Fascism
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This and all other quotes by Dorothy Thompson: “Political Dictionary” (March 19, 1936), in Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939), 17–20. ↩︎
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Erich Ludendorff, Der totaler Krieg (Ludendorffs Verlag, 1935). ↩︎
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Good historical background: Geoffrey Best, Honour among Men and Nations: Transformations of an Idea (University of Toronto Press, 1981). ↩︎
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Peter Pomerantsev, This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War against Reality (PublicAffairs, 2019). ↩︎
- Data Vampires: Going Hyperscale (October 7, 2024)
- Data Vampires: Opposing Data Centers (October 14, 2024)
- Data Vampires: Sacrificing for AI (October 21, 2024)
- Data Vampires: Fighting for Control (October 28, 2024)
Who would the strongman past and present be without those crowds that form the raw material of his propaganda? His secret is that he needs them far more than they need him.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Propaganda is also a system of attention management that works through repetition.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
At its core, propaganda is a set of communication strategies designed to sow confusion and uncertainty, discourage critical thinking, and persuade people that reality is what the leader says it is.
– Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen, chap. 5.
Molly White, “Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia,” www.citationneeded.news…
“Die Welt am Sonntag veröffentlicht einen Gastbeitrag, in dem Techmilliardär Elon Musk für die AfD wirbt. Mitarbeitende der Redaktion sind empört. Meinungschefin Eva Marie Kogel reicht ihre Kündigung ein.” www.spiegel.de…
Finally started reading Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (Norton, 2020).
U.S. Government Caricature of Nazi Propaganda
This 1942 poster was designed to counter the effects of Nazi propaganda in the United States. It is fascinating in its own right, but parts of the text reveal startling similarities to Russian disinformation in our own time.
Accessibility: Description and full transcription of poster.
Europe's Changing Map in 1939 (Photo)
European situation spoils map on Post Office department floor. Washington, D.C., April 12. The huge map on the floor of the Post Office Department here is all out of kilter these days due to the aggression in Europe. Many are the embarrassing questions being asked officials about when Mr. Farley is going to do something about Ethiopia, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The answer so far has been - nothing. Probably the Post Office is waiting to see what will happen next on the continent. Miss Edna Strain is inspecting the damage done by the ambitious dictators. 4-12-39
Image and caption: Harris & Ewing Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2016875385/.
Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen
I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.
Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.
Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.
Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.
The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.
When Russia makes yet another nuclear threat, why is the biggest scaredy cat in the room always a would-be “man’s man” like Joe Rogan? Also, when did doing the right thing cease to be a part of normative masculinity for so many Americans?
We Need a New Political Translation Dictionary (English–English)
In 1936, Dorothy Thompson observed in her newspaper column that “dictatorships often have quite different interpretations of words from liberal democracies. . . . In the dictionary of democracies,” for example, “peace is a desirably permanent condition of amicable relations with other nations. In the dictionary of dictatorships peace means: a quiet undisturbed period in which to prepare for war . . ."1
The phrase “between nations” excluded asymmetric colonial conflicts, so the difference Thompson painted was quite real. In fact, it was the entire argument of Erich Ludendorff’s 1935 screed Der totale Krieg (Total War). In that book, Ludendorff flipped Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum on its head. Instead of understanding war as the pursuit of political aims by other means, states had to understand war as the driving force behind all politics.2
Regarding “nonaggression” in international relations, Thompson wrote,
liberal democracies mean . . . simply the renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. Both Russian and German dictatorships mean by it the substitution of revolution for other weapons. Neither Russia nor Germany considers the fomenting of internal strife in countries which they want to bring under their influence to be aggression.
In our own time, Russia, now a different creature, is playing a similar game inside NATO countries. Observers in these democracies refer to Russia’s current suite of activities as “hybrid warfare,” although their governments often play down these activities. Thompson’s discussion of “war” itself can help to explain why, provided we keep the “between nations” qualification in mind. “For the democracies war is armed conflict between nations, to be avoided as an unmitigated catastrophe. Above all, war is regarded as an abnormal condition. In the Russian dictionary,” on the other hand, “war is either an inevitable byproduct of the struggle of capitalist countries for markets, or the permanent, unremitting and inevitable struggle between classes for power.” The first theory of war came from Lenin’s interpretation of imperialism and the World War (1914–18). The second was the basic dialectical understanding of history as class conflict posited by Marx and Engels in the nineteenth century.
In contrast to the USSR’s take on war, “in the Fascist dictionary it is the necessary and normal condition in which heroic nations and personalities reach their highest potential. . . .” Such thinking could be found in the democracies, too, especially in the two decades or so before the First World War. After all, the educated learned Latin everywhere in the west, including the Roman poet Horace’s phrase, “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.) During that war, Winfred Own referred to that sentiment as “the old Lie." And many politicians did everything they could to avoid the next war, leading to the catastrophic extreme of Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler, while the United States pursued an isolationist foreign policy.
