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.
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.