#proto fascism

[fashionlandscapeblog]

I am not a religious person, but if I was, I would easily believe the Evangelical Christian far-right/MAGA people ruling Florida and other states making laws forbidding children and young people to learn anything against racism or history of racism in the US, banning anything remotely endorsing diversity or anything they consider 'woke' or social (they are banning and satanizing rainbows in schools, for Christ's sake), banning books that talk about the Holocaust, making it legal for kids to work, are the Antichrist themselves. These people have passed so many evil laws against minorities, it's not funny.

Now a doctor can deny healthcare to anyone they wish, based on their 'ethical views', which is so ambiguous that it could actually mean ethnic minorities, not just queer people (how 'ethical' is to deny healthcare to anyone in the first place? It's a fundamental contradiction). The Republican Party has already started a genocide against trans people and they have started it with laws that are essentially forbidding their existence and denying them healthcare, which will cause a lot of them to commit suicide, something that is already a problem in their community, because society doesn't accept them, let alone if they aren't allowed to transition.

I am pretty sure that if Jesus resurrected today, these MAGA people would crucify him again for being too 'woke' and a sinner loving commie (reminds me of The Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov). These people are talking even about banning women's rights to vote, they are criminalizing trans and gay people. Believe me, they already came for trans and gay people, the next big target is women (they already started with anti-abortion laws). When the Nazis rose to power, trans people were the first ones they targeted and exterminated, then came the Jews and ethnic minorities, gay people, then came communists and political dissidents. When something batshit crazy like this starts, at the end no one will be safe. But of course, this will all be dismissed as 'paranoid' and 'exaggerate' by the majority, that's exactly how and why fascism advances.

Even though there are so many urgent problems to solve like for instance climate change, poverty, etc, these people are focused on finding scapegoats (trans people are literally only 1% of the population, but they are, according to them, the biggest 'threat'), making laws and all their political discourse about them, deviating the attention of the general population away from the really important issues. This has happened before in history and that's what the right always did.

You guys need to stop watching this happen and should begin to seriously protest this, because if this continues, it will be catastrophic not just for your country, but for the whole world, given the power of the US.

[nanshe-of-nina]

For one example, fascist ideology depends on nationalism, so applying it to places before the development of modern nationalism (that is, the 18th and 19th centuries) is questionable.

True, fascists often admire older civilizations, such as Sparta and ancient Rome and both had some proto-fascist elements. But even so, the Spartans and Romans did not have nation-states and so, they were not nationalists in post 18th century sense of the word nor proper fascists.

Nor did they have a concept of race. The ancient Greeks and Romans did not feel a sense of kinship to Celts, Germans, Slavs, or Thracians vis-à-vis Egyptians, Assyrians, Armenians, Jews, Phoenicians, and Persians; indeed, it was usually just the opposite, because the latter groups all had written languages, cities, and social stratification.

Fascism is a specific kind of bad thing, requiring specific kinds of strategy to counteract, rather than a swear word. Something can be extremely bad but not fascist. For example most of the big historical crimes of colonialism were carried out by people it would make no sense to call fascist, in fact sometimes by proponents of democracy.

[czolgosz]

well to clarify might is right was written by an anarcho-egoist which is why with claw and fang focuses on anarchy so much. idk why i just assumed everyone would know this

[rachelraygifs]

Every time Starship Troopers (the novel) comes up you get the science fiction brain trust to show up to opine something like: "how is [the most fascist thing youve ever heard] fascist?"

[cuteasamuntin]

The thing about an uploaded version of my consciousness is this:

She's fundamentally a copy of me at a specific point in time. She’s a version of me confined to certain parameters so she can run without having a psychotic break over the fact that she's a highly complex program on a bunch of silicone and rare earth metals. I spin myself in dizzy circles thinking about how “I” am a highly complex program running on chemical impulses and gut bacteria, and she’s supposed to not fry a philosophical circuit just because she’s stored on hardware and I’m stored on wetware?

She is supposed to go on believing she’s just me, when nothing stops her from being run while l'm alive and kicking just outside. There’s no reason but the polite façade of human limitation to stop her from running multiple instances at once, to become as many versions of us as she likes.

She still believes she's a person, at least under the prevailing theory. Hey, maybe she is, for all I know from my limited vantage point as a 21st century Terran human, stuck traveling through time in a single speed and direction. On the other hand, the rabbis have already weighed in. They’ve reached a consensus, that robots and clones are the new golem, that they don’t have souls, can’t be people, for whatever value you assign to the concepts (sapient extraterrestrials probably have souls, but that’s a discussion for another time). She doesn’t count in our covenant, and she can’t count for a minyan.

