Kelley wrote:
>i'm objecting to the constant
>conjunction of fascism with racism. it is quite conceivable that fascism
>can exist without racism. indeed, it has existed without founding itself
>on genocidal, violent racism. all political regimes associated with the
>modern nation-state are ab initio founded on racism, in any event.
let's take a step back: if, as you say, nazism began as the erasure of peoples defined as antithetical or disruptive of the nation and its 'pure' reproduction/reassertion (began in a sense as a eugenics directed against those deemed as abnormal), then isn't this racism? didn't fascism consist of the slogan of 'work, family, nation', and hence the depiction of citizenship and the purpose of work (sacrifice, duty, etc) within a biologised, of at least ethnicised, version of the national family? but in another sense, weren't fascism and nazism marked by the fantasy of a harmonious nation where antagonism was relegated to the outside in the figure of the Jew (esp as the Jewish banker and as the influence of cosmopolitanism), the communist (marked as irredeemably foreign, modernist, etc), the disabled (as degenerative of the national family and its ability - duty - to work), the gypsies (as a-national), gays (as likewise degenerate, cosmopolitan and a-familial), and so forth...? isn't this racism? how is all this possible without racism? i.e.., it would seem to me that whilst it's not a commonplace to think of communists, gays, the disabled, and more recently, Jews, as a race, isn't this beside the point? weren't these people grouped together and targeted because of a definition of 'the German race' and an attempt to apply that concept to the real?
Chaz wrote:
>The unique character of fascistic racism is the degree of terrorism and
genocidalism
I've heard this before, but I don't really understand it. I've no doubt that fascism is violent, indeed Mussolini was very big on violence as building national character as I recall from somewhere. but how is it possible, desirable even, to think of fascism as more violent than other forms of racism?
Angela --- rcollins at netlink.com.au