Comments on: Fascism, Fascism, Fascism

By: John Protevi

John Protevi — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 18:18:33 +0000

engels, I took your advice about googling "dan simon" and all I can say is that he's good, but he's no floyd alvis cooper.

By: harry b

harry b — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 15:12:10 +0000

engels, I just logged on to continue, but I bow, as I sometimes do and probably should more often, to your gentle chiding. Thanks.

By: engels

engels — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 13:24:58 +0000

Interesting points from both Geo and Harry. However, Dan Simon’s views on torture, detention without trial and war crimes, among other topics, have been given adequate prominence in these debates (and are easily discoverable via Google). I do not know whether he is a fascist, but is someone who does not deserve a civil response from reasonable people on the left or right.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 09:33:20 +0000

Communism adds the twist that they are to be achieved through violent revolution, led by a politically conscious vanguard that establishes a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in order to completely re-engineer society in the socialist mold.
…says Dan Simon who just a couple of years ago lamented about Amnesty International

…dickering about the treatment of a few hundred suspected terrorists captured during the overthrow of a brutal theocratic tyranny. How far they [Amnesty International] have fallen….

Note the unmistakenly revolutionary rhetoric: what’s a few hundred suspected terrorists (probably bad people anyway) compare to the glorious goal? Felix Dzerzhinsky couldn’t have said it better.

By: abb1

abb1 — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 08:48:35 +0000

Sergei Dovlatov, soviet dissident and a writer, immigrated to the US in the seventies, lived there for a few years and wrote: “next to communism the thing I hate most is anti-communism.”

And that’s a pretty common sentiment; Adam Michnik, for example, writes about “anti-Communism with a Bolshevik face”.

Well, I think he’s wrong, it’s not a “Bolshevik face”. The anti-communist fervor, the kind that my friend Dan exhibits here, is itself a notable characteristic of a fascist.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 06:29:07 +0000

I apologize Harry—when you referred to “the communists who composed a large proportion of the small number of whites to suport the civil rights movement” I assumed you were referring to the Communist Party members, Trotskyites, Maoists, and other proponents of capital-R-Revolution who made up the overwhelming majority of self-professed communists in America at the time. But since you have such a grossly distorted view of the representation of communists among whites in the civil rights movement, I should have guessed that you might also have a grossly distorted view of the number of self-professed American communists who were neither Stalinists nor Maoists nor Trotskyites nor members of any of the other anti-democratic factions, but were in fact social democrats who happened to find the word “communist” so much more mellifluous than “social democrat” that they stuck with the former label despite its ugly connotations.

I hope you’ll forgive my misstep—I think it’s a minor one, but since all the folks around here are always so incredibly meticulous about drawing the fine line between “conservative” and “fascist”, I should have been similarly careful about the line between, uh, “communist” and, well, you know, “communist”.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 05:50:02 +0000

I still don’t see, though, that there is any parallel with fascism. You still haven’t specified any noble fascist ideals that Hitler betrayed but Mussolini, Franco, or other non-Nazi fascists held to.

I’m afraid you’ll have to ask someone who thinks fascist ideals are noble in the first place. Neither do I know of any noble ideas Stalin betrayed that Mao, Castro, et al. held to, but apparently some communists believe they exist.

By: harry b

harry b — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 03:57:43 +0000

I think, geo, that Dan uses communism in the way that traditional anti-communists have always done, to refer to Leninism-as-practiced-by-Stalin, but to tar everyone else in from the second international on with the same brush. Even me, in fact, who despite clearly disassociating myself from Leninism-as-practiced-by-Stalin, and clearly identifying communists (like the eurocommunists) who did the same thing themselves, am beyond his pale. He is either startlingly unaware of the role of the Italian and Spanish eurocommunists, for example, in their respective countries (silly Spanish communists, trying to ensure that the transition from fascism would actually work to produce a stable liberal democracy) or he is just dishonest. Its hard to tell.

martin james—I’ll answer both your questions in good time, I promise, but not in this thread and not before Christmas!

