Thank you. I will suggest one more thing: study the Spanish Civil War. It's the ignored run-up to everything Hitler did. Franco was smart enough to USE both Mussolini and Hitler to carry out a war on his own people. Franco was the first human being to BOMB his own people. He was allied with the landed gentry in the South and heavily backed by the off-the-map Spanish Catholic Church, which ran all education in the heavily illiterate country. Hemingway told Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner's (see "Genius" the 2017 film which is great) that he had to be there--and he was there--along with John Dos Passos, George Orwell (who went to write about it and went to war less than six weeks later he was so shocked by what was happening to the peasantry) and the brilliant Martha Gellhorn. Part of 1984 comes from Orwell's experiences there. The Spanish Civil War was INQUISITIONAL in terms of what the Francoists and the Falangists did to people. But it's forgotten. Great books on this: Catalonia (Orwell), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), The Spanish Holocaust (Paul Preston), and the Guillermo del Toro films Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone. Del Toro's films show in full terror the hypermasculine "Cult of the Male body" that was promulgated by Francoist and Third Reich fascism. More later. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for sharing. The notion that tools of fascism aligns with evangelical morality continues to boggle my mind. How do many on the religious right defend their biblical virtues yet defend fictitious bigotry and hate? Hasn’t history taught us that spreading messages of hate and vengeance always leads to more chaos and destruction? It is rooted in a feeling of ordainment that some mortals deserve ultimate power and control
A couple of things ... First, Christianity in the United States shifted from being focused on New Testament teachings (hence the name Christianity rather than Judaism) with the rise of Evangelical Christianity, which is based more on draconian passages of the Old Testament) in the last century. ... Also--and coming tomorrow with the posting of Fascism Part II--fascism ALWAYS BUT ALWAYS is tied to religion. In Nazi Germany, 80% of Nazis were members of the Lutheran Church, and the Hitler Youth met in Lutheran churches during most of the war. Around 1943, the Lutherans started getting cold feet, so Hitler invented the Reich's church. The Catholics, roughly 20% of Germans, were also involved, with the Vatican capitulating to Mussolini early on and later storing the art Nazis stole from the Jews. Hitler's Catholic mother's grave was a SHRINE during the Third Reich. Only the Methodists really rebelled, but they were only 3% of the population. They are the only religion ever to have apologized. If you look back through religious history, particularly Islam and Christianity, you find a grave tendency towards brutal enforcement of their religious beliefs on others. The Founding Fathers had to fight this in almost every one of the 13 Colonies. Meanwhile, this got a lot worse after 9/11. It's almost as if the Christians in America looked at what Bin Laden et al. were getting away with--the execution of gays, the chatteling and enslavemnt of women, the religious supremacy enforced by brutal repression and thought, "Hey, if they can get away with that, so can we." Religions have gone seriously fascist all of their own accord -- witness the Hindutvu in India right now -- and have had a greed for having their own religious states and religious worlds, the ummah and the Body of Christ, for millennia. For those of us who grew up in kind, beautiful Christian churches, history is deeply important. The "natural order of things", a philosophy that gave God's imprimatur to slavery, was preached by every denomination in the South for 400 years. So the desire to control within religion has had deadly affect. And another element (again, coming tomorrow) is a virtual "cult of the male body" of the kind we find in Nazism, Italian fascism, and Spanish fascism in the 20th century. Combining that with the racism and anti-Semitism you find in all European fascism, including the vicious Romanian version, you get white patriarchy, supremacism, and nationalism shot through with religious justification. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Your mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters are losing their rights, and anyone not heterosexual along with them. But eventually, everyone who doesn't agree will lose theirs, too. Anyone who speaks out has a target painted all over them. And greed--the elevation of one's own rights to impoverish and take the wealth of all others--has been a part of organized religion since day one. Early in Islam, there was actually a chance a society might really be good, but it went the way of all the others. Only polytheist religions (Buddhism comes to mind) have partially broken this pattern, but again, the Hindutvu running India at the moment are a vicious group and utterly patriarchal. You'd think these people never read the Bhagavad Gita. Like you'd think the Evangelicals never read the New Testament about the prophet whose mantle they were supposed to have taken up and whose name they have now destroyed.
