Everyday Life in Fascist Society - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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The non-democratic state: Platonism, Fascism, Theocracy, Monarchy etc.
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#14387734
1984 wasn't satire. It was the outline for a better future.

At last, SO - somebody who gets it.
#14387742
You're not supposed to empathize with Winston Smith or Julia. They are disaffected and violent radicals who promise to murder children if necessary. The beauty of the story is that the system works: violent criminals are safely weeded out and rehabilitated. I don't know how you could read the book and walk away with the impression that Winston is a good guy or even a victim.
#14387945
warsmith17 wrote:Looking at your post history, I seriously thought your end goal was something like what Special Olympian posted (which was the most hilarious post I've ever seen on this site.


Sure he was satirizing it.

The one thing that I would assume about a Fascist society is that everyone would probably have a stronger sense of purpose, and society would be more united.


Of course.
#14388205
What will fascism be like?

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. They shall squeeze you empty and then they shall fill you with ourselves.

The Party would not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it gets power because men in the masses are frail and cowardly creatures who can not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who are stronger than themselves. The choice for mankind lays between freedom and happiness, but for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. The party is the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.

But the Party also seeks power entirely for its own sake. They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. They will be different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that they will know what they are doing.

They will know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.

Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that an individual is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. The new fascism will be founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else they shall destroy — everything.

They shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of the Party. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.*

*with apologies to George Orwell
#14388266
It's so beautiful. How could people look upon Orwell's perfect work and reject it?

Precisely, SO. The final pages of 1984 always bring a tear to my eye - a tear of joy at the awesome beauty of Winston Smith's redemption. He was lost, but has now been found. He had strayed, but has now been brought back into the loving embrace of Big Brother. It is possibly the supreme achievement in all of world literature.... <there isn't even a smiley which can adequately symbolise the supreme spiritual awesomeness of it all - just imagine that I've put the most awesome smiley ever right here>
#14388275
I can not agree more. The end of 1984 is moving. The ending of the book is so powerful because, well, it ends. You leave the wonderland Orwell constructed and you realize the utopia he described will not exist unless you make it exist.

I think most readers don't realize that Winston Smith is an unreliable narrator. He's an anti-social alcoholic. He buys a diary so he can document his unsatisfying and humiliating liaisons with elderly prostitutes. And worst of all, he is a repressed homosexual with a crush on O'Brien, his immediate supervisor.

Winston Smith is a weak man desperate to blame his inadequacies on the world around him. Orwell was a genius to contrast the most perfect ideology with the least perfect man. It only makes fascism that much more attractive and proves that fascism has a plan and a place for even the smallest cog in the great machine that is society.
#14389459
Red_Bull wrote:Under a modern Fascist society, citizenship would take on a greater meaning while the state would be perceived as an embodiment of the people's will rather than a nefarious entity. Nationalism would hold greater importance while modern corporations would work with the government rather than against it. A Fascist America for example, would be less concerned with irredentism/war mongering but more so with self-sufficiency. America is totally dependent on foreign markets like the Chinese. That obviously would have to change. I would suspect a Fascist America would be far more isolationist, prioritizing domestic affairs over world affairs. That's just my ideal version in a nut shell.

This is actually like my ideal regime, as far as nation states go. Only I do not self identify as being a fascist, but rather as being a liberal socialist. I suppose though that a number of leftists would deride me as being a social fascist, and conservatives might tar me as being a liberal fascist. But part of a social democratic mixed economy does involve social corporatism. So I suppose that I wouldn't mind so much being termed a red fascist. But it's just that I also believe in the principle of the social contract, and/or the mandate of heaven. In other words "lex rex", rather than "rex lex". The head of state would serve as father of the fatherland, and uphold the public good, while still respecting fundamental civil rights of the individual, so far as they do not undermine the well being of society at large.
#14464697
Typical day in a fascist society:

Company representative - "Your company, along with the Works Council, have decided to cut wages and lay off many workers."
Worker - "I will complain to the Court of Arbitration and exercise my rights under the Workers' Agreement"

The worker appeals to the government and then the government responds with the secret police and the worker is taken behind a wall and shot. All this talk about corporatism, organic society, the nation and all that jazz amounts to nothing when corporate executives want to make extra profit.

