ursula von faschist and the commission of doom
always accuse the other side of that which you are guilty
watching the explosive cases of the vapors breaking out all over europe as country after country shifts right in attempts to save themselves from technocratic and ideological domination driven ruin endlessly foisted upon them by the cool kids table at davos is getting quite instructive.
but perhaps even more so is the gross and utter revisionism and false claims and history being engaged in by these flailing fascisti as they contemplate their fall from grace and loss of power.
the histrionic hectoring is full throated.
but most dazzling is the projection. they describe mussolini and hitler as “far right,” but they were not.
both were far left.
fascism is a leftist ideology, not a right wing one. the fascists came from socialist parties that broke from communism and globalism in favor of technocratic control by the few to dominate businesses and economies and societies and inculcate them into doing what they were told “for the collective good” and accepting the top down all-encompassing dictates of a ruling class whose precepts may be neither denied nor resisted generally referred to as totalitarianism.
and these fascist/totalitarian structures (the two tend to go hand and hand) were all and everywhere far left. watching reporters describe them as far right is not only fabulism, but propaganda. it’s the goebbels maxim applied to relentless perfection as these groups take over media and commerce and use these structures of influence and censorship to never endingly “tell it like it ain’t.”
if you cannot see how ESG, DEI, and green grift are all fascist and totalitarian structures proudly purveyed and pushed by a group of left wing ideologues who echo nothing so much as folks like wilson (who set the whole fascist movement into motion in the teens) and came to power and prominence by accelerating, exacerbating, and elongating a global depression that generated so much pain for so many people that they were willing to surrender sovereignty, rights, and autonomy just to feed themselves and make the trains run on time then may i invite you to go take a look at what is going on all over the world right now.
this is way past “history rhyming a bit.”
i suspect this is WHY the left is railing against it so vociferously.
but like so many things in the “streisand effect denier” universe, this line of endless evergreen projection has become so threadbare that no one outside the ever shrinking echo chamber could possibly credit it any longer.
being called a "fascist" by the actual fascists has become a badge of honor, a shibboleth for being on the side of liberty and the center is increasingly onside with this interpretation an unafraid of such accusation.
in the 30’s as now, the masses were asleep at the switch and allowed that which they should have cherished and defended to slip onto the floor and spoil.
but what is perhaps different now than then is that despite such voluble protest, pretext, and posing: the left is losing in much the same way they lost in the late 70’s.
it’s simply too obvious that their top down authoritarian instincts are what got us here and from equity to energy and rapacious rights revocation to vicious vilification of dissent, it’s all coming unglued.
and they are not happy about it.
and the threats are starting.
consider this charming little missive from suddenly omnipresent ursula von der leyen.
her political notions carry uneasy consonance to folks like mao, who also thought himself “a centrist” and viewed democracy like a sort of dude ranch where everyone gets to pretend to play cowboy as long as they never actually try to determine the fate of the dogies and stay on plan with the drive boss.
they are also a nasty throwback to the 30’s.
i mean, if you put her in a black uniform with silver skulls, she'd be straight out of central casting for WW2 movie bad guy lines.
if zey do ze right think, gut! if zey do ze wrong think, vee haff tools!"
she is literally threatening member states with sanctions, exclusion, and punishment if their elections go the wrong way and flexing EC might to dominate supposedly sovereign nations.
this is how a lot of the post WW1 tensions that blew up onto WW2 arose.
yeah, yeah godwin’s law and all that, but before going there, hear me out for a moment because it’s sort of jarring watching ideas like being “pro italy” and “pro family” get cast as “dangerous fascist ideologies from the past” by the very fascists who have been ramming ideas antithetical family and freedom with a side order of “eat your damn bugs!” so hard down the throats of the unwilling for so long that they have provoked this backlash.
but even more jarring is all this association with “mussolini and hitler” from people who seem to want to keep their own pasts and associations out of the limelight through accusatory practice against others.
for those casting so many stones, there is an AWFUL lot of glass in many of their homes…
now, this sort of thing is always a little tricky as the same families and companies that have been running germany, austria, italy and europe in general for a century mostly still are and so a great many powerful people and corporations have deeply unsavory ties from the 30’s and 40’s, but still, there it is and the current generation seems to have a different set of ideological payloads and pretexts but has sustained the same overall belief in their destiny and duty to rule whether people like it or not.
and the very fact that after all this time and so many frightening outcomes that the same groups retain the same positions is quite piquant. it speaks to aristocracy and oligopoly and the sorts of elitist and crony corporatist systems that carry water and bear shields for them.
in the end, they are still fascists to the bone and always were, it’s just a new powerpoint deck that replaced “fatherland” with “ESG” but is no less domineering or coercive.
i certainly do not agree with all of meloni’s policies or principles, but i can also certainly see how she has come to prominence. the natural backlash to being dragged unwilling into globalist subjugation is nationalism and there is really only so much from so far outside one’s own universe of acceptable outcomes and imposition that can be tolerated before you say “enough is enough” and bite that hand that oppresses you.
in many ways this can be a very good thing. it’s a return to more rights, more liberty, more agency, and all the things that underpin markets, freedom, and human flourishing.
and i am all for that.
but we have to be a bit careful as well as when you have forced an overton window past the point that a society finds bearable, you can get some profound and out of control over-reactions as well and it’s incredibly important to remember that “the enemy of your enemy may not be your friend but merely another zealot offering up a different kind of harm” and fleeing one slaughterhouse for another is still gonna turn you into lambchops in the end.
but despite such risks, this feels like progress. the last 20 years or so has been building to something of a technocratic fascist moment and it all got really out of hand and out in the open both as a result of covid and because as gato’s postulate™ warns us:
a democratic government powerful enough to dictate that which is bought and sold will inevitably devolve into rule by rube.
and we just got too far out on the limb of immense power wielded by people who have no idea how anything works and so the center has failed to hold.
we sit at a time of profound potential for remaking. the hand of impositional totalitarian structures has been badly overplayed and all over the west, people are rising and saying they have had enough and want another way.
but the way we choose will matter greatly. putting a new cast of characters in charge of the same machinery will at best be a band-aid that briefly arrests our slide down the slippery slope to autocratic rule by rube and at worst simply slides us into the arms of different dictators for while fascism may be left wing, there is no shortage of right wing authoritarianism as well.
it is the power amassed by the state and the vast bureaucracies that put this rubber upon our road to serfdom and so long as they remain intact, our lives and livelihoods will never be safe.
the cult of “build back bigger” is the antithesis of human agency. what we must do instead is to dismantle until we are free.
there is no longer a place for this sort of predation:
and so let us grasp this opportunity and tear apart that which has tied us down, eliminate agencies and the license of safety and nanny statism that have evolved to represent a greater threat to our thriving than anything from which it could plausibly protect us.
we the people and not they leviathan are the giant and it is time once more to stand.
It has been fascinating to watch over the last decade as I have become steadily more extreme Right Wing™
Of course, my principles haven't changed much at all. But (classical) libertarian views on things like freedom of speech, individual responsibility, and even freedom itself are seen as being "far-right" positions these days.
But, as many have pointed out, the battleground isn't really left vs right, it's about authoritarianism vs individual freedoms. There has been a very successful, and long-running, propaganda campaign to equate 'right wing', of even the slightest hue, as being somehow immoral.
You vill have nothing, even your own views. And you vill eat ze bugs.
Great post, as usual, el Gato. But I especially wanted to thank you for pointing out that fascism is a far LEFT ideology. It drives me nuts that 99 percent of people in general, and every single imbecilic media talking head, equates fascism with conservatism run amok, somehow.