Quote: (03-04-2013 09:49 PM)Blaster Wrote:
I suspect British people are reflexively anti-fascist
That's now. They were not reflexively anti-fascist when fascism was new. If you look at, say, a newspaper from the 1920s talking about Mussolini a bit after his rise to power, they're all pretty indifferent to any danger - some are adoring, some are skeptical, but rather few people had some reflexive worry that fascism is dangerous. The Daily Mail actually declared itself fascist aligned (gotta love the Daily Mail). Mussolinis bombastic dictator cult was mostly just seen as an Italian thing and not taken very seriously.
Fascism started gaining a bad reputation only well into the 1930s when the German regime got ever more repressive and it got ever more obvious that they were dragging the world to war.
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because they associate fascism with authoritarianism and suppression of individual rights and racist nationalism.
The kind of racial ideology that today looks unique to Naziism was more or less the norm in Britain and the Germanic countries, it was the "diversity" and "multiculturalism" of the day. Everyone just buried it after WWII. In fact, most of this stuff originated in Britain and that's why Hitler thought he'd find the British sympathetic - the racial nationalism was adopted precisely because Hitler thought it would bring Germany closer to Britain.
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Do you really think the Nazi influence would have been able to overcome Britain's commitment to enlightenment ideals?
Uhwhat?
Oswald Mosley wrote a book about developing a British kind of fascism centered around the monarchy, with the aim of transforming the state to a parliamentary type of fascism, and he quickly gained a pretty large follower base for his fascist party. Of course it all evaporated pretty quick since he was an idealistic moron who let just about everyone in and the British Union of Fascists soon became a refuge for thugs but really, nothing in fascist ideology itself turned off people before it became associated with the violent fringe.
Of course, everyone today who thinks that fascism just means a strong dictator should re-read their history. Actually, much of what used to be called fascism was integrated into Western societies under a different name after World War II or even before (eg New Deal)... I think most fascist ideology is rather disastrously wrong even though I don't much care for today's democracy.