Radio War Nerd EP #514 — The Original Fascismo, feat. Annibale

I love how hard it is for liberals like annibale or mark to understand that the better system might kill capitalists to preserve the better system.

Now I know why Tolkien didn't have the eagles fly Frodo and Sam to Mordor straight away. Learn something new every day.

Trump is not like Mussolini or Hitler and whatever the true nature of this monstrous regime it will inevitably have some resonances and many more discontinuities with any 20th century analogue. This is basically a truism, so I've always found efforts to match up present-day politics with interwar fascism very wrongheaded. Still, one thing I think Mark underrates in emphasizing that 'oh, it got bad but it took a while and it was a slow descent to the level of mass political violence' is that things in this country have been slowly deteriorating for decades now and at an ever-increasing rate. Add to that the total lack of an organized left or labor movement to countermand the quasi-fascist forces arrayed loosely behind Trump, and it's not at all inconceivable that things could turn very ugly very soon in the US.

funny i was just reading the tolkien letters talking about his hatred of airplanes lol

Also worth mentioning that Benito Juarez was Mexico’s first 100% indigenous president and the first indigenous, democratically-elected president in the Americas.

I really liked this episode. I think the misuse of the word “fascism” on the left is very similar to the misuse of “anti-semitism” and “terrorism” on the right.

I get your contempt for Snyder and his buddy, but wasn’t your takeaway from the ends of syria and other civil conflicts that getting out early consistently led to the best outcomes?

Does anyone know a good account of the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in English, French or German? (I know there are some good ones in Italian, but my Italian just ain't good enough.)

I always got the impression that originally fascismo was this futurist quasi-socialist militant movement a la sorel that eventually just kinda turned into a giant fraud that didn’t really stand for much of anything, or at the very least would just turn on a dime from believing in one thing to all of a sudden believing in something totally contradictory

Feels like so much of this “fascism” discourse in the US is dipshit libs using it as shorthand for “evil” and trying to flood the neuron pathways in everyone’s brains that are wired for recognizing and retrieving info about the dang “nazzies”.

I'm sorry, Annibale is almost almost totally incoherent here. It's very hard to parse any meaning in this interview. If you are not already somewhat aquainted with the fascist ideology it's impossible. It's tidbits of local culture, analasys, history, names, religion, anecdotes and stories. I get totally lost several times in a jumble of sidelines, parentheses and analogy.

High five to whoever got Annibale a microphone

Trump seems to be a more a berlusconi figure for America.

The Sardinian socialist Emilio Lussu wrote a famous memoir of the event: ‘He had taken up his seat at the back, on the extreme right; high up and separated from the rest of his deputies, he seemed like a vulture, crouching upon a rock. “I must declare at once,” he began, “that my speech will be reactionary in character. It will be reactionary because I am anti-Parliamentarian, anti-Democratic and anti-Socialist.” ’ What was the gist of this reaction? A return to simple-minded Manchesterism. It was time to ‘deprive the State of all the functions which render it dropsical and vulnerable,’ he asserted. ‘Let the State provide a police-force to protect decent people against villains, properly organised courts, an army ready for anything, and a foreign policy in tune with real national needs. Everything else – even the secondary school system – ought to be left to private enterprise. To save the State, we must first abolish the collectivist state.’

The political economy of how the ill douche was able to make the 20s and 30s (generally speaking) comfortable for Italians interests me. Economics isn’t necessarily a zero sum game but if one person’s living high on the hog, someone else ain’t. Trueanon’s il popo series has got me thinking about Italy and Somalia and I wonder if the colonial exploitation helped fuel some of these “good times”

One of my favorite/most hard hitting Annibale episodes was after January 6th when he asks what does it mean to be a fascist and circling this question. Sono contenta che sia tornato

Fantastic ep. I hope there’s an episode in the future that examines how the racial laws of America influenced Nazism as well. Stuff like the California Indian Indenture Act of 1850 gives horrifying prescience to Nazi actions on the Eastern Front of WW2. Thanks again Annibale for answering my stupid question about whether Waffen SS soldiers were nerds or jocks a year and a half ago.