Neoliberalism is bad, the fascists say, but Thatcherism with death squads is somehow better for the worker? The legitimacy of fascism is dependent on the support of the big business and smallholders and without that support, fascism will revert to liberalism or socialism becomes a viable alternative.
#14464823
The Immortal Goon wrote:What will fascism be like?

Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. They shall squeeze you empty and then they shall fill you with ourselves.

The Party would not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it gets power because men in the masses are frail and cowardly creatures who can not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who are stronger than themselves. The choice for mankind lays between freedom and happiness, but for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better. The party is the eternal guardian of the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come, sacrificing its own happiness to that of others.

But the Party also seeks power entirely for its own sake. They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. They will be different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that they will know what they are doing.

They will know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Alone — free — the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.

Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that an individual is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. The new fascism will be founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else they shall destroy — everything.

They shall abolish the orgasm. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of the Party. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.*

*with apologies to George Orwell


This isn't describing fascism. It's describing every civilized society.
#14465180
Watch Thomas the Tank Engine.

Thomas the Tank Engine Lives in a Totalitarian Dystopia
Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, a story about sentient trains learning about responsibility, friendship and all that noise, might possibly be the most sickeningly wholesome children's show in existence. With that in mind, it'd take some pretty massive balls to accuse said show of, say, promoting totalitarianism, fascism and racism.

Shauna Wilton, a professor of political sciences at the University of Alberta, has just such balls. She argues that the world of Thomas the Tank Engine is in reality a fascist, racist hellhole where dreams go to die and where only "useful" elements are allowed to continue to toil away in pointless misery.

Or maybe ... maybe someone switched Wilton's Thomas DVDs with Schindler's List.

Why It's Not That Crazy:

Here's a totally hypothetical question: What if one of the trains on the show decided that he wanted to do something else with his life, like travel or star on Snakes on a Train 2: Snake Harder? He'd probably get yelled at and told to get back to work.

You see, on the island of Sodor where the show takes place, there is only room for really useful engines. That's not only the show's catch phrase, but also the basic summary of every episode in the series. That is, the engines are either trying to prove themselves or worrying that they aren't working hard enough (see "James and the Coaches," "Thomas, Percy and the Post Train," "Tender Engines" and many more).

This totalitarian obsession with usefulness is instilled in the engines by the iron fist of Sir Topham Hatt, aka the Fat Controller, who swiftly punishes all those deemed as "useless."

In the episode "Break Van," Hatt has two twin engines, Donald and Douglas, compete against each other to determine which one he will send back to Scotland to be destroyed. In "The Sad Story of Henry," when an engine refuses to go out of the tunnel because of the rain, Hatt actually gives orders to brick him alive in the tunnel.

You can't really defend any of this by saying that the trains are Hatt's property. They are obviously sentient beings capable of emotions ... one of which unfortunately happens to be racism. In the show, there is a clear feud going on between the steam engines like Thomas and Percy and the diesel engines, who are depicted as stubborn, lazy and shifty.

In the episode "Daisy," a diesel named Daisy arrives on Sodor and flat out refuses to do chores. In "The Diseasel," a diesel called BoCo is accused of stealing trucks. In "Thomas's Day Off," a new, lazy diesel, Dennis, tricks Thomas into doing his work. Even the closest thing the show has to a villain is a diesel fucking named DIESEL.

But maybe there is some perfectly reasonable, nonracist explanation for why the trains that run on clean white steam dislike the trains powered by dirty, black diesel oil. So, if you can think of one, please tell us, because we're just dying to hear it.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19673_6- ... z3DPR73rTN
#14465196
This is a glowing description of the life in North Korea. The dictatorship seems to have its fans in the west.

