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No Fascism and Big Business by Daniel Guerin, no The Corporate State in Action: Italy under Fascism by Carl T. Schmidt, not even The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer. Mm, mm, mm. Typical.
Why is this list so heavily biased in favor of fiction? There was hardly anything ‘boring’ about actually existing fascism. Is somebody afraid that reading history books would make the links between fascism and capitalism too obvious?
They would rather you stick to your highschool history book that purposely leaves these connections as obfuscated as possible
I can also recommend Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze.
Did a doubletake upon seeing this name. Very much not to be confused with Carl Schmitt. A Jason Hickel vs. Jackson Hinkle of their time?
A Critical Read of Animal Farm
Towards a Critique of Totalitarianism
Some fun reading if you like people dunking on Orwell and Arendt.
The Asimov critique is probably my favorite thing to send to libs who bring up anything “Orweillian”. That and Ursula K. Le Guin’s critique of Harry Potter
Yep! Easily shuts them down with another “hero” of theirs with much better takes.
Plus Asimov comes across as pretty socialist/communist sympathetic. he’s not really fully bought into red scare shit and seems to be pretty nuanced in his takes
it’s kind of refreshing. although i would probably consider Asimov a utopian socialist. he liked central planning, he just wanted AI to do it
Yea, he was always comrade-adjacent and didn’t buy into the anti-communism of the time.
i love telling people about one of the short stories in I, Robot where economic AI supercomputers just slowly take over the global economy and create communism and nobody cares because humanity’s material conditions keep getting better
the secret is they redistribute wealth shhhh
One of the funniest god damn things in the animatrix is the shorts that explain how the human v ai conflict began, and its basically just rabid reactionary humans doing a genocide, which leads the ai to form its own robo-communist country where they outproduce everyone (and are seemingly willing to work with humans to the benefit of all), only for the humans to go and nuke them because they can’t have that.
rightoids are already setting this shit up with the “clanker” memes and other robo slurs
YES. i’m glad i’m not the only one who noticed that. and the fact that leftists fought alongside the Ai in the streets and were exterminated along with them. it really makes shit like “Detroit Become Human” look like the derivative slop that it is.
humans pack bond, and i have no doubt leftists would fight to help liberate humanoid AI slaves even if it meant dying along side them.
in the animatrix you see the results towards the end when the last human mech soldiers are all religious fanatics hopped up on stimulants. the last human resistance were pure fascists and deserved to be casually disassembled by the squid robots.
the AI wanted to bring us FALGSC and the reactionaries rejected it utterly
(also you could take if further and since the robots set themselves up deep in the desert of Saudi Arabia I wonder if they brought prosperity to the middle east, which also threatened the economic order)
Oh shoot! I gotta read Asimov, lol. Been putting it off too long.
just be prepared for some somewhat boring character interactions.
he’s a better world builder then dialog crafter, as is true in much sci-fi from that era. more his early stuff then later
his wife wrote some stuff in his universe after he died and i think she did characters/dialog so much better. i suspect she helped him in his later works (which is super cool some of the best writing comes from couples collaborating)
the ‘psychohistory’ in Foundation is pretty much a thinly veiled version of historical materialism, at least that’s the way it came off to me
Oh gotta book mark Isaac Asimov on 1984.
It’s good!
Its a quick read and pretty funny
Lol OK Asimov almost makes me want to read 1984 in the same way one might want to watch Space Mutiny or Manos: The Hands of Fate or The Room. It sounds comical!
I hear you, haha, but I find something that requires commitment and an active engagement like reading really sours you on it, rather than being funny.
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The concept of “totalitarianism” was popularized by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 right at the start of the heated phase of the Cold War.
Inside it, you can see her contradict herself within the bounds of her own concepts, but the main issue is: it attempted to create a false parallel between what she calls “Stalinism” (supposedly the ideology of the Soviet Union at the time) and Nazism, as if they’re two sides of the same coin. When, of course, they aren’t. This is what we call “making up a concept, pointing to two things in the world, and saying those are the same.”
The book also says that totalitarianism is novel in that it attempts to terrorise whole populations instead of only political adversaries, so as to whip the people into shape, when in material terms, we know that isn’t what happened in the Soviet Union, and neither in Nazi Germany honestly.
