I have nothing to add to the definitions others are giving, but I do wanna say it really annoys me how radlibs and some socialists who are non-Marxist will define fascism mostly as “strong man who appeals to populism”. Like I enjoyed most of the Dollop episode on Huey Long, but Dave at the end describing the basic concept of a demagogue and saying “that is what fascism is” was frustrating. I mean Dave is smart and understands Trump is not really cognizant enough to be a fascist himself, he still defines fascism in a really weak way. It is the same trick people fall into when calling Peron a fascist, even though Peron was at least a fan of Mussolini in the early 30s though for very stupid reasons of buying his propaganda when visiting Italy.

Something similar happened with Quinton Reviews when talking about the History Channel, he sorta goes to far in mocking Nazi inefficiency and ends up saying fascism is internally incoherent and is more or less just a vibe. I think a lot of breadtube and breadtube adjacent folks do this, heck WTYP have done this iirc. People ignore that the ideology and political structure of fascism is a thing, weird and unreasonable as it is, it has theories and shit like the hollow earth that are super goofy stem FROM those reactionary real material forces.

Esoteric fascism is not just the realm of history channel, shit like Sofindus and Executive Outcomes, these orgs literally run by former Nazis who said they communed with Hitler’s spirit, actively did horrifying shit. And fascist ideology was not just left in the dustbin of history, not just reactionaries, but true believers in Hitler personally, got to structure and design our world. The bureaucratic fascists who remained in control of West Germany and the Von Braun types are not so easily divorced from the wacky guys, and said wacky guys had serious sway in the CIA, blew up shit in Italy, ran torture camps in Chile, and formed the basis for modern private military contractors and current torture techniques. Both parts of that equation are relevant.

I HATE when libs say “oh well bigotry is illogical, it doesn’t make sense so there is no structure or path that led to these people” even if they accept that material conditions led to these ideologies. Because they more or less let fascism become the masses going crazy and their irrationalities and anxieties being the driving force hence the scattershot beliefs. This shit ignores that we can track how this shit develops socially, we can trace the esoteric shit and it doesn’t come from the backwards hicks of saxony, it is the fucking Thule society and elite dinner parties.

I think Trueanon’s spider-network series genuinely covers this shit so well

I ADORE Tom Veitch, but yeah that sums most of his work up in one sentence.

On the bright side, it is heartening to see Iwata’s influence and decency still influencing devs today

Who would our Cuban, Venezuelan, and Nicaraguan comrades prefer to see in the White House, considering the U.S. imperialist blockade loosened up during the Obama administration? Our short-term tactics and strategy are not limited to voting for the “lesser of two evils,”

They would prefer Americans grow a backbone and not chain themselves to the oppression of the third world. That we would separate ourselves from our state’s power and build working class movements divorced from these ghouls. Also Joe just tried to coup Diaz

Wait that’s what is happening if a reply keeps loading? I always thought that was a glitch

Jenny is always great at providing several hours to burn

Thanks for the recs. I got my start in the subject from Victor Davis Hanson who in hindsight is a fucking maga nut. So I need some less…um fashy reading on the matter. Much as War Like No Other is well written and he does interestingly frame the Aegean islands as “Greek third world”. I got super into this era of Greek history and Hanson unfortunately is the one who sparked my love for reading history that never stopped. Finding out what he really is killed my momentum on the specific subject matter.

Thucydides is so fascinating and frustrating. His writing is great, he provides some incredible perspective, but he also invents or embellishes in ways we cannot discern fully. Particularly with Pericles. Don’t we have like a half dozen actual documents from Pericles himself, several of which are just his name, much like Shakespeare? Thucydides did know the man though.

We love Thucydides don’t we folks? Truly one of our handsome generals

I know they abandoned the countryside immediately but abandonment was not permanent, the war had large lulls and assaulting troops would go back to friendly cities when it wasn’t campaign season , but for some reason I remember A War Like No Other implying Thucydides wasn’t able to respond as fast because he was cautious about abandoning his existing region. I checked and I can’t find anything like that so oops. However his banishment is certainly an early example of the trend that would destroy Athens’ military, the banishment of commanders for being unable to do the impossible. Most significantly Alcibiades

Rhetoric was all he had at that point. He served Athens as one of its better military minds and got banished for protecting the rural areas instead of pointlessly heading to the walled Athens. Sat out the rest of the 29 year war watching 2 entire generations of young Greeks be slaughtered for nothing. Thucydides is best read as someone wrestling with the collapse of empire and of being able to actively follow tragedy but not fully square that circle as to why they feel so hollow and depressed.

Battleship Potemkin

I just started the first two episodes and it sold me. They get the humor of the franchise really well.

Remember the Maine!!!

The hexreplybot is the giveaway that there is one.

Storm of Steel the memoirs of Ernst Junger are very highly recommended. I never got around to buying a copy but I have had it recommended so many times. The guy became a Nazi then turned on them but not for a grand moral reason so much as they killed his son. However his contradictory pov that has been described as both glorifying war and anti-war, and his being a young man who was exactly the Prussian archetype make him a perfect case-study. The Russian wikipedia article gives some good analysis if you want https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/В_стальных_грозах https://politosophia.org/page/ernst-yunger-v-stalnyh-grozah-mirovoy-voyny.html https://www.amazon.com/dp/0143108255/?coliid=I178UE3BU40311&colid=1JEGNQDCXXPVB&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it

Good article on the mindset of that general and honor https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/article/wartime_emotions_honour_shame_and_the_ecstasy_of_sacrifice

Origins and meaning of WWI is a brief anarchist rundown of a lot of that officer mindset and what we should take away from the war https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-zerzan-elements-of-refusal#toc12

For an in depth critical view of WW1 and why it happened Mccullough’s work seems interesting https://www.amazon.com/How-First-World-War-Began/dp/1551641402

This whole reading list is leftist and seems amazing

https://network23.org/realww1/2014/03/03/ww1-reading-list/

I read it before I really turned left and I know it has some lib brain but I really devoured “1914: the year that ended peace” by MacMillan. It covers all the palace intrigue in a really digestible manner despite being huge. I don’t know if I have ever read a history book that juggled so many characters and events that fucking well. It shows how the institutions meant to stop war broke down, how the war as it was was utterly preventable, but in doing so shows how A war was sorta inevitable, not cause the Balkans are a powder keg but because the concert of europe was inbred and rotten at its core.

It absolutely broke me with how it described the Lost Generation’s elementary school years to the start of the war. Those kids had been promised a world without war, with diseases cured in no time, a technocratic utopia, and also by those same progressives (in the technological sense) that they are not real men unless they fight in a war. The boy scouts started as an all-genders pseudo-military organization explicitly because its founder felt that boys and girls didn’t have the proper survival capabilities and that they needed to learn how to hunt wild game and stich wounds and shit at the age of 10. They promised them utopia and oblivion. It fucking broke me dude.

I would suggest picking a moment you find interesting like Gallipoli or Zeebrugge, or Verdun, or Brusilov’s campaigns, something specific. A lot of the war is self contained almost, and totalizing or even just broad histories of it can be disjointed. Focus on a battle or event and find the passion project someone wrote because their uncle was killed by a stray allied shell there. Personally I want to look more into the Italian Alpine campaign because my namesake, my great great uncle apparently died of mustard gas there.

Wenceslas as a shonen protag

That sounds fucking amazing

Great song about the Limerick Soviet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ff_5SdLXvM