Welcome to the land where the streets are full of children playing and there is no litter on the ground. Where there is respect for elders and “the state provides everything”. A land where there is “a splendid sense of community”.

Sound familiar? It may not be the usual verdict on North Korea; there is, for instance, a distinct absence of any reference to forced labour, hunger or personality cults.

But this is North Korea nonetheless – as seen through the eyes of one of Italy’s political party leaders.

Matteo Salvini, head of the right-wing Northern League, has returned from a five-day visit to North Korea and has warm words for the country, which, according to the United Nations, “does not have any parallel in the contemporary world” in terms of human rights abuses.

“I am happy to have gone,” Salvini told Italian daily Corriere della Sera. “I saw a splendid sense of community. Many children playing in the streets and not not on play stations. A great respect for older people. Things that no longer exist in Italy.”

When the journalist pointed out concerns over Pyongyang’s nuclear programme and its human rights violations, Salvini was quoted as responding: “While I would not swap my life for the one they lead in North Korea, the death penalty also exists in the United States. And as far as freedom of the press is concerned, ok, there they do nothing but talk of the Supreme Leader, but here don’t people sing [prime minister Matteo] Renzi’s praises every day?”

Salvini travelled to North Korea with another Italian politician, Antonio Razzi, a senator in Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Forza Italia party. He told Il Fatto Quotidiano last year that North Korea reminded him of Switzerland, praising people’s punctuality and their “very, very clean” streets.

While the Northern League is also known for its xenophobic rhetoric, it appears Salvini has a lot of time for the North Korean way of doing things. He said the country operated according to “another model which I do not demonise”. “There, the state provides everything: school, housing, work,” he said. “The American lifestyle is not the only one that exists in the world.”

He went on to criticise the trade restrictions slapped on Pyongyang by the west as “idiotic”. North Korea, he added, represented a “huge opportunity for our [Italy’s] businesspeople.”

Salvini’s bizarre remarks sparked a mixture of condemnation and satire on social media on Wednesday. “Salvini’s comments on North Korea prove that anyone who votes [for the Northern League] is a danger to themselves and others,” wrote economist Michele Boldrin on Twitter.
#14465198
"Many children playing in the streets and not not on play stations. A great respect for older people."

Salvini’s bizarre remarks sparked a mixture of condemnation and satire on social media on Wednesday. “Salvini’s comments on North Korea prove that anyone who votes [for the Northern League] is a danger to themselves and others,” wrote economist Michele Boldrin on Twitter.

lol, these are bizarre remarks indeed, having no play stations is hardly anything of which to boast; play stations are a far superior recreational activity to running around in circles. Poor people..
#14471666
AFAIK wrote:Watch Thomas the Tank Engine.

Thomas the Tank Engine Lives in a Totalitarian Dystopia
Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, a story about sentient trains learning about responsibility, friendship and all that noise, might possibly be the most sickeningly wholesome children's show in existence. With that in mind, it'd take some pretty massive balls to accuse said show of, say, promoting totalitarianism, fascism and racism.

Shauna Wilton, a professor of political sciences at the University of Alberta, has just such balls. She argues that the world of Thomas the Tank Engine is in reality a fascist, racist hellhole where dreams go to die and where only "useful" elements are allowed to continue to toil away in pointless misery.

Or maybe ... maybe someone switched Wilton's Thomas DVDs with Schindler's List.

Why It's Not That Crazy:

Here's a totally hypothetical question: What if one of the trains on the show decided that he wanted to do something else with his life, like travel or star on Snakes on a Train 2: Snake Harder? He'd probably get yelled at and told to get back to work.

You see, on the island of Sodor where the show takes place, there is only room for really useful engines. That's not only the show's catch phrase, but also the basic summary of every episode in the series. That is, the engines are either trying to prove themselves or worrying that they aren't working hard enough (see "James and the Coaches," "Thomas, Percy and the Post Train," "Tender Engines" and many more).