Supposedly, totalitarian movements would attempt to control every single aspect of the life of their subject, and this would be why Hitler and Stalin were totalitarians and Mussolini isn’t, because Mussolini would ‘just be an autocrat’ who wants to subjugate their political opposition.
Many people would mention that she forgets a spooky thing called slavery, that did the same thing. Capitalism could be argued to do it too, colonialism also, etc.
All that aside, a lot of people criticised her for just not understanding certain events correctly. For instance, she mentions that the Nazis weren’t really interested in murdering all Jews; instead, those were simply a convenient proxy— a 2-minute hate, if you will— to whip up your population. Therefore it’d be comparable to any famine from the USSR, since intent would be similar, according to her. This fundamentally misunderstands the Nazi project in a futile attempt to draw a line between two different things for political purposes, and ignores historical documentation of intent like the Wannsee conference and Generalplan Ost.
Bottom line: Hannah Arendt created Cold War propaganda to try and equate the old enemy (Nazi Germany) with the new one that was finding itself in the Korean War (Soviet Union). Liberals gobbled this up because they’re scared of big words like “authoritarianism”, and therefore she had a ton of success. Her theories ignore the political violence of the state and of capitalism because, in her liberal mindset, these weren’t actual violence, but instead just the way the world works. This flies in the face of everything the Third World ever tries to accomplish, because our revolutionary violence wouldn’t be justified.
It’s almost like a “big-tent” propaganda, you can take a million conclusions out of this, and it’s been deeply influential.
As a final note, Hannah Arendt was extremely racist in defense of colonialism.
credit to u/Logan_Maddox
Anti-fascist books:
-Fiction
-Fiction
-Fiction
-Fiction
-Fiction
Not that fiction is bad per se, but my god, how about we recommend some reading about actual fascism?
Also, why the literal monopoly capitalist caricature as inviting the reader?
Only is someone knew what is to be done and had published it
I’ll give them this. Brave New World may be a bit of a cliche but the fact that we have a decadent elite claiming divine right to their decadence on account of being “alpha”…yeah Huxley called it.
Brave New World is one of the actual decent dystopian fictions
Because Huxley understood that hopping people up on treats is a way more straightforward and stable way to control a populous than cartoonish supervillainry.
Yeah, definitely. I love Huxley, but I just know everyone references Brave New World and I wish he got more credit for more than just that book.
I’m reading Island right now and so far liking it.
Yeah it resonated with me far more than whatever else I read when I was younger, and the whole soma thing has only felt more and more relevant as time has gone on. As a sort of aside this all reminded me of The Giver, a book my mom tried to team up with another evangelical mom to petition our school to get us not to read. Ironically the book really comes off as being super liberal, as well as not particularly good.
The Giver
I’ve heard that book cited as being a cautionary tale about the evils of communism
Yeah I mean its basically about some super hightech post scarcity future where humans have decided to genetically engineer (I think) all of their racial differences and to remove all sexual desire and prejudice, or something like that. And basically one kid every so often gets to like… psychically inherit all these memories of how the world used to be. Basically you’re meant to feel like its awful to ruin the human condition this way, but long after I read it I clocked it as seeming very anti-communist, like this is what the foolish commies will do if they eradicate scarcity and whatnot. Its not very good, from a creative perspective I think it would’ve been better as a short story that was more sci-fi in nature.
Yeah it’s been forever since I read The Giver, but my memory of it is “Baby’s first dystopian novel.” Like it was even more oversimplified in its depiction of authoritarianism than a typical YA novel.
Its definitely peddled to pretty young kids, and its written in a way as to be really ambiguous about the kind of ideology/society its criticizing. Theres definitely elements of fascism (racial purity), but the society portrayed is also essentially classless with some sort of big brother element that assigns everyone work and eradicates any form of dissent. Its just not a good book, really, but its also meant to be a somewhat edgy novel for very young people so I guess thats kinda normal.
Honestly I look back on a lot of the assigned reading from my youth and kinda resent being forced to read a lot of tripe. To be fair I was lucky to have a really advanced reading ability (I watched my brother play RPGs before I could read at all, and picked up a lot before I learned in school), so maybe I felt kinda put upon just not reading at whatever level I was at. I really dont mean this as a form of bragging, my experience with education just made me feel like sometimes the system assumes the least of kids when they’re really capable and ready for a lot more.
