August 12 - On this day we remember Heather Heyer, murdered by a fascist in Charlottesville at age 32, while she was putting herself on the line demonstrating against the neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally.
the california ideology is an interesting lil essay. it suggests sv culture was the product of hippies and yuppies working together. i clipped some of my favorite parts.
'both visions at the same time-- not criticizing either'
idk about this part but it reminds me of the early days of 'ai' social media hysteria where some people's first response was to find a slur to call robots
One thing I'm grateful for about Twitter is the way it opens my eyes to how ethnic supremacists are the same no matter their nationality. They all use the same rhetoric about the group they decide to hate. I'm humbled that my thesis that nationalism is the biggest scam on earth is proven true.
They wrap their weaknesses in flags and call it love for their country, but it's just greed dressed up as loyalty. The moment you scratch the surface, every supremacist no matter ethnicity sings from the same hymnbook: 'We are the Chosen people, they are less.'
I'm grateful to Twitter for making this so visible that the scam can no longer hide.
Reproduction and rebirth, fascism claims, do not really require women, not in any active role. With notable exceptions (e.g., Sandra in The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire), the emblematic protagonist in fascist fiction is a man or a band of men, a Männerbund. If the male protagonist has a family, a wife, mother, daughter, they are typically killed already in the introduction. By being killed, an act that does not require her saying much, the main role of the female character is over, except as a motif for revenge or metaphorical representation of the defiled nation. Her death sets the plot in motion, and the protagonist free to focus on his main mission, the violent destruction of the murderers and what they represent (blackness, Jewishness, Muslimness, or any other otherness and uncleanliness).
In Warrior Dreams, James Gibson’s seminal study on violence and manhood in post-Vietnam popular culture of the early 1990’s, the warrior hero in American film is a man set apart. As in fascist noir, the hero’s family, if there is one, his wife or children, are typically killed (Mad Max, Lethal Weapon) or nearly killed (Patriot Games). The hero acts alone, with a partner or with a tribe of male warriors. If he belongs to an organization, he will not abide by their regulations but creates his own rules of engagement to serve a Higher Justice (Dirty Harry; Death Wish). He always fights for righteous American values but is typically frustrated or betrayed by representatives of the System (Rambo III; Clear and Present Danger; Black Berets). Substitute American values with white nationalist values and the System with politically correct multiculturalism, and the similarities to fascist fiction are obvious. Fascist fiction is not necessarily that different from mainstream popular culture, as evidenced by the fact that Braveheart arguably was the most popular movie in [the] White Power United States in the late 1990s.
Mattias Gardell, “‘The Girl Who Was Chased by Fire’: Violence and Passion in Contemporary Swedish Fascist Fiction” (2021)
fascism is a revolutionary nationalist ideology that is 1) national socialist (in a generic sense, not specifically nazi; fusing organic nationalism w/ a nonmaterialist social radicalism), 2) popular elitist (per eco, fusing mass mobilization w/ 'natural hierarchy/aristocracy'), 3) archeofuturist (aka 'rooted modernist' – enthusiastic for the future but anchored in the past, or a myth of it), and 4) both vitalist and voluntarist (stressing spontaneity, freedom, individual will) and militaristic and authoritarian (stressing duty, submission, self-sacrifice).
this array of syntheses or paradoxes is inspired by roger eatwell's multidimensional definition of fascism and my best attempt at improving on stanley payne's definition which is imo otherwise the gold standard.
1) maybe the aspect of fascist ideology most visibly emphasized by fascists themselves, in formulations like 'national socialist', 'national syndicalist', 'national bolshevik', 'national popular', 'national collectivist', and so on.
