I know fascists do this, but doesn't everyone kind of? If you don't think your enemy has strengths then they're not worth being your enemy and if you don't think they have weaknesses then opposing them is pointless.

edit: I guess one difference is fascists pick enemies that genuinely are powerless, but that doesn't really seem to line up with the original claim

  • Dimmer06 [he/him,comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Okay so a couple of things:

    1. I brought up Umberto Eco because my mind immediately jumped to him but the specific question you first asked about how an enemy can be weak and strong at the same time was specifically put forward by an American political scientist in an article called Fascism Anyone? which was calling the Bush regime fascist. This was probably derivative of Eco's essay Ur-Fascism which is why I got them mixed up, though the critique largely remains true.

    2. You're correct about material analysis but nowhere in either piece does either author describe class struggle (maybe with the small exception in Eco's sixth point but otherwise it is absent) or the crisis of capitalism. For instance, lets look at Eco's second point

    Traditionalism implies the rejection of modernism. Both Fascists and Nazis worshiped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon Blood and Earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life, but it mainly concerned the rejection of the Spirit of 1789 (and of 1776, of course). The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.

    Now to be fair to Eco, his whole idea is that fascism coalesces around these ideas and is not necessarily defined by or limited to them, but in this instance he specifically ascribes rejection of modernity to the arise of political liberalism in the American and French revolutions and calls rejection of capitalist relations a "disguise". Now what seems more likely? That the Nazis wanted to return to the political relations of the 18th century, or that they recognized urban industrial capitalism sucks and wanted to go back to their romanticized version of the past as peasant farmers?

    As you point out in your post, anyone with enemies will consider them simultaneously weak and strong. Doomed to failure, but they'll succeed if we don't act. Idealists like Eco say that plainly contradictory stances like this are what people (or fascists specifically) look for in political movements, materialists say that this is a product of the experiences those people have and how they've come to understand the world.