Jason Stanley, philosophy professor at Yale, is my go-to person on understanding Fascism.
"The Soviet system never commemorated the Holocaust. One reason for this is that once you define and identify one genocide, you can recognize other genocidal crimes. The Soviet empire didn't want us to learn our history."
-Victoria Amelina, "Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened"
One lesson the past century has taught us is that authoritarian regimes often find history profoundly threatening. They conceal history or cancel history to consolidate their power. They deny multiple perspectives on history. Democracy demands a share reality & multiple perspectives. Fascists demand only one perspective. There are equal perspectives to national narratives from the democratic point-of-view, but only one from the Fascist view.
The serious study of history is always open to new evidence, new perspectives, and theoretical framings. History in a democracy is not static, not mythic, but dynamic and critical. P. xi-ii
"Wars are won by teachers." P. 1
-Vladimir Putin
Fascism is usually organized a charismatic leader, but not always. Example: The Jim Crow segregation in the South after the Civil War. P. 2
Us and them views can lead to cruelty to the thems. P. 3
The author is known for his shorthand of Fascism as us and them views.
A Fascist culture must control education meaning controlling what students are exposed to meaning book banning and presenting only the one historical narrative they desire usually for racial reasons. P. 3
Russia today is clearly the world's most clearly fascist nation. P. 62
Fascist social and political movements thrive of a sense of grievance. The German Nazi education emphasized German loss of lands in the Treaty of Versailles, blaming this loss on Jews, who were the source of a stab in the back that caused the German loss of WWI. Germans did not lose but fell victim to Jewish betrayal. So Aryan Germans should seek revenge for his betrayal; this becomes a central feature of Nazi propaganda. P. 79
For sure the author emphasizes the importance of education in the creation of a fascist state. P. 79
Fascism likes "great men" narratives. P. 80-81
In the ideology of American White Christian Nationalist, the United States is a white Christian country. P. 82
Great Replacement Theory is a name for a type of conspiracy where an internal enemy tries to destroy the nation from within by importing inferior peoples to "replace" the nation's defining national group. A population rises with myths of national greatness and national purity is susceptible to Great Replacement Theory, as they will believe their nation is in great and its greatness is due to the greatness of the defining national group. P. 82
Madison Grant started it in 1916, mentioned by F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby. P. 83
Scientific racism. Grant stepped into a powerful political current of his time. President Coolidge agreed with Grant. P. 83
The second KKK adopted the slogan "America First." P. 83
Replacement was a century theme in Nazism with the belief that Jews were replacing Germans and destroying the purity of the German nation. P. 84
Germany's replacement policy was based on the Jews to replace Germany's Aryan population with non-Aryans. P. 86
Trump's replacement act is that secret Marxists seek to open the borders to non-white immigration, thereby displacing the white race numerically, culturally, and politically leading to perpetual power, precisely what claimed about the Jews. P. 87
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