[stalker]

Sounds like the most bizarre combination ever. I mean I can imagine National Bolshevism or even the Libertarian Nazi Green Party as coherent ideologies but Feminist Fascism really takes the cake as the latter is unremittingly, totally hostile to any expression or variant of equal rights for women.

Rei please explain how the hell you reconcile the two.

[Il Duce]

Fascist Feminism would be the doom of us all....

[Rei Murasame]

I thought I did this before. We are now in a post-1968 world in which the social pressures that have been unleashed by the liberal market and the New Left have heavily shaken up the old political divide and brought an incredible re-ordering of the field.

This is at the point now where Alain de Benoist acknowledged this seismic shift in his piece "The French New Right in the Year 2000". We also observed the Far Right completely shedding its old allegiance to established churches (one that it was originally designed to shed but failed to at the critical juncture in 1937). How is it shedding it? Well, one notices Marine Le Pen taking the stage in France, and positioning herself as nothing less than the 'defender of the French secular Republic'!

As if that were not enough, one also recalls the incident in which it was discovered that Far Rightists in the UK also attended gay pride parades. We also see young people of the Far Right in the UK - in EDL form - actually engaging in a Kulturkampf whereby the defence of queer issues is juxtaposed against the influx of intolerant Muslim immigrants.

We see furthermore in continental Europe, the supposedly surprising move of homosexuality into the sphere of Pim Fortune, and even into the sphere of Geert Wilders. When I name these I of course say so strictly on a cultural level and I am not going to criticise their economics in this thread, although their economic views of all the people I've mentioned here do indeed leave much to be desired.

Father afield, there is a similar trend in Asia where Taiwan quite sternly asserts its desire to have lesbian and gay issues in their national curriculum, which was then juxtaposed against the anti-gay policies and social norms in mainland China which are seen as parochial.

And then we see India, where just recently homosexuality was legalised in the Delhi high court under the government of the BJP, under the logic that homophobia was a foreign concept that was imposed onto India by the British. Nationalist bloggers such as Arnab Mitra at the Hindustan Times then emerged immediately to support the decision, declaring that "everyone loves a good homosexual", extolling "the free mixing between the two sexes" and "power equations have changed dramatically within families", and "this clash was inevitable. The old order is changing, yielding place to the new".

I don't want to live in 1920, does anyone else? That I take it to its logical conclusion ought not to be surprising. It is not "Fascist feminism", it is Fascism that emerged in a society where feminism already was active.

[Verv]

Rei's position, while I do not agree with it 100%, is logical and well thought out.

I am confused how people do not think that there could be 'feminism' in 'fascism' when we are talking about not any specific fascist ideology necessarily but, what she has used as a recurring theme in her posting career, the emergence of a new right wing (of which she is a clear advocate).

I think you would find a sizable amount of the far right here are entirely unorthodox. Hell, for that matter you see members of the general left here as well that do not carry the ideological burdens of yesteryear and have divorced themselves from some of the more pulpy, populist concepts of what the 'right' and the 'left' are and need to be.

One of the things that makes PoFo unique is that it is not a site where discussing politics is done from very populist terms... There is not this "99%" idea but more of a pure, rationalist approach to politics. That is why I simply cannot discuss politics with people whose concept of it is being up on the "Democrat/Republican" "Labor/Tory," "Sae Nuridang/Minjudang" principles... These are utterly irrelevant to me, by and large, and much of it does not even catch my eye as interesting because it is such a ridiculously small scope through which to view the world.

[Rei Murasame]

Indeed, Verv, these ideologies are not codified commandments, they are formed and assembled within circumstances that are not of the people's choosing. Its ideological role is actually what defines it, and not the specific bullet-pointed tenets within it.

To really show how obvious it might be, imagine if New Fascism emerged inside Thailand. Would anyone be surprised that it might in fact embrace transgendered people as its own culture? No doubt.

Would we then say, "that's impossible, that's not what they did in 1920!"

