Calling on all ex-fascists!

[LevDavidovichBronstein]

I cannot comprehend the mindset of a fascist, I know there are ex-fascists on this forum (there's nothing wrong at all with being an EX-fascist), so could an ex-fascist please explain to me how they became a fascist, what motivated their beliefs and what on earth they were thinking?

thankyou

[Catmatic Leftist]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/confessions-ex-nazi-t139575/index.html?&highlight=confessions+ex-nazi

^^This should give you some good insight. Also, there was a documentary called "Erasing Hate" about Bryon Widner, who was an Ex-Vinlander. It's actually pretty recent. They removed it off of YouTube, though.

[Commissar Rykov]

I am an ex-fascist of the Original Italian School not the Germanic Nazi School. Any questions you have I would be willing to answer. I figure we might as well do it out in the open as well since it is rather unprecedented as far as I have seen.

[Catmatic Leftist]

I am an ex-fascist of the Original Italian School not the Germanic Nazi School. Any questions you have I would be willing to answer. I figure we might as well do it out in the open as well since it is rather unprecedented as far as I have seen.

How do the two schools differ?

[Commissar Rykov]

How do the two schools differ?

The original Italian School was much less Authoritarian and did not have racialist undertones in fact it rejected racialism. The Italian School also believed in creating a Corporatist State thus giving owners and unions equal opportunity in running the business. The whole idea behind the Italian school was class cooperation, the State is the ultimate binding force of the people and the idea of being multiethnic while being monocultural whereas the German School was based entirely on race and the nation was considered an extension of race thus everything must be done for the betterment of the race.

Nazi philosophy is extremely vague in the practical sense unlike Italian Fascism because the Nazis specifically couldn't agree or even had any ideas that really gelled other than the Germanic Race is the ultimate binding force.

[Susurrus]

I used to have fascist sympathies(not Nazi, but of the same type as Rykov). Never liked Hitler at all, thought he was a crazy fool.

Edit: A good tool for understanding fascism in general is the Fascism Oxford Reader. Lots of source documents, essays, etc. Also, Fascist Italy under Mussolini differed somewhat from the original philosophy, as I recall, with more power in the upper class and a religious overtone.

Edit 2: In answering the original post, I developed the mindset coming out a mild interest in Communism(the authoritarian type, and I had very limited understanding of the critique of Capitalism), and figured that corporativism would be an easier way to secure a comfortable and un-oppressed position for the workers than Communism.

[Commissar Rykov]

I used to have fascist sympathies(not Nazi, but of the same type as Rykov). Never liked Hitler at all, thought he was a crazy fool.

Edit: A good tool for understanding fascism in general is the Fascism Oxford Reader. Lots of source documents, essays, etc. Also, Fascist Italy under Mussolini differed somewhat from the original philosophy, as I recall, with more power in the upper class and a religious overtone.

Edit 2: In answering the original post, I developed the mindset coming out a mild interest in Communism(the authoritarian type, and I had very limited understanding of the critique of Capitalism), and figured that corporativism would be an easier way to secure a comfortable and un-oppressed position for the workers than Communism.

Indeed, fascism under Mussolini changed quite a bit from the original ideology. At first it attempted it but after all the violence done by the Blackshirts no one wanted to work in the multiparty government that Mussolini attempted to create so it quickly turned into Fascist Yesmen holding Minister positions. I think the biggest change that happened within the Fascist Movement was the inclusion of Futurists and Conservative Monarchists whereas most of the party originally had come from the Socialists. The basic tenets of Theoretical Fascism still demanded democracy and keeping the people involved but they simply replaced class warfare with the idea of Class Cooperation.

Class Cooperation obviously doesn't work and it was one of the falling outs I had with the ideology in that you could not get the Bourgeois to ever stop the warfare. The question would always return to, "Why should I let my workers have a say?" This in turn leads to the Fascist State having to use force to keep the owners in line and that doesn't even remotely guarantee results thus leading to cronyism. Also my time amongst Neo-Fascist movements really soured me entirely to the ideology as I was the only serious anti-racist. While many in the Neo-Fash movements will claim to not be racist they will use certain terms, phrases and hints to indicate they view racism in a positive light.

The real tipping point is when I was asked to be an editor for an up and coming American based "Nationalist Newsletter." I wanted it to be run along my own views the problem is I was told I needed to add more subtle references to pro-Nazi sources and slowly begin turning the newsletter racialist. This really lead me to understand how deeply over my head I was and that just because I rejected Hitler as a nut and racism as counterproductive and stupid doesn't mean everyone else or even a very good sized minority do. The reality is the Neo-Fash movement is just a way for Neo-Nazis to protect themselves from the Racist Banner they deserve because it drives away recruits.

[Susurrus]

Yeah, I didn't even join any movements before I abandoned it and turned leftist again.

[Catmatic Leftist]

Where can I get information on the history and origins of Fascism and Mussolini, Hitler, etc.?

