Fascism and the Future, Part One: Up From Newspeak | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

Feb. 12, 2014 (Archdruid Report) -- Over the nearly eight years that I’ve been posting these weekly essays on the shape of the deindustrial future, I’ve found that certain questions come up as reliably as daffodils in April or airport food on a rough flight.

Some of those fixate on topics I’ve discussed here recently, such as the vaporware du jour that’s allegedly certain to save industrial civilization and the cataclysm du jour that’s just as allegedly certain to annihilate it. Still, I’m glad to say that not all the recurring questions are as useless as these.

One of these latter deserves a good deal more attention than I’ve given it so far: whether the Long Descent of industrial society will be troubled by a revival of fascism. It’s a reasonable question to ask, since the fascist movements of the not so distant past were given their shot at power by the political failure and economic implosion of Europe after the First World War, and “political failure and economic implosion” is a tolerably good description of the current state of affairs in the United States and much of Europe these days. For that matter, movements uncomfortably close to the fascist parties of the 1920s and 1930s already exist in a number of European countries. Those who dismiss them as a political irrelevancy might want to take a closer look at history, for that same mistake was made quite regularly by politicians and pundits most of a century ago, too.

Nonetheless, with one exception -- a critique some years back of talk in the peak oil scene about the so-called “feudal-fascist” society the rich were supposedly planning to ram down our throats -- I’ve done my best to avoid the issue so far. This isn’t because it’s not important. It’s because the entire subject is so cluttered with doubletalk and distortions of historical fact that communication on the subject has become all but impossible. It’s going to take an entire post just to shovel away some of the manure that’s piled up in this Augean stable of our collective imagination, and even then I’m confident that many of the people who read this will manage to misunderstand every single word I say.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/fascism-and-the-future-part-one-up-from-newspeak-john-michael-greer

[OffWithTheirHeads]

1. Most excellent!

[KoKo]

2. Bookmarked for later....