Brave New World is a dystopia with treatlerite characteristics.
Animal Farm is a joke. A book for brainwashing children. I feel like you have to have not read many books in your life to think its something worth reading to learn about anti-communism (which is funny because this is an anti-fascist list). I guess the allegory is simple enough to understand that it makes these manchildren feel smart.
Orwell is peddled to kids/teens because its much more digestible at those ages. Its sad that people can read/reread 1984 as an adult and believe its actually pithy rather than being simple, weird (god the fucking sex stuff), and largely not compatible with the reality we live in. It takes on an insane amount of irony when one realizes the kind of work Orwell was doing for the British government, or the fact that the UK has already adopted a level of surveillance that is honestly more legitimately capable than whats even described in 1984!
When I tried and failed to read 1984 I was shocked at how little it was interested in the politics of the setting, and instead really really wanted to tell you about this dudes torrid fling with his manic pixie dream girl. Given how much people reference it about fascism I was expecting something much different.
The sad thing is that the sex stuff could maybe have been written in a far better way, but its not and its just weird/creepy. Like I genuinely assume Orwell was trying to do something more interesting there but it fails to land on anything other than a naive reader. Even the teenager me who was willing to accept quite a bit of slop had a hard time with it. I assume people just reference it because, like Harry Potter, its one of the few books they ever engaged with.
Considering he was a removed, he probably wasn’t trying to do anything more interesting than jerk himself off and hate women with that stuff.
I may be giving him some sort of creative benefit of the doubt that he doesn’t deserve lol
Nobody seems to find it odd that so many state-funded schools encourage students to read his two most famous works. If Orwell only wanted to warn future generations of ‘big government’, no dictatorship of the bourgeoisie would ever promote his books.
The most scathing indictment of Orwell that I could ever make is that he betrayed whatever Anarchist/Leftist ideology he supposedly believed in. Obviously if he had written books that were actually Anarchist in nature I don’t think liberal governments would peddle them as propaganda pieces. Certainly nothing I could say about it would match the thoroughness with which Asimov lays it out.
I thought he was a trot
From everything I understand he aligned himself with an Anarchist group in the Spanish revolution. I have heard him referred to as a social democrat as well, though.
In conclusion, eric blair is a land of incoherence
His actual name is Blair? God, how appropriate.
Blackshirts and Reds is notably absent from this list
Considering the calibre of some of this list, I think Harry Potter is more likely to show up than anything by Parenti.
Do people even read books anymore? half of these can’t be classified anti-fascist
I am desperately clawing back the voracious reading I had as a kiddo
You and me both
That makes three
Hexbear book club when?
We have one, people just ignore it I think
Yay. I used to read a fuckton of books as a teenager. Then like basically nothing in my twenties. These days I started to get back into reading crappy (but fun) fiction books.
Nice! Same here, haha. Easy stuff is fun! Though some fiction I’ve read has been really good, like Piranesi!
Yeah I wanna read more demanding works down the line but atm Im just reading basic stuff like Brandon Sanderson books and 40k novels
and 40k novels
NO, STOP! Go Back! You’ll never get off this train, they are just gonna keep releasing Horus Heresy books until the heat death of the universeI wont touch the Horus Heresy. (anytime at least) I just read chaos and xeno novels at the moment
Dan Abnett’s Gaunt’s Ghosts is a good series too, as is both Eisenhorn and Ravenor (I never read the third part because it came out after I’d stopped keeping up with 40K, but I assume it’s just as good).
I’ve only heard good things about those!
I really loved Piranesi. I didn’t really care about the actual plot, but I liked the protagonist trying to interpret his environment.
Yep! It was super charming in that way, with the protagonist always being innocent and cheerful in dark and scary circumstances.
Ive been getting into anthologies of “weird fiction”/cosmic horror/Lovecraftian stuff the past few years.
A local author brought us a copy of one of his anthology books for us on tour, and it wasn’t the best but it was nice to be reading in the car like i did as a kid!
Oh yeah I do wanna get into stuff like cosmic horror/ weird fiction and pulp stuff down the line as well.
If you like weird fiction China Miéville is a great author, especially since he’s a commie there’s a lot of good politics in his books.
