From: jamesd@echeque.com
Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 13:43:56 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: [NOISE] "Fascism is corporatism"
Message-ID: <199606100023.RAA25303@dns2.noc.best.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 12:44 AM 6/9/96 -0700, Rich Graves wrote:
[A whole bunch of totally irrelevant boring distractions, amongst them]:
> The Encyclopedia Brittanica says of Mussolini:
>
>  He read widely and voraciously, if not deeply, plunging into the
>  philosophers and theorists Immanuel Kant and Benedict de Spinoza, Peter
>  Kropotkin and Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Kautsky, and Georges
>  Sorel, picking out what appealed to him and discarding the rest, forming no
>  coherent political philosophy of his own

To argue that fascism has no philosophy without mentioning Maurice Barres is
nearly as silly as arguing that communism has no philosophy without mentioning
Marx.  If you delete all reference to Fascist philosophers, you will of course
come to the conclusion that fascism has no coherent philosophy.

Fascism got its epistemology from Barres, and its economic theory from Sorel.

Your argument is analogous to someone who argues that communism had no coherent 
philosophy by talking about Mao as if he had popped out of nowhere, and failing 
to mention Marx and Lenin.

In my opinion the most coherent fascist 
philosopher that preceded the fascist rise to power was Maurice Barres. 
(Of course once fascism was on the rise, you got a bunch more fascist 
philosophers, most of them way to the left of Barres.) This thread in 
philosophy has continued to the present day, though it was abruptly 
renamed after the defeat of Hitler.  Barres's arguments are logically 
and philosophically coherent, and are clearly and unambiguously 
recognizable as the epistemology, and much of the claptrap and rhetoric 
of fascism, and as the epistemology, and much of the claptrap and rhetoric 
of modern PC, and we can trace the philosophical thread connecting modern 
PC to Barres through known Nazi philosophers who not merely philosophized, 
but also participated actively in Hitler's regime, and to direct and 
immediate disciples of those philosophers, such as Derrida.

> > Many of my readers will think I am excessively harsh, calling Rich
> > Graves a liar rather than a fool, but I hear the above story 
> > (that fascism is not a coherent ideology or philosophy) primarily from
> > those whose interests this story serves, and if they genuinely 
> > thought this story was true, they would not know that it is in their
> > interests to push it.

> Huh? In English, please.

Perhaps I was elliptical in the above.  I will restate:

The claim that fascism lacks an economic program and/or a philosophy comes 
primarily from those whose economic program and/or philosophy bears a
marked resemblance to fascism.   If they were not aware of this resemblance
they would not so vigorously seek to redefine fascism as military dictatorship, 
racism, etc.

This leads me to doubt the basic human honesty of those who push this line,
and their concern for human lives.

> Anyway, I never suggested that there was no such thing as fascist
> philosophy; just that fascism was not rooted in a well-developed ECONOMIC
> ideology, 

Revisionism alert:  

I just deleted vast chunks of text from your message above 
where you presented negative evidence that fascism had no 
philosophy, and I was just thinking that maybe I had overdone it 
and would get flamed for deleting arguments rather than answering them.

> and that Tim's definition of corporatism is incorrect both in the
> abstract and in the cases of Italian fascism and Nazism.

Revisionism alert:

Tim gave a perfectly correct definition of corporatism, and you then
proceeded to give a very similar definition, and you then proceeded 
to smear Tim by falsely implying that he gave a silly ignorant 
definition, radically different to the one he did in fact give.

You also have carefully avoided mentioning Sorel, who of course advocated 
roughly the economic problem that Mussolini attempted to implement, that
Hitler did implement, and that Timothy May condemned, long before Mussolini
got of the ground.  Sure sounds like an economic ideology to me.

> > Not only do such concepts as feminist science, phallocentric science, 
> > etc, strongly resemble such concepts as aryan science, jewish science, 
> > etc, but they are justified using the same arguments from the same 
> > philosophers.  Indeed Heidegger was not only a philosopher of fascism, 
> > but he personally participated in Hitler's terror, terrorizing his academic
> > colleagues, and Paul De Man of Yale University worked directly for the 
> > Nazis as a propagandist in occupied Belgium.

> Here James demonstrates his absolute mastery of the subject.
>
> Heidegger only really supported Nazism from 1933-34; in the 40's and
> thereafter, he referred to Nazism as a disease. 

Yeah, right, And the only fifty thousand jews were murdered.  :-)

Historical Revisionism alert:  

The above is wildly implausible:  You do not call Nazism a disease 
in Nazi Germany and live to tell of it, let alone call Nazism a 
disease and get appointed to the important and well paid job of 
terrorizing your academic colleagues.

The above is also infamously false:  As rector, Heidegger denounced 
those of his colleagues he wished murdered as jews, including his 
own teacher, and he organized paramilitary camps for his students, 
spouting martial rhetoric about the "inner truth and greatness of 
National Socialism," see citation below.

> He is remembered as an
> existentialist, not a Nazi, 

Historical Revisionism alert:  

See http://www.inlink.com/~dhchase/heidig.htm for how he is REALLY 
remembered.

Heidegger himself claimed at the time, his political activities grew 
out of his philosophy, and this claim seems to me to be very obviously true.

Indeed what he claimed then is equivalent to what I have been telling you in
public and private email:  That your ideas lead to people being murdered by
the state, and therefore you should consider them more carefully.

> though he did join the party when he became the
> rector of Freiburg. 

Historical revisionism alert:

His most infamous work was his laudatory speech on Hitler given when 
he was appointed rector of Freiburg.  In addition he never disowned 
his works on the "jewish problem".  As rector he imposed Nazism on 
his colleagues by the usual means.

> The fact that Paul de Man, in his early years in Nazi-occupied Belgium,
> wrote antisemitic propaganda for a number of local collaborationist journals
> was not discovered until four years after his death (by Ortwin de Graef). 

The fact that Paul de Man's philosophy had a very strong resemblance to 
fascist philosophy was discovered considerably earlier.  The fact that he 
also wrote the kinds of racist propaganda that are no longer politically 
correct was merely the icing on the cake.

> By the way, I voted for Bush, and no matter how many times you contradict
> me, I know I don't support the government's actions at Ruby Ridge. 

Revisionism alert (or perhaps in this case merely a reinterpretation alert):

In previous mail you claimed it was not a government action, it was just
a few FBI guys running amuck entirely on their own initiative.
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