chapotraphouse

Eh, Ur-Fascism works fine for what it wants to work at, providing a rundown of fascist semiotics. Does it outline the historical and material roots of fascism? No, but that's already been covered by various Marxists and Marxism-influenced scholars, especially Dimitroff with his core idea that fascism is capitalism in decay, "the terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of financial capital." A capitalist system aching so much under its internal contradictions that it turns the mechanisms of imperialist oppression developed in the periphery inward, against the populace of the imperial core itself. That's a good explanation, it is my explanation as well, but it is also fully compatible with Eco's Ur-Fascism, because Dimitroff and Eco analyze two completely different layers of the issue, Dimitroff how fascism originates and Eco with which signifiers it operates in the emotional manipulation of the masses that is so crucial for the actively anti-rational, anti-empiricist, purely mythologizing fever dream that is fascism. Adorno and Horkheimer with their studies of the authoritarian character are also useful to grasp this propagandistic and psychosocial dimension of fascism. We need to understand how our enemies think. We also need to understand which material conditions have brought them there, that is fundamental, but we have to grasp both this "why" and that "how".

The problem with libs trying to wrap their treat-filled heads around fascism isn't that they always cite Eco, there's nothing wrong with that, the problem is that libs, being wide-eyed, bumbling idealists, would never even begin to imagine that a pure critique of semiotics is not enough to understand a subject, that like all of their beloved theories it misses its material foundation and is therefore standing upside down, with no contact to anything outside of the dazzling and blinding world of big brain ideas they would so love to inhabit.

They play pretend at the role of a revolutionary without having any greater meaning to their words. I call it Umberto Ecco’s Getting Up.