Two related terms for Thompson were “honor” and “dishonor.” We do not consciously use them much in twenty-first-century international relations, but Thompson’s explanation is not hard to understand.3
Honor in England means allegiance to accepted standards of conduct. Honor in Germany and Italy means prestige. Dishonor in the Anglo-Saxon dictionary is a crime which one commits against oneself; in the Fascist dictionary it means a crime which is committed against one.
Following this logic, the U.S. dishonored itself when it turned to torture in Iraq. Similarly, our former and next president dishonored our country, our military, and his office by pardoning American war criminals. In the process, he didn’t honor international treaty obligations either. That is because his understanding of honor is more like that of the fascists of the 1930s. Anyone who takes him down a peg has injured him and faces retribution, much like a gang member who can’t afford to lose face. Looking weak is unbearable to this man, whereas conventional rules and fair play are for suckers. The current Russian president follows a similar gangland code, restoring his injured honor by having opponents poisoned or fall out of windows. There might well be a sense of injured honor involved in his attempt to destroy Ukraine.
Thompson’s column underlined something with which we are all too familiar these days. We speak the same language as our enemies. We use the same words. But our common language both obscures and fosters different perceptions of reality that leave us at cross purposes. The Russians talk about “information war."4 And Alex Jones spread disinformation in the United States with a profitable website called InfoWars. Perhaps the problem goes even deeper, and individual words themselves have become players in our fight for the soul and honor of this nation. Maybe we need a comparative political dictionary to bridge the gap or at least bring the conflict into sharper focus.
Good and healthy societies do not require to be ruled by terror. This is not to deny that terror is an enormously effective means of creating a menacing machine. The shrewd exploitations of fear is an ancient means of ruling. But it is also a dangerous way of ruling. For one thing, it cuts the rulers themselves off from reality. In a society where no one can complain, no one knows the depths of resentment ready to flare up once the opportunity comes.
– Dorothy Thompson, Let the Record Speak (Houghton Mifflin Co. 1939), 11.
Important thread by political historian Seth Coltar that extrapolates from a couple centuries of print culture and civic nationalism to our current moment.
“Who Goes Nazi?" by Dorothy Thompson, Harper’s Magazine, August 1941 (alternative link). – This short piece by a woman who watched it happen up close in Germany, Austria, and France, a woman who knew “the types,” makes for a fascinating read in our current moment.
A threat to the U.S. military’s morale, cohesion, and effectiveness: "‘Profound fear and anxiety among women in uniform’: Pentagon reacts to sex assault allegations against Hegseth", Politico, November 22, 2024. 🪖
…The only thing more vexing than being a Trump critic is being a Trump ally.
House Speaker Mike Johnson announces that male Republicans neutered by Donald Trump may continue to use the men’s bathrooms.
“Minneapolis Assault on Transgender Women Sparks Rally,” Transvitae, November 20, 2024. 🏳️⚧️
In Minneapolis, two transgender women were violently attacked, prompting a rally and raising fears within the trans community amid President Trump’s re-election. As concerns over rising transphobia grow, community leaders emphasize solidarity, self-defense, and advocacy to protect the rights and safety of transgender individuals.
'Digital Vampires': Four-Part Podcast Series
I highly recommend the following series from Paris Marx’s Tech Won’t Save Us. It underlines the stakes of the podcast’s overarching theme and even sheds light on the extreme right-wing turn among some of Silicon Valley’s ultra wealthy.
Tech Won’t Save Us challenges the notion that tech alone can drive our world forward by showing that tech is inherently political and ignoring that has serious consequences.
I don’t think there’s a trend towards actual conservatism in the Valley—there’s a trend towards monopoly and corruption, and that’s led a bunch of VCs directly to Trump. Peter Thiel wrote “Competition is for Losers” in The WSJ a decade ago! Here you go, America.
– Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, in an interview with Oliver Darcy for Status, November 17, 2024
At least, when you knock a fascist out, you will send him to a hospital or observation ward—but when he knocks you out, he sends you to a concentration camp or a crematorium.
– Frances Fineman Gunther (ca. May 1934 in Vienna), quoted by Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 8
From my experience in fascist countries, I have come to one conclusion. Rules of democratic fair play should be reserved for democrats. Decencies of liberalism should be reserved for liberals. But the only way to treat a fascist is to treat him the way he intends to treat you—first. That means hitting him below the belt before he has a chance to hit you below the belt.
– Frances Fineman Gunther (ca. May 1934 in Vienna), quoted by Deborah Cohen, Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, chap. 8
When we walked into school on the morning of 6 November, we exchanged quick glances with the other girls in our social circle – looks filled with uncertainty and dread about the future….
But as we sat down at our desks, we noticed a very different attitude among our male peers. Subtle high-fives were exchanged and remarks about the impending success of the next four years were whispered around.
– “The boys in our liberal school are different now that Trump has won,” The Guardian, November 15, 2024.
This news has hit me harder then any stupid cabinet announcement.
Dunno which nomination freaks me out the most, but if the Senate GOP bows to the recess appointments demand, we are in for a world of hurt. Will we be able to hang on until the midterms, when there’s a chance to begin picking up the pieces? More people are vulnerable than realize it. 😱