One wonders what fascism could have done had it not alienated intellectuals. But one also wonders if that alienation is core to fascism, even definitive. Fascism is notoriously hard to define, but "alienates the best thinkers" seems like a good litmus test.
Well... for curiosity-sake I clicked through the list of scientists on the Martians page. Every single one of them has Jewish ancestry. So while fascism more generally (right-wing nationalist authoritarianism) doesn't strictly prohibit intellectuals, World War II fascism alienated these folks because of their heritage.
There were still lots of smart people in Nazi Germany, as evidenced by Operation Paperclip which brought ~1,600 Nazi scientists over to the US to work on rockets and help the US fight the USSR in the Cold War and space race.
Anti semitism is not a core or a common ingredient of what we historically define as fascist governments.
Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar did not persecute Jews, in fact allowed them safe passage from Vichy France.
Italy really turned antisemitic after more than a decade with the alliance with Germany to appease Hitler mostly. There's a nice book on the topic, in Italian, "Mussolini Razzista Riluttante" by Antonio Spinosa.
the fascists distrust thinking that doesnt mirror their own -- the whole "youre either with us or against us" mentality that ironically we see all around the western world right now
Only a very stable society is capable of tolerating dissent (in fact it is much better to tolerate than to make martyrs). Once it becomes unstable all bets are off
It's not hard to define, it's an extreme version of "us vs them", divide the society into explicit in- and outgroups and kill the outgroup, repeat forever. Also kill everyone who opposes this, even if a member of in-group.
So it's just a matter of time an "intellectual", or any individual really, says or does something that will be used as a pretext to accuse them of not being a good enough member of in-group (this will earn the accuser status as a guardian of purity). Soon enough the society is full of people accusing others and also of those that want to appease "the authorities" by proposing the most extreme ways of purifying and enhancing the in-group. It's easy to see this is not the best environment for seekers of truth.
A friend of mine wrote a book about what happened in Germany: Scientists under Hitler : politics and the physics community in the Third Reich by Alan Beyerchen. I'm about a third of the way through it, but they mixed politics with the physical sciences to a remarkable degree, driving away many of the best people and isolating German scientists.
Social "sciences" are always political because they are mostly not science and so is easy to co-opt them. Math doesn't have different results depending on countries political system but social sciences do - tells you all you need to know.
Of Comte, Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, the people credited with the establishment of "modern" (pre WWI & WWII) sciences of society all were "political" philosphers | thinkers that looked at the behaviour of societies.
Max Weber (1864 – 1920) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Weber was a German of some influence, and the pre and inbetween World War periods were a time of intense political debate in France, Germany, and surrounds.
Who are "they" to whom you refer, and what is "political" as opposed to "social" ?
You mean the Nazis? Yes. (As did the Stalinists in their totalitarian state at the same time).
One might guess (and its just that, a guess) that such regimes target the social sciences first because such departments (eg economics, political studies) are adjacent to live politics, the regime's people think they understand them and can make contributions (in reality, trying to take control of course) and of course because the hard sciences require the payment of a hard tax of mathematical skills to say anything useful, which most political hacks do not have.
Every form of government targets in some way the social "sciences". Immagine being in a government where the majority of your social scientists are calling for your removal. Same applies to religious institutions and media
Fascism, a neighbour of Futurism, idolises technology, of only for its
semiotic power. But then so did Soviet Communism. Stalin executed all
the "bourgeois engineers" and Bolsheviks who built the industrial
engine of the CCCP. Alternatively, the great leap forward in China and
Pol Pot in Cambodia both rounded up the thinkers, teachers and
engineers first.
So I don't think it's unique to fascism. What is common?
Seems it's a hallmark of the treachery of totalitarianism. Tyrants
fear but use intellectuals. They need actual smart people to gain
power, but then who is more threatening than people who know how the
system works because they built it for you? So they are always
betrayed. Consider Oppenheimer. Many of the great scientists and
artists are put out to pasture once they've done what's useful for the
party.
> "alienates the best thinkers" seems like a good litmus test.
Almost the whole Frankfurt School were Jewish intellectuals who fled
to America.
I've written (probably in Digital Vegan) on how the Silicon Valley
Billionaires, once they've built their "Social Media Digital Utopia" -
a pageant of vanity, fear and cybernetic governance - would simply
dispose of the coders (perhaps not as directly as Stalin). Maybe an
indicator of that came early with the layoffs when some got a bit too
moist about "AI". I think they hope that "AI" will be the way to
pull up the ladder, leaving no challenging class.
Thanks. Wish I could go back in time and rewrite some parts - it's one
of those "needed to write it as a way of thinking" projects. Better to
follow us on the Cybershow now. PM me there and I'l send you a DRM
free ebook if you like.
No, we don't need to update the definition to retroactively legitimize the mass murder of civilians in warfare. The people killed by the atomic bombs were innocent under any sane definition of the term, and the cruelty behind that was intentional. The US wanted to impart to the Japanese that the violent suffering and death of every man, woman and child would be the cost of anything less than their immediate and unconditional surrender.
Nukes bad, mmkay. Would you have preferred to learn that lesson 6 years later in Korea at the hundred-kiloton level, or 25 years later in Vietnam at the megaton level?
And would you have preferred that Japan be left to the mercies of the Soviets, turning them into what North Korea and Cuba are today?
Childish naïveté, world wars, and postwar geopolitics don't mix.