[Commissar Rykov]

Yeah, I didn't even join any movements before I abandoned it and turned leftist again.

Didn't join any myself either I just happened to get approached with working on the Newsletter due to my postings on some fash boards. Which to me shows how desperate they are to find someone who can help legitimize them. I imagine I was only approached due to being so vocally against racism thus it would be harder to apply that label on me if I was running their racialist newsletter.

[Commissar Rykov]

Where can I get information on the history and origins of Fascism and Mussolini, Hitler, etc.?

Robert O. Paxton is probably one of the best. The Doctrine of Fascism is also good although it was written by Gentile it is usually accredited to Mussolini. If you want it from the horse's mouth though you can't go wrong with Mussolini's Autobiography My Rise and Fall the first part is excellent as it highlights how the party came to be, what lead to its creation and how it achieved power and what they did with it initially. The latter half while being imprisoned and awaiting for the rescue by Otto Skorzeny and German Commandos is rather whiny and he blames everyone but himself for the mess Italy is in. I found the latter half of the book really hard to read as it is obvious Mussolini doesn't want to blame himself for getting into bed with Hitler and smashing Italy into pieces while condemning Italian Jews and former Jewish Fascists to death.

As to Hitler Mein Kampf pretty much lays out his views of the world and his Second Book the Sequel to Mein Kampf lays out Foreign Policy and his views on warfare. I always find with movements that are highly leader centric it is best to go to the top first. If you can find Rosenberg's book Myth of the Twentieth Century it lays out Nazi Racial theory more clearly. Richard J. Evans also wrote an excellent trilogy on the rise and fall of the Nazis.

[Susurrus]

Where can I get information on the history and origins of Fascism and Mussolini, Hitler, etc.?

As I said in my first post, the Oxford Reader on Fascism has a lot of documents and essays on it.

[LurksWithinUsAll]

I know this is an old thread but I've been retracing my influences and I am a total ex-fascist.

Basically my ideas were influenced by Necessity: the necessity of compulsory labor in a world without enough to go around, the necessity of competition and warfare in such a world, etc.

In a world with scarce resources, compulsive labor is required, and I thought the most humane thing to do would be to drop the pretenses and illusions of freedom and democracy in order to create a hyper-productive society, thus advancing us as quickly as possible toward a world where there would be genuinely enough to go around, allowing for a final dissolution of the state, compulsive labor, and economic hierarchies.

Of course, this is all based on the flawed assumption that there is not enough to go around, whereas this has probably been untrue since the 1930s if not earlier.

I was a Republican, but not a conservative in the ordinary sense. I did not believe that capitalism/corporatism was a solid basis for freedom and democracy. In fact, I thought capitalism/corporatism was authoritarian and anti-democratic -- and I supported it for precisely that reason! So in moving from fascist to leftist I had the same analysis of capitalism all along, and simply switched from preferring it to disliking it.

It's important for leftists to understand this mindset, because many rightwingers have a strong internal consistency to their ideas, and people find that attractive. America is attacked? Fight back with military measures! Limited resources? National war, economic competition, slash budgets! A lot of rightwingers are very practical and yet well-meaning people who want a decisive answer to what they see as society's major problems. So every time we question their view of precisely what society's problems actually are, we must give them a very clear understanding of our strategy -- not just what policies we support, but how we actually intend to get them implemented against the obstacle of the capitalist state/system.

I should note that, while I respected Hitler's forging of a European state (I saw global imperialism as the answer to national competition LOL), I abhorred his racism, and even as a fascist admired Martin Luther King Jr's struggle, as well as the Panthers etc. If I had not abandoned fascism earlier, the racism of the modern neo-Nazis would be a major stumbling block for me. There are no real functional Mussolinian fascist groups, at least not in the USA; all the real organized energy is in Nazism. I doubt I would ever have joined the Nazis.

I feel that the hardnosed pragmatism of my early fascist days still lives on in me, in the form of bolshevism's tendency towards being highly organized and ultimately supporting extreme tactics such as labor strikes/revolution, but the political system we're trying to implement is opposite.

[Winkers Fons]

In fact, I thought capitalism/corporatism was authoritarian and anti-democratic -- and I supported it for precisely that reason!.

I was the same way. It's kind of funny to find out that other people believed that as well.

I suppose my past fascist opinions stemmed from social isolation. I was an outcast throughout middle school and early high school and because of that I began to think people were just stupid, weak and all sorts of other bad things and as such needed to be controlled by the select few superior people (me) who could guide them to prosperity. It was really just a case of jealousy developing into a sense of superiority.

I also held racist opinions under the guise of "realism", which I think can mostly be attributed to my upbringing and family life. Both of my parents are racists but in different ways. My mother is just a typical ignorant conservative racist but my father is outright Nazi in the most literal sense of the word. Judging by the other people I knew growing up I think more people than we would admit can relate to this. Racism is still pervasive in the U.S.A.