iirc it was georges valois (french fascist, founder and leader of the party faisceau) that proposed the equation "nationalism + socialism = fascism", which historian of ideas ze'ev sternhell adopted for his definition of fascism as a synthesis of integral nationalism and non-marxist socialism through a common rebellion against liberalism. this is especially appealing because national socialism is the thread most clearly linking fascism to its direct political and intellectual precursors—movements like austrian and czech national socialism, the french antisemitic and boulangiste movements, the social content in pan-germanism, and 'christian social' clergy like adolf stoecker and karl lueger—which advocated a rudimentary form of the same recipe to win workers away from the left in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
what you notice studying fascism is that this wasn't a one-time deal—fascism continually replenishes and reinvents itself by fusing with (or pilfering from) the left in new ways, and each era and each left gets its own fascism—the 'european new right' mirroring the new left of '68; the original russian nazbols adopting a '90s anarchic punk style as well as nostalgia for the ussr; 'national-anarchists' drawing on, well, anarchism; and 'autonomous nationalists' mirroring antifa and dressing in bloc
actual fascist economic policy ranges widely from the state socialism of the polish falanga, hungarian arrow cross, or russian national bolsheviks to the free-market enthusiasm of american neo-nazi george lincoln rockwell or early 1920s italian fascism, with most movements hovering somewhere in between around the goal of a state-managed mixed economy. what's interesting, though, is that even at their most economically liberal, fascists unlike conservatives still feel compelled to frame themselves as in some sense anti-capitalist—GLW called his system 'free enterprise' but specifically not capitalism, for instance.
2) popular elitism is probably the element least discussed by fascists themselves and i'm not aware of a native term for it. the closest might be the mexican national synarchist union contrasting communist 'proletarianization' with their intention to 'bourgeoisify' mexican society through land redistribution.
the paragraph in "ur-fascism" remains pretty much definitive, although scholars both liberal (e.g., michael geyer's model of the third reich as based on competition over the right to dominate and exploit at all levels of society) and marxist (e.g., j. sakai's observation that nazism "de-proletarianized aryan society" by shifting working-class men into police and managerial work) have attempted to sketch out what it means in concrete socio-economic terms to make the people into an elite.
i've also used the homebrew concept (which i'm sure has been identified under another name elsewhere) of stratified uniformity to describe the paradox of a society where everyone is 'the same' (obsessively racially and/or culturally homogeneous) and yet unequal (implying differentiation).
one related concept that fascists do identify with is 'meritocracy'—the idea that, while liberal capitalist meritocracy is a scam by which unworthy people have amassed undue wealth and power, a fascist society will reshuffle the social order so that the true natural elite can rise to the top and everyone else can be sorted accordingly, free of privilege and favoritism (lmao): an 'earned' hierarchy, of function rather than status, where everyone is 'equally' valued for fulfilling their role in an un-equal system (still gotta read hitler's social revolution by david schoenbaum which rhymes w/ this).
3) 'archeofuturism' is french new rightist and B-list neofascist intellectual guillaume faye's term; 'rooted modernism' is political theorist and historian of ideas roger griffin's, borrowed from architecture and design.
fascism is not primarily a nostalgic or conservative ideology—unlike conservatives who admire and may want to literally resurrect the institutions and values of the recent past, fascists isolate out and abstract some past era or regime (often multiple, like the first and second german reichs) into a national 'essence' or 'soul', existing outside of time and space but manifesting throughout history as periodic resurgences of national glory which might look rather different in practice.
when we call fascism 'palingenetic' (griffin's term, but also protofascist thomas carlyle's; from the greek for 'rebirth'), it refers not to a return or restoration of some specific thing in the past, even accounting for mythologization and pseudohistory—it means a bottom-up remaking of life in an aggressively forward-looking spirit, animated and inspired by the 'eternal' national essence reflected in previous periods of strength and prosperity.
for kahanists, this is the 'authentic jewish idea'; for nazis, it's the aryan race-soul; for italian fascism, it's the roman ethos and the ideal of empire; for Traditionalists (capital t) it's appropriately called the Tradition (but refers, again, to a timeless principle existing outside of history); in tosaka jun's analysis, this lifting-out-of-history is the operation performed by japanese ultra-nationalists on the bushidō code; and there's a movement that calls it simply 'the Idea' but i can't for the life of me remember which. you get it.
4) people are readily familiar with fascism's militarism, rigid hierarchy, social conservatism, and crushing of individual conscience, and in fairness that is the dimension which is most obvious and most destructive in the behavior of fascism-in-power, but fascism is also experienced by some as a movement of rebellion and nonconformity, with special appeal to avant-garde artists, intellectuals, and youth and students—university students would actually seem to be the most consistent (not to say the largest or necessarily most important) demographic presence in interwar fascist movements.
here i always think about british fascist leader oswald mosley's own version of valois' equation from earlier—that fascism is, in short, the reconciliation of christianity and nietzsche. by 'christianity' he meant service and self-sacrifice, and by 'nietzsche' he meant the desire to break the mold and explore new horizons. the nazis, infamously, thought nietzsche's project of secular transcendence and the production of a new type of human being could be mapped onto their goal of eugenically reengineering germany and europe. italian fascism was marked culturally by an obsession w/ daring and adventure and achieving new heights—literally in the case of its fascination w/ aviation.
