Download or read book French Literary Fascism written by David Carroll and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to provide a sustained critical analysis of the literary-aesthetic dimension of French fascism--the peculiarly French form of what Walter Benjamin called the fascist "aestheticizing of politics." Focusing first on three important extremist nationalist writers at the turn of the century and then on five of the most visible fascist intellectuals in France in the 1930s, David Carroll shows how both traditional and modern concepts of art figure in the elaboration of fascist ideology--and in the presentation of fascism as an art of the political. Carroll is concerned with the internal relations of fascism and literature--how literary fascists conceived of politics as a technique for fashioning a unified people and transforming the disparate elements of society into an organic, totalized work of art. He explores the logic of such aestheticizing, as well as the assumptions about art, literature, and culture at the basis of both the aesthetics and politics of French literary fascists. His book reveals how not only classical humanism but also modern aesthetics that defend the autonomy and integrity of literature became models for xenophobic forms of nationalism and extreme "cultural" forms of anti-Semitism. A cogent analysis of the ideological function of literature and culture in fascism, this work helps us see the ramifications of thinking of literature or art as the truth or essence of politics.

Download or read book Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway written by Dean Krouk and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2017-09-19 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascism and Modernist Literature in Norway illuminates the connections between literature and politics in interwar Europe. Focusing on the works of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Knut Hamsun and modernist poets Asmund Sveen and Rolf Jacobsen, all of whom collaborated with the Nazi regime during the occupation of Norway in World War II, and those of the anti-fascist novelist and critic Sigurd Hoel, Dean Krouk reveals key aspects of the modernist literary imagination in Norway. In their writings, Hamsun, Sveen, and Jacobsen expressed their discontent with twentieth-century European modernity, which they perceived as overly rationalized or nihilistic. Krouk explains how fascism offered these writers a seductive utopian vision that intersected with the countercultural and avant-garde aspects of their literary works, while Hoel’s critical analysis of Nazism extended to a questioning of all patriarchal forms of authority. Krouk’s readings of their works serve as a timely reminder to us all of the dangers of fascism.

Download or read book Azadi written by Arundhati Roy and published by Haymarket Books. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chant of "Azadi!"—Urdu for "Freedom!"—is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation. Ironically, it also became the chant of millions on the streets of India against the project of Hindu Nationalism. Even as Arundhati Roy began to ask what lay between these two calls for Freedom—a chasm or a bridge?—the streets fell silent. Not only in India, but all over the world. The coronavirus brought with it another, more terrible understanding of Azadi, making a nonsense of international borders, incarcerating whole populations, and bringing the modern world to a halt like nothing else ever could. In this series of electrifying essays, Arundhati Roy challenges us to reflect on the meaning of freedom in a world of growing authoritarianism. The essays include meditations on language, public as well as private, and on the role of fiction and alternative imaginations in these disturbing times. The pandemic, she says, is a portal between one world and another. For all the illness and devastation it has left in its wake, it is an invitation to the human race, an opportunity, to imagine another world.

Download or read book Fascism written by Walter Laqueur and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-12-11 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mussolini's march on Rome; Hitler's speeches before waves of goose-stepping storm troopers; the horrors of the Holocaust; burning crosses and neo-Nazi skinhead hooligans. Few words are as evocative, and even fewer ideologies as pernicious, as fascism. And yet, the world continues to witness the success of political parties in countries such as Italy, France, Austria, Russia, and elsewhere resembling in various ways historical fascism. Why, despite its past, are people still attracted to fascism? Will it ever again be a major political force in the world? Where in the world is it most likely to erupt next? In Fascism: Past, Present, and Future, renowned historian Walter Laqueur illuminates the fascist phenomenon, from the emergence of Hitler and Mussolini, to Vladimir Zhirinovsky and his cohorts, to fascism's not so distant future. Laqueur describes how fascism's early achievements--the rise of Germany and Italy as leading powers in Europe, a reputation for being concerned about the fate of common people, the creation of more leisure for workers--won many converts. But what successes early fascist parties can claim, Laqueur points out, are certainly overwhelmed by its disasters: Hitler may have built the Autobahnen, but he also launched the war that destroyed them. Nevertheless, despite the Axis defeat, fascism was not forgotten: Laqueur tellingly uncovers contemporary adaptations of fascist tactics and strategies in the French ultra-nationalist Le Pen, the rise of skinheads and right-wing extremism, and Holocaust denial. He shows how single issues--such as immigrants and, more remarkably, the environment--have proven fruitful rallying points for neo-fascist protest movements. But he also reveals that European fascism has failed to attract broad and sustained support. Indeed, while skinhead bands like the "Klansman" and magazines such as "Zyklon B" grab headlines, fascism bereft of military force and war is at most fascism on the defense, promising to save Europe from an invasion of foreigners without offering a concrete future. Laqueur warns, however, that an increase in "clerical" fascism--such as the confluence of fascism and radical, Islamic fundamentalism--may come to dominate in parts of the Middle East and North Africa. The reason has little to do with religion: "Underneath the 'Holy Rage' is frustration and old-fashioned class struggle." Fascism was always a movement of protest and discontent, and there is in the contemporary world a great reservoir of protest. Among the likely candidates, Laqueur singles out certain parts of Eastern Europe and the Third World. In carefully plotting fascism's past, present, and future, Walter Laqueur offers a riveting, if sometimes disturbing, account of one of the twentieth century's most baneful political ideas, in a book that is both a masterly survey of the roots, the ideas, and the practices of fascism and an assessment of its prospects in the contemporary world.