By: geo

geo — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 02:56:41 +0000

Fair point, Dan, but we’re shading off here into terminological matters, I think. A significant minority of people who’ve called themselves communists (eg, Diggers and Levellers, Marx, Engels, William Morris, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, many anarchists, and (after a certain point) the French, Spanish, Italian, and Scandinavian Communist parties I mentioned earlier) were not Leninists or Bolsheviks, and in my opinion have a stronger claim to the term than the Soviet and Chinese communists, whom I would agree with Chomsky in calling “state capitalists.”(Actually, my favorite term is “pseudo-communists,” since their ideology has nothing in common with what was understood as communism before the Bolsheviks: ie, worker control, radical democracy, etc.) Before the Russian Revolution the distinction between socialism and communism was practically insignificant. This is why Orwell, Silone, Macdonald, and all the other people I’ve cited initially called themselves communists and, faced with the Bolshevik betrayal, abandoned the word and simply called themselves socialists. But they continued to hold to the ideals that the word “communism” named before Lenin. Anyway, I do agree with you that liberals and leftists should clearly dissociate themselves with Leninism.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 00:08:35 +0000

many honorable people affirm communist ideals (equality, worker control, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” etc) while repudiating Stalinist and Maoist practice, while few if any honorable people affirm fascist ideals while claiming to have been betrayed by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco etc.

We need a bit more precision here. The goals you specify are socialist goals. Communism adds the twist that they are to be achieved through violent revolution, led by a politically conscious vanguard that establishes a “dictatorship of the proletariat” in order to completely re-engineer society in the socialist mold. If you believe in establishing a socialist economy through purely democratic processes, then you’re a democratic socialist, and I have no more quarrel with you than I do with anyone else whose political goals I consider silly (and there are an awful lot of those all over the spectrum, I can assure you).

Now, there are communists who believe (or at least make a show of believing) that Stalin betrayed communism, but embrace Mao’s, or Castro’s, or Enver Hoxta’s, or their own as-yet-powerless party’s, revolution and dictatorship wholeheartedly. There are also fascists who repudiate (or at least make a show of repudiating) Hitler’s fascism, but embrace Mussolini’s, or Franco’s, or their own as-yet-powerless party’s, iron fascist rule wholeheartedly. Note, though, that most of the latter use various euphemisms for fascism—usually some combination of “people’s”, “national”, and the name of their home country or ethnicity—fascism itself having been so discredited. The former, on the other hand, are typically quite comfortable using communist, or perhaps Marxist-Leninist, or Trotskyite, to describe themselves, knowing that at least left-of-center people will retain respect for them. One wonders what more the world’s communist regimes have to do before the left finally recognizes that they’re not just “socialists in a hurry”.

By: abb1

abb1 — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:29:51 +0000

No, not everyone; communists and classical liberals are typically against national unity and all that stuff. Or, at least, it’s a very low priority for them. For the fascists it’s the highest priority. At the very extreme end, yes, it’ll manifest itself in all those bad things you mentioned, but so is the drive to equality – when they start killing people who wear glasses and speak foreign languages or whose parents owned a farm. Or the drive to ‘liberty’, when they kill people (foreigners, usually) who don’t accept their idea of property rights. The ideals themselves are not bad, they are ordinary enlightenment concepts: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

By: geo

geo — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:22:32 +0000

abb1: Fascist ideals are: unity, greatness and prosperity of the nation.

Isn’t that a bit too general? After all, pretty much everyone is in favor of unity, greatness and prosperity. Isn’t the point of fascism that these things are to be attained through racial and cultural homogeneity, political and ideological conformity, sexual subordination, and military assertiveness?

By: John Protevi

John Protevi — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:11:37 +0000

I’d say the problem with Dan Simon is that he’s an essentialist. People and parties are for him homogeneous unities with lists of properties that allow them to be slotted into neat categories. Look at the language in 155: “clear and unequivocal,” “critical distinction,” etc. But the world works as a series of concrete multiplicities: a person or a party is a site of clashing forces; the role of the historian is to describe the quality and relative strength of those forces and identify the tendency the system is heading in. In other words, there were by most historian’s accounts social democrats within western CPs, something his essentialism leads him wrongly to deny. But the real problem, as Uncle Kvetch points out above, is that Dan disregards the current context: are there forces within the current Administration (cough, Cheyney, Addington, cough) who are taking the county in a direction that leads to increasing concentrations of corporate / state (meaning executive) power? Just because they call it “national security” (and leave out the corporate stuff entirely) doesn’t mean we shouldn’t investigate the convergence between their petro-securitarian stance and that of historical fascism. But Dan isn’t interested in that: thrashing libs for insufficient commie-bashing is much more important in his mind.

By: abb1

abb1 — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:34:09 +0000

Well, Dan Simon thinks I’m an ass too, so there you go.

By: engels

engels — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 12:11:39 +0000

No, abb1, I just think you are an ass, and very ignorant about the nature of fascism.