Political Comics, Memes, Jokes, etc.

[Dill]

(06-19-2017, 03:12 PM)6andcounting Wrote: Posting two contradicting headlines from the same paper is usually "meh" because it's two different opinion authors on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Like so what? In this case, it's the same author.

A pretty sharp author too. The first article addresses Trump's policies--sans the populism. The second is responding to the increasing harshess of Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric after the Paris attacks. He makes some amazing parallels between "ur-fascism" and Trump and Trumpsters following a 1995 essay by Umberto Eco.

For general interest, here is Bouie's summary of Eco--

Eco emphasizes the extent to which fascism is ad hoc and opportunistic. It’s “philosophically out of joint,” he writes, with features that “cannot be organized into a system” since “many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanacticism.”

With that said, it is true that there are fascist movements, and it’s also true that when you strip their cultural clothing—the German paganism in Nazism, for example—there are common properties. Not every fascist movement shows all of them, but—Eco writes—“it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it." Eco identifies 14, but for this column, I want to focus on seven.

They are: A cult of “action for action’s sake,” where “thinking is a form of emasculation”; an intolerance of “analytical criticism,” where disagreement is condemned; a profound “fear of difference,” where leaders appeal against “intruders”; appeals to individual and social frustration and specifically a “frustrated middle class” suffering from “feelings of political humiliation and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups”; a nationalist identity set against internal and external enemies (an “obsession with a plot”); a feeling of humiliation by the “ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies”; a “popular elitism” where “every citizen belongs to the best people of the world” and underscored by contempt for the weak; and a celebration of aggressive (and often violent) masculinity.

I think there is still one important point missing--statism--but otherwise the resemblance is close.

Apologies to Zona. I won't post any more on the subject.