Download or read book Fascist Interactions written by David D. Roberts and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-05 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although studies of fascism have constituted one of the most fertile areas of historical inquiry in recent decades, more and more scholars have called for a new agenda with more research beyond Italy and Germany, less preoccupation with definition and classification, and more sustained focus on the relationships among different fascist formations before 1945. Starting from a critical assessment of these imperatives, this rigorous volume charts a historiographical path that transcends rigid distinctions while still developing meaningful criteria of differentiation. Even as we take fascism seriously as a political phenomenon, such an approach allows us to better understand its distinctive contradictions and historical variations.

Download or read book The New Faces of Fascism written by Enzo Traverso and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-01-29 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is fascism in the twenty first century? What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of violence, dictatorships, and genocide. These images spontaneously surface in the face of the rise of radical right, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia and terrorism, the last of which is often depicted as a form of "Islamic fascism." Beyond some superficial analogies, however, all these contemporary tendencies reveal many differences from historical fascism, probably greater than their affinities. Paradoxically, the fear of terrorism nourishes the populist and racist rights, with Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the US claiming to be the most effective ramparts against "Jihadist fascism". But since fascism was a product of imperialism, can we define as fascist a terrorist movement whose main target is Western domination? Disentangling these contradictory threads, Enzo Traverso's historical gaze helps to decipher the enigmas of the present. He suggests the concept of post-fascism--a hybrid phenomenon, neither the reproduction of old fascism nor something completely different--to define a set of heterogeneous and transitional movements, suspended between an accomplished past still haunting our memories and an unknown future.

Download or read book Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism written by Tim Redman and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-03-29 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating account of Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism allows the reader to understand the causes and results of Pound's ideology and actions.

Download or read book Liberal Fascism written by Jonah Goldberg and published by Crown Forum. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Fascists,” “Brownshirts,” “jackbooted stormtroopers”—such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist. Do these striking parallels mean that today’s liberals are genocidal maniacs, intent on conquering the world and imposing a new racial order? Not at all. Yet it is hard to deny that modern progressivism and classical fascism shared the same intellectual roots. We often forget, for example, that Mussolini and Hitler had many admirers in the United States. W.E.B. Du Bois was inspired by Hitler's Germany, and Irving Berlin praised Mussolini in song. Many fascist tenets were espoused by American progressives like John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson, and FDR incorporated fascist policies in the New Deal. Fascism was an international movement that appeared in different forms in different countries, depending on the vagaries of national culture and temperament. In Germany, fascism appeared as genocidal racist nationalism. In America, it took a “friendlier,” more liberal form. The modern heirs of this “friendly fascist” tradition include the New York Times, the Democratic Party, the Ivy League professoriate, and the liberals of Hollywood. The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore. These assertions may sound strange to modern ears, but that is because we have forgotten what fascism is. In this angry, funny, smart, contentious book, Jonah Goldberg turns our preconceptions inside out and shows us the true meaning of Liberal Fascism.

Download or read book Fascist Directive written by Catherine E. Paul and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals changes in Ezra Pound's prose writing resulting from his excitement over Mussolini's use of Italian cultural heritage to build and promote the modern Fascist state. Drawing on unpublished archival material and untranslated periodical contributions, the author delves into the vexing work of perhaps the most famous, certainly the most notorious, American in Italy in the 1930s and 1940s, providing fresh understanding of Fascist deployment of art, architecture, blockbuster exhibitions, music, archaeological projects, urban design,a nd literature. Pound's prose writings of this period cement a "directive" approach - declaiming his views with an authority that shuts down disagreement. This work reveals the importance of this approach to his larger artistic mission.

