[lbo-talk] Re: 14 characteristics of fascism

dredmond at efn.org dredmond at efn.org
Tue Jun 10 13:34:28 PDT 2003


Quoting Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org>:


> This catastrophe weighed as heavily on countries like Britain and France
> as it did on Germany, but they did not take the course Germany did. Why
> was this? Of course, they were among the victors, and Germany among the
> losers, but I think their greater experience with democratic traditions
> had something to do with it.

It's not so simple. Fascism wasn't a uniquely German phenomenon: there was Mussolini's Italy and imperial Japan -- semi-industrialized regions of the world-economy, who were far outclassed in the economic struggle with the Allies, and thus gambled on aggressive war. Adorno noted that Hitler's battlefield stupidity was a ruse of reason: only dim provincials could be stupid enough to think that mass terror could ever negate the Allies' quantitative superiority.

-- DRR



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