How Many Of These Are Familiar?

[RANT]

I sometime watch YouTube video by Beau of the Fifth Column and in his video he mentioned Umberto Eco. I searched Google and found this article.

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism
Open Culture
November 22, 2016


One of the key questions facing both journalists and loyal oppositions these days is how do we stay honest as euphemisms and trivializations take over the discourse? Can we use words like “fascism,” for example, with fidelity to the meaning of that word in world history? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expression fascist pig, writes Umberto Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism,” “used by American radicals thirty years later to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smoking habits.” In the forties, on the other hand, the fight against fascism was a “moral duty for every good American.” (And every good Englishman and French partisan, he might have added.)

Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fascist regime, which “was certainly a dictatorship, but it was not totally totalitarian, not because of its mildness but rather because of the philosophical weakness of its ideology. Contrary to common opinion, fascism in Italy had no special philosophy.” It did, however, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be.” The dark humor of the comment indicates a critical consensus about fascism. As a form of extreme nationalism, it ultimately takes on the contours of whatever national culture produces it.

He said that there were warning signs to fascism in 1995 and the article listed an abridged list of them…

1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The obsession with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
8. The enemy is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9. Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”

Now ask yourself how many of these warning signs do we see in the today’s Republican party? Let me count the ways.

• The cult of tradition: Trying to bring back bans on LGBTQ people, and trying to bring back abortions to the 1950s
• The rejection of modernism: Vaccines are bad!
• Disagreement is treason: Trump, need I say more? RINOs.
• Fear of difference: Anti-LGBTQ, Blacks, and immigrants.
• Appeal to social frustration: Critical Race Theory, anti-trans laws, and the attacks on LGBTQ books in the library.
• The obsession with a plot: Election fraud.
• The enemy is both strong and weak: The attacks on non-Christian religions and the so called attack on Christmas.
• Everybody is educated to become a hero: Trumpism they are the “True” defenders of the Constitution as they try to stop Congress from doing their duty.
• Machismo and weaponry: Look at the people who stormed the Capitol dressed out in their para-military grab and showing up at rallies armed to the teeth.
• Selective populism: The Cult of Trump.
• Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak: “Let's go, Brandon,” CRT, Woke, and the list of their jargon goes on and on.

And remember he wrote this in 1995 not in 2016 or 2021.

The Republican party is on its way to becoming fascist party and their goal is a one party system like Russia or China. 

[/RANT]