Sure, but it wouldn't have served to support the basis of their power at that time, would it?

[Rei Murasame]

Double-post, but I should mention that if my responses seem brief it's because we are in Gorkiy and I am just typing without structuring the thoughts in my head first. It might also be wise of me to mention that I talked about this issue before in the context of the past as well (I now searched for it):

Take for instance the ideological milieu around Japanese fascism at the beginning of the Showa era, where they - the Journal of Racial Hygiene - actually did seek collaboration with "these feminists" as they used to say, because they wanted to overturn the traditional Confucian view about women, and make women into people who are enabled to pass down blood along a family line and vet the fitness of partners.

Now, you know this cuts directly against the traditional view, in which women are regarded as merely vessels for men and not the active party. This is why in the lead-up to that war and during it, and even after it, no laws were actually passed to actualise that new eugenically-inspired view that the people at the Journal of Racial Hygiene had proposed back then.

It was only as late as the year Showa 59 (read: 1984 CE!) that finally they actually passed the laws to give women a leg up and shatter the traditional family structure in a legal sense. Fifty-eight years late.

So despite the fact that the whole thing was couched in racial terms and pushed by fascists, the whole thing was on block and stalled in the train-station under a snow-blizzard, until... the New Left showed up and cleared the snow off of the tracks and that train could then actually depart the station.

It's no surprise that people are wary of 'traditional' conservatives and their influence. They are obstructionists.

Let's take another example, the United States. Charlotte Perkins Gilman was talking about a type of 'women's nationalism' back in 1910, and traditional Christian conservatives and Fabians both pissed and moaned and complained, and threw themselves all over her in an attempt to shut her up. Yet again it would be the New Left that would come along later and clear the snow off those train-tracks as well. Gilman's works are still part of the 'Ur-texts' of feminism today, just they are not frequently read anymore since they've been superseded by subsequent waves of feminism which are more developed.

It's not surprising that the New Left gets credited, since they came and magnificently smashed up everything and thus opened up a social space for everyone to actually operate in. The very Far Right views that I espouse - for example - would actually not have any social space to exist in if it were not for the fact that the New Left smashed many of the edifices of the old society and carried in post-modernism which brought into question the foundations of that old society and this modern one as well.

We on the Far Right have even appropriated the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian socialist, to use as an assist in our critique of modern society. This is not a bad thing. If the Left happens to say that the sky is blue and it is, then we need not obstinately claim that the sky is purple.

We should not be seeking alliances with traditional conservatives unless they agree to stop believing the traditional things that they believe in. I think that the European New Right has been quite correct in taking that sort of non-compromising line by issuing statements about how the European New Right is, "anti-capitalist, anti-American, [pro-]pagan".

And to clarify, of course "American" is not a group of people, it is a global liberal idea, that idea which threatens us with the destruction of identity in the name of trade interests (the danger of supercapitalism) along with universalist so-called 'anti-racist' Judeo-Islamo-Christianity as the oil on the ball-bearings of that destructive device (among other things...).

I'll quote one of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's essays from 1923, "Is America too Hospitable?", with the area highlighted which is a real example of what they were thinking:



She then goes on to basically (and correctly) blame, in addition to the founders of the USA, the financiers, the free market, and profiteering for the rest of the trouble.

They loved their country because it was their nursery, playground, and workshop--theirs and their children's. They were proud of it as a workshop, proud of their record of ever-increasing efficiency; they had made a pleasant garden of it, a very practical little heaven; but most of all they valued it--and here it is hard for us to understand them--as a cultural environment for their children.

That, of course, is the keynote of the whole distinction-- their children.

From those first breathlessly guarded, half-adored race mothers, all up the ascending line, they had this dominant thought of building up a great race through the children.

All the surrendering devotion our women have put into their private families, these women [instead] put into their country and race. All the loyalty and service men expect of wives, they gave, not singly to men, but collectively to one another.

