/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.12266306]

Who are some actual, persuasive fascist philosophers, political scientists, and novelists? What books capture the essence and cause of fascism? Don't give me embarrassing "jews did everything i hate niggers"-tier stuff, give me the utmost Fascist tour-de-force for a complete non-believer.

[Anonymous No.12266315]

>>12266306
listen to his speeches

[Anonymous No.12266988]

I'm not through with reading it yet, but Giovanni Gentile's The Origins and Doctrine of Fascism.

[Anonymous No.12267003]

>>12266306
You're missing the point entirely.
Fascism's real power is that it appeals to the primitive and the primal. Any appeal to reason is more or less unnecessary given a real talent for this sort of appeal.
Why do you think Nazi rallies were so powerful? And even the most ardent anti-Nazis will admit that. Just see Triumph of the Will and see if you don't feel the raw power of Hitler's speeches in a way that no other public speaker has ever really managed, not even Martin Luther King's famous speech really matches it.
Why you won't find much fascist intellectual writings compared to other ideologies is because it was born after the days of ideologies being born out of educated men's debates about such and such a problem and grew more organically out of the ground in Italy and Germany, and then spread to Romania and Hungary and so on. So there's no real strict doctrine, first of all.
But the general idea of it is that it is at heart rejuvenation, and central to it is the idea of rebirth. Hence the emphasis on youth in Nazi propaganda, and the emphasis on war and the eternal struggle in both Nazi and Italian propaganda.
What this attracts is the people who are no longer a part of democratic society. They are disillusioned, often lonely (not an insult, merely fact), and society has in some way failed them. Hence they are beyond the reach of debate. They no longer seek reason which has failed them or betrayed them when in the silver tongues of politicians.
This is why fascism is somewhat unique in ideologies in that it cannot be fought with debate, because most of its supporters no longer want debate. They want the entire system to be burned to the ground and reborn, metaphorically speaking.

[Anonymous No.12267009]

For fascist novelists check out Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Drieu is interesting as someone who came to fascism from the left while D'Annuncio captures the fascist aesthetic like no other.

[Anonymous No.12267032]

>>12267003
You can also observe this in Hitler's speeches. He mastered the art of telling a small kind of myth with this rejuvenation (often called palingenesis) in his speeches.
If you don't mind youtube flagging you, go and listen to how he talks. He starts off with a sombre tone, quite often, and he'll build this sense of urgency or danger or doom and he'll end his speech by uplifting the people with some kind of hope or inspiration, and the crowd goes absolutely fucking nuts for him.
Often he doesn't even dictate to them directly what to do (neither did he in such events as kristallnacht, for example) but inspired such rabid emotion first, that they would fill in the gaps themselves so to speak.
The basic idea behind this in fascism is that the whole identity of the mass movement is absorbed into one single great leader (almost necessarily a man) who in turn gives his identity to the people. This is not unique to fascism though, and is more generally the principle of totalitarianism (see Stalin, for this appearing outside the context of fascism).
But mobs are notoriously not creatures of reason but are governed almost solely by the most primitive forms of emotion. So you see these incredible displays of power and inspiration and very little discussions of public policy.
And this isn't a criticism, because why would they? If you're in a fascist movement or are a supporter, it's almost certainly because the system before it has failed you and you feel it cannot be fixed from within. Again, you're past the point of debate with politicians, you're at the point where you want to storm the parliament in Rome, and not to tell them that their tax policy sucks.
Essentially you want to think of fascism not as a reasoned thing (again, not a criticism, and it's an incredibly powerful tool in politics to rely on emotion and use it in the way fascism does) but as a way of seeing politics altogether.
Think of other politics as procedural whereas fascism takes politics as just an extension of emotion or even a kind of proto-spirituality. A sophisticated understanding just isn't necessary because it operates on a much more fundamental level than that.

[Anonymous No.12267048]

>>12267032
>Think of other politics as procedural whereas fascism takes politics as just an extension of emotion or even a kind of proto-spirituality
Sorry, I wanted to cram as much in as I could but the result isn't very clear, I think
By procedural I mean the idea that politics is purely a formalism and need only refer to economic activities and management miscellanea whereas fascism is in the category of politics where one sees politics as an expression of something inherently meaningful (but note also that it lacks the scholarship of theocracy or the long experiential development of certain kinds of monarchy, etc.)
I hope the rest isn't too incomprehensible or misleading due to lack of space to explain.