Thank you, I had never heard about this book (The Protocols). I will also check out Le Bon; I have experienced crowds that turned irrational, as if there was "nobody home" any more, and how they can be steered this way or that way. Risking to sound like a broken record because I've mentioned it so often: I was born in Germany in 1946. HOW people could fall for all this irrational horror has been important all my life. The PEOPLE who follow -- they're the ones who enable facism and Nazi ideology. They're today's MAGA crowd. They like authority, have strong religious beliefs, prefer tradition to change, and don't like to think much. I find this rather disturbing, because it's so ordinary, so banal. Nothing special.
I remember reading something very interesting and unique about “The Protocols..” booklet in one of my books. Now I have to track it down to reread it again. I’ll share it with you once I find it.
Hey there ... Here's a wee clip from my dissertation, which was on Guillermo del Toro's Spanish Civil War films, and I ran into the Protocols and their impact when I was studying the rise of the Radical Right in Europe as a precursor of that Paul Preston called "The Spanish Holocaust" -- which I deeply encourage you to read if you have an interest in fascism. Here's a wee clip from my interminable dissertation: the entire Radical Right philosophical edifice was erected on a foundation of long extant, psychologically and socially endemic anti-Semitism radically worsened by the publication of a lethal work of fiction. Paul Preston, writing in The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, describes the emergence of the book:
The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin … by the dissemination … of one of the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russian in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.
The Protocols was a modernized re-visioning on a virulent older mythology. A belief in “an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages.” In the nineteenth-century run-up to the fascist conflicts of the twentieth century, “the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging to their interests. In this paranoid fantasy … it was alleged that, using Freemasons as their willing intermediaries, the Jews controlled the economy, politics, the press, literature and the entertainment world through which they propagated immorality and the brutalization of the masses.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion poured gasoline on an already flaming bonfire of shifted blame, shadow projection, and scapegoating in the Western world. As scholar Hasia Diner relates to PBS, American automotive magnate Henry Ford published half a million copies of The Protocols, distributing them free at his car dealerships and to subscribers of the newspaper he owned. He continued to support The Protocols until 1927 —six years after London Times correspondent Philip Grave had published a definitive proof that The Protocols was based on fiction, not fact. In Europe, Hitler used The Protocols as an historical textbook with no reference to its fictional origin and applauded Henry Ford, with whom the Third Reich had business connections. In 1938 Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum comments:
During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion played an important part in the Nazis’ propaganda arsenal. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1939. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, some schools used the Protocols to indoctrinate students.”
Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, author of Night, makes profound note of the influence of this most virulent of publications. “If ever a piece of writing could produce mass hatred,” Wiesel wrote, “it is this one.”
With these pan-European influences now in place—reactions against the Russian Revolution and the unraveling masculine control of women, the elitist attitudes in France and England, the rising Nazism in Germany and militant fascism in Italy, the anti-Semitism and racism and anti-socialism in general—the stage was set for fascism’s fiery subjugation of Europe. On this proscenium, Francisco Franco staged his coup.
P.S. The Protocols were first written by a French priest as FICTION. But it was fiction that fell into the most fertile of soils: the rampant and virulent anti-Seminitism extant on the continent for 1,900 years. It stoked also the pograms in Russia which led to Theodore Herzl's fateful plan.
Now I have to go back again and figure out what it was that I was looking to find originally. I am curious to know more about the French Priest who penned the fiction and his circumstances.
To conflate so many vastly different ideologies—Herder’s Romanticism, Maistre’s Catholic royalism, Social Darwinism, Le Bon’s mass psychology, the KKK, Mussolini’s fascism—I find this very confusing and misleading. None of those movements have much in common, except for a shared opposition to Western liberalism. None of them have much to do with Trump, either. As a distinctly American nationalist, Trump is much more similar to Teddy Roosevelt and George Patton than he is to Hitler or Mussolini.