And the mother instinct, with us so painfully intense, so thwarted by conditions, so concentrated in personal devotion to a few, so bitterly hurt by death, disease, or barrenness, and even by the mere growth of the children, leaving the mother alone in her empty nest--all this feeling with them [instead] flowed out in a strong, wide current, unbroken through the generations, deepening and widening through the years, including every child in all the land.

"Children!" she said [referring to the adult citizens in metaphor]. "Anything more like the behaviour of a lot of poor, underbred children it would be hard to find. Quarrelsome, selfish, each bragging that he can 'lick' the others -- Oh you poor dears! How you do need your mother! And she's coming at last."

"And I suppose you think she will solve these economic problems forthwith."

"Why not, Van? Look here, dear -- why can't you people see... [t]here is nothing to prevent human beings in this historic period from being healthy, beautiful, rich, intelligent, good - and happy."

"That's easy to say, my dear," I remarked, rather glumly, "I wish it was true."

"Why isn't it true?" she demanded. "Do you think Satan prevents you, or God, or what? Don't you see-- can't you see? God's on the side of all the growing good of life. God's with you-- what's against?"

You know I can't resist puncturing these balloon-like stereotypes[...]

There was actually a division within protofascist thought over whether fascism was going to be imbued with masculine symbolism or feminine symbolism, and there was also an internal debate over whether women were going to be empowered within it or not.

In Ernst Bergmann's book, "The German National Church" (1933), in a chapter called "The Mystery Principate of Woman", Bergmann suggests - in seriousness - that there ought to be a Germanic Mother Goddess and a cult of 'providential maternity', in which the Nordic mother figure is then elevated to the position of "Highest Priestess in the dawning Easter morning of a racial epoch". And then he demands that from time to time, all males must sink into contemplation of this "image of the eternal mother", like if it were a sort of mandala, so as not to fall prey to any distractions from the indisputable fact of the race-mother's eugenic selective power and supreme competence. Oh, and marriage would be apparently have to be abolished because marriage would get in the way of all this if were to continue.

Was it a well-developed position? Not exactly, the deeper you dig into it, the more problems arise, but you can see where he was going with it.

Sophie Rogge-Börner (definitely a protofascist herself), editor of the journal Die Duetsche Kämpferin (The German Woman Warrior), responded to Bergmann by critiquing (quite rightly) the most obvious problem in it, which is that in his enthusiasm he had leaned into a dysfunctional one-sided image of the woman as a purely maternal creature. She pointed out that women should not be only objects in a eugenic matriarchy, but that they should in fact be empowered in all areas and should take on leadership roles in all fields, drawing on the Iron Age woman as a jump-point from which to reference the woman's ability to defend herself, bear arms, and produce original thoughts.

Had the two of these positions found some sort of synthesis it might've been interesting to see what would've happened (although obviously all this stuff is quite undeveloped compared to present-day feminism, but that was the 1930s so forgive them), but unfortunately as it turned out, it was the masculine groups that gained control over the fascist movement when it actually coalesced into the form that it was to take, and those masculine groups had no intention of power sharing after they had gotten on top.

So you see, the Right is really not that simple or stereotypical at all.

More coming soon.

[Rei Murasame]

Triple-post but I just found this alignment funny:

There is no such thing as an illegitimate child. I am fucking sick of people talking about 'illegitimacy'. Every child of the nation is legitimate so long as the woman consents to the pregnancy. Every single one of them is legitimate. I absolutely despise this anti-child anti-sex anti-race nonsensical talking point. Every child of the nation is legitimate, and if some craven child-molesting Priest representing a foreign middle eastern (wtf!) religion wants to say otherwise, he can fuck - just miles of - off.

Fast forward two years and and the same sentiment appears in the mouth of the Indian columnist I quoted from in my first post in this thread:

So, how was the Supreme Court judgment legalising “cohabitation”– living in – out of sync with Indian culture. And why is its judgment giving children born out of wedlock (and here, I deliberately avoid using the highly derogatory word illegitimate) the same rights as those born within a legally recognised marriage being criticized as being influenced by a foreign culture?

