Archive
The inconvenient history of Liberal Fascism
Based purely on its title, Liberal Fascism: The secret history of the Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning by Jonah Goldberg, published in 2007, is not a book that I would usually consider buying.
The book traces the promotion and application of fascistic ideas by activists and politicians, from their creation by Mussolini in the 1920s to the start of this century. After these ideas first gained political prominence in the 1920s/30s as Fascism, they and the term Fascism became political opposites, i.e., one was adopted by the left and the other labelled as right-wing by the left.
The book starts by showing the extreme divergence of opinions on the definition of Fascism. The author’s solution to deciding whether policies/proposals are Fascist to compare their primary objectives and methods against those present (during the 1920s and early 1930s) in the policies originally espoused by Benito Mussolini (president of Italy from 1922 to 1943), Woodrow Wilson (the 28th US president between 1913-1921), and Adolf Hitler (Chancellor of Germany 1933-1945).
Whatever their personal opinions and later differences, in the early years of Fascism Mussolini, Wilson and Hitler made glowing public statements about each other’s views, policies and achievements. I had previously read about this love-in, and the book discusses the background along with some citations to the original sources.
Like many, I had bought into the Mussolini was a buffoon narrative. In fact, he was extremely well-read, translated French and German socialist and philosophical literature, and was considered to be the smartest of the three (but an inept wartime leader). He was acknowledged as the father of Fascism. The Italian fascists did not claim that Nazism was an offshoot of Italian fascism, and went to great lengths to distance themselves from Nazi anti-Semitism.
At the start of 1920 Hitler joined the National Socialist party, membership number 555. There is a great description of Hitler: “… this antisocial, autodidactic misanthrope and the consummate party man. He has all the gifts a cultist revolutionary party needed: oratory, propaganda, an eye for intrigue, and an unerring instinct for populist demagoguery.”
Woodrow Wilson believed that the country would be better off with the state (i.e., the government) dictating how things should be, and was willing for the government to silence dissent. The author describes the 1917 Espionage Act and the Sedition Act as worse than McCarthyism. As a casual reader, I’m not going to check the cited sources to decide whether the author is correct and that the Wikipedia articles are whitewashing history (he does not claim this), or that the author is overselling his case.
Readers might have wondered why a political party whose name contained the word ‘socialist’ came to be labelled as right-wing. The National Socialist party that Hitler joined was a left-wing party, i.e., it had the usual set of left-wing policies and appealed to the left’s social base.
The big difference, as perceived by those involved, between National Socialism and Communism, as I understand it, is that communists seek international socialism and define all nationalist movements, socialist or not, as right-wing. Stalin ordered that the term ‘socialism’ should not be used when describing any non-communist party.
Woodrow Wilson died in 1924, and Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) became the 32nd US president, between 1933 and 1945. The great depression happens and there is a second world war, and the government becomes even more involved in the lives of its citizens, i.e., Mussolini Fascist policies are enacted, known as the New Deal.
History repeats itself in the 1960s, i.e., Mussolini Fascist policies implemented, but called something else. Then we arrive in the 1990s and, yes, yet again Mussolini Fascist policies being promoted (and sometimes implemented) under another name.
I found the book readable and enjoyed the historical sketches. It was an interesting delve into the extent to which history is rewritten to remove inconvenient truths associated with ideas promoted by political movements.
Is sorting a list of names racial discrimination?
Governments are starting to notice the large, and growing, role that algorithms have in the everyday life of millions of people. There is now an EU regulation, EU 2016/679, covering “… the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data…”
The wording in Article 22 has generated some waves: “The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her”
But I think something much bigger is tucked away in a subsection of Article 14 paragraph 2 “…the controller shall provide the data subject with the following information…”, subsection (g) “…meaningful information about the logic involved…” Explaining the program logic involved to managers who are supposed to have some basic ability for rational thought is hard enough, but the general public?
It is not necessary for the general public acquire a basic understanding of the logic behind some of the decisions made by computers, rabble-rousing by sections of the press and social media can have a big impact.
A few years ago I was very happy to see a noticeable reduction in my car insurance. This reduction was not the result of anything I had done, but because insurance companies were no longer permitted to discriminate on the basic of gender; men had previously paid higher car insurance premiums because the data showed they were a higher risk than women (who used to pay lower premiums). At last, some of the crazy stuff done in the name of gender equality benefited men.
Sorting would appear to be discrimination free, but ask any taxi driver about appearing first in a list of taxi phone numbers. Taxi companies are not called A1, AA, AAA because the owners are illiterate, they know all too well the power of appearing at the front of a list.
If you are in the market for a compiler writer whose surname starts with J (I have seen people make choices with less rationale than this), the following is obviously the most desirable expert listing (I don’t know any compiler writers called Kurt or Adalene):
Jones, Derek Jönes, Kurt Jônes, Adalene |
Now Kurt might object, pointing out that in German the letter ö is sorted as if it had been written oe, which means that Jönes gets to be sorted before Jones (in Estonian, Hungarian and Swedish, Jones appears first).
What about Adalene? French does not contain the letter ö, so who is to say she should be sorted after Kurt? Unicode specifies a collation algorithm, but we are in the realm of public opinion here, not having a techy debate.
This issue could be resolved in the UK by creating a brexit locale specifying that good old English letters always sort before Jonny foreigner letters.
Would use of such a brexit locale be permitted under EU 2016/679 (assuming the UK keeps this regulation), or would it be treated as racial discrimination?
I certainly would not want to be the person having to explain to the public the logic behind collation sequences and sort locales.
Recent Comments