I THINK IT IS VERY IMPORTANT TO STUDY FASCIST THOUGHT SO ONE CAN PROTECT ONE'S SOCIETY--AND ONESELF--FROM IT!
A. James Gregor, The Fascist Persuasion on Radical Politics (Princeton Legacy Library) (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1974) ("The advent of the twentieth century marked a critical turning point in the development of Marxism. . . . Classical Marxism disintegrated under the impact of events, and out it its elements emerged the two revolutionary movements that were to shape, in large part, the political, social, and intellectual history of the twentieth century. The years between the two world wars were to be dominated by two radical movements: Leninism on the one hand and Fascism on the other. . . Both movements were irrepressibly elitist; both led minoritarian revolutions, and both consequently conceived violence essential to the acquisition of political power; both retained that power, once seized, by monopolizing all the effective control devices afforded by contemporary technology: arms, the educational and propaganda media, and mass organizations, The one-party state became the institutional manifestation of their revolutionary success, the 'exceptional leaders,' the Voshd, or the Duce, gave expression to special relations understood to obtain between leaders and followers." "That classical Marxism could devolve into such systems is a phenomenon of such complexity, and yet of such significance for our time, that some attempt should be made to outline briefly but as responsibly as possible at least part of the process. . . .What will be attempted will be the highlighting of features of that process, focusing on two special issues around which a constellation of related issues collected: 91) the problem of the non revolutionary proletariat, and (2) the problem of nationalism. If the following account is at all correct, these two concerns have remained and will remain the preoccupation of radical thought through tour the twentieth century." Id. at 86-87. "All of this suggests how irrelevant all of the theoretic substance of classical Marxism has, in fact, become. While such developmental dictatorships may continue to invoke Marxist language, it has become increasingly clear that Fascism's frank abandonment of the substance of classical Marxism anticipated its surreptitious suppression at the hands of 'revolutionary' Marxists. We are left with the distance impression that perhaps Marx was not, after all, the prophet of our time. Perhaps in a curious, but not totally incomprehensible sense, Mussolini was." Id. at 188. "The second half of the twentieth century has seen such mass-mobilizing movements sweep whole populations into the vortex of revolution. The invocation to revolution is made in a special language style. The vocabulary is frequently 'Marxist,' but the content is more symbolic than cognitive. . . . That any of this has anything whatever to do with classical Marxism is doubtful. The Marxism of Marx and Engels has endured such extensive and intensive 'creative development' that it has become the legitimating rationale for mass mobilizing, developmental dictatorships that share far more features with the paradigmatic Fascism of Mussolini than with any of the anticipations of Karl Marx or Friedrich Engels." Id. at 259. "The 'ideology' with which Castro made his revolution was not 'Marxist' of 'Marxist-Leninist.' It was Martian [Note: as in Jose Marti (1853-1895)], and as such shared more features with Fascism interns of strategy and content than it did with Marxism-Leninism." Id. at 283.).
Albrecht Koschorke, On Hitler's Mein Kampf: The Poetics of National Socialism (Untimely Meditations), translated from the German by Erik Butler (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: The MIT Press, 2017) (From the back cover: "Hitler's Mein Kampf was banned in Germany for almost seventy years, kept out of print by the accidental copyright holder, the Bavarian Ministry of Finance. In December 2015, the first German edition of Mein Kampf since 1946 appeared, with Hitler's text surrounded by scholarly commentary apparently meant to act as a kind of cordon sanitaire. And yet the dominant critical assessment (in Germany and elsewhere) of the most dangerous book of the twentieth century is that it is boring, unoriginal, jargon-laden, badly written, embarrassingly rabid and altogether ludicrous. (Even in the 1920s, the consensus was that the author of such a book had no future in politics.) How did the unreadable Mein Kampf manage to become so historically significant? In this book, German literary scholar Albrecht Koschorke attempts to explain the power of Hitler's book examining its narrative strategies." "Koschorke argues that Mein Kampf cannot be reduced to an ideological message directed to all readers. By examining the text and the signals that it sends, he shows that we can discover for whom Hitler strikes his propagandistic poses and for who he does not. Koschorke parses the borrowings from the right-wing press, the autobiographical details concocted to make political points, the attack on the Social Democrats that bleeds into an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, the contempt for science, and the conscious attempt to trigger outrage." "A close reading of National Socialism's definitive text, Koschorke concludes, can shed light on the dynamics of fanaticism. This lesson of Mein Kampf still needs to be learned." And, particularly so for Americans in this this time of dog-whistle politics.).
David Frum, "How to Build an Autocracy," The Atlantic, March 2017, Vol. 319, no. 2, at 48-59.
James M. Rhodes, The Hitler Movement: A Modern Millenarian Revolution (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1980) (From the book jacket: "Could other movements as powerful and as fanatical as the Hitler movement ever come to the fore again? "Of the many works that describe and explore Nazism, few if any follow the approach of the book: that Nazi self-interpretations should be taken seriously as starting points for the analysis of National Socialism; and that it is, indeed, possible for a millennial movement to be generated by any clarity, in any society. "The book inquires into the nature and causes of the Nazi movement from the standpoint of classical Greek and Christian political theory. One of its premises is that National Socialism was a secular apocalyptic movement, probably smilier to the religious apocalyptical uprising of the Middle Ages and perhaps akin to the millenarianism of the apostle John. "In cases like these, a distinct pattern of events and reactions can be discerned. First, some disaster occurs, Then, disaster syndromes develop among the most affected. Characteristic of these syndromes is confusion and a hysterical fear of annihilation. Revelations follow on the part of the victim: the troubles they face must be caused by devils incarnate who intend to destroy them. The only alternative is for these victims, the 'chosen one,' to unmask the devils and fight to attain there own early paradise.")
Graeme Wood, "His Kampf," The Atlantic, June 2017, Vol. 319, no. 5, at 40-52 (This is an article about the white supremacist Richard Spencer.).