Even so-called “love marriages” – where a man and a woman – decide to marry against the wishes of their relatives and communities have always been a part and parcel of Indian culture. Such marriages are called “gandharva vivah”. There are innumerable instances of such marriages in ourholy as well as secular texts, all dating back to antiquity – ie, thousands of years before the West became a player in world affairs.

And what were swayamvars? They were platforms that allowed women to choose their own husbands. Often, the women had prior relations, including sexual ones, with the men they finally selected publicly.

One can imagine that I smiled upon reading that sentence.

[Demolitionman]

It would not surprise me if many of the far right don't care too much for homosexuals but realise that opposing them hurts the movement more than it helps as evidenced by the EDL(the Anglo working class aren't known for their love of homos) for the incident Rei mentioned. Simply put, the issue of homosexuality is not terribly important in light of the main goals of the far right and could be dealt with (if desired) at a later stage.

For now, gay influence and issues should be channelled towards far right goals primarily by highlighting to the left how contradictory their beliefs are.

[Rei Murasame]

Since we are in Gorkiy, on that note I'll add in fact - on average - that I've experienced less negative discrimination from men who hold Far-Right views than I have from the centre-right.

It seems to me that the far-right just can't work up the effort to run around annoying people on these issues. Let me paint two examples, since I am a bisexual woman and you would think that'd be just asking for trouble, right? Well:

• In the first example, it's truly remarkable how centre-rightists that I have known have tried to trash my name and talk behind my back as soon as I made the 'mistake' of revealing my tendencies to them. I've actually been referred to in terms that would make your hair stand on end.
  
  
• In contrast, I have not observed the same thing among the Far Right, as I have been tolerated and even covered for by them before. Those I've known have taken the view that they can't be bothered to care about the issue.

For now, gay influence and issues should be channelled towards far right goals primarily by highlighting to the left how contradictory their beliefs are.

On that note, you remember the thing where Muslim fundamentalists were posting anti-gay leaflets through people's front doors in UK towns, right? It's like "what the hell?"

[Fasces]

To add a final note: A syncretic and unitary regime which seeks to protect and express the will of its people as a whole cannot do so by ignoring the interests of 50% of the population.

[Dave]

It's perfectly sensible. The logical endpoint of feminism is fascism, since feminism is incompatible with the sort of orderly morality that underpins all free societies. Feminism results in moral and societal breakdown, and thus the maintenance of order requires ever-increasing amounts of state repression. And since feminism is opposed to reason, fairness, and freedom it is compatible with many fascist values.

We can see this in the West today. Feminism is destroying society, and states are becoming far more repressive. Rising levels of incarceration, increasing budgets and personnel for internal security services, weaker evidential standards and attacks on attorney-client privilege, and increasing criminalization and medicalization of unacceptable political speech. Feminism is partly responsible for all of this.

To add a final note: A syncretic and unitary regime which seeks to protect and express the will of its people as a whole cannot do so by ignoring the interests of 50% of the population.

These interests are not served by feminism, so I'm unsure what your point is.

[Preston Cole]

Well, there's an anti-fascist post from Dave that I didn't expect.

http://xtremerightcorporate.blogspot.co ... /feminists

Women have a great responsibility in this and must embrace TRUE feminism. That does not mean embracing the cause of the so-called “feminists” of today who want to remake women along the lines of the very worst aspects of men. The true feminist recognizes that women can be anything their talents allow and must even shoulder their share of the burden of national defense (in non-combatant roles although they should be trained for that). However, the true feminist also does not sacrifice her femininity and does not embrace the permanent ‘victim’ status being pushed on women. Women have a great deal of power and always have and it is the women who can and must take the lead in reforming the men. Too many men today are listless, pathetic creatures and all too often it is women who have been responsible for this as they themselves have fallen prey to the Marxist lie of total and absolute equality.

Alessandra Mussolini is a feminist, too.