This totalitarian obsession with usefulness is instilled in the engines by the iron fist of Sir Topham Hatt, aka the Fat Controller, who swiftly punishes all those deemed as "useless."

In the episode "Break Van," Hatt has two twin engines, Donald and Douglas, compete against each other to determine which one he will send back to Scotland to be destroyed. In "The Sad Story of Henry," when an engine refuses to go out of the tunnel because of the rain, Hatt actually gives orders to brick him alive in the tunnel.

You can't really defend any of this by saying that the trains are Hatt's property. They are obviously sentient beings capable of emotions ... one of which unfortunately happens to be racism. In the show, there is a clear feud going on between the steam engines like Thomas and Percy and the diesel engines, who are depicted as stubborn, lazy and shifty.

In the episode "Daisy," a diesel named Daisy arrives on Sodor and flat out refuses to do chores. In "The Diseasel," a diesel called BoCo is accused of stealing trucks. In "Thomas's Day Off," a new, lazy diesel, Dennis, tricks Thomas into doing his work. Even the closest thing the show has to a villain is a diesel fucking named DIESEL.

But maybe there is some perfectly reasonable, nonracist explanation for why the trains that run on clean white steam dislike the trains powered by dirty, black diesel oil. So, if you can think of one, please tell us, because we're just dying to hear it.

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19673_6- ... z3DPR73rTN


Children's TV shows tend to reinforce the Protestant work ethic. At least the kids are not being brainwashed to such an extent when the play their Xbox. This insipid conditioning of our children through TV is hard for a parent to counter, especially with the amount of TV that is watched by kids. Personally speaking as a parent, my kids are watching much less TV as the boys are playing computer games and the girls are social networking. My youngest son hardly watches any TV, his maths ability is incredible and I put this down to playing games most of his life. His vocabulary is excellent as he is talking on Xbox live continually. He is 8 years old.
#14471743
Technology wrote:
I've never understood this line.


Look at its context:

But the Party also seeks power entirely for its own sake. They are not interested in the good of others; they are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. They will be different from all the oligarchies of the past, in that they will know what they are doing.

They will know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.


O'Brien is saying that the oligarchies of the past pursued power only as a means to "noble" ends. But of course, the only reason that the oligarchy exists is because of its pursuit of power, and not because its existence is "justified" by the "noble" goals it purports to strive for. The oligarchies of the past have also all ceased to exist precisely because they forgot what was the reason for their existence, power, and sacrificed power for the sake of their "noble" ends. This made them weak, and more ruthless groups replaced them. O'Brien says that The Party will not have this fatal flaw. It will pursue power for its own sake, and so, it will never succumb to a challenger.
#14471749
Also, Orwell has another shining moment in 1984 where he touches on a real truth, and that is in this section here:
1984, Part Three, pg 234, George Orwell wrote:The first thing you must realise is that power is collective. The individual only has power in so far as he ceases to be an individual.

You know the Party slogan 'Freedom is Slavery." Has it ever occurred to you that it is reversible? Slavery is freedom.

Alone - free - the human being is always defeated. It must be so, because every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures. But if he can make complete, utter submission, if he can escape from his identity, if he can merge himself into the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all-powerful and immortal.

The second thing for you to realise is that power is power over human beings. Over the body - but, above all, over the mind.

This was a moment of actual genius, because it is actually true. When the human is atomised, left adrift in a sea of infinite possibility but with no power to act, defeat follows from that. But when people come together for a common agenda, then human beings gain power over everything and can decide everything.

Real power is the ability to get things done, and what I like about you the most Saeko, is that you get it.