Happy to chat about it if you ever want some recommendations!
have you read Clark Ashton Smith
http://www.eldritchdark.com/writings/short-stories/210/the-testament-of-athammaus
Not all his works, but ill book Mark this for the week! Got another long drive or two coming up after tomorrow
I am desperately [cultivating] the voracious reading [habit] I [never] had as a kiddo.
Hell yea lmao
I haven’t read all of these, but of them I think only Handmaid’s Tale, The Wave (blegh), It Can’t Happen Here, and “Anything by Hannah Arendt” (blegh) can be called “antifascist,” and I guess V with caveats.
I always got the vibe that V was basically Nietzschean while masquerading as anarchist, and being Nietzschean is really not a good tool for opposing fascism or really for facilitating anything except overtly irrational self-destruction. Nietzsche’s philosophy was certainly warped by the proto-Nazis and Nazis, but there’s a reason it was his philosophy that became so much of their face and not that of Hegel or even Schopenhauer, because it’s the western philosophical school for the “cult of the hero” and “heroic” society generally.
But I’ve arrived at basically 4.5/12. I don’t really see how Long Walk by Stephen King maps on to this unless it’s extremely loosely anticapitalist like most death game stories are, but the title isn’t “The Long Walk Home,” that’s a different book by a different author and a romance novel at that. I think Brave New World is more anticapitalist than anything, with the remaining titles being anticommunist and/or antidemocratic more than antifascist (if they are antifascist at all). 451 is elitist and antidemocratic, people just gloss over that part, because the book ban was a popular decision and not one made by the government.
There are plenty of actually antifascist books out there, though it’s not as widely-taught as anticommunist books in America. Even limiting ourselves to YA type books, there’s still titles like Book Thief. It sure makes you wonder why they would purport to teach antifascism and then mostly just give you anticommunism instead, and I don’t think the answer is simple illiteracy.
Lot of people listen to audio books
Not sure V for Vendetta translates so well to audio though
Many people read a great many things and learn precisely nothing from them
I swear to god people are allergic to anything written by someone non-white.
Oh yeah, they read like 20 books total across their lives and most of them are assigned reading at school
The rest are usually Harry Potter
erm, where’s atlas shrugged? that’s my favourite woke book
It’s woke because a girl boss wrote it
All fiction of course
Eat shit, everything by Hannah Arendt
Yeah snitching on your friends to the CIA is hardcore antifascism
My favorite anti-fascists, George “gave lists of Jews and Gays to MI6” Orwell and Hannah Ardent Antisemite
Hannah Arendt was anti-Jewish? I know that she had a low opinion of Africans, but this is the first time that I heard of her having a low opinion of other Jews.
I remember this allegation but I didn’t save receipts, a hexbear search turned up this by @activated@hexbear.net:
Regardless: There’s no reason for a leftist to read Arendt. She was explicitly anti-Marx and anti-socialism, and her concept of totalitarianism gave us the greatest removed(in the Stirner sense) of modern political critique. She was so fucking racist that she was at the Nuremberg trials and spent time observing the savagery of the Sephardic Jews doing the security detail in comparison with the lofty European judges.
It is certainly jarring to read Arendt, the great proponent of binational coexistence and Arab rights, disparage the “oriental mob”—otherwise known as Sephardic Israelis—who stand outside the courthouse, “as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.”¹³¹ (All pariahs are not, apparently, created equal.) In her view, it was unfortunate that “the European element [has been] very much pushed into the background.”¹³²
Yet even the European element, at least if it came from the East, can disappoint: Chief Prosecutor Gideon Hausner is “a typical Galician Jew, very unsympathetic. […] Probably one of those people who don’t know any language.” As the trial progresses, Arendt will find Hausner “increasingly revolting.”¹³³
(Source.)
Ugh… unfortunately, this is not the first example that I have seen of a Jewish adult expressing ethnocentrism. As early as the sixteenth century, the Ashkenazi Mayer Winterbach expressed contempt for ‘Oriental Jews’, and I made a thread on the sometimes unpleasant relations between Ashkenazim and Sephardim in concentration camps, so I am sad to say that Arendt’s attitude towards Eastern Jews is not that surprising. Thankfully, this phenomenon is less common than it used to be (although some Jews still get frustrated with their Ashkenazi siblings).
Finally, a genre of writing that is inherently anti-fascist: military history…
Fascists did lose in most of military history
Political history however
i’m surprised gulag archipelago isnt on the list
