Slop.

On Orwell

Isaac Asimov on 1984

A Critical Read of Animal Farm

Towards a Critique of Totalitarianism

Some fun reading if you like people dunking on Orwell and Arendt.

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?

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?

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.

Do people even read books anymore? half of these can't be classified anti-fascist

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

erm, where's atlas shrugged? that's my favourite woke book

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.

I swear to god people are allergic to anything written by someone non-white.

Blackshirts and Reds is notably absent from this list

Yeah snitching on your friends to the CIA is hardcore antifascism

Finally, a genre of writing that is inherently anti-fascist: military history...

My favorite anti-fascists, George “gave lists of Jews and Gays to MI6” Orwell and Hannah Ardent Antisemite

Oh great I love famous author Margaret

Liberals are allergic to reading anything that would actually inform their own ideology, even the stuff that completely affirms what they already believe. What we have instead is just this vibes based bullshit, because thats what the education system instills in them instead of a critical exploration of the system we live in. I cannot even have a decent conversation with super libbed friends because they have never even tried to read anything to explain what the purpose of, say, the state is. Instead they start from the idea that the state just "kinda has to exist or something", the actual purpose is entirely nebulous. They would never let kids read Lenin, but I can only imagine the consequences of students reading just State and Revolution.

All fiction of course

JORJOR WELL

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret

"check out military history" fucking hell not even normal history you gotta read the chud school for some reason

"The Long Walk Home by Stephen King"

Lmao I love reading

If you can read french I recommend this about Arendt https://archive.org/details/arendtetheidegge0000faye

So anticommunist fiction largely written by fascist sympathizers.

Check out military history for anti-fascist reading??????

love to check out military history