Umberto Eco: Ur Fascism

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Content Creator

Thomas and others have done a better job than I could hope to do taking apart some of the things that stood out the most as wrong.

The central idea though of reoccurring themes in history is, well kinda eh. It isn't wrong because certain themes like Umberto says, tradition, notions of "the people", do have their origins fairly remotely. A lot of fascism is "eternal" in the sense that the motivations behind it are eternal. People will never stop feeling grievances or the desire to return to a former glory. This has always been the case. It isn't that there were elements of the fascist in the past it is that there are elements from the past in fascism. Which is hardly a revolutionary statement. Ultimately he is trying to make the case that there are browns under the beds and we have to be vigilant that these subterranean forces don't re-emerge.

I love this kind of thinking from the left because it reveals their belief that the dangerous revolutionary right is some kind of elemental force. Almost suggesting that it is human nature or at least something which we're naturally susceptible to. Which I wouldn't even disagree with honestly.

Cte de St Germain
Speaking of holy rollers.


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Thomas777
The book Hitler's War Aims by Norman Rich delved into Mussolini's sexual decadence (albeit briefly) - as Rich, to his credit, included biographical capsule summaries of the men who were the chiefs of nations allied to the Reich (esp. Antonescu, Quisling, and Mussolini).

After Il Duce was rescued by Skorzeny's special operations team and installed in the Salo Republic, he began living a very wild and degenerate life - that included regular orgies with very young women, and Rich cites sources for this.

I wasn't trying to be pornographic and lurid in mentioning this - I was just utilizing an anecdote to rebut this bizarre, Freudian nonsense promoted by Eco that Fascists and National Socialists were a cult of sexually repressed, histrionic moralists.
Cte de St Germain
Actually, orgies with younger women are the most 'macho' thing one can do (though BAP would disagree).

I am reminded of a country song "Faster Horses"

I told him I was a poet,
I was lookin' for the truth
I do not care for horses, whiskey,
Women or the loot
I said I was a writer,
My soul was all on fire
He looked at me an' he said, "You are a liar."

"It's faster horses, younger women,
Older whiskey, and more money"
Well, I was disillusioned, if I say the least
I grabbed him by the collar and I jerked him to his feet
There was something cold and shiny layin' by my head
So I started to believe the things he said
Well, my poet days are over and I'm back to being me
As I enjoy the peace and comfort of reality
If my boy ever asks me what it is that
I have learned I think that I will readily affirm
"It's faster horses, younger women,
Older whiskey, and more money"
shkanamataee
Tom T. Hall for the win.
Cornelio

Modern scholars are just lazy. Really, is it so difficult to write "you are"?

Cornelio
Ok, ok. That was a bad joke, even by my standards. I present my apologies.
RedHand
Carl Schmitt has been sidelined in history courses dealing with inter-war Germany, the crisis of Weimar and national-socialism which is pretty incredible really. I don't mean he's mentioned in a negative light or slandered or something like that, he's just never mentioned.
Herr Gundolf

Dr. Eco, no doubt a pious believer in human rights, had the gall to write:

and not be ashamed by it.

This is not at all limited to fascism. This is the mark of any man or movement which has a vulgar conception of the enemy. Our liberals, because they are, at least in ethos and in their own minds, friends of "the people," have the very same conception of the enemy. For them, just as for any vulgar nationalist and anti-Semite, the enemy is not merely an enemy but a criminal. My view is that they are not really liberals. Liberalism, if it ever has existed, has always existed opposed to the public. Liberality, as a virtue , has always meant something aristocratic. What is called liberalism today is some naive mass politics of the world. They have no conception of the enemy as an equal because the equal is supposed to be the Good. So, whoever is evil, must be inferior to myself, a cretin, an insect. One says: if all humanity is equal and good then the enemy is something inferior and inhuman and evil: an enemy of "humanity." One has merely stolen the worst tendencies of the old nationalisms and extended them to the whole human world.

Liberalism, in its oldest and most serious sense, has always implied a capacity to give. Only an aristocrat can really give. The rest of "humanity" merely steals and calls its theft "liberality" and "freespiritedness." In order to give one must actually have. Does "the public" actually have anything?

This is why I have always maintained that liberalism and democracy are eternal enemies.