[lbo-talk] More Rightwing proto-fascism

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Fri Feb 25 07:58:11 PST 2011


I'm not sure you pay much attention to how what you write might read by others before you click Send...

What I am talking about is that the majority of the list to which you posted your polemic are "European and American whites" and you referred to how "we" had to

abandon the ethnocentric view of fascist victimization and stop

erroneously believing that fascism is something unique and

unprecedented and accept the fact it is something quite common in

history, there will be nothing imprecise in calling US right wingers

fascists. before you informed us that

They are fascist in their hearts, they just happen to

operate within the constraints of a liberal state which

limits what they can do to their political enemies.

If we were supposed to read this as directed at folks other than us, it would have been helpful if you'd made that clear... At the same time, however, since it still appears that you haven't gone back to read what was discussed a year ago, a good deal of effort and a good number of reputable sources of efforts to define fascism - sources which didn't agree - were posted. You treat fascism as if it is were quite common in history. Do you mean, by history, millennia? many centuries? a century and a half? Do you mean, within that history, to also suggest that the commonality was geographically widespread? Everything I have ever read about fascism has argued that it is a feature of modernity, and usually capitalist modernity but, like in the other thread, you're point focuses on hearts and minds and homogenizes - by refusing to carefully differentiate between varieties of right wingers - all right wingers into the fascist camp. Surely you've seen Charles Ragin's work on comparative methods where he advocates extensive case studies compared and contrasted on a range of diverse variables en route to a complex process of elimination seeking to ascertaining whether apparently common cases are substantially similar? In this light, I have absolutely no sense of what specific characteristics of fascism that differentiate it from anything else right wing and violent in your mind. We actually sought to determine at least some of the valences of a reasonable discussion on this issue last year which is why it might could make sense to stop shouting.

On Fri, Feb 25, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:


> WTF are you talking about? I did not say anything about members of this
> list. I made a statement about general Western perceptions of European
> (German) fascism vis a vis atrocities against non-white people, which I
> believe is true. What does this have to do with what you or others on this
> list said six months ago?
>
> Wojtek



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