That said, I don't really share Rei's optimism in part of the far-right's exploring the issues of homosexuality, especially Taiwan embracing these issues (which I think is the result of the KMT's liberalization while the PRC can enforce anti-gay policies because it's not connected to world liberalism).

[Dave]

Women have a great deal of power and always have and it is the women who can and must take the lead in reforming the men. Too many men today are listless, pathetic creatures and all too often it is women who have been responsible for this as they themselves have fallen prey to the Marxist lie of total and absolute equality.

It is this sort of view which leads to the destruction of society. Because women have sexual superiority over men, giving women legal and economic equality leads to overall social superiority. With power comes responsibility, and women are simply not equipped for this sort of responsibility. Worse, because women are attracted to power it leads to many men simply being considered unattractive and unsuitable, permanently. This causes a collapse in family formation, family stability, and birth rates.

This isn't even speculation, as all of this has already happened.

[Sephardi]

Well my communications professor is a ball breaking feminist who teaches us that masculinity is the cause of everything bad in the world. She's also a power hungry professor who uses her power over male students who aren't allowed to argue back so she's an educational fascist. Is that fascist feminism?

[Preston Cole]

Fascist feminism is a moronic term. Feminism teaches women to be what they aren't, while fascism incorporates them into the organic nation with their nature-given roles.

[Soixante-Retard]

Fascist feminism?...



?



I joke, cool down Marxists...

[Daktoria]

Well my communications professor is a ball breaking feminist who teaches us that masculinity is the cause of everything bad in the world. She's also a power hungry professor who uses her power over male students who aren't allowed to argue back so she's an educational fascist. Is that fascist feminism?

If you want, just ask her to prove her arguments.

My experience with feminazis is they fundamentally overlook affirmative burden of proof. They play a lot of "Why not?" games to make you think for them.

Also, if they throw out statistics, just say "post hoc" and call them out for stereotyping.

[R_G]

Fascism by definition is strict law enforcement and open decree of destroying anything opposing the enacting will.


I imagine Feminist Fascism would go like so:

All those who oppose equality of women in work force, sport and government are imprisoned or killed.
Feminism is a social mainstay and well advertised.
Ultimately, the highest seat in every department is held by a woman.

THAT would be Feminist Faschism.

It's like Liberal Fascism and telling people what they can or cannot say under political correctness.

[Preston Cole]

Again, this use of the word fascism as nothing else but enforcement of strict laws is just nonsensical. There's no such thing as liberal/feminist/whatever fascism. At least call it feminist totalitarianism or something.

[Daktoria]

Again, this use of the word fascism as nothing else but enforcement of strict laws is just nonsensical. There's no such thing as liberal/feminist/whatever fascism. At least call it feminist totalitarianism or something.

Not true:

http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/icuss/pdfs/LeftLegalism.pdf

What is the value of rights language for women?
An impossible question in many ways, especially when it is uninflected by
historical, political, or cultural specificity, I nevertheless took it as an
opportunity to consider, at a very general level, the difficult relation between
select contemporary feminist ambitions and rights discourse in the United States.

There is a certain political immediacy to the study of this relation, given the
transposition of venue from the streets to the courtroom of many social movements over
the past two decades. If much of the struggle against male dominance,
homophobic practices, and racism now dwells irretrievably in the field of
rights claims and counterclaims, what are the perils and possibilities of this
dwelling?

Speaking for the disenfranchised in loose cross-cultural fashion, Gayatri
Spivak depicts liberalism (and other modernist emancipatory formations)
as "that which we cannot not want.'" This from a Derridean Marxist
postcolonial feminist critic keenly aware of what liberalism cannot deliver,
what its hidden cruelties are, what unemancipatory relations of power it conceals in
its sunny formulations of freedom and equality. Indeed, Spivak's grammar suggests
a condition of constraint in the production of our desire so radical that it perhaps
even turns that desire against itself, foreclosing our hopes in a language we can
neither escape nor wield on our own behalf.