Friends of RWN The Empire Never Ended podcast did quite a few episodes breaking down the love affair between the Western capitalist ruling classes and various kinds of fascism. Their takeaway is that Western nationalism and white supremacy, particularly Americanism, predate fascism and, if anything, the Europeans copied from us. (Honestly the Italian fascists were nicer and less racist in some ways than, say, the Klan, or demon capitalists like Henry Ford.) Guys like Henry Ford basically said that fascism is great for the Italians, who are shiftless and dumb and need a firm hand to whip them into shape, but that the American system (as they envisioned it, a purely white supremacist anti-communist authoritarian corporatist ideology) was better for the United States.

🤌

This would be good to pair with the Neoliberalismo episode

Wheatler (Scuzzi Annibale 😅)

Re: the lack of people visiting the US, it’s unsurprising, but Republicans (at least on Twitter) literally do not care. Tourists, immigrants, students: fuck ‘em all. Pure belligerence

Good to have Annibale back to talk about this; non vedo l'ora di ascoltarlo attentamente stasera. By the way, and although not directly related, your mention in the introduction of Snyder & co. finding refuge in "the Ukraine of North America" (or, as the hip kids call it online, Banderastan) reminded me of something I thought of when I listened to your episode with Dan. I've been reading Michael Carley's three volume recounting of diplomatic relations between the USSR and other European powers from ca. 1929 to 1941, detailing the attempts by the NKID of the USSR and especially Litvinov to arrange a coalition against Nazism on the basis of collective security and their complete failure. He's published two volumes so far, "Stalin's gamble" (ca. 1930-1936) and "Stalin's failed alliance" (1936-1939), which build on his previous work, including "1939: the alliance that never was", and it is to be followed by a third volume focused on German-Soviet relations from Molotov-Ribbentrop to Barbarossa. Having been somewhat exposed to Soviet and post-Soviet literature on the subject (although very limited by the language barrier), his work seems to square very well with that historiography, but of course it is in complete contradiction with the standard pop history version we're exposed to in EU and Anglo countries in which the USSR was an expansionist ally of Nazi Germany while, on the other hand, any compromises France or the UK made with the Nazis (including selling out the Czechoslovaks without giving them a say) were necessary steps from principled enemies of Nazism who needed time to prepare to fight Germany, which is something that (apart from a handful of appeasers) they always wanted to do. Given how that period is being used and abused in current propaganda against Russia (peace in Ukraine would be a new Munich Agreements, the Russians were Nazi allies, double genocide of the Snyder flavour, etc.), perhaps it would be interesting to have a show on the topic? As a bonus Carley had a petition circulated against him around April 2022 asking for his suspension or dismissal from the University of Montréal for his "pro-Putin" positions and "Kremlin propaganda" on his private social media, which seems to have utterly failed simply because the University didn't entertain it. Out of curiosity I looked up some interviews and op eds by him and while I found some slightly spicy opinions, I didn't get any major red flags from it, although lacking any other context I might be wrong. Sorry for the long text and thanks as always for your work, looking forward to listening to this later today.

will this have annibale's most "eetlers" yet?

"Italy: soon after his inauguration in 1932, fdr was confiding to a friend that ‘I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman’. Asked five years later by his Ambassador in Rome if ‘he had anything against dictatorships’, he replied ‘of course not, unless they moved across their frontiers and sought to make trouble in other countries’. Spain: within a month of Franco’s uprising, he had imposed an unprecedented embargo on arms to the Republic—‘a gesture we Nationalists shall never forget’, declared the Generalísimo: ‘President Roosevelt behaved like a true gentleman’. France: he felt an ‘old and deep affection’ for Pétain, with whose regime in Vichy the us maintained diplomatic relations down to 1944, and matching detestation of De Gaulle—a ‘prima donna’, ‘jackanapes’ and ‘fanatic’.

Nature is healing

Damn this is a big time snub to friend of the show Danny bessner

Annibale = GOAT

Ehhhhh let's-a fuh keeng goOOoAh !!

So tired of this. Annibale acts like he fucking grew up in Italy and knows everything about it