vitalism (the idea that there is an animating 'life force' existing behind(?)/above(?) the material world, and more broadly the pursuit of a richer or more holistic way of living) and voluntarism (here meaning the belief in the radical potential of human willpower to transform the world) are two nodes in a cluster of secular nonmaterialist philosophical traditions that make up fascist philosophy and culture, alongside a martial or religious focus on obedience and discipline. the former have been embraced and elaborated most fully by fascist intelligentsia like french writer robert brasillach or italian artist f.t. marinetti to construct a dissident and even individualistic cultural fascism, dissatisfied with the repressive conformism of the real thing (but usually willing to collaborate with it anyway).
fascism is a revolutionary nationalist ideology that is 1) national socialist (in a generic sense, not specifically nazi; fusing organic nationalism w/ a nonmaterialist social radicalism), 2) popular elitist (per eco, fusing mass mobilization w/ 'natural hierarchy/aristocracy'), 3) archeofuturist (aka 'rooted modernist' – enthusiastic for the future but anchored in the past, or a myth of it), and 4) both vitalist and voluntarist (stressing spontaneity, freedom, individual will) and militaristic and authoritarian (stressing duty, submission, self-sacrifice).
Also hey Cubano- and Islamo-Bolshevists: is the meeting still on? I know we agreed to meet tonight at midnight in the profane grove to sacrifice a goyische white baby we’ve written ‘FREE ENTERPRISE’ on in Sharpie, but work is riding my ass and I’ll be a little late :( pleeeeease save some canapés for meeeee
ICE killed another person in maine today, just days after the murder of lorenzo salgado araujo in houston
the maine immigrants rights coalition has released a statement confirming he was a 26 year old columbian man who was authorized to work in the US and had a valid social security number
will update this post with a gofundme link if/when one becomes available
his name was joan sebastian guerrero. his 3 yr old daughter was in the backseat of the car in her bluey pajamas. after he was shot, witnesses saw ICE agents pull him from the car and cuff him as he died
If you can’t donate to the gofundme for any reason, you may also consider supporting Presente, which supports Latin American and Afro-Latin people in Maine: https://www.presentemaine.org/
Presente! Maine
Or the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project (ILAP): https://ilapmaine.org/
My copy of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers proudly declares it "the controversial classic of military adventure." Military there is plenty, adventure not so much, but of course the real eye grabber is the controversy, which has mired the novel since its release. Is the futuristic sci-fi society Heinlein depicts fascist? Director Paul Verhoeven, who experienced the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands as a child, sure thought so when he adapted the book into a 1997 film; openly condemnatory of the novel in interviews, he framed shots to mimic Leni Riefenstahl and dressed Neil Patrick Harris in Gestapo uniform to make his point clear.
Verhoeven's film is itself one of the most fascinating Hollywood blockbusters ever made thanks to the satirical gloss it places on the source material, but I intend here to instead focus on the novel itself. I also don't intend to answer whether Starship Troopers is fascist, or libertarian, or some other offshoot (racially integrated fascism, maybe). Instead, I have one really pressing question:
Does the military in Heinlein's military society actually function at all?
Heinlein served in the military—during peacetime. Specifically, he served in the US Navy from 1929 to 1934, when he was discharged for health reasons. Prior to serving, he attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis starting in 1925. Taken altogether, this term of service is dominated by the process of training to become a soldier, and this experience is reflected in Starship Troopers by almost exactly half of the book being dedicated to boot camp rather than actual combat. In fact, there are precious few combat scenes in this tale of supposed "military adventure," limited to:
A routine raid at the beginning of the novel where the hero spends most of his time lobbing bombs at civilian infrastructure
A brief and confused depiction of "Operation Bughouse," an attempt by the humans to invade and capture the Bug home planet that immediately goes off the rails and ends in disaster
A detailed depiction of "Operation Royalty," in which the hero establishes a perimeter without resistance, manages troop reconnaissance, and finally goes to fight some Bugs in their tunnels only for a piece of debris to fall and knock him unconscious (the mission is over when he wakes up)
It's a strange absence of military action in a novel otherwise so committed to detailing the realistic minutiae of day-to-day military life, though a reasonable omission for an author who never saw any action himself.
