On Sat, 8 Jun 1996 jamesd@echeque.com wrote:

At 07:09 PM 6/7/96 -0700, Rich Graves wrote:

...

you forget that I'm a Certified Political Scientist. [...] Once they got in power, then they started developing an economic ideology.

Untrue:

Fascism is of course a reasonably complete, coherent, and philosophically consistent logical system, almost as coherent as marxism, and far more logical than Mill's utilitarianism. It was published and thoroughly debated well before they pursued or took power.

Besides being unture, this is rather skew to the discussion of whether fascism = corporatism = Clinton. Whether it is possible to construct a coherent ideology is rarely relevant to historical processes; was Castro's Moncada attack motivated by Marxist ideology, for example? But anyway...

Rich Graves's lie is a lie I frequently hear from those who well know the truth,

I know you & Tim aren't impressed by Webster's, which Tim claimed as an authority without bothering to check whether it agreed with him at all (it doesn't; in fact, it directly contradicts him), but how about The Encyclopedia Brittanica on "The Philosophical Bases of Fascism": In its beginnings fascism was not a doctrine and had no clearly elaborated program. It was a technique for gaining and retaining power by violence, and with astonishing flexibility it subordinated all questions of program to this one aim. From the beginning it was dominated by a definite attitude of mind that exalted the fighting spirit, military discipline, ruthlessness, and action and rejected all ethical motives as weakening the resoluteness of will. It pleases me greatly that you do not presume to call me a fool. I've cited Machiavelli, the historical progression of risorgimento, and Paul Morrison, "The poetics of fascism : Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Paul de Man," ISBN 0-19-508085-8. All you're doing is blathering on with some anti-intellectual lumpenlibertarian claptrap that tries to smear anything you disagree with as tantamount to fascism. You do libertarianism, with whose precepts I wholeheartedly agree, a serious disservice. Go back to Bastiat and leave history alone. The Encyclopedia Brittanica says of Mussolini: He read widely and voraciously, if not deeply, plunging into the philosophers and theorists Immanuel Kant and Benedict de Spinoza, Peter Kropotkin and Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Kautsky, and Georges Sorel, picking out what appealed to him and discarding the rest, forming no coherent political philosophy of his own yet impressing his companions as a potential revolutionary of uncommon personality and striking presence. For a more nuanced view, try A. James Gregor's "Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism," ISBN 0-520-03799-5. I could mail you photocopies of the relevant sections if you like.

Many of my readers will think I am excessively harsh, calling Rich Graves a liar rather than a fool, but I hear the above story (that fascism is not a coherent ideology or philosophy) primarily from those whose interests this story serves, and if they genuinely thought this story was true, they would not know that it is in their interests to push it.

[Boggle] Huh? In English, please. [much more content-free blather deleted] Anyway, I never suggested that there was no such thing as fascist philosophy; just that fascism was not rooted in a well-developed ECONOMIC ideology, and that Tim's definition of corporatism is incorrect both in the abstract and in the cases of Italian fascism and Nazism.

Not only do such concepts as feminist science, phallocentric science, etc, strongly resemble such concepts as aryan science, jewish science, etc, but they are justified using the same arguments from the same philosophers. Indeed Heidegger was not only a philosopher of fascism, but he personally participated in Hitler's terror, terrorizing his academic colleagues, and Paul De Man of Yale University worked directly for the Nazis as a propagandist in occupied Belgium.

How did we get from economics to philosophy? Here James demonstrates his absolute mastery of the subject. Heidegger only really supported Nazism from 1933-34; in the 40's and thereafter, he referred to Nazism as a disease. He is remembered as an existentialist, not a Nazi, though he did join the party when he became the rector of Freiburg. I don't believe that either Hitler or Goebbels were familiar with Heidegger's philosophical work. The fact that Paul de Man, in his early years in Nazi-occupied Belgium, wrote antisemitic propaganda for a number of local collaborationist journals was not discovered until four years after his death (by Ortwin de Graef). The statement "Paul de Man of Yale University worked directly for the Nazis" is not true in the sense that most readers might think. He collaborated, left, and started a new life. He contributed absolutely nothing to Nazi philosophy, because he did not become a philosopher until years after the war -- probably as a way to cope with the horrors he saw, and the shame of his cowardly collaboration. I don't think anyone has suggested that de Man was a serious Nazi -- just a fucking wimp. Where are you getting this nonsense about Heidegger and de Man? I have no sympathy for their views, but any attempt to smear them as a bunch of Nazis is ludicrous. Give me a reference. This is sure to be amusing. By the way, I voted for Bush, and no matter how many times you contradict me, I know I don't support the government's actions at Ruby Ridge. Your foaming-mouth projections on people who disagree with you are laughable. James, I have a lot of respect for Tim and Bruce (anyone who thought I was calling Bruce a Nazi for holding a common libertarian fallacy must be oxygen-deprived), but you're really losing me here. -rich