Download or read book Black Fascisms written by Mark Christian Thompson and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this provocative new book, Mark Christian Thompson addresses the startling fact that many African American intellectuals in the 1930s sympathized with fascism, seeing in its ideology a means of envisioning new modes of African American political resistance. Thompson surveys the work and thought of several authors and asserts that their sometimes positive reaction to generic European fascism, and its transformation into black fascism, is crucial to any understanding of Depression-era African American literary culture. The book considers the high regard that "Back to Africa" advocate Marcus Garvey expressed for fascist dictators and explores the common ground he shared with George Schuyler and Claude McKay, writers with whom Garvey is generally thought to be at odds. Thompson reveals how fascism informed a rejection of Marxism by McKay--as well as by Arna Bontemps, whose Drums at Dusk depicts communism as antithetical to any black revolution. A similarly authoritarian stance is examined in the work of Zora Neale Hurston, where the striving for a fascist sovereignty presents itself as highly critical of Nazism while nonetheless sharing many of its tenets. The book concludes with an investigation of Richard Wright's The Outsider and its murderous protagonist, Cross Damon, who articulates fascist drives already present, if latent, in Native Son's Bigger Thomas. Unencumbered by the historical or biblical references of the earlier work, Damon personifies the essence of black fascism. Taking on a subject generally ignored or denied in African American cultural and literary studies, Black Fascisms seeks not only to question the prominence of the Left in the political thought of a generation of writers but to change how we view African American literature in general. Encompassing political theory, cultural studies, critical theory, and historicism, the book will challenge readers in numerous fields, providing a new model for thinking about the political and transnational in African American culture and shedding new light on our understanding of fascism between the wars.

Download or read book Reproductions of Banality written by Alice Yaeger Kaplan and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproductions of Banality was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. An established fascist state has never existed in France, and after World War II there was a tendency to blame the Nazi Occupation for the presence of fascists within the country. Yet the memory of fascism within their ranks still haunts French intellectuals, and questions about a French version of fascist ideology have returned to the political forefront again and again in the years since the war. In Reproductions of Banality, Alice Yaegar Kaplan investigates the development of fascist ideology as it was manifested in the culture of prewar and Occupied France. Precisely because it existed only in a "gathering" or formative stage, and never achieved the power that brings with it a bureaucratic state apparatus, French fascism never lost its utopian, communal elements, or its consequent aesthetic appeal. Kaplan weighs this fascist aesthetic and its puzzling power of attraction by looking closely at its material remains: the narratives, slogans, newspapers, and film criticism produced by a group of writers who worked in Paris in the 1930s and early 1940s — their "most real moment." These writers include Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Lucien Rebatat, Robert Brasillach, and Maurice Bardeche, as well as two precursors of French fascism, Georges Sorel and the Italian futurist F.T. Marinetti, who made of the airplane an industrial carrier of sexual fantasies and a prime mover in the transit from futurism to fascism. Kaplan's work is grounded in the major Marxist and psychoanalytic theories of fascism and in concepts of banality and mechanical reproduction that draw upon Walter Benjamin. Emphasizing the role played by the new technologies of sight and sound, she is able to suggest the nature of the long-repressed cultural and political climate that produced French fascism, and to show—by implication — that the mass marketing of ideology in democratic states bears a family resemblance to the fascist mode of an earlier time.

Download or read book A Brief History of Fascist Lies written by Federico Finchelstein and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2022-08-01 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "There is no better book on fascism's complex and vexed relationship with truth."—Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them In this short companion to his book From Fascism to Populism in History, world-renowned historian Federico Finchelstein explains why fascists regarded simple and often hateful lies as truth, and why so many of their followers believed the falsehoods. Throughout the history of the twentieth century, many supporters of fascist ideologies regarded political lies as truth incarnated in their leader. From Hitler to Mussolini, fascist leaders capitalized on lies as the base of their power and popular sovereignty. This history continues in the present, when lies again seem to increasingly replace empirical truth. Now that actual news is presented as “fake news” and false news becomes government policy, A Brief History of Fascist Lies urges us to remember that the current talk of “post-truth” has a long political and intellectual lineage that we cannot ignore.

