Folks, I know everybody hates long quotes, but this one from Tony Judt is too good not to be shared. Judt explains how Fascist rhetoric seemlessly transformed itself into the ultra-progressive one:
Intellectuals, journalists and teachers who before and during the war had espoused Fascist or ultra-reactionary sentiments had good reason after 1945 vociferously to affirm their new-found credentials as progressives or radicals (or else retreat into temporary or lasting obscurity). Since most parties and journals of a Fascist or even ultra-conservative persuasion were in any case now banned (except in the Iberian Peninsula, where the opposite was true), public expressions of political allegiance were confined to the center and left of the spectrum. Right-wing thought and opinion in Europe had been eclipsed. But although the content of public writing and performance was spectacularly metamorphosed by the fall of Hitler, Mussolini and their followers, the tone stayed much the same. The apocalyptic urgency of the Fascists; their call for violent, ‘definitive’ solutions, as though genuine change necessarily led through root-and-branch destruction; the distaste for the compromise and ‘hypocrisy’ of liberal democracy and the enthusiasm for Manichean choices (all or nothing, revolution or decadence): these impulses could serve the far Left equally well and after 1945 they did so.
I’ve only read a quarter of this long book but I enjoy it beyond what I can tell you.
Clarissa's Blog 
I love long quotes, if they are so good. 🙂
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Yes, please continue with the long quotes, Tony Judt or no Tony Judt.
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I think when the psyche is very brittle, you do need to take a black and white approach, simply because a slight mistake with a compromise could change the psychological margins for you in a significant way, such that instead of staying on the side of sanity, you go mad, or lose yoru health, or get in with the wrong crowd and die.
I think this kind of redemptive radicalism is often mistaken for fascism by those who have never had to fight for themselves in this way.
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This is exactly correct. The Judt quote is false equivalence.
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In Spain, fascist journalists and writers turned into passionate anti-fascists and democrats practically overnight in 1975. Hence it doesn’t surprise me that the same thing happened in the rest of Europe 30 years earlier.
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But now a lot of what is called fascism or fascistic thinking is really nothing of the sort. It’s like casting a net for sharks and catching dolphins in it.
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Two things about post WWII Germany.
It’s odd how much each turned into almost a parody of the sides they were presumably on in the cold war. West Germany fattened up on captialist excess and dumbed down its (apparently frightening) intellectual traditions and could not get enough of superficial American junk culture. East Germany hunked down into Russian style paranoia and became of snakepit of intrigue as the citizenry spied on each other with abandon and gave the brutality of the soviet system its ultimate physical anifestation with the wall.
In 1993 or thereabouts I saw a few episodes on nationalism by Michael Issikoff. Despite some unevenness and superficiality he made a great point during the episode devoted to Germany, whose biggest problem was that almost no one really liked the country as it really was.
At one extreme there were people that wanted borders or a degree of mono-ethnicity that could not be (re)gained without wars that no one else wanted and at the other end, people that wanted the country to be more humane and tolerant and progressive than a functioning state can be. He didn’t mention the vast middle that wanted nothing more than to escape from the burden of history and recast their lot as ‘Europeans’ instead of ‘Germans’.
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“At one extreme there were people that wanted borders or a degree of mono-ethnicity that could not be (re)gained without wars that no one else wanted and at the other end, people that wanted the country to be more humane and tolerant and progressive than a functioning state can be. ”
– This is a brilliant insight and the central dilemma for most developed countries. In the US, of course, there is no mono-ethnicity but there is also a scary need to convince oneself that this is a mono-ethnic country. On this very blog, people earnestly tried to convince me, for instance, that the soaring rates of obesity in this country are caused by genes.
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That’s related to what Judt was talking about, isn’t it? 20th century history as a yearning for monoethnicity, with outbursts of terrifying violence when it can’t be achieved by softer methods. It terrifies me, sometimes, to walk through my hometown and look at streetnames and buildings and realize that all these people that contemporary English would call “minorities” are gone.
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// It terrifies me, sometimes, to walk through my hometown and look at streetnames and buildings and realize that all these people that contemporary English would call “minorities” are gone.
May I ask, why are they gone? Where do you live?
Before and during recent Olympic games, we watched a British channel a bit and the anchorwoman (in general news program, not connected to Olympics) was African. I suppose in England minorities do get representation.
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Jewish center ‘killer’ who screamed ‘Heil Hitler’ during arrest is revealed to be renowned KKK leader who ran for CONGRESS as his victims are identified
Christians Dr. William Lewis Corporan and his grandson, Reat Griffin Underwood, 14, were killed in the shootings. A woman was also shot dead, but she hasn’t been identified.
The shooter killed at two locations – a community center and retirement Jewish home – the day before Passover
The suspect has a long history of KKK involvement and anti-Semitism and he ran for Congress in the 1980s for the White Patriot Party
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2603828/Three-dead-shootings-two-separate-Jewish-centers-Kansas-City.html
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Despite everything, I still wish you
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Thank you! Any excuse to eat hard-boiled eggs works for me.
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QUOTE: “The fact is folks, Bush and his Zionist Jew bosses not only want more tens of millions of illegal aliens to flood into our country, they do everything they can to encourage it.
“Why? To drown the white race in a sea of color. That’s why.
“The Zionist Jews and their gentile prostitute government managers want to create a one-world government inside a world populated overwhelmingly by mixed-racial, therefore leaderless and easily controlled zombie slaves, forever unable to free themselves — a world void of white people. END OF QUOTE
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/14/suburban-kansas-city-shootings-suspect/7689607/
Look how the word “Zionist” stands for “Jews” and is, of course, a swear word, while being an American patriot is a must. Also Jews are blamed for globalization and destruction of nationalist worldview, even though Zionism and creation of Israel support nationalism more than anything else. Afraid of changes? Search for a “Jew”.
