Departments

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fascism

  • SOURCE: CNN
    8/5/2021

    Why Tucker Carlson went to Hungary

    by Nicole Hemmer

    Tucker Carlson's PR visit to Orban's Hungary echoes the tribute paid by leaders of the American right to racist regimes in Rhodesia and South Africa in the 1970s, and reflect the ongoing fantasy of the right to rule free of constraints of law and democratic norms. 

  • SOURCE: Dissent
    7/12/2021

    What Was the Fascism Debate?

    by Udi Greenberg

    What are the stakes in the academic debate over whether the Trump administration was fascist? 

  • SOURCE: Jacobin
    4/25/2021

    Stop Pretending Italian Fascists Were Innocent Victims

    The growing far right has sought to draw a moral equivalency between Italian Fascists and the leftist partisans, including Communists, who fought to expel fascist forces from occupied Yugoslavia at the end of World War II. Historian Eric Gobetti says that victims of reprisals were targeted for fascist allegiance, not Italian ethnicity.

  • SOURCE: Public Seminar
    4/8/2021

    Why Weimar is an Imperfect Mirror

    by Helmut Smith

    Peter Gay's "Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider" became a key text for understanding the Weimar era as an allegory for understanding political conflict when it was published in 1968. But his psychoanalytical approach can be an impediment to understanding the historical specificity of the era. 

  • SOURCE: The Nation
    4/6/2021

    Methods of Power: How do Authoritarians Rule? (Review)

    by David A. Bell

    Is Trumpism a fascist movement or a response to a power vacuum created by decades of neoliberal policies? Historian David A. Bell reviews Ruth Ben-Ghiat's "Strongmen" and argues that the book misses the specific context of Trumpism by making him an archetype of the authoritarian ruler. 

  • 3/21/2021

    Rally 'Round the Rune: Fascist Echoes of the CPAC Stage

    by Mark Auslander and Jay Ball

    The incorporation of a Norse rune associated with the SS into the stage of the recent CPAC conference probably isn't an accident; the choice reflects the cultural cachet of Norse myth on the far right, the conservative movement's desire to maintain deniability about its ties to the far right, and the recognition that the design would be crystal clear to viewers of internet memes. 

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    3/16/2021

    Fascism and Analogies — British and American, Past and Present

    by Priya Satia

    "Historical and local specificities mean all analogies are ultimately inaccurate in ways that historians must always make clear. The point of such comparisons, however, is to uncover darker historical truths obscured by prevailing, more flattering comparisons."

  • SOURCE: Boston Review
    2/17/2021

    The Americans Who Embraced Mussolini

    Katy Hull's book looks to four American fascist sympathizers to conclude that the appeal of fascism reflected anxieties about how the United States could function as a world power and connect communitarian values with national progress. 

  • SOURCE: Just Security
    2/4/2021

    Movie at the Ellipse: A Study in Fascist Propaganda

    by Jason Stanley

    Not enough attention has been paid to the video shown to spectators at Donald Trump's January 6th "Save America" rally. A close look shows it to be a work of propaganda firmly in the tradition of fascism. 

  • 1/24/2021

    Cheese to Chalk: Can Democracies be Compared to Dictatorships?

    by Leonid Luks

    A German historian argues that American scholars and commentators have for years been too quick to equate antidemocratic measures taken by Republicans with Hitler's seizure of dictatorial power, dismissing ample research on the nature of totalitarian regimes. The last three months have shown that America's core institutions are not weak enough to be crushed. 

  • 1/14/2021

    Donald Trump’s Situational Fascism

    by Gavriel Rosenfeld

    Rather than engage in an unproductive debate about whether Donald Trump is or is not a bona fide fascist, scholars should consider the events of January 6 (and Trump's role in inciting them) as emergent, contingent results of the interplay of factors latent in American liberal democracy.