Sometimes it seems a mystery why the postmodern Left seems to be so fascist in practice — while billing itself as anti-fascist.
Consider this quotation from a leading activist of the 1920s. I’ll reveal his name afterwards:
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth … then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity … . From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.”
Is that not precisely the line of thinking that pomo leftists follow — from skepticism about objectivity to relativism to epistemological equivalence to subjective fictiveness to physicalist activism?
The quotation is from Benito Mussolini, in Diuturna [The Lasting] (1921).
It seems to be fascist because it is.
Source: Quoted in Henry B. Veatch, Rational Man: A Modern Interpretation of Aristotelian Ethics (1962).
Related:
“Mussolini on Keynes’s economics.”
“Mussolini and Kant on war and the sacrifice of individuals.”
Thank you, Stephen.
I was reminded of this blog when I came across the following lines from Karl Mannheim over the weekend.
I don’t know whether it’s applicable in the same way, but it still seems like an interesting similarity.
“Hitler has invented a new method which could be called Nazi group strategy. The main point about Hitler’s psychological strategy is that he never approaches the individual as a person but always as a member of a social group. What Hitler does instinctively is in keeping with discoveries of modern sociology, namely, that man is most easily influenced through his group ties.”
(Diagnosis of Our Time, p. 95)
https://goo.gl/UX9jXf
I was not aware of that Mannheim observation, David, so thank you. I’ll put it out on my social media.