Sorry, it took me a VERY long time to get back to this.
me:
The people nowadays who yell about fascism
On 1/3/07, Charles Brown wrote:
Your claim that people are "yelling" it is telling. It is a subtle misrepresentation of those using the term so as to characterize them as "wild" , overly emotional, or that their thinking is distorted by their emotion. I'm not "yelling" about fascism anymore than you are yelling about any of the analysis you do.
(1) to me it feels like yelling, because it doesn't make any sense to stress the "fascist" dimension. (BTW, to see a recent movie that portrays fascism pretty well, see "Pan's Labyrinth.") (2) at a demo I went to in 2006, some people were indeed "yelling" about fascism. me:
The authoritarianism we've seen in recent years -- especially right after 911 -- was forcible only toward an unpopular minority and was generally accepted by the majority in the US.
Charles:
There's plenty of evidence that the main repression of Nazism was of "unpopular" minorities. The vast majority of the German population were not subjected to the very worst repressions. We don't even have to accuse the "Good Germans" of being inherent "Nazis" to say that they were not nearly as badly repressed as the despised minorities. In other words, we don't have to subscribe to a "Goldenwhathisname" [Daniel Jonah Goldhagen] thesis to see that the German majority was not very repressed compared to the despised minorities.<
Of course, but the election that put Hitler into power didn't give him even a majority. It was Hindenberg who put him in power. His authoritarian government was clearly a minority government (in electoral terms). Further, his repression wasn't simply against unpopular minorities (Jews, gypsies, gays, etc.) It was also against significant political forces such as the social democrats, labor unionists, and communists. He also intensified and deepened the repression of women. As he solidified power, of course, the population of Germans -- atomized by Nazi repression -- slid toward supporting him, mostly in terms of German nationalism. Even then, the Nazis had to keep a lot of their worst actions secret. On the other hand, a lot of (maybe most of) the support for Bushian authoritarianism after 911 was spontaneous (though of course it was based on generations of miseducation and propaganda). Bush exploited a majoritarian wave after 911, while Hitler's rise to power was more based on elite conniving. It's interesting how Bush has undermined the majoritarian wave by exploiting it, so that more and more it opposes him. On the other hand, Hitler used his power to make sure that no majoritarian wave was needed. -- Jim Devine / "Doubt is uncomfortable, but certainty is ridiculous." -- Voltaire.
