Critiques of fascism/NatSoc from a practical, systemic, yet non-moral perspective

Expansionist ideology means empires have to conquer to secure themselves, but this conquest eventually antagonizes neighbors and coalitions are rapidly formed to combat such a militaristic group.

A Fascist state is one which necessitates a constant state of conflict to justify its existence and core philosophies. In the absence of conflict the justification for the restrictions the state places upon its citizens fall apart - and its ideology falls under scrutiny by the intelligentsia.

However, no state can eternally wage war against an external threat. Eventually the population will grow tired of conflict and/or the state's industry will cease to be able to support its militarism. This will inevitably lead to the gradual internal deterioration of a Fascist state.

> nazi is an abbreviation for nationalistic socialistic German worker's party
> national socialism is defined as the political doctrine of the nazi party
>national socialism is a revisionist term for nazism
Wtf my senpai.

Well Germany as it was under the Nazis was the least fascist fascist state. They had diverged greatly from the other fascist movements. They also drifted away from National Socialism. Hitler basically did what he did best and took advantage of a bunch of useful idiots.

As for criticizims of fascism it is an attempt to return to authoritarianism, and a reformation of caste systems in a sense. It was a huge step backwards in terms of social growth. Under traditional fascism you would see something akin to a modern feudal society where you have the rulers by birth, and very little mobility between castes, this was not a good system to excel in the modern world, and would most likely be unsustainable one suffrage movements get underway.
Think of fascism as a knee jerk reaction to people thinking democracy has failed and is unsalvageable.

Well first of all, Hjalmar Schacht's economic policies weren't going to last, and he probably knew it wouldn't.

It's interesting how massive state spending on military and infrastructure can give the illusion of economic miracle in the span of 5-10 years, and when the gig is up, you go to war.

Or you just got out of a major war, ala the 1920s and 1950s US.

Where does this meme come from? Mussolini glorified war and conflict but not perpetual unending war, that's a communist ideal

>that's a communist ideal
I'm assuming you mean Trotskyist.

German economics leading upto world War 2,.Germans are the poster child of fascism to most people even if they were primarily fascist in name they kind of usurped the meaning.

its a step back, to feudalism, it reeks of corruption, always

the most disgusting thing about it, its using patriotism to hide nepotism

I hope you realize that, if they truly are fascists, practical arguments are exactly the ones that will not make any impact at all on them. Fascism is an ethos as much as it is a political movement, and that particular ethos shuns comfort and comfortable living.

>Heroic life fulfils itself in the daily work of the miner, the farmer, the clerk, the statesman, and the serving self-sacrifice of the mother. Wherever a life is devoted with an all-embracing faith and with its full powers to the service of some value, there is true heroism ... Education to the heroic life is education to the fulfilment of duty ... One must have experienced it repeatedly that the inner fruition of a work in one's own life has nothing to do with material or economic considerations, that man keeps all of his faculties alive through his obligation to his work and his devotion to his duty, and that he uses them in the service of an idea without any regard for practical considerations, before one recognizes the difference between this world of heroic self-sacrifice and the liberalistic world of barter. Because the younger generation has been brought up in this heroic spirit it is no longer understood by the representatives of the former era who judge the values of life according to material advantage ... German life is heroic life.

Yeah, I know it's German, but in this regard it is the same with fascism.

True. Perhaps arguments which demonstrate that fascism inherently tends to fail to live up to its own heroic ideals, or leaves the nation exposed to superior adversaries, would make an impact.

Cont... for example, I find it hard to imagine a fascist state ever being as good at technology over the long haul as more liberal states. If this is true, then fascist states will always tend to be second-rate in war.

>Cont... for example, I find it hard to imagine a fascist state ever being as good at technology over the long haul as more liberal states. If this is true, then fascist states will always tend to be second-rate in war.

You fail to understand the reason they would go to war in the first place. War has an important place in the fascist ideology as a pure form of struggle, and struggle is to them what turns a spirit 'heroic'. It wouldn't matter if they have worse military technology. Just that they fight. You are once again choosing a wrong way to go about it.

>Fascism wants a man to be active and to be absorbed in action with all his energies; it wants him to have a manly consciousness of the difficulties that exist and to be ready to face them. It conceives life as a struggle, thinking that it is the duty of man to conquer that life which is really worthy of him: creating in the first place within himself the (physical, moral, intellectual) instrument with which to build it.