[marcu No.12267050]

>>12267003
>>12267032

I don't even know if this shit is true, but I enjoyed reading this. Thank you.

[marcu No.12267052]

>>12267009

D'Annunzio was a Proto-Fascist Corporatist, I would think.

[Anonymous No.12267061]

The philosophical background is mainly Hegel, Nietzsche and Sorel. It’s fundamentally about a aesthetic rather than moral perspective on life.

[Anonymous No.12267063]

>>12267003
>>12267032
WTF I love fascism now!

[Anonymous No.12267082]

>>12267050
Mostly from various writers on the topic I liked
Paxton and Arendt are the two who really understand fascism. Aside from probably Goebbels, who no longer takes questions on the topic.
Don't bother reading Mussolini. It's short but it's still a waste of time, mostly. He barely understood his own ideology (he admits as much, he just needed to throw some stuff together to say they were a coherent 'thing' after they'd already obtained quite some success) and Hitler embodied fascism so much better than him or anyone else it's not really worth using him as a significant case study.
Part of this is also that Mussolini never obtained such a density of support to maintain totalitarianism and it slipped into only authoritarianism after he took power. Whereas Hitler was most certainly an embodiment of totalitarianism. So was Stalin, but in a non-fascist way, really.
If you want to read what real fascists wrote I suppose I'd recommend Codreanu first. But I actually think watching it happen in Triumph of the Will or listening to and really thinking, and feeling how Hitler speaks is the best way to get an intuitive feel for it. Because fascism really is more of a when you're in a real fascist rally, "you'll know it when you see it" kind of thing.
You'll also notice that Trump fits almost none of the criteria listed for being a real fascist, despite accusations of it.

[Anonymous No.12267090]

[Anonymous No.12267095]

>>12267063
I'm not out to promote it lol, I'm just giving an honest answer that OP is looking at it the wrong way. Not the right tool for the job.
Just got bored when I struggled to find work a few years back and spent hours in the library trying to educate myself on things I didn't know about before, and one of them was politics.

[Anonymous No.12267109]

>>12266306
Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga

[Anonymous No.12267474]

>>12267082
> Arendt understood fascism

Too bad she deliberately ignored the fact that Heidegger was no different than Eichmann. Really makes you think about how much she understood fascism.

[Anonymous No.12267525]

>>12267474
>these two disparate things are the same
cringe

[Anonymous No.12267542]

>>12267082
This, Mussolini's dream was an imperial italian hegemony of N. Africa and the Levant along with the balkans and greece. it was revanchism, and as such needs no evola-esque spiritual backing.

The pseuds in this thread looking at fascism as a flexible ideology are retarded. "fascism" takes on very different forms depending on different places and beliefs. Mussolini undermined the church whereas the Franco, Salazar states required the church for legitimacy, and the last two had totally different long terms goals, like salazars african empire vs franco's conservative non-intervention. Arendt at least demonstrates that traditional conservative fascism basically just replaces the national elite with another set of actors, whereas the Nazi totalist state was an extranational actor.

[Anonymous No.12267546]

>>12267542
*inflexible ideology

[Anonymous No.12267578]

>>12267009
>Pierre Drieu la Rochelle

Has his work on the French fashy been translated to English yet? Last I checked it hasn't. I really wanted to read it, I've heard it's the "for whom the bell tolls" of facism.

[Anonymous No.12267596]

>>12266306
>>12266315
Mosley is really good for building an understanding of Fascism, for a beginner I'd recommend reading Fascism: 100 questions asked and answered and The Coming Corporate State to understand Fascist economics

[Anonymous No.12267601]

>>12267525
Read up about Heidegger's relation with the NDSAP, what he did as a professor and tell me he's any different than the banal bureacrat Eichmann. And then Arendt goes on to defend Heidegger.

Arendt is a hack.

[Anonymous No.12267609]

>>12267601
EIchmann literally kept the trains going when Himmler told him to stop. Heidegger got a guy fired, who then went to the camps. And neither of this has anything to do with Arendt's formulation of the totalist and fascist states.

[Anonymous No.12267614]

>>12267003
>>12267032
someone read emilio gentile i see

[Anonymous No.12267634]

>>12267609
Heidegger did a lot more than just that.