However, Heinlein's personal understanding of the military from an entirely peacetime lens—studying, drilling, training—skews his ability to understand what a military actually does.
This confusion is most obvious in the depiction of the main branch of the military described in the story, the Mobile Infantry (MI for short). The MI are simultaneously framed as disposable grunts used mainly as cannon fodder and highly trained elites who perform special missions with unparalleled finesse. On the one hand, they fight in power armor, which protagonist Johnny Rico describes as intuitively easy to use, compensating for all deficiencies in strength and speed with "negative feedback," requiring only a few days of training at most to get the hang of (and that training mostly dedicated to using its radio circuits effectively), while able to pack firepower as devastating as portable atomic bombs. In Operation Bughouse, the MI is deployed en masse for (attempted) shock and awe tactics; while their mass annihilation is seen as tragic, it's also par for the course throughout the rest of the story. The low survival rate of MI troopers is constantly mentioned, any named character has a good chance of offhandedly dying in a paragraph summary at any given time, and even officers (who always go out onto the field with their men) are said to "buy it" in droves—one line mentions that officers die at a higher rate than privates, because they are always the first to make their orbital drops onto a planet.
On the other hand, despite this disposability, the MI is extremely choosy about who it lets in. Rico's boot camp starts with 2,000 hopefuls and ends with under 200; everyone else is simply sent home, deemed not good enough to be in the military at all. And this in a military branch that exclusively fights in power armor, which removes the physical limitations of elite combat. The training to become an officer is even more demanding, despite the fact that officers drop like flies and Rico claims there are never enough officers to enable a squad to operate at optimal efficiency. All of this is on top of the fact that even making it to boot camp is a struggle; the military actively uses its most mangled recruiters to dissuade as many people as possible from signing up, and once they do sign up the recruiter is liable to flunk them from joining any branch except as a guinea pig for weapons testing. This is a military that only wants the best of the best, the physical and intellectual elite, which it proceeds to train for years just so they can die a few minutes into their first Normandy Beach-like drop.
And while fighting an existential threat that is truly built on disposable fodder. As Rico explains: "Every time we killed a thousand bugs at the cost of one MI it was a net victory for the Bugs." This comparison is fundamentally illogical; if the military wants to kill Bugs, the Navy can nuke a planet from orbit and eradicate all life on it. The logistics of killing shouldn't be a factor for the MI, whose military successes as depicted in the story are performing state-sponsored terrorism (blowing up that civilian infrastructure during the raid is used as an alternative to glassing the planet because the goal is to terrorize them into defecting from the Bugs) and capturing a live specimen of a Brain Bug so the military can understand it better. Why does it matter how many Bugs are killed per MI, then? Why are the MI used like fodder when planet glassing exists?
Of course, everything in Starship Troopers is filtered through the perspective of its protagonist, Johnny Rico. And Rico is confused. He is confused about how he conceptualizes himself as a soldier. Sometimes he describes himself as a "foot slogger," sometimes as a "scalpel." Of course, Rico doesn't know anything, understand anything. He doesn't know why he's fighting. Is it to earn the right to vote in this society where only veterans can vote? He thinks so at first, then later decides he doesn't actually care about voting. Despite all his Moral Philosophy lecturers telling him that the current government is "scientifically moral" because it is founded on its members achieving self-sacrificing devotion to the highest possible cause (humanity as a whole), Rico seems to have no real interest in humanity and refers to civilians back on Earth dismissively the few times he does refer to them. His devotion is only to his unit. When he learns his mother died, "smeared" when the Bugs hit Buenos Aires, it screws him up a little. His lieutenant asks him if he wants some time off; Rico says no, preferring to "wait until the outfit all took R&R together." He continues:
I'm glad I did it that way, because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been along when the Lieutenant bought it . . . and that would have been just too much to be borne.
He's able to bear not being there for his mother's death. The implication is that his lieutenant, his squad, is more important.
This flies in the face of the lectures on morality littered throughout the story. In the same lecture about achieving self-sacrifice for the sake of humanity, the instructor Dubois discusses the "juvenile delinquents" of the 20th century. Street gangs, he means. Dubois claims these delinquents were morally undeveloped because they had loyalty only to the unit of their gang, rather than to society, the nation, the world... yet isn't Rico himself only really loyal to his "gang," his military unit? Is this "scientifically moral" society not simply sublimating the exact "immoral" impulses of the street gang into its own disposable tools?
