‘Lemmygrad’s resident expert on fascism’ — GrainEater, 2024

‘The political desperadoes and ignoramuses, who say they would “Rather be Dead than Red”, should be told that no one will stop them from committing suicide, but they have no right to provoke a third world war.’ — Morris Kominsky, 1970

  • 503 Posts
  • 464 Comments
Joined 6 years ago
Cake day: August 27th, 2019
  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•General Discussion Thread - Juche 115, Week 6English
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    2 days ago

    Cato did not just attack the Roman turn toward ostentatious consumption. Another feature of Roman life in the early second century BC also attracted his ire. Cato saw Rome’s growing engagement with the Greek world as a threat to the Roman and Latin culture he idealized.

    His xenophobic attacks greatly exaggerated the impact of Greeks in Rome. Most Greeks would have come as slaves following a series of second-​century Roman victories in the East. Relatively small numbers of free Greek philosophers, teachers of rhetoric, and doctors had come to Rome, but it was precisely these high-​status, high-​visibility Greeks whom Cato targeted. Cato said that Greeks “will corrupt everything” in Rome and predicted that the Romans would lose their empire when they began to be “infected with Greek literature.”²⁰

    (Source.)

    Huh… interesting.

    So, how’s everybody doing?

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•General Discussion Thread - Juche 115, Week 5English
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    7 days ago

    Pg. 66:

    Vesga certainly expressed his claims in an atmosphere of heightened anti-morisco popular anxiety and in the years immediately preceding the royal decision to decree the expulsion of the moriscos from Spain in 1609.

    The decades preceding the expulsion decree were characterised by increasingly strident and alarmist claims targeting the moriscos: from the allegation accusing them of systematically conspiring with Spain’s Muslim adversaries in the Mediterranean to that of seeking to take over the kingdoms through their allegedly explosive birth rate.³⁶

    (Emphasis added.)

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•General Discussion Thread - Juche 115, Week 5English
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    7 days ago

    Quoting Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, pg. 63:

    Perhaps inevitably, the public hysteria about medical murder was stoked by incendiary manuscript pamphlets listing the names and places of residence of individual medical practitioners accused of murdering their patients.

    By way of illustration, the Portuguese pamphlet Treatise in which it is proved that the New Christians of the [Hebrew] Nation who dwell in Portugal are secret Jews and in which the evils that they inflict upon Old Christians are pointed out, circulating in the 1630s, enumerated the names of fifty-one New Christian physicians, surgeons and apothecaries working in Portugal and Spain convicted by the Inquisition of crypto-Jewish beliefs and, in some cases, even of mass murder.

    Looks like doxxing is an older phenomenon than I thought.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoGenZedong@lemmygrad.ml•Ryan Grim, an American journalist, giving a live history lesson, to the disbelief of the propagandist presenter next to him, who believes the US was who ended Nazism.English
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    9 days ago

    From Rich Brownstein’s Holocaust Cinema Complete, pg. 70:

    [T]he [Third Reich] built six camps specifically for slaughter, interchangeably known as “death camps,” “extermination camps” or “killing centers.” All six of these death camps were in occupied Poland: Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibór, Treblinka, Majdanek, and the camp system of Auschwitz/Birkenau. While some concentration camps had small gas chambers—Dachau, Stutthof, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, and Ravensbrück¹¹—extermination was the main business of the six death camps, even if labor ­sub-camps were part of a specific camp’s system, like at Auschwitz/Birkenau.

    (Emphasis added.)

    Since these were all in Poland, and the Soviets reached Poland whereas the Western Allies never did (otherwise there’d never be such a thing as the Polish People’s Republic), that means that the Soviets liberated all of these camps.

    I hate to state the obvious, but scholarly citations like these are worth keeping in mind when anti-Bolsheviks inevitably say ‘you’re wrong’ to this sore point. Unfortunately, I predict that they are going to rescue their assumption by claiming that the Soviets merely captured the camps without liberating anybody (like this) and citing an Internet meme as the evidence. That, and referencing the Molotov Cocktease Pact: the single most important event in all of history right up until somebody murdered Charlie Kirk.

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mltoShit Reactionaries Say@lemmygrad.ml•Liberals would rather claim fascism is some primordial evil than question capitalismEnglish
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    10 days ago

    People misunderstand fascism. It’s not a political ideology. It’s a dark side of human nature that must always be repressed.

    I almost laughed out loud as I read this. Correctly stating that people misunderstand fascism only to immediately prove your own point is embarrassing, and boiling it down to human misbehaviour is simply not useful.

    I can agree that fascism demonstrated how complex human behavior is: not many of us want to admit that plenty of ordinary people willingly supported fascism and that even the most atrocious fascists were still humans, but somehow I doubt that this is what the author had in mind. Calling fascism ‘a dark side of human nature’ is much too vague to be meaningful.

    Note how fascism doesn’t really have a consistent definition though. It is much more of a constellation of political traits that serve towards an end.

    This is a classic oversimplification. Initially, yes, the Fascists did try to appeal to the lower classes, but we can see that that was a cynical ploy since the Fascists firmly sided with the bourgeoisie once it promoted them to institutional power, for the simple reason that the haute-bourgeoisie is the ruling class. The self-contradictory appeals to various classes was a natural consequence of fascism’s predominantly petty bourgeois base.

    It’s a shame that these types seem more interested in masturbatory philosophizing rather than examining episodes from the Fascist era. When I emphasised that militarism is crucial to fascism, I was worried that I was only kicking at an open door because it just seemed so obvious. Now that I’ve seen Fedditors saying nothing about fascism’s militarism, I can rest easy knowing that my thread was necessary after all.

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