Bushflash

April 7, 2005 3:40 AM

Adding images to words makes things easier to remember. The 14 defining characteristics of Fascism as a flash movie. I know, I know, it's been discussed quite a few times at MeFi, but I only post this as Thursday fun. Only. Really. Fun.
posted by acrobat (31 comments total)

Godwin makes Baby Jesus cry.
posted by Rothko at 4:58 AM on April 7, 2005

please fasten your seatbelt.
posted by crunchland at 5:04 AM on April 7, 2005

Why are we condemned to repeat this post over and over?
posted by coelecanth at 5:16 AM on April 7, 2005

If it's not going to go away, it would be nice if a calm discussion happened here.

Let's not talk about the US. Consider other countries in terms of those 14 points. Which other countries are (in those terms) fascist? Which are not? What sort of data did you use to decide whether a country matched the 14 points? How valid is this list and how it is used?

Or does anyone have a similar list or definition but something written before the current US administration? (I think the list in question is from 2002.) Maybe a definition by a conservative, to try to take any advertent or inadvertent anti-Republican bias out of it?

Before this list started kicking around, how did you decide whether a country was fascist?

Or, if it has to be a discussion of the US, try the list on the US of the past. How would the US of 10, 20, 50, or 100 years ago look in terms of this list?
posted by pracowity at 5:35 AM on April 7, 2005

My head is swimming with all your questions, pracowity. But I think I have a term paper somewhere here that will do in a pinch.
posted by breezeway at 6:13 AM on April 7, 2005

Britt's original article, dated Spring 2003

I wonder about some of the points. How can they mark a fascist country as having "rampant sexism"?

I mean, are we talking about wage discrepancies? Enforced motherhood? What are the markers of "rampant sexism" and how do they relate to previous markers? I don't really see the US actively enforcing "Kirche, Kueche, Kinder" anytime soon...

Also, I don't really know if the US hits the controlled mass media point either. Wouldn't that require active controlling versus passive? Does it count if people who aren't a part of the political structure (i.e. Rupert Murdoch, who really does have his fingers in all the pies around the world, not just the US) push their bias onto their property?

Admittedly, I'm not in the US. I have a vague idea of how much it's changed in the past four and a half years, but I don't have the knowledge of living there. So I might just be naïve about the entire thing.
posted by Katemonkey at 6:22 AM on April 7, 2005

It's rare that I get to call out something as "wingnut," but this could only have been produced by someone who has only a cursory knowledge of fascism.
Read some Hannah Arendt about what truly makes fascism (or totalitarianism) and stop calling anything you don't like "fascist."
(Oh, and under these, Stalin would be a fascist, which he was not. The categories are too broad and the supporting evidence is too scant.)
posted by klangklangston at 6:22 AM on April 7, 2005

Is now a good time to tell you all about my living will?
posted by eatitlive at 6:52 AM on April 7, 2005

Only if you can link to a Flash file of your living will performed by Lego characters, bunnies, stuffed animals, or Japanese schoolgirls, eatitlive.
posted by Slithy_Tove at 7:11 AM on April 7, 2005

A scientific approach to political science cannot accept an article written after the situation arises. Britt had an opportunity to tailor his list to items he could apply to his subject, the USA. Thus his article worked more as a persuasive piece than as a legitimate work of scholarship, and should be taken as propaganda.

That Wikipedia link contains a list of propaganda's characteristics. I saw 11 of 17 characteristics in this video:

• Appeal to fear
• Obtain disapproval
• Intentional vagueness
• Transfer
• Oversimplification
• Common man
• Stereotyping
• Scapegoating
• Virtue words
• Slogans
• Unstated assumption

While the Bush administration disturbs me, it is not an unending nightmare from which we shall never awake. It is a manageable problem that must be dealt with rationally with politics rather than cheap flash agitprop.
posted by NickDouglas at 7:25 AM on April 7, 2005

klangklangston and NickDouglas have it right. I'll only add, at the risk of sounding like an expose-hungry blogger, that we showed in the last (that is, the third, and deleted) thread about this that Mr. Britt probably isn't a doctor. Neither does the original source seem to indicate it. While I don't put too much stock in a piece of paper, since this amounts generally to an argument from authority (there's no evidence or history in it whatsoever), it might have been a good idea to get the authority right.

Apparently, this little blurb got forwarded to somebody who turned it into a movie. Just goes to show, once again, that flash presentations about politics are underresearched, empty, thoughtless psychobabble.
posted by koeselitz at 7:43 AM on April 7, 2005

You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.
posted by fet at 7:59 AM on April 7, 2005

I couldn't even finish watching that thing because I wanted to punch the narrator in the face. (Not because of what he was saying, per se, but because his delivery was hella annoying.)
posted by ddf at 8:11 AM on April 7, 2005

While the Bush administration disturbs me, it is not an unending nightmare from which we shall never awake.

How can you be sure where the things happening today will lead? How can you be sure that they won't lead to ever greater restrictions on freedom and a greater centralisation of power in the hands of those who will use it solely for their own gain? The trick is not to write off that there is any danger to a free society but to strike a balance between the real potential for danger and worthless propaganda.