Download or read book Sex Drives written by Laura Frost and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Salvador Dalí's autobiography confesses that "Hitler turned me on in the highest," while Sylvia Plath maintains that "every woman adores a Fascist." Susan Sontag's famous observation that art reveals the seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of politics?Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination. She argues that the first generation of writers raised within psychoanalytic discourse found in fascism the libidinal unconscious through which to fantasize acts—including sadomasochism and homosexuality—not permitted in a democratic conception of sexuality without power relations. By delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates how politics enters into fantasy. This provocative and closely-argued book offers both a fresh contribution to modernist literature and a theorization of fantasy.

Download or read book How Fascism Works written by Jason Stanley and published by Random House. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “No single book is as relevant to the present moment.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen “One of the defining books of the decade.”—Elizabeth Hinton, author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • With a new preface • Fascist politics are running rampant in America today—and spreading around the world. A Yale philosopher identifies the ten pillars of fascist politics, and charts their horrifying rise and deep history. As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics. In fact, fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. Alarmed by the pervasive rise of fascist tactics both at home and around the globe, Stanley focuses here on the structures that unite them, laying out and analyzing the ten pillars of fascist politics—the language and beliefs that separate people into an “us” and a “them.” He knits together reflections on history, philosophy, sociology, and critical race theory with stories from contemporary Hungary, Poland, India, Myanmar, and the United States, among other nations. He makes clear the immense danger of underestimating the cumulative power of these tactics, which include exploiting a mythic version of a nation’s past; propaganda that twists the language of democratic ideals against themselves; anti-intellectualism directed against universities and experts; law and order politics predicated on the assumption that members of minority groups are criminals; and fierce attacks on labor groups and welfare. These mechanisms all build on one another, creating and reinforcing divisions and shaping a society vulnerable to the appeals of authoritarian leadership. By uncovering disturbing patterns that are as prevalent today as ever, Stanley reveals that the stuff of politics—charged by rhetoric and myth—can quickly become policy and reality. Only by recognizing fascists politics, he argues, may we resist its most harmful effects and return to democratic ideals. “With unsettling insight and disturbing clarity, How Fascism Works is an essential guidebook to our current national dilemma of democracy vs. authoritarianism.”—William Jelani Cobb, author of The Substance of Hope

Download or read book Modernism and Fascism written by R. Griffin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2007-05-22 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Intellectual debates surrounding modernity, modernism and fascism continue to be active and hotly contested. In this ambitious book, renowned expert on fascism Roger Griffin analyzes Western modernity and the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler and offers a pioneering new interpretation of the links between these apparently contradictory phenomena.

Download or read book From Fascism to Populism in History written by Federico Finchelstein and published by University of California Press. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is fascism and what is populism? What are their connections in history and theory, and how should we address their significant differences? What does it mean when pundits call Donald Trump a fascist, or label as populist politicians who span left and right such as Hugo Chávez, Juan Perón, Rodrigo Duterte, and Marine Le Pen? Federico Finchelstein, one of the leading scholars of fascist and populist ideologies, synthesizes their history in order to answer these questions and offer a thoughtful perspective on how we might apply the concepts today. While they belong to the same history and are often conflated, fascism and populism actually represent distinct political trajectories. Drawing on an expansive record of transnational fascism and postwar populist movements, Finchelstein gives us insightful new ways to think about the state of democracy and political culture on a global scale. This new edition includes an updated preface that brings the book up to date, midway through the Trump presidency and the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

Download or read book Essays on Fascism written by Benito Mussolini and published by . This book was released on 2019-03-25 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Ideology of Fascism" was written by Oswald Mosley in 1967 and provides a post WW2 analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Fascism as a political doctrine, and utilising its strengths proposes a United Europe, in union with science, as a prime requirement for the 21st Century. "The Doctrine of Fascism" was written by Benito Mussolini and the Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile. A key concept of which was that fascism was a rejection of previous models: "If the 19th century was the century of the individual we are free to believe that this is the 'collective' century, and therefore the century of the State." Giovanni Gentile was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he developed the idea of "self-construction," but also was strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought - namely Marx, Hegel, Fichte, and Nietzsche. Gentile was described by Mussolini, as 'the philosopher of Fascism'. Alfredo Rocco developed the economic and political theory of corporatism which would become part of the Fascist Manifesto of the National Fascist Party. Rocco denounced the European powers for imposing foreign culture on Italy and criticized the European powers for endorsing too much liberalism and individualism. The Fascist Manifesto was endorsed by a large number of intellectuals, and writers, including Luigi Pirandello, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Giuseppe Ungaretti.