>War alone brings all human energies to their highest tension and sets a seal of nobility on the peoples who have the virtue to face it. All other tests are but substitutes which never make a man face himself in the alternative of life or death. A doctrine which has its starting-point at the prejudicial postulate of peace is therefore extraneous to Fascism.

These are from 'the Doctrine of Fascism'. If you are interested, this is a pretty good overview of the fascist ideology.
gutenberg.org/files/14058/14058-h/14058-h.htm

Italy regressed in terms of its percentage of world industrial capacity under Italy (although I'd have to look that up, I remember reading it but not from where). Autarky proposals are inherently inefficient, as they make it so that the nation produces goods which it is not as suitable at producing. Thus, while Italy was able to increase wheat production to the level where they weren't importing much of it any more, they caused the price of wheat to skyrocket and this caused a drop in living standards for the Italian population. Emphasis on national prestige meant that an overly strong currency crippled exports.

It isn't like everything was bad, there were some good public work projects, but a lot of Fascist Italy's expenditure was just throwing money down the drain in an elusive race for glory.

In its own way though, Fascist Italy isn't too different from our modern mixed market economy; sure it does the whole corporatist thing to extreme, but it is similar enough to merit comparison. Of course, Italy's model was also marred by corruption and poor planning, and the Italian national debt sky-rocketed, but it probably wasn't explosively unstable.

Hitler's Germany on the other hand is basically a huge national Ponzi scheme. Huge amounts of money get invested into armaments and armament industries, and these produce a temporary economic boost, but produce an ever-accelerating spiral of debt. The Germans could manage an "economic miracle", but 5 years on if they didn't secure something new to feed the machine, to expand the base with new resources, then it would all come tumbling down as their economy went bankrupt. Thus they were primed for war and expansion inherently; their choice was to either back down and watch the economy implode and make a very painful shift back to a liberal economy, or to go to war. It is in no way a sustainable organization, and combine this with the way the Nazis neutered German scientific education, it only gets worse.

they lost

What I don't understand is why anyone loaned Nazi Germany money. What made anyone think that was a sound proposition?

In a ploy to destroy the supremacy of the White Race, rabbi Adonai Shickelstein (known under the alias of 'Adolf Hitler'), with loans from international Jewish banks, started the largest war in history. Millions of Whites were killed, and antisemitism affirmed as 'racist', ensuring that Jewish supremacy would never be threathened. In doing that, it was crucial that (((they))) take over the NSDAP, the largest antisemitic party in Europe. Its Aryan leadership was massacred in the so-called "Night of Long Knives", leaving Adonai with full power over the Germany. Since then, in the effort to root out antisemitism, the NSDAP started targeting the most patriotic of Germans, flagging them as 'Jews' and sending them into concentration (and, later, extermination) camps stationed primarily in Poland.

I'm pretty satisfied with my little /pol/-style conspiracy theory.

what if the borrowed money went into infrastructure and industrial growth instead. saying that spending money on the military when your plan is to conquer your neighbors is bad fiscal policy is what i imagine the french were doing in the 30s.

German tycoons did, since they wanted to be on good side of the regime.

>whether they would have been successful economically and in other practical regards in the long run, had they not been destroyed in war.
they started that war, how could they not?

Nazifascism was obsessed with not only nationalism, but other traditional values. Like seem in asian cultures, that undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific progress.
Also, I don't know about Mussolini, but Hitler was very obsessed with centrilizing power, and that never works in the long run because even if you are an efficient leader, you are not immortal and everything will fall apart after you die (see Alexander the Great).

The problem is that just conquering your neighbors my have some bad consequences like the entire world banding to bring you down and millions of dead able bodied males and other civilians that could be used in a much better way.

>>>/leftypol/

He's correct though. Just put it to google and see.

>traditional values undermine creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
Wat.
>honesty undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
>chastity undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
>diligence undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
>solidarity undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
>family undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
>responsibility undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
>patriotism undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
Also, neither nazism nor fascism were very traditionalistic.

I don't see how shortening national socialism to natsoc suddenly makes someone a white supremacist, except maybe in the eyes of someone straight from either tumblr or leftypol
which one are you?

You know nazi is LITERALLY natsoc without the accent right?

Because surprise, surprise only retarded people like neonazis themselves use it. Why not use the established term "Nazi" like normal people do, its even shorter?

It even makes more sense as it's a neologism with clear meaning. While "National socialism" might make uneducated minds think that Hitler's regime was some kind of synthesis of nationalism and socialism.

It dates back to Marx & Engels, Stalinism is just revisionist nationalistic communism.

