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India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

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Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#71

Post by legolas2412 »

pkd wrote: post #67

Yeah, no. I guess yes, if you consider any implementation of a far reaching policy in a democracy to be fascist. I have thought a lot about this. And I think that the western media seems have a genetic dislike for popular leaders. I guess the UK/US media expects their country's leaders to be Eton/Harvard boys who maintain an air of separation from the common population. Anytime a leader tries to get close to the publ…

"and this was after the opposition tried to brand him as the key perpetrator in the 2002 riots."

TRIED? He may not have started it, but he let riots run for three days.

"Under him Gujarat became the fastest growing state of the country," Any facts here? I keep hearing this "Gujarat Model", but statistics put it in the same range as Haryana, Punjab, Delhi, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_unio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_states_and_unio...

"He works 18 hours every day." please recognize propoganda when you see one.

"The greatest change in his rule has been the focus on making the bureaucracy to work instead of sleep, as it has been doing for the last 40 years." We'll talk when we see actual results.

"and I can say that Modi has been good for the country". To some extent, I'd agree, atleast it has spirited people up.

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#72

Post by throwawayIndian »

sremani wrote: post #50
realrocker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already happened with the lynchings, killings and sporadic riots, but at scale of India, it just doesn't leave a big enough mark. It's kind of sad really. India rationalizes the most horrific acts of humanity, shrugs and moves on.

Have you lived through 80s, and the constant riots in India during that time ? India is a no where near being a fascist country, because for love of god, its not ONE country. Calling RSS alt-right, completely makes the whole article laughable. RSS was the Right, BJP was the Right, Jan Sangh (BJP's predecessor) was the Right and they were the only game in town, in a mostly Fabian socialist India. Please go read some H…

> Calling RSS alt-right, completely makes the whole article laughable.

RSS is alt-right of India even if you think it isn't. Anyone who claims otherwise simply because INC or TDP jokers did something wrong elsewhere is either stupid or simply insane. RSS is and always will be an alt-right outfit even if every other political party like INC/TDP/BJP cease to exist.

Go read the some history yourself. I can meanwhile eat some beef nuggets on the side. ;)

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#74

Post by cstross »

gaius wrote: post #14
cstross wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the just-aborted far right coup in Montenegro, or the way France is looking to see a run-off presidential election between a hard-right candidate and Marine Le Pen (who is a court-certified fascist -- as in, she sued an opponent who called her a fascist for libel and the court found that she was, indeed, a fascist )? Or the rise of the AfD in Germany? Golden Dawn in Greece? Vladimir Putin's adherence to th…

Fascist is the most overused word of recent years. The original fascists in Italy were WW1 veterans who had read Marx and observed that being put in a uniform and militarized erased distinction between classes, and sought to replicate that at a societal level to end class conflict. The patriotism, the strong hierarchical government, the diversion of industry towards armaments production, were all parts of this, but t…

Your definition of fascism is totally inadequate. Here, try reading Umberto Eco on the subject: he grew up under Italian fascism, and has some insights: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#75

Post by sctb »

NotACongitard wrote: post #65
middleclick wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of new accounts for this specific thread. Is the BJP IT team working overtime?

Just like commies and pseudo-seculars are working overtime in mudslinging Indian government. Are you one of them?

We ban accounts that show up just to violate the guidelines, like this one. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll post civilly and substantively in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#76

Post by gaius »

cstross wrote: post #74
gaius wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascist is the most overused word of recent years. The original fascists in Italy were WW1 veterans who had read Marx and observed that being put in a uniform and militarized erased distinction between classes, and sought to replicate that at a societal level to end class conflict. The patriotism, the strong hierarchical government, the diversion of industry towards armaments production, were all parts of this, but t…

Your definition of fascism is totally inadequate. Here, try reading Umberto Eco on the subject: he grew up under Italian fascism, and has some insights: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

I see your Eco and raise you Orwell http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless... almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#77

Post by snrplfth »

6502nerdface wrote: post #29
snrplfth wrote: post #6

“These features cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” Umberto Eco is a smart guy but that essay is pretty silly. Fascism: anywhere, everywhere, and you can tell it's coming by any number of contradictory and non-definite phenomena.

No, if you read Eco's essay he takes pains to clarify that he's not saying "you can see it coming" -- he's describing the seeds of fascism that are present in many, perhaps all societies, which fascism can potentially latch onto and grow from... the aspects of our socieites that are usually checked, but have the potential to germinate into something worse.

