Pic Of The Moment: Trump Supporters React To The News That He Hid The Truth About Coronavirus

[ancianita]

43. Fascism is also a feeling that Trumpists feel, needing a "perceived"strong man leader.

Which Trump knows. He knows this has happened before. This is a cultural review of people's receptivity to fascist messaging.

And what moved them, in Knausgaard’s view, was not the Nazis’ promise to redistribute income, or Hitler’s analysis of world affairs, or even, initially, their hatred of the Jews. What moved them was, rather, the joyful feeling of togetherness and community, of being able to transcend not only the fragmented democracy of the Weimar period but politics altogether.

“In National Socialism,” writes Knausgaard, “philosophy and politics come together at a point outside the language, and beyond the rational, where all complexity ceases, though not all depth.” Riefenstahl’s film [Triumph of the Will]communicates the pleasure the people experienced—how “good” it felt to them—at having escaped the quotidian chaos of their shabby republic and their trivial private lives, at being liberated from the restrictions of rationality and deliberation, at being on the brink of achieving something large and lasting, deep and simple.

Beginning not long after the 2016 election with the historian Timothy Snyder’s bestseller Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017), soon followed by the philosopher Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), numerous scholars have sought to use historical analysis of the Weimar period to alert Americans to the early signs of fascistic rule. As the Trump presidency has dragged on, these urgent warnings have given way to a wide-ranging debate, including in these pages, about whether such historical analogies are warranted or appropriate.

Understood in relation to that debate, Malick’s and Knausgaard’s artistic treatments of Nazism may persuade us not of the inaccuracy or inappropriateness of such analogies, but of their utter and complete futility—at least insofar as it is claimed such comparisons can inoculate us against repetition. In their focus on the emotional pull of Nazism—its promise to liberate citizens from the frustrations and banalities of an alienated, lonely existence, to connect them with a mass of like-minded souls in “unconditional joy”—the works of Malick and Knausgaard expose us to aspects of how fascism works that it would be laughable to think could yield to academic analysis, no matter how accessibly arranged.

“Establish a private life,” warns Snyder. “Listen for dangerous words.” Do we really imagine it was advice such as this that interwar Germans lacked?

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/08/14/the-unbearable-toward-an-antifascist-aesthetic/?fbclid=IwAR0JbfH134TAdSyZhKQgtp7vgFZgM8QFQ7jqwYMg_yt_YAopymHHNL4zIyo