>Why not use the established term "Nazi" like normal people do
Not them, but very likely due to the combination of it being an emotionally charged term and constantly being used as an insult. Much like you wouldn't use "commie" in a serious post about communism.
>It even makes more sense as it's a neologism with clear meaning. While "National socialism" might make uneducated minds think that Hitler's regime was some kind of synthesis of nationalism and socialism.
The term's meaning is muddied due to it being used irresponsibly. It is being used to denote a variety of things people don't like, which are not necessarily connected with the ideology in question. If you want clarity, you say "National Socialism" or, if that is too long, "natsoc".

Because "nazism" and "national socialism" are different words with different meanings, dummy.

>Example(s) of Nazism: Hitler
>Example(s) of National Socialism: Nasser, Mussolini, Ataturk, Salazar

>While "National socialism" might make uneducated minds think that Hitler's regime was some kind of synthesis of nationalism and socialism.
>It's wrong to call national socialism national socialism
yeah fuck off already, don't you have to make another "it wasn't real communism" thread?

>Not them, but very likely due to the combination of it being an emotionally charged term and constantly being used as an insult. Much like you wouldn't use "commie" in a serious post about communism.
Wrong, the term Nazi is commonly used in both official contemponary sources and academic writings and the emotional charge was already lost. Second part is irrelevant, since "communist" is also used as an insult.

Communist: 58.5M results on google
Commie: 4.5M

Nazi: 106M
Natsoc: 159k (!)
National socialist: 4.4M

While the use of the term natsoc is not wrong or anything, it is a huge red flag.

You shouldn't call people dummy, when making posts like these...

How about you make an argument? Plenty of times I've seen Americans on /pol/ thinking that the German National socialism was just a synthesis of nationalism and socialism.

>OP basically said national socialism is a failure and unsustainable while using the term natsoc
>only retarded neonazis use the term

It would probably be better for everyone if you focused less on what flimsy assumptions you can make based off people using certain innocent terms.

I want totale KRIEG and i want it NOW!

>It would probably be better for everyone if you focused less on what flimsy assumptions you can make based off people using certain innocent terms.
I wasn't the one who started this argument famalini.

>like normal people do
Literally every political theory class explains that nazism stands for national socialism. It's been shortened to nazi because it rolls off the tongue easier and that's how german contemporaries referred to it, but it's important to understand where the term comes from if you want to fend off the ideology properly.

>Hitler's regime was some kind of synthesis of nationalism and socialism
But it is exactly how they portrayed themselves. Read the nsdap's 25 point manifesto, they argued for some utopian socialist policies for the german citizens. It was all bullshit of course (or only defined purely through their autistic understanding of socialism) but it's not entirely baseless.

Was it mainly propaganda to beat back the SPD and KPD? Of course, but there is historical value in knowing where that sort of shit comes from. As to not repeat past mistakes, hopefully.

Yeah that's true too. Nazizm does a good job of examplifying 1930-40s german style national socialism (and a subset of fascism in itself), while natsoc can be applied to describe other regimes like nasserism or baathism. Arab socialism was literally built by arab intelligentzia who took those fascist memes literally and tried to apply them to MENA ( See michel aflaq).

>he has the gall to call out others on their lack of arguments, when not posting any himself

>But it is exactly how they portrayed themselves
Fair enough, but plenty of people did that and they were not "Nazis". Reich's ideology featured totalitarian, esoterical and biological aspects that would set it apart from other National socialist parties like those in Czechoslovakia, for example.

These aren't the only traditional values that exist.

>chastity undermines creativity, stagnating societal and scientific process
It does. I'm not saying that people should be promiscuous, but having more sex means more children and more genetic diversity, which is biologically beneficial for a species, and that's no different for humans.
The more genetic diversity, the higher the likelihood of positive genetic traits (defective too, but thinking about intelligence specifically, which should be the main goal of man, genetically speaking, the good outweigh the bad).

>Reich's ideology featured totalitarian, esoterical and biological aspects that would set it apart from other National socialist parties
Probably because those other parties were more fascist than natsoc. The original italian strain of fascism was meant to be racially blind, they opposed racialism and nordicism as esoteric memes. Mussolini wanted to resurrect caesarism and shape it in the image of the old Roman Empire where undivided loyalty to the state was the only criteria for citizenship. He changed his tone eventually due to pressure coming from Berlin post 1936 anticomintern pact. However fascism was ALWAYS totalitarian and built around personality cultism. "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state" and all that.

>having more sex means more children and more genetic diversity, which is biologically beneficial for a species, and that's no different for humans.
And that sex could not possibly be had within a family unit that is also immedately ready to take care of its products because...?

