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Fascism and the Future, Part One: Up From Newspeak | John Michael Greer
Feb. 12, 2014 (Archdruid Report) -- Over the nearly eight years that Ive been posting these weekly essays on the shape of the deindustrial future, Ive found that certain questions come up as reliably as daffodils in April or airport food on a rough flight.
Some of those fixate on topics Ive discussed here recently, such as the vaporware du jour thats allegedly certain to save industrial civilization and the cataclysm du jour thats just as allegedly certain to annihilate it. Still, Im glad to say that not all the recurring questions are as useless as these.
One of these latter deserves a good deal more attention than Ive given it so far: whether the Long Descent of industrial society will be troubled by a revival of fascism. Its a reasonable question to ask, since the fascist movements of the not so distant past were given their shot at power by the political failure and economic implosion of Europe after the First World War, and political failure and economic implosion is a tolerably good description of the current state of affairs in the United States and much of Europe these days. For that matter, movements uncomfortably close to the fascist parties of the 1920s and 1930s already exist in a number of European countries. Those who dismiss them as a political irrelevancy might want to take a closer look at history, for that same mistake was made quite regularly by politicians and pundits most of a century ago, too.
Nonetheless, with one exception -- a critique some years back of talk in the peak oil scene about the so-called feudal-fascist society the rich were supposedly planning to ram down our throats -- Ive done my best to avoid the issue so far. This isnt because its not important. Its because the entire subject is so cluttered with doubletalk and distortions of historical fact that communication on the subject has become all but impossible. Its going to take an entire post just to shovel away some of the manure thats piled up in this Augean stable of our collective imagination, and even then Im confident that many of the people who read this will manage to misunderstand every single word I say.
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Fascism and the Future, Part One: Up From Newspeak | John Michael Greer (Original Post)
Tace
Feb 2014
OP
OffWithTheirHeads
(10,337 posts)1. Most excellent!
KoKo
(84,711 posts)2. Bookmarked for later....