That contradiction points to the real reason why Heinlein's military is so nonsensical. Despite officers being hard to come by, despite the MI being chronically understaffed, officers drop first -- to boost the morale of the troops who jump after them. It's the romantic notion of the general who leads from the front, which flies in the face of even basic military strategy (it's bad, actually, when the chain of command gets disrupted and your best men die first), but which feels virtuous, which hearkens to heroic ballads of soldiers past (ballads Heinlein loves and quotes liberally throughout the story). Hence too the confusion about what the MI even is: it is whatever it needs to be to feel pride about itself at any given time, whether that be via expression of elite soldiering, when the MI is doing elite tasks with finesse, or the beautiful expression of noble sacrifice, when the MI is mowed down as fodder.
(As an aside: Despite how highly Heinlein esteems sacrificing one's life for one's country, he manages to mention as one of the positives of his ideal society that taxes are low. Sacrificing one's money for one's country, I suppose, is a bridge too far.)
Heinlein's vision of the military is one seen by a man in perpetual training, never in combat. A man who served safely between the two greatest wars humanity ever fought, who got to watch both wars from the sidelines. A military that can always be the ideal it wishes it was, righteous and noble, and never has to butt up against the reality of what it becomes when its true function is inevitably brought to bear.
Verhoeven's adaptation does not really critique fascism. There is no explicit commentary on Heinlein's society within the film, only implicit commentary via the visual connection to the Nazis. Verhoeven assumes the audience already considers fascism loathsome, and doesn't bother explaining why that is. In doing so, Verhoeven's adaptation becomes much more concerned with critiquing propaganda; the way an ideology can be implanted in someone, transforming them into a willing soldier for a cause. In doing so, Verhoeven much more directly strikes at the heart of what Starship Troopers the novel is really obsessed with. Is Heinlein's proposed society good, or even functional? Like all proposed societies, Heinlein claims it will be both good and functional because it will be run exclusively by good people (military veterans). At its base level, it's merely another shade of the theoretical "benevolent dictatorship," only Heinlein is convinced veterans must necessarily be benevolent. (As with all these proposed benevolent dictatorships, nobody ever stops to ask whether the benevolent dictator is competent too.) Heinlein has wholly bought into the narrative of the military, and prioritizes that narrative over the reality of how the military functions. Starship Troopers is, for all its dry logistical minutiae, simply a story where the man Heinlein wishes he was stands on top.
Before Starship Troopers, I read a novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, an author who was actually a fascist, or at least a Nazi collaborator in occupied France. This novel, the semi-autobiographical Journey to the End of the Night, details Céline's experience in World War I, a war Heinlein only ever understood from a distance. Céline recounts being caught up in a sudden rush of patriotic fervor to enlist, only to realize in the trenches the utter horror of war, the depravity and the insanity of it, and to immediately do anything in his power to escape it. Despite this, he was wounded—wounded heroically even—and received the medaille militaire, an award that would later save him from serious prosecution after his much less patriotic activities during WWII.
Céline looked upon the medal as a joke, the war a joke, all of it a joke. He would despise war thereafter, he would despise governments, he would despise all authority. In his cynical writings he skews anarchist, if not merely nihilist. Yet he wound up carrying water for the Nazis, producing propaganda for them that even the Nazis at times found too extreme to print. Why? The reason is simple.
Céline really, really, really hated Jews.
These two novels by two supposed fascists could not be more dissimilar. Celine and Heinlein would despise each other, are in many regards utterly ideologically opposed. I suppose you can discover in this contradiction the mercurial nature of fascism, which seems to be any kind of radical right-wingism at any time. Heinlein reveals that his protagonist Johnny Rico is Filipino on almost the final page of the book, as though it's a twist, similar to the twist Verhoeven pulls when NPH marches into frame in full Gestapo regalia during the film's climax. Aha, Verhoeven seems to say, it was fascist all along—and you didn't realize! Aha, Heinlein seems to say, it wasn't fascist (or at least racist) all along—and you didn't realize!
In the end, though, Heinlein was an author of speculative fiction. He existed only in theory, only in the mind, only in the space of narrative. For him, the military—war itself—was a narrative. Céline and Verhoeven lived through war, and for better or worse that experience informed their art. Heinlein could write about war the way he did only because war meant nothing to him.
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