In any case, very thought-provoking and interesting article. Thank you for sharing.
Hey ... I did not mention Herder's Romanticism, the KKK, or Maistre's Catholic royalism. I think you might have hooked this article up with others in the recent past, and if you can tell me who's talking about THESE connections, I'd love to know. As for LeBon, Western liberalism, etc., please read Kevin Passmore's *Fascism: a Very Short Introduction" in which he THOROUGHLY discusses these issues and then move on to Helen Graham's "The Spanish Civil War: a Very Short Introduction" where you'll get a much from gruesome and graphic image of how fascism REALLY goes down. And everything fascism has to do with Trump. Trump has, as you say, some really distinctive American qualities (!), but he also has a lot in common with every other DARK TETRAD PSYCHO (article on this soon). I can see his reflections of George Patton--and Franco--but Teddy Roosevelt did his damnedest to shut down exactly the kind of people Trump is--and Teddy seems more to me like Ernest Hemingway: all gung-ho hypermasculine, though Hemingway spent his last years really examining his masculinity while trying not to drown in genetic depression. To Hemingway's credit, he LOVED strong, intelligent women. Not exactly your average male supremacist. Thank you for writing. Let's hope we can hang on to democracy. The forces against it right now are formidable indeed, and it's going to take every clear mind we can find. Thank you for adding your clear mind to this discussion. I appreciate it.
Thank you. I will suggest one more thing: study the Spanish Civil War. It's the ignored run-up to everything Hitler did. Franco was smart enough to USE both Mussolini and Hitler to carry out a war on his own people. Franco was the first human being to BOMB his own people. He was allied with the landed gentry in the South and heavily backed by the off-the-map Spanish Catholic Church, which ran all education in the heavily illiterate country. Hemingway told Max Perkins, his editor at Scribner's (see "Genius" the 2017 film which is great) that he had to be there--and he was there--along with John Dos Passos, George Orwell (who went to write about it and went to war less than six weeks later he was so shocked by what was happening to the peasantry) and the brilliant Martha Gellhorn. Part of 1984 comes from Orwell's experiences there. The Spanish Civil War was INQUISITIONAL in terms of what the Francoists and the Falangists did to people. But it's forgotten. Great books on this: Catalonia (Orwell), For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway), The Spanish Holocaust (Paul Preston), and the Guillermo del Toro films Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone. Del Toro's films show in full terror the hypermasculine "Cult of the Male body" that was promulgated by Francoist and Third Reich fascism. More later. Thanks for being here.
Thank you for sharing. The notion that tools of fascism aligns with evangelical morality continues to boggle my mind. How do many on the religious right defend their biblical virtues yet defend fictitious bigotry and hate? Hasn’t history taught us that spreading messages of hate and vengeance always leads to more chaos and destruction? It is rooted in a feeling of ordainment that some mortals deserve ultimate power and control
A couple of things ... First, Christianity in the United States shifted from being focused on New Testament teachings (hence the name Christianity rather than Judaism) with the rise of Evangelical Christianity, which is based more on draconian passages of the Old Testament) in the last century. ... Also--and coming tomorrow with the posting of Fascism Part II--fascism ALWAYS BUT ALWAYS is tied to religion. In Nazi Germany, 80% of Nazis were members of the Lutheran Church, and the Hitler Youth met in Lutheran churches during most of the war. Around 1943, the Lutherans started getting cold feet, so Hitler invented the Reich's church. The Catholics, roughly 20% of Germans, were also involved, with the Vatican capitulating to Mussolini early on and later storing the art Nazis stole from the Jews. Hitler's Catholic mother's grave was a SHRINE during the Third Reich. Only the Methodists really rebelled, but they were only 3% of the population. They are the only religion ever to have apologized. If you look back through religious history, particularly Islam and Christianity, you find a grave tendency towards brutal enforcement of their