkas were probably cleaners stuck in the building. If Soviet and early-post-Soviet Moscow had a surplus of anything, it was elderly ladies with cheap corn brooms.
possible!
One of the reasons I use the term fashoid instead of fascist is to avoid the pitfall of the original term: It has been overused, misused and abused to the point of being rendered meaningless.
Why -oid instead of -ism? The analogue comes from drugs. You have opium, and you have opioids. Opium is an organic plant that can be rendered into something intoxicating. Opioids are chemicals synthesized to produce the same effects as opium without the need for organic material.
The best scholarly treatments of fascism come from Robert Paxton and Roger Griffin. So, to answer the question "What is fascism," you'd have to read thousands of pages of their texts, check their bibliographies, and then you can go, "Oh, *that's* fascism." Who has time for that, especially when mass culture demands, "Explain it to me in memes."
Definitional fascism says one of its elements is nationalism -- a community with a shared language, religion, history, etc., and often with aspirations of their own government (stateless people) or to separate from an existing government (e.g., nations who lost a war and became subordinate to an empire).
Fascism is resurgent in the first quarter of the 21st century, after a latency of about 80 years. This time, though, it's not manifesting itself among nationhoods. They do synthesize the historic arc of fascism -- the death event, appeal to an idealized and mythologized past, syncretism and eclecticism, veneration of pain and death, aesthetic fetishism, to name a few. The group-based threats now are theocracy, White supremacy (treating European nations and their settler state descendants in the Americas and Down Under as a colorized unitary entity as is done in the U.S.) and masculinism.
Because these are not nations per se, and other more precise words exist for these groupings -- religions, races (the American definition) and men -- they can not be fascism by description. However, because they are not nations yet exhibit the same traits and behaviors of 20th century palingenetic ultranationalism, they are synthetic. So, fashoid.
Can't know if it's something that autocorrect is doing but it's certainly closer to 'Dyen' than 'Deyn' if you really need to flag that palatalization of 'd' sound (or, imo, you can eschew the 'y' altogether, although writing about a newspaper called 'Den' may appear funny).
typo, I have it as Dyen in the first post
Thought so!
I remember it being written both ways in a previous article but that might have been fixed since.
Everyone else here already cited the recent Adam Curtis documentary about this period, right?
have not seen