I've read it, thanks. I read it a decade ago and a few times since, back when I was in a semiotics degree program and Eco was a prominently featured thinker. I respect him, but I don't really agree with him on this one.

Sure, he's describing major features of the category of political thinking that he calls fascism - but with the purpose of seeing it coming and doing something about it. He says: "Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our finger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world." His article is a rubric for identifying its features. Yet to say that fascism may have any of the enumerated features, in almost any combination, with drastically varying applications and manifestations, is to construct a category so broad that it is practically useless. It's a recipe for calling, and perceiving, almost everything as being nascently fascistic. We need to make better distinctions than this, I feel.

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#78

Post by snrplfth »

danharaj wrote: post #31
snrplfth wrote: post #6

“These features cannot be organised into a system; many of them contradict each other and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.” Umberto Eco is a smart guy but that essay is pretty silly. Fascism: anywhere, everywhere, and you can tell it's coming by any number of contradictory and non-definite phenomena.

It is a feature, not a bug, of fascism that it tolerates contradiction and does not care about constructing a coherent picture of the world. Truth is irrelevant and aesthetics are fungible. Fascism is unlike more sophisticated totalitarian ideologies like Marxism-Leninism. Umberto Eco's points are a summary of nucleation points for fascism: tendencies in society that can be the starting point for the process of fasci…

Well, I take issue with the "know it when you see it" characteristic of the piece. Eco accuses fascists, rightly I think, of making no clear distinctions, of thinking in impressions. That's why I'm annoyed that he seems to give up on distinctions himself in characterizing fascism.

I find the "social class" analysis just as unsatisfactory. You might usefully characterze these different tendencies by their rhetoric, but if you insist on looking at them as an "actual implementation", I tend to find that they're just the same side of the same coin - a small state political class enormously empowered, and all other "classes" being simply categories measuring the loyalty and proximity to the state class.

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#79

Post by EthanHeilman »

gaius wrote: post #76
cstross wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your definition of fascism is totally inadequate. Here, try reading Umberto Eco on the subject: he grew up under Italian fascism, and has some insights: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/

I see your Eco and raise you Orwell http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless... almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much-abused word has come

I like Orwell, but you can't see an Eco with an Orwell. For a raise you'd need at least an Orwell, Russel and Huxley.

The fact that people abuse the word fascist, especially its use by the Soviets who used it describe anything Anti-Soviet when they grew bored of calling things imperialist, does not mean that no coherent phenomena exists which has been consistently described as fascist.

A closer reading of your Orwell essay shows that Orwell does believe that fascism is meaningful, mostly he is just complaining that people often abuse the word:

>But still, when we apply the term ‘Fascism’ to Germany or Japan or Mussolini's Italy, we know broadly what we mean. It is in internal politics that this word has lost the last vestige of meaning. For if you examine the press you will find that there is almost no set of people — certainly no political party or organized body of any kind — which has not been denounced as Fascist during the past ten years. Here I am not speaking of the verbal use of the term ‘Fascist’. I am speaking of what I have seen in print. - George Orwell, What is Fascism (1944) [0]

Furthermore note that Orwell wrote this in 1944, the world war hasn't even ended, the histories and analysis we now have access to haven't yet been written. The perspective Orwell has when writing this is fairly limited, as Orwell himself says it is too early to say what fascism is (while admitting it is a political system):

>But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one — not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword. - George Orwell, What is Fascism (1944) [0]

Eco on the other hand grew up in Fascist and post-Fascist Italy and then studied it for many years. With the distance of time, personal experience and access to the work of historians, it is not surprising Eco has more to say about fascism that Orwell.

[0]: http://orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

Re: India is displaying classic signs that foreshadow fascism

#80

Post by sremani »

throwawayIndian wrote: post #72
sremani wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you lived through 80s, and the constant riots in India during that time ? India is a no where near being a fascist country, because for love of god, its not ONE country. Calling RSS alt-right, completely makes the whole article laughable. RSS was the Right, BJP was the Right, Jan Sangh (BJP's predecessor) was the Right and they were the only game in town, in a mostly Fabian socialist India. Please go read some H…

> Calling RSS alt-right, completely makes the whole article laughable. RSS is alt-right of India even if you think it isn't. Anyone who claims otherwise simply because INC or TDP jokers did something wrong elsewhere is either stupid or simply insane. RSS is and always will be an alt-right outfit even if every other political party like INC/TDP/BJP cease to exist. Go read the some history yourself. I can meanwhile eat…

You can eat beef nuggets with bacon, for what I care. That does not change the facts.
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