{"id":10208,"date":"2006-05-05T17:26:27","date_gmt":"2006-05-05T21:26:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2006\/05\/05\/10208.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:54:50","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:54:50","slug":"more-fascist-stuff-im-afraid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2006\/05\/05\/more-fascist-stuff-im-afraid\/","title":{"rendered":"More fascist stuff, I’m afraid"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. More musings about fascism, I’m afraid. One thing that occurred to me during those musings was that I hadn’t remembered to link to Umberto Eco’s Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt<\/a>. As long as I’m linking to it, I should mention that the essay is a version of a speech Mr. Eco gave to an American audience in, I believe, 1991 or 1992. At any rate, don’t think of it as an authoritative or rigorous examination of historical fascism, but as a warning or philippic tailored to the American political scene, although of course given by somebody with extensive knowledge not to say experience of historical fascism.\n

But the thing I wanted to write about was that I can easily identify fascist art<\/I>, that is, there are certain works of art, mostly public sculpture but not all, that I immediately respond to as fascist. And it occurred to me that one element of fascism—let me stop for a moment and go back to a point I’ve related a few times about Conservatism. Charles Rossiter described Conservatism as a mindset, or a bias, rather than a collection of either policy principles or ideals. When he laid out his list of 21 Tenets of Conservatism<\/a>, he did so (he said) reluctantly, because he didn’t want to give the impression that all Conservatives believed all this stuff, just that it seemed like most people with the Conservative mood believed most of it. Of course, at any particular point in any particular State, there are also a set of policies that are associated with Conservatives and Conservatism; it stands to reason that most Conservatives would support most of those policies. The surface argument is about which policies are sensible ones, likely to have good outcomes, but the deeper argument is about that mindset and mood, and arguments about particular policies are unlikely to shift that.\n

Anyway, it seems to me that one of the things about the fascist mindset—and I am speaking here about the appeal of fascism to the masses, not about the policy matters that may well properly define whether a government is fascist or not—is that it contains an image of an Ideal Citizen. This Ideal Citizen is sound in mind and body, or I should say strong<\/I> in mind and body, in accordance with Mr. Eco’s observation. He (possibly she, but probably not) is good-looking, young, idealistic, loyal (of course) to the State that he embodies, and ‘of good stock’, if you know what I mean. Now, as a little spindly Jewish guy, I find those images threatening rather than inspiring, but it’s also true that lots of people who look nothing like those images find them inspiring. And, of course, it’s true that a country and its culture may well find those images cropping up often without that country and culture descending into fascism proper. But I think, at least initially, that the fascist mindset does necessarily include an Ideal Citizen, and that people within the state are then judged by the extent to which they conform to that ideal.\n

Myself, I have no such image of an Ideal Citizen. I do (and this is probably itself unfortunate and lays me open to exploitation of other kinds) have a sort of an image of an Ideal Citizenry, not unlike a painting I vaguely remember but can’t locate at the moment, possibly a Rockwell, possibly from my own imagination, of a naturalization ceremony with all the different faces, all from different backgrounds, all loving their new country and all with different (but overlapping) ideas of what it is and can be. But, you know, I see how that isn’t as powerful an image. Anyway, my question for you, Gentle Reader, is essentially this: do you have an image of an Ideal Citizenry? Of an Ideal Citizen? Are you seeing either of those images in our culture right now?\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So. More musings about fascism, I\u2019m afraid. One thing that occurred to me during those musings was that I hadn\u2019t remembered to link to Umberto Eco\u2019s Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt. As long as I\u2019m linking…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17747,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10208\/revisions\/17747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}