religious beliefs on others. The Founding Fathers had to fight this in almost every one of the 13 Colonies. Meanwhile, this got a lot worse after 9/11. It's almost as if the Christians in America looked at what Bin Laden et al. were getting away with--the execution of gays, the chatteling and enslavemnt of women, the religious supremacy enforced by brutal repression and thought, "Hey, if they can get away with that, so can we." Religions have gone seriously fascist all of their own accord -- witness the Hindutvu in India right now -- and have had a greed for having their own religious states and religious worlds, the ummah and the Body of Christ, for millennia. For those of us who grew up in kind, beautiful Christian churches, history is deeply important. The "natural order of things", a philosophy that gave God's imprimatur to slavery, was preached by every denomination in the South for 400 years. So the desire to control within religion has had deadly affect. And another element (again, coming tomorrow) is a virtual "cult of the male body" of the kind we find in Nazism, Italian fascism, and Spanish fascism in the 20th century. Combining that with the racism and anti-Semitism you find in all European fascism, including the vicious Romanian version, you get white patriarchy, supremacism, and nationalism shot through with religious justification. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Your mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters are losing their rights, and anyone not heterosexual along with them. But eventually, everyone who doesn't agree will lose theirs, too. Anyone who speaks out has a target painted all over them. And greed--the elevation of one's own rights to impoverish and take the wealth of all others--has been a part of organized religion since day one. Early in Islam, there was actually a chance a society might really be good, but it went the way of all the others. Only polytheist religions (Buddhism comes to mind) have partially broken this pattern, but again, the Hindutvu running India at the moment are a vicious group and utterly patriarchal. You'd think these people never read the Bhagavad Gita. Like you'd think the Evangelicals never read the New Testament about the prophet whose mantle they were supposed to have taken up and whose name they have now destroyed.
Thank you, I had never heard about this book (The Protocols). I will also check out Le Bon; I have experienced crowds that turned irrational, as if there was "nobody home" any more, and how they can be steered this way or that way. Risking to sound like a broken record because I've mentioned it so often: I was born in Germany in 1946. HOW people could fall for all this irrational horror has been important all my life. The PEOPLE who follow -- they're the ones who enable facism and Nazi ideology. They're today's MAGA crowd. They like authority, have strong religious beliefs, prefer tradition to change, and don't like to think much. I find this rather disturbing, because it's so ordinary, so banal. Nothing special.
I remember reading something very interesting and unique about “The Protocols..” booklet in one of my books. Now I have to track it down to reread it again. I’ll share it with you once I find it.
Hey there ... Here's a wee clip from my dissertation, which was on Guillermo del Toro's Spanish Civil War films, and I ran into the Protocols and their impact when I was studying the rise of the Radical Right in Europe as a precursor of that Paul Preston called "The Spanish Holocaust" -- which I deeply encourage you to read if you have an interest in fascism. Here's a wee clip from my interminable dissertation: the entire Radical Right philosophical edifice was erected on a foundation of long extant, psychologically and socially endemic anti-Semitism radically worsened by the publication of a lethal work of fiction. Paul Preston, writing in The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, describes the emergence of the book:
The idea of an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy the Christian world was given a modern spin … by the dissemination … of one of the most influential works of anti-Semitism, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published in Russian in 1903 and based on German and French novels of the 1860s, this fantastical concoction purveyed the idea that a secret Jewish government, the Elders of Zion, was plotting the destruction of Christianity and Jewish world domination.