Yet even in Williams's and Cornell's critical yet ultimately utopian rapprochements with rights discourse,
there is a tacit confession that recalls Spivak's own weary recognition of the historical
limits of our political imagination. If we are constrained to need and want rights, do
they inevitably shape as well as claim our desire without gratifying it?

Given the still precarious and fraught conditions of women's existence in a
world ordered by a relentless construction and exploitation of sexual difference as
subordination, certainly rights appear as that which we cannot not want. Our
relative reproductive unfreedom; our sexual violability and objectification; the
highly exploitable character of much of our paid and unpaid labor; our vulnerability
to losing our children, means of subsistence, and social standing when we resist
compulsory heterosexuality- all of these require redress if we are not only to
survive in this world but amass the strength and standing to create a more just one.
And the panoply of rights women have acquired in this century - to vote, work, and
divorce; to keep our children when we deviate from sexual norms; to not be sexually
harassed at work and school; to have equal access to jobs and be paid equal sums
for the work we do side by side with men; to prosecute sexual violence without
putting our own sexual lives on trial; to decide whether, when, and how we will
have children; to be free of violence in our homes - these are things we
cannot not want. And if these acquisitions remain tenuous and partial, then surely
procuring and pressing our rights to them can only abet the process of making them
more certain possessions.

Yet this very list of our historical woes and their minimal redress over the past
century through a proliferation of rights for women also recalls that rights almost
always serve as a mitigation - but not a resolution - of subordinating powers.
Although rights may attenuate the subordination and violation to which
women are vulnerable in a masculinist social, political, and economic
regime, they vanquish neither the regime nor its mechanisms of
reproduction. They do not eliminate male dominance even as they soften
some of its effects. Such softening is not itself a problem: if violence is
upon you, almost any means of reducing it is of value. The problem
surfaces in the question of when and whether rights for women are
formulated in such a way as to enable the escape of the subordinated from
the site of that violation, and when and whether they build a fence around
us at that site, regulating rather than challenging the conditions within. And
the paradox within this problem is this: the more highly specified rights are
as rights for women, the more likely they are to build that fence insofar as
they are more likely to encode a definition of women premised on our
subordination in the transhistorical discourse of liberal jurisprudence.

The first part of the paradox might be understood as the problem that
Foucault painted most masterfully in his formulation of the regulatory
powers of identity and of rights based on identity. To have a right as a
woman is not to be free of being designated and subordinated by gender.
Rather, though it may entail some protection from the most immobilizing
features of that designation, it reinscribes the designation as it protects us,
and thus enables our further regulation through that designation. Rights
ranging from the right to abort unwanted pregnancies to the right to litigate
sexual harassment have presented this dilemma: we are interpellated as
women when we exercise these rights, not only by the law but by all the
agencies, clinics, employers, political discourses, mass media, and more
that are triggered by our exercise of such rights. The regulatory dimension
of identity-based rights emerges to the extent that rights are never
deployed "freely," but always within a discursive, hence normative
context, precisely the context in which "woman" (and any other identity category)
is iterated and reiterated.

The second paradox is the one illuminated by Marxist and neo-Marxist critiques
of liberalism: in inegalitarian orders, rights differentially empower different social
groups, depending on their ability to enact the power that a right potentially entails.
This is not to say that generically distributed rights offer nothing to those in the lower
strata of such orders - First Amendment rights offer something to all- but that, as
countless critics have pointed out-;the more social resources and the less social
vulnerability one brings to the exercise of a right, the more power that exercise will
reap, whether the right at issue is sexual freedom, private property, speech, or
abortion. And still another conundrum of rights comes into play here. To the extent
that rights such as private property rights are exercised not only against the state but
against one another in economic arrangements in which some gain at the expense of
others, universally distributed rights function not only as power but as deprivation:
the right to private property is a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth through the
production of another's poverty.

There's a lot more in the essay, but I think this is enough to prove my point.