>revisionist term
>literally the name that nazi derives from

Can someone give me an unbiased explanation of what National Socialism is?
How does it work?

>Probably because those other parties were more fascist than natsoc.

No, they were literally just the synthesis of the nat and soc, while nobody would call them "Nazi". So in order to accomodate the defining traits of German regime, I propose we stick with the established neologism.

It's fascism that replaced national consciousness with racial consciousness.

See picrelated for a brief overview of what fascism is to begin with. Basically merger of state and corporatism with a good dose of totalitarianism to make sure things "go to plan".

>liberal republics

But it's the german nazis who popularised fascism and thus they took to calling themselves natsocs rather than fascists.

He isn't saying that glorifying war is a fascist ideal, he is saying that in a time of peace with relatively little in the way of external threats, the restrictions the state places on its people would make them revolt.

>practical
Do you really want to go there? A genuine pragmatist would take the standpoint that it is just propaganda to prop up a dictatorship, that any ideological differences were minor at best in the grand scheme of things.

Anyone who tells you fascists were special snowflakes is no better than people who unironically believe communist dictatorships actually wanted a communist utopia, opposed exploitation and oppression etcetera...

>Nazism subscribed to theories of racial hierarchy and Social Darwinism, identifying Germans as part of what Nazis regarded as an Aryan or Nordic master race.[2]
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism

Yup, they took a calling that doesn't fit them and their contemponaries invented a neologism.

Why should we replace the neologism, when it fits better than the original term?

>Before he became an anti-Semite and a Nazi, Hitler had lived a bohemian lifestyle as a wandering watercolour artist in Austria and southern Germany, though he maintained elements of it later in life.[26] Hitler served in World War I. After the war, his battalion was absorbed by the Bavarian Soviet Republic from 1918 to 1919, where he was elected Deputy Battalion Representative. According to the historian Thomas Weber, Hitler attended the funeral of communist Kurt Eisner (a German Jew), wearing a black mourning armband on one arm and a red communist armband on the other,[27]

Hey I don't entirely disagree with you, I know it is the czech natsoc party who actually went into exile and acted as the moderate faction while it was Tiso's party that fully cooperated with the german nazis.

But look, it's gonna be hard to define what is the ideal or "true" national socialism because most tend to be various strains of fascism, most developed during the interwar period, and most got btfo 12years later. And then the entire ideological umbrella died. Except in the MENA where it was rebranded as arab socialism rather than national socialism. And even the salazar/franco regimes were more clerical fascists than national socialists.

>Yup, they took a calling that doesn't fit them and their contemponaries invented a neologism.
The term nazi wasn't used because people thought the nazis were misappropriating national socialism or socialism. It's just a derogatory term and an abbreviation.

>Völkisch nationalism denounced soulless materialism, individualism, and secularised urban industrial society, while advocating a "superior" society based on ethnic German "folk" culture and German "blood".[40]

>Aryan mysticism claimed that Christianity originated in Aryan religious tradition and that Jews had usurped the legend from Aryans.[51]

>Hitler created a public image as a celibate man without a domestic life, dedicated entirely to his political mission and the nation of Nazi Germany. His relationship with Eva Braun, which lasted nearly 14 years, was hidden from the public and all but his inner circle. Braun biographer Heike Görtemaker notes that the couple enjoyed a normal sex life. Hitler and Braun married in late April 1945, less than 40 hours before committing suicide together.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_of_Adolf_Hitler

>It's just a derogatory term and an abbreviation.
That's how it started, but non-Germans can't understand the deregatoriness of it. Nowadays it's the most common term used.

>The term nazi wasn't used because people thought the nazis were misappropriating national socialism or socialism
But it prevents it.

>The radical Nazi Joseph Goebbels hated capitalism, viewing it as having Jews at its core, and he stressed the need for the party to emphasise both a proletarian and national character. Those views were shared by Otto Strasser, who later left the Nazi Party in the belief that Hitler had betrayed the party's socialist goals by allegedly endorsing capitalism.[23]

>Spengler claimed that socialistic Prussian characteristics existed across Germany, including creativity, discipline, concern for the greater good, productivity, and self-sacrifice.[83] He prescribed war as a necessity, saying "War is the eternal form of higher human existence and states exist for war: they are the expression of the will to war."[84]

>Example(s) of National Socialism: Nasser, Mussolini, Ataturk, Salazar
>Ataturk
Explain

"National Socialism" is more descriptive than "Nazism"