Besides fascism I also flirted with right-libertarianism and mainstream American conservatism (which should show you just how closely those ideologies are related). Coming from a person who was once all three, I can tell you that at the core they are all based on selfishness, jealousy and most importantly, fear.

As to how I became a communist, all I can say is that I may have been a hateful bastard but I was never an idiot. I was always an avid student of history and politics and as I became more knowledgeable in those fields I naturally drifted towards communism. I would also like to cite my grandfather (a socialist) as a factor in my political transformation.

[Stork]

It's been said a thousand times. It's just a reactionary doctrine that is unsubstantiated. "Everyone should be like me because I know what is right".
As to how I became an anarchist, I was watching allot of anti-statist and vulgar-libertarian/AnCap videos on youtube and learning about the anarchist philosophers, mainly individualists like Proudhon, Tucker and Rothbard. Then after the Anders Berring Breveik incident and listening to some in my circle of friends defending his barbaric actions I started to see similarities between him and me. Even though we differed allot on politics we both supported using terror to "take Europe back", when you break it down, using force to impose ideals onto others is absurd and morally bankrupt, but they always us words like "preserving European values" and "destroying Marxism"to make it appeal. Then I went to learn more about the anarchist philosophers and it all appealed. Then I met up with some folks from SolFed and they got me into the collectivist Anarchists like Berkman and Kropotkin.

[NewLeft]

I started out as a right-libertarian.. I used to read infowars daily and preach free markets. I only became interested in leftism after reading essays by Voltairine de Cleyre, recommended by a right libertarian.

[Sam Varriano]

...I used to be a bit of a right-libertarian when I was younger, but I was pretty open minded and later went into left-libertarianism and then communism.

It was like:

First I was into Ayn Rand

Then Noam Chomsky/Howard Zinn

And finally Karl Marx/Lenin/etc

Took a few years but the one good thing now is I've read a lot of political literature from all ends so I feel like I have a bigger world view now.

[Susurrus]

Right libertarian does not equal fascist.

[Tim Cornelis]

I don't know whether I could have been considered a "fascist" but I was pan-Germanist and authoritarian, so I suppose my "mindset" was quite similar.

The "mindset" of a fascist is anti-intellectual and based on gutfeelings, alienation, and hatred as opposed to reason. It is infantile and in my case I simply grew out of it as I became to appreciate freedom.

[Charlie Watt]

I was a hardline unionist as a teenager. All god and ulster, god save the queen, that sort of pish, and I did have some nazi syampathies. If you want to know the motivations behind it, it boils down to isolation more than anything, in my case. I was a gay kid, growing up in a small, backward town. The only things to do were drink and watch football. I somehow managed to indoctrinate myself into the whole patriotic, nationalist mindset, and the more angry, bitter and drunk I got, the more right wing I became. It's all fairly text-book and pathetic to be perfectly honest. I remember seeing a study a couple of years ago about young gay men that remain in the closet being more drawn to the right (overcompensating for their perceived lack of masculinity,) with the opposite holding true for those that come out early on. That all peaked when I was about 19, then I had an epiphany moment, and came to the realisation that xenophobia and loyalty to parasitic haemophiliacs was not making me happy. It provides a false sense of belonging, which can be shattered by a random moment of clarity, and I'm so fuckin glad it happened sooner rather than later.

I still clung to a kind of toned down patriotism for years after that, mistakenly conflating pride in ones culture with patriotic fervor (the primary tool for recruiting to the cult of nationalism,) even as I moved into Marxism. Only in the last couple of years has that ceased to be the case and I moved toward a proper internationalist outlook.

To sum up, the main draw of that particular brand of fascism (as I believe loyalism is,) is the fetishism surrounding traditional institutions, as displayed by the numerous, masonic style loyalist groups (loyal orange lodge,) the macho fixation on militarism, be it for the armed forces or the paramilitaries in Ulster (adopted by C18 and the EDL, incidentally,) and a romanticised view of the British Empire.

Noxious pile of shit, I know, but nationalism, like any other religion, requires that the heads that it's drilled into be soft and/or confused, as was the case when I was a kid.

[magicstick]

I cannot comprehend the mindset of a fascist, I know there are ex-fascists on this forum (there's nothing wrong at all with being an EX-fascist), so could an ex-fascist please explain to me how they became a fascist, what motivated their beliefs and what on earth they were thinking?

thankyou

A while back I was a dedicated white nationalist(I'm ashamed, but there's no point in hiding it).

I became a fascist because I met some people many years ago who tried to dumb down fascism and make it seem as peaceful, non-hateful, and non-fascist as possible, then I slowly started to believe it... I don't even quite understand how that happened! I was believing such a big lie.

It's thinking the old way is always better, removing rights and discrimination is better for humanity. It's implying that certain human beings are better than others, and you have to treat them differently to make humanity as a whole better.

It's hard to explain, but it's stupid and I'm glad I don't believe in it anymore.