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Thomas Hurt
Thomas Hurt's Journal
Thomas Hurt's Journal
July 24, 2018
Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco (1995)
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Impoverished vocabulary....like witch hunt, open borders, fake news, etc.
Ur-Fascism, the characteristics of Eternal Fascism...No. 13-14
13. Ur-Fascism is based upon a selective populism, a qualitative populism, one might say. In a democracy, the citizens have individual rights, but the citizens in their entirety have a political impact only from a quantitative point of viewone follows the decisions of the majority. For Ur-Fascism, however, individuals as individuals have no rights, and the People is conceived as a quality, a monolithic entity expressing the Common Will. Since no large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Leader pretends to be their interpreter. Having lost their power of delegation, citizens do not act; they are only called on to play the role of the People. Thus the People is only a theatrical fiction. To have a good instance of qualitative populism we no longer need the Piazza Venezia in Rome or the Nuremberg Stadium. There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.
Because of its qualitative populism Ur-Fascism must be against rotten parliamentary governments. One of the first sentences uttered by Mussolini in the Italian parliament was I could have transformed this deaf and gloomy place into a bivouac for my maniplesmaniples being a subdivision of the traditional Roman legion. As a matter of fact, he immediately found better housing for his maniples, but a little later he liquidated the parliament. Wherever a politician casts doubt on the legitimacy of a parliament because it no longer represents the Voice of the People, we can smell Ur-Fascism.
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. Newspeak was invented by Orwell, in 1984, as the official language of Ingsoc, English Socialism. But elements of Ur-Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning. But we must be ready to identify other kinds of Newspeak, even if they take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show.
Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco (1995)
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
Impoverished vocabulary....like witch hunt, open borders, fake news, etc.
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Member since: Wed Mar 8, 2017, 01:59 PMNumber of posts: 13,903