Most Israeli Jews would tell that anti-Zionist is a new word for anti-Semitic.
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“Most Israeli Jews would tell that anti-Zionist is a new word for anti-Semitic.”
– Hardly new. ‘Zionist’ was the word used in the USSR to persecute Jews.
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Немецкие психологи провели исследование, доказывающее психологическую базу антисемитизма в современном мире. В его основе лежит механизм психологической защиты, который включается при появлении чувства вины. Этот механизм хорошо изучен в приложении к межличностным отношениям, но, как выяснилось, он работает и на уровне социальных групп. Психологические эксперименты показали, что антисемитизм появляется при провоцировании чувства вины по отношению к евреям. Однако он остается в виде скрытых эмоций, сдерживаемых официальными общественными нормами.
[…]
Казалось бы, информация о злодеяниях нацистов и мучениях евреев должна вызывать только сочувствие. Но судя по результатам проведенных экспериментов, постоянное напоминание о страданиях евреев — как прошлых, так и настоящих — ничуть не улучшает положение, а, напротив, увеличивает уровень антисемитизма — по крайней мере, на эмоциональном уровне. Включается механизм отторжения чувства вины, и негативные эмоции переносятся на саму жертву.
Авторы исследования предупреждают о двойственном эффекте пропагандистских кампаний, призванных формировать массовое мнение по еврейскому вопросу.
http://elementy.ru/news/431177
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Jesus.
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I began web searching and found something even more “Jesus”-y . Look:
BERLIN – The Jerusalem Post exposé on the German Holocaust foundation Remembrance, Responsibility, Future (EVZ) in late September and October revealed that two of its Holocaust high school student programs were being fueled by hatred of the Jewish state.
[…]
The EVZ used 38,690 euros ($53,687) to finance studentexchange programs in 2010- 2011, in which Israel was equated with the former repressive Stalinist East German state, and students published crude cartoons of Jews in a brochure. German taxpayer monies funded the speaking engagement of a hardcore anti-Israel Holocaust survivor, Hajo Meyer, at the Anne Frank high school in Gütersloh.
During Meyer’s talk with the students, he termed Israel a “criminal state” and equated the suffering of Palestinians to the persecution and mass murder of Jews during the Holocaust.
[…]
“In a book about the ‘end of Judaism,’ an end he favors, he wrote that the Jews’ ‘otherness,’ like their dietary rules, caused antipathy already thousands of years ago,” De Winter continued. “It is a fascinating and frightening way to survive – he is still the Nazi prisoner he once was by completely internalizing the Nazi’s hatred.”
[…]
A Holocaust survivor like Meyer helps to “assuage their [Europeans’] guilt” and an organization [EVZ] should not be party to this kind of exploitation.
http://www.jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-Features/Germans-use-anti-Israel-Jews-to-soothe-Holocaust-guilt
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It’s a mistake to believe that there is anything Jews can do to prevent anti-semitism. As hard as this is to accept, Jews have no control over this at all. Again, look at Spain. People go to a bloody civil war against each other under passionate anti-semitic slogans in a country that hadn’t seen any Jews for centuries.
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Last link about it:
Hitler’s Inspiration and Guide: The Native American Holocaust
Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild west; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.
[…]
His favorite game to play outside was cowboys and Indians. Tales of the American West were very popular among boys in Austria and Germany. Books by James Fenimore Cooper and especially German writer Karl May were eagerly read and re-enacted. May, who had never been to America, invented a hero named Old Shatterhand, a white man who always won his battles with Native Americans, defeating his enemies through sheer will power and bravery. Young Hitler read and reread every one of May’s books about Old Shatterhand, totaling more than 70 novels. He continued to read them even as Führer. During the German attack on the Soviet Union he sometimes referred to the Russians as Redskins and ordered his officers to carry May’s books about fighting.
http://www.jewishjournal.com/sacredintentions/item/hitlers_inspiration_and_guide_the_native_american_holocaust
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I like your links. You can post as many of them as you like.
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// I like your links. You can post as many of them as you like.
I am very glad to hear that. Wondered whether I was already annoying you. If I ever do, do tell. I can sometimes go over the limit. 🙂
I loved this post by an historian “about why medieval governments and the Church used so much violent torture, not by analyzing the Middle Ages, but by revisiting the first moment that the very questions Jen asked were asked by someone else, and thereby entered the central conversation of European thought, with real and wonderful consequences.”
http://www.exurbe.com/?p=2339
// It’s a mistake to believe that there is anything Jews can do to prevent anti-semitism
I don’t really think we can, but I was shocked by EVZ engaged in it: “students published crude cartoons of Jews in a brochure” — this was too much even for cynical me! Would have never thought this possible.
Just had a thought tonight. Pesah is a holiday of freedom, we have a state, but there still is a large Jewish community held captive in the Middle East. As horrible as it may sound, other Middle Eastern countries were better to Jews by exiling them (to be 1st class citizens in Israel) than Iran – by holding the community captive to demonstrate “we are only against Zionists.”
I have read some excerpts from Cooper recently, and didn’t like them. Probably it’s the age since in childhood I loved “15-iy kapitan”, “Adventures in the land of tigers” about an expedition (?) to jungle and other similar books.
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Fenimor Cooper is popular with boys everywhere, it seems. My husband loved him and was shocked to discover how much I hate his books.
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