That's not too say the 14 characteristics spiel isn't drivel however. Don't most of the incredibly vague generalisations apply to feudalism also?
posted by biffa at 8:30 AM on April 7, 2005

cheap flash agitprop

but cheap flash agitprop is so much fun!
posted by quonsar at 8:37 AM on April 7, 2005

That was hella fun! I'm whistling zippa-dee-doo-dah out my asshole!
posted by fungible at 8:57 AM on April 7, 2005

Why not go to the source: Moussolini's essay defining fascism? And another good set of articles on the subject. Reading these, it is clear that whatever Bush and the Republicans are, they aren't fascists, and the good Doctor who wrote the list doesn't know what he is talking about.

For example, fascism protects corporatations and free markets? From Benito, defining fascism again: "In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production."

You can hate Bush without calling him a fascist, you know.
posted by blahblahblah at 9:17 AM on April 7, 2005

NickDouglas. Your post was rational, coherent and logical. IOW: Knock it off.
posted by tkchrist at 9:31 AM on April 7, 2005

"Fascism" has become more or less of a meaningless term that seeks to encompass all that is negative in authoritarian politics... but then the definition in the late 20th century bases itself, often exclusively, on the study of an organization which was actually national-socialist.

So, having become largely meaningless, I'd say that the term has outlived its usefulness in the vast majority of conversations.
posted by clevershark at 9:45 AM on April 7, 2005

Nickdouglas -- Omigod! I see those same characteristics in this thread. MeFi is becoming fascist!
posted by esquire at 10:48 AM on April 7, 2005

Blahblahblah: Yeah, that Italian Encyclopedia article should be the urtype for any fascism argument... But it wasn't written by Mussolini, rather by academics friendly to him... (Just as one of those historical notes).
Doesn't everyone here have a copy of Hannah Arendt's work on totalitarianism? I mean, I hate to argue from authority, but she's pretty much the best authority (and possibly the best female political scientist/philosopher ever).
posted by klangklangston at 10:55 AM on April 7, 2005

Umberto Eco has listed 14 points of Fascism, about which he says: "These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it."
posted by Panfilo at 12:16 PM on April 7, 2005

Panfilo, cool link.
posted by blahblahblah at 12:27 PM on April 7, 2005

Ditto on the Eco, Panfilo. I was considering linking to same.
posted by The White Hat at 1:06 PM on April 7, 2005

This thread has been Umberto'ed.
posted by Rothko at 2:11 PM on April 7, 2005

#15 - Bush with hand out like Hitler = FACIST!!!!11
posted by iamck at 2:46 PM on April 7, 2005

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.

This - Umberto's last point - represents the greatest danger I see in the States. If we forget who to engage in reasoned, critical discourse then we lose the main weapon by which we oppose irrationality [fascism, fundementalism, and even populism]. Healthy debate seems to be alive and healthy online [despite the trolls and flamethrowers], but comatose in the more popular media.
posted by kanewai at 4:25 PM on April 7, 2005

NickDouglas: A scientific approach to political science cannot accept an article written after the situation arises.

There is an egregious linguistic error in that sentence.

And I completely disagree with you. Game Theory, while not commonly accepted as having predictive value, is heuristic and often explains "why" things happen the way they did. Saying Political Science isn't Science unless it predicts things is ridiculatarded. (Egregious indeed.)

Perhaps the libruhl professor was putting on an accusatory hat when he wrote that paper - and perhaps he had the U.S. in his heart the whole time - but neither of these things necessarily invalidate his findings.

I.E.
"National Socialism can lead genocide. (Picture of Hitler in the background)."

I wrote that sentence while thinking about Nazis. Obviously. The fact that I was thinking about Nazis doesn't invalidate my findings.

I'm not agreeing with the professor, either. Before you damned filthy fascist conservatives try and crucify me.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 5:45 PM on April 7, 2005

Whoa. Those small tags can really get away from you. Slippery little bastards.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 5:46 PM on April 7, 2005

"Saying Political Science isn't Science unless it predicts things is ridiculatarded."

Maybe not, but saying "political science is an abortion based on the incredibly faulty premise that the human soul admits of easy observation and prediction, and is therefore not a science" makes sense. And I say this as a graduate student in political science-- it's a failed field, at least so far. Medical science has saved lives. Nuclear physics has created huge explosions. But political science hasn't done anything for anybody-- it probably even unwittingly created communism-- and it probably won't. Just look at what's happened over the last century, when "political science" was supposed to come into its own.

I grant that all this is sort of a digression; I just think it should be said. I'll also say, again, that the guy who wrote these '14 points' was no professor; he's a novelist.
posted by koeselitz at 8:39 AM on April 8, 2005

I don't disagree at all.
I am also a graduate student in political science, Mr. Fancy Pants.
And you can defend NickDouglas by taking a non-rationalist approach to human behavior, and I say more power to you. However, your statement does make a number of theoretical assumptions.

And political science may be a failed field stacked against medicine and physics, but it has provided scores upon scores of slightly-overweight white men with secure employment.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 10:37 AM on April 9, 2005