The Protocols was a modernized re-visioning on a virulent older mythology. A belief in “an evil Jewish conspiracy to destroy Christianity had emerged in the early Middle Ages.” In the nineteenth-century run-up to the fascist conflicts of the twentieth century, “the Spanish extreme right resurrected it to discredit the liberals whom they viewed as responsible for social changes that were damaging to their interests. In this paranoid fantasy … it was alleged that, using Freemasons as their willing intermediaries, the Jews controlled the economy, politics, the press, literature and the entertainment world through which they propagated immorality and the brutalization of the masses.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion poured gasoline on an already flaming bonfire of shifted blame, shadow projection, and scapegoating in the Western world. As scholar Hasia Diner relates to PBS, American automotive magnate Henry Ford published half a million copies of The Protocols, distributing them free at his car dealerships and to subscribers of the newspaper he owned. He continued to support The Protocols until 1927 —six years after London Times correspondent Philip Grave had published a definitive proof that The Protocols was based on fiction, not fact. In Europe, Hitler used The Protocols as an historical textbook with no reference to its fictional origin and applauded Henry Ford, with whom the Third Reich had business connections. In 1938 Hitler awarded Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle.
The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum comments:
During the 1920s and 1930s, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion played an important part in the Nazis’ propaganda arsenal. The Nazi party published at least 23 editions of the Protocols between 1919 and 1939. Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, some schools used the Protocols to indoctrinate students.”
Nobel Prize-winning writer Elie Wiesel, author of Night, makes profound note of the influence of this most virulent of publications. “If ever a piece of writing could produce mass hatred,” Wiesel wrote, “it is this one.”
With these pan-European influences now in place—reactions against the Russian Revolution and the unraveling masculine control of women, the elitist attitudes in France and England, the rising Nazism in Germany and militant fascism in Italy, the anti-Semitism and racism and anti-socialism in general—the stage was set for fascism’s fiery subjugation of Europe. On this proscenium, Francisco Franco staged his coup.
P.S. The Protocols were first written by a French priest as FICTION. But it was fiction that fell into the most fertile of soils: the rampant and virulent anti-Seminitism extant on the continent for 1,900 years. It stoked also the pograms in Russia which led to Theodore Herzl's fateful plan.
Now I have to go back again and figure out what it was that I was looking to find originally. I am curious to know more about the French Priest who penned the fiction and his circumstances.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Jouin ... I wonder if this man's soul has any idea how many Jews his dirty little fantasy killed.
Excellent read
I commented on a post a few days ago and said that the former president had Fascist Tendencies
That did not to well
To conflate so many vastly different ideologies—Herder’s Romanticism, Maistre’s Catholic royalism, Social Darwinism, Le Bon’s mass psychology, the KKK, Mussolini’s fascism—I find this very confusing and misleading. None of those movements have much in common, except for a shared opposition to Western liberalism. None of them have much to do with Trump, either. As a distinctly American nationalist, Trump is much more similar to Teddy Roosevelt and George Patton than he is to Hitler or Mussolini.
In any case, very thought-provoking and interesting article. Thank you for sharing.
Hey ... I did not mention Herder's Romanticism, the KKK, or Maistre's Catholic royalism. I think you might have hooked this article up with others in the recent past, and if you can tell me who's talking about THESE connections, I'd love to know. As for LeBon, Western liberalism, etc., please read Kevin Passmore's *Fascism: a Very Short Introduction" in which he THOROUGHLY discusses these issues and then move on to Helen Graham's "The Spanish Civil War: a Very Short Introduction" where you'll get a much from gruesome and graphic image of how fascism REALLY goes down. And everything fascism has to do with Trump. Trump has, as you say, some really distinctive American qualities (!), but he also has a lot in common with every other DARK TETRAD PSYCHO (article on this soon). I can see his reflections of George Patton--and Franco--but Teddy Roosevelt did his damnedest to shut down exactly the kind of people Trump is--and Teddy seems more to me like Ernest Hemingway: all gung-ho hypermasculine, though Hemingway spent his last years really examining his masculinity while trying not to drown in genetic depression. To Hemingway's credit, he LOVED strong, intelligent women. Not exactly your average male supremacist. Thank you for writing. Let's hope we can hang on to democracy. The forces against it right now are formidable indeed, and it's going to take every clear mind we can find. Thank you for adding your clear mind to this discussion. I appreciate it.
I will definitely check out Passmore's work. Thanks for your feedback, I enjoy your content.
P.S. The article on Trump as Dark Tetrad, it was published yesterday!