Amazing. Every day I get new confirmation that fascist “ideology” is just the mentality of idiot highschoolers writ large.
Kimilsungist-Kimjongilist.
Amazing. Every day I get new confirmation that fascist “ideology” is just the mentality of idiot highschoolers writ large.
Sorry for the late reply. Most of my knowledge of Wilhelm Reich comes from a book of his I picked up in school: The Mass Psychology of Fascism, which for some reason was in our library. I found his arguments – not very convincing: despite claiming to be a Marxist, he ignored economics almost totally, and instead focused on Freudian psychosexual development as the mover of history. His big claim was fascism is the direct result, not of a prolonged capitalist crisis and divisions in the ruling class, but of sexual repression. Since German children in the early 20th century were not allowed (taught?) to masturbate, and sex between adolescents was deeply discouraged, a whole lot of German citizens grew up, Reich claims, somehow sexually unfulfilled; and hence, by some sort of Freudian mechanism of symbolic castration and absence of the father, they ended up gravitating to an authoritarian regime. (Remark of a not-very-serious friend to whom I painstakingly explained this thesis: “That explains German fascism, sure, but how the hell does it account for Mussolini?”)
There were a couple things which really soured me on the book. First was some of the “evidence” presented: Reich, claims, for instance, that the swastika on the Nazi party flag is meant to evoke the Freudian “primal scene” (i.e., a prepubescent child stumbling upon his parents having sex, and interpreting it as the father committing violence against the mother). I took a good long look at some pictures of the Nazi flag after that, and no matter how I turned it, I couldn’t possibly find anything that looked like two humans screwing. Second was that a whole lot of the book is actually a polemic against the Soviet Union: the Soviet Union, claims Reich, exhibits nearly all the pathologies of fascism, and that this too is rooted in sexual repression. He actually uses, if I remember correctly, the term “red fascism,” and basically out and warns people that Nazism is bringing bad Soviet stuff into the civilized heartland of Europe. We have seen this before: anti-communism disguised as anti-fascism (it is the bread and butter of whole sectors of the online left). It exists today in claims that the CPC’s new pro-family and pro-natal policies, designed to increase the birthrate, are actually just a bunch of evil Fu Manchu conservatives trying to reverse Mao’s policies and enslave women.
Reich, by the way, ended up in the US, where he ended up being investigated by the federal government for promoting junk medicine: “orgone accumulators,” which were boxes in which you sat and soaked up the sexual energy that he claimed pervaded the universe. So pretty clearly a nut. You can probably find PDFs of his works online, but my advice is that there are way, way better uses of your time…
So he’s recycling the Wilhelm Reich thesis. I wonder when that ghastly thing will ever die.
Just another coomer lib
“Yeah, but they aren’t having enough sex with me!” – this prof
I’d say she needs to put down her copy of Beowulf and start studying history, but there’s no way in hell this woman has ever read Beowulf
Hey American auto makers, make me a good car for a reasonable price and I might buy it.
Law of the market, right?
Kim: Friendly Father
Biden: Creepy Hair-Sniffing Daddy
The old, proud liberal tradition of looking at some video on the internet and calling it geopolitical analysis
So… when does Hamas get that American arms and funding?
Butthurt lib downvoter on this comment
Marxism could have been like anarchism. A bunch of people posting online about how “pure” and “non-authoritarian” they are, and occasionally going out into the real world to do “mutual aid” (read: knocking over trash cans and spray painting “fuck the state” on a wall somewhere).
Plus, the average American moviegoer absolutely does not understand these war movies as “honest.” He experiences them as patriotic, with the “honesty” simply there to show the tough conditions our Heroes in Uniform face. Take Black Hawk Down, for example (incidentally one of the most boring things ever put to celluloid): even though it’s ostensibly an anti-war film, that very much is not the feeling you’re left with at the end.
The only people who really experience American war movies as “honest” are professional film critics who confuse masturbatory self-flagellation for real political action.
I have literally never seen an attempted anarchist “takedown” of On Authority that didn’t fall into the trap Engels identified of just renaming things. Profound thinkers indeed.
Following in the footsteps of Enlai and Xiaoping. Pretty soon he’s gonna be invading other countries like Vladimir.
It’s also got one of the all-time great film scores, by Dmitri Shostakovich. Way better than any of John Williams’ derivative crap.
Is that Xi? If so, it’s an utter fail of a likeness.
Also, I see that we’re digging out the late 90s Yugoslav war stereotypes for that Putin caricature.
I wish someone had come and freed the west from hideous 1970s fashion. Now we’ve all got to live with photos of mom and dad in bellbottoms and polyester.
To the liberal mind, there is no substance, everything is performative.
The real “inconvenient truth”