Rather than debating whether today’s far right is fascist, we need to think about fascization. Focusing on language and desire enables us to understand the process of becoming fascist, even within ourselves, and thus to resist it.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever : George Orwell
Are there any movements currently in power in Europe, or on their way to power, that can be called fascist? And if so, can those who support these movements also be called fascists? Objectively, in terms of actual practices and discourses, and subjectively, in terms of beliefs and agendas, these are open questions.
None of the movements today often referred to as fascist openly identifies with the fascism of the past. But all have emerged from the fascist tradition. Their political programmes contain no racial laws; nonetheless, all are constructed around the figure of the radical Other.
It is difficult to speak of these movements as totalitarian, though all are situated within the pentagonal matrix of fascist totalitarianisms: subversion of democracy through legal means; racist nationalism; glorification of force; replacement of the rule of law and political pluralism with the pretence of these things; and systematic repression of opponents and dissenting voices.
There are good reasons, then, for leaving historical singularities intact and being wary of jumping to label the European far right as fascist. But such prudence may also come at great political cost: normalizing the resistible but apparently inexorable fascization of European societies, perhaps even societies worldwide, since the middle of the 1980s. For in practice, the term ‘fascism’ refers less to a historical reality than to a political position that in a democratic society cannot be tolerated. Removing this marker of infamy would mean removing from our democracies any limits or prohibitions.
If we cannot talk of fascism as such, we can at least talk of fascization and being fascisized, as we do of racialization and being racialized. Is the development of multiple fascism-like features almost everywhere in Europe over the last thirty years not a similarly complex, strategically ambiguous, and partly impersonal process?…
https://www.eurozine.com/on-fascization
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Julien Benda: Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds
The Disappearing Present: Reflections on Ideology: Webinar delivered on October 16, 2020)
On Post-Fascism: How citizenship is becoming an exclusive privilege by G. M. Tamás
Gáspár Tamás; prophet of post-fascism
The Intellectual We Deserve (2018)
What is truth? said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer
History and revolution in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)
Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility: Lord Acton
After the truth-shower 