Also, I don't just mean they are reactionary in certain area or in their personal life (Like Aristotle was important for biology despite being an apologies for slavery)?

I mean worth looking into their thinking precisely in areas where they're reactionary.

Possible suggestions (not saying they're justified) that I expect people would put forward include:

  • Carl Scmitt
  • Heidegger
  • StalinForTime [comrade/them]
    hexagon
    ·
    2 years ago

    Mishima's a really fantastic example because, as you say, he's got an actually very developed, sophisticated cultural background that he's working out of (despite people on here often getting on the Japan-hate bandwagon, which is politically correct but often culturally ignorant and quite chauvinistic), and he's a genuinely fantastic writer. He's also so weird as a fascist in terms of his contradictory personal life, beliefs and aesthetic tastes that I agree that it's difficult for me not to be morbidly fascinated in him at a minimum. Unlike the alt-right edgelords and cultureless USAmerican conservatives however, Mishima has actual culture and actually explores his disturbing topics in ways that are philosophically interesting.

    The sad thing is that apparently his writing's poetic nature is so tied to Japanese that it's extremely difficult to convey what it's like to read him in the original.

    I reconvinced myself of this by reading another book by him a few months, ago. I can't recall the title in English but the Italian one is 'Il sapore della gloria' (The Taste of Glory'; CW for extreme animal cruelty).

    Like you note, a great example of fascist reaction against neoliberal capitalism under a military dictatorship.

    Also: I wouldn't say that USAmericans have no culture, although alot of yank comrades like to get masochistic about it and claim so. It's just that most of the great US culture is not white (music first comes to mind, like Blues, Gospel, Jazz, Soul, Funk, Disco, House, Techno, Hip Hop..., but literature and painting too, like the Harlem Renaissance).