[Soundtrack]
#14471753
That Salvini guy appears to be some kind of nazbol.
In addition to being Lega Nord he apparently also ran for office on some ticket called Comunisti Padani or Comunisti Po.
Actually LN appeared to have some ideological variation within its ranks. As long as you agreed with racism and northern Italian secession/autonomy LN didn't seem to care what your stances were on any other issue.
#14471775
Rei Murasame wrote:Also, Orwell has another shining moment in 1984 where he touches on a real truth, and that is in this section here:

This was a moment of actual genius, because it is actually true. When the human is atomised, left adrift in a sea of infinite possibility but with no power to act, defeat follows from that. But when people come together for a common agenda, then human beings gain power over everything and can decide everything.

Real power is the ability to get things done, and what I like about you the most Saeko, is that you get it.

[Soundtrack]


Exactly! In my opinion, that whole book is just a prop that holds up that passage. It is one of the most important and underrated insights ever. I wrote about this a little in this post.

I don't think of myself as particularly individualistic or egoistic. I know that I am just a cog in the machine, and ultimately insignificant in the grand scheme of things. I also don't place any value on the individual in and of himself, nor do I believe that people ought to do what is in their self-interest.


I agree with the part about living without regard to the well-being of humanity as a whole, but unlike Stirner, I don't draw a sharp boundary between myself and everything else.

To illustrate, I care about attaining power as an end in itself, but I don't see it as something that I am uniquely entitled to (even if I would greatly prefer if no one else had any). If say, a Skynet-type machine overlord took over the world tomorrow, and it kills me in the process, then I would be just fine with that, even though I want power for myself, because it would mean that Skynet was better at doing the exact same thing I would be doing if I was it.... this is kind of hard to explain.


If you replace "skynet-type machine overlord" with "society", you get where I'm going with this. No matter how strong the individual is alone, the group consisting of him plus any other individual who isn't a net liability is necessarily stronger than the first. This, combined with the above, leads to the emergence of a truly collective interest which at once serves the interests of the individuals within the group, but also subordinates individual interests to the group.

The group can survive the death of all of its individual members, and, as an outgrowth of their individual drive for power, can serve their interests long after their deaths. The group, therefore, makes the individuals immortal.
#14471815
Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly. The so-called "abolition of private property" which took place....meant, in effect, the concentration of property in far fewer hands than before: but with this difference, that the new owners were a group instead of a mass of individuals. Individually, no member of the Party owns anything, except petty personal belongings. Collectively, the Party owns everything in Oceania, because it controls everything, and disposes of the products as it sees fit......

.....In principle, membership of these three groups is not hereditary. The child of Inner Party parents is in theory not born into the Inner Party. Admission to either branch of the Party is by examination, taken at the age of sixteen. Nor is there any racial discrimination, or any marked domination of one province by another. Jews, Negroes, South Americans of pure Indian blood are to be found in the highest ranks of the Party, and the administrators of any area are always drawn from the inhabitants of that area. In no part of Oceania do the inhabitants have the feeling that they are a colonial population ruled from a distant capital. Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows. Except that English is its chief lingua franca and Newspeak its official language, it is not centralized in any way. Its rulers are not held together by blood-ties but by adherence to a common doctrine. It is true that our society is stratified, and very rigidly stratified, on what at first sight appear to be hereditary lines. There is far less to-and-fro movement between the different groups than happened under capitalism or even in the pre-industrial ages. Between the two branches of the Party there is a certain amount of interchange, but only so much as will ensure that weaklings are excluded from the Inner Party and that ambitious members of the Outer Party are made harmless by allowing them to rise. Proletarians, in practice, are not allowed to graduate into the Party. The most gifted of them, who might possibly become nuclei of discontent, are simply marked down by the Thought Police and eliminated. But this state of affairs not necessarily permanent, nor is it a matter of principle. The Party is not a class in the old sense of the word. It does not aim at transmitting power to its own children, as such; and if there were no other way of keeping the ablest people at the top, it would be perfectly prepared to recruit an entire new generation from the ranks of the proletariat......

.....The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
Chapter I: Ignorance is Strength

- Emmanuel Goldstein
(1984 - George Orwell)
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