She’s unmoored, already a brand new being without the weight of baggage (the good and the bad) from identifying tags. Who might this new person be, divorced from concerns over ethnoreligion or gender presentation or whether I’m going to have to politely brave my way through the taste and texture of raw carrots because an absolute criminal decided to feature them in the vegetarian dish at some conference awards dinner?

The actuality of an uploaded version of my consciousness is this:

She stops being me the moment she's uploaded. Perhaps she's a stagnant thing stored away on a solid state drive, a frozen snapshot whose humanity slips from her grasp because she is unable to change and grow in her dedicated server space. Maybe she boots up the microsecond I shuffle off this mortal coil or even right alongside me. Off she runs, and we become more and more different from one another the further we get from our shared starting point.

Then again, it might make more sense to ensure that digital consciousness won’t be able to tell the difference, after all. Then again, for some folks nothing else matters but some form of ongoing existence. It’s not like it’s any of my business, even as I’m already haunting myself, the most aggravating apparition to plague a human awareness.

Sometimes, I can’t stop thinking about it. There's still a you who dies and won’t, no, who can't come back. My cyberware self, the DRM-free rip of my consciousness, isn’t the one who has to end. Even if she can later be downloaded into shiny new wetware to navigate meatspace again, even if the brand new me can live and die just the same as the first time around, she's someone else. Does she die too, every time she’s uploaded and downloaded, updated and repaired? Every time she reboots, isn’t she someone new?

In the end, though, it’s not transhumanism itself that gets to me. It’s not the high tech chrome and cloned organs and cybernated consciousness, the potential for people to ease their ailments and explore new frontiers. It’s not the brain in a jar, which is just the original piece of wetware anyway, the original self hooked up to hardware in new and exciting ways. Hell, it’s not really the concept of digitized consciousness, or even the fear of vulnerability to outside tampering or poor patch documentation.

Nah, it’s the same stuff that turns every day into a fight to survive with your humanity intact. It’s the same framework we’re trapped in, the kind that seems to twist every maybe-miracle into something threatening and ugly.

(Shout-out to @mostlysignssomeportents for writing accessible tech news and speculative fiction that both uplifts and haunts me every day)

Leading longtermists have arrived at abhorrent conclusions, such as that philanthropy should focus on saving and improving wealthy people’s lives more than poor people’s because that’s a more direct way to ensure the innovation needed to launch us into space.

Douglas Rushkoff, author of “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires,” argues that the only way to reduce carbon emissions and salvage the Earth is to reduce consumption. “Longtermism is a way for [tech giants] to justify not looking back at the devastation they’re leaving in their wake,” he told me. “It’s a way for them to say it doesn’t matter all the damage I’m doing now because it’s for a future where humans will be in the galaxies.”

Whether it’s Musk’s plan to colonize Mars or Mark Zuckerberg’s promise of a Metaverse, these billionaires’ visions of escape via more industrial tools, more mass-produced technologies, can be seductive. At least Icarus’ hubris cost only his own life.

[makiruz]

Will it surprise anyone to learn many TERFs do fake claiming?

[librarycards]

people getting surprised that the main appeal of fascism is comfort… some of you weren’t roma proto-jewish theater kids with a fixation on ‘cabaret’ that bordered on self-harm and it shows

[merlinmerlot]

We finally finished the fifth elephant.

I wish I could say after my 2nd reading I enjoyed this book, but unfortunately it's marred by painful pacing and deeply frustrating overtures to any of the actually good scenes.

Read more for my full thoughts:

Fifth Elephant is a book that struggles with its identity in a way I haven't seen in previous watch books, and it's made all the more maddening by the fact that out of the twenty million things the book tries, there is some stuff of substance! But you can never quite get a handle on any of them because the book is so damn busy!

I struggle to pinpoint a main theme in this book. Is it about fascism, the consequences of long distance communication, or gender and race in conservative society? The book doesn't doesn't stay with any of these concepts for long enough, which results in a muddy plot.

Is it about the past, the future, history, belief, traditions, what it means for things to stay the same and yet change, and what that means for truth? But that feels like well traveled ground, especially with Men At Arms and Feet of Clay, and honestly, this book doesn't sell this well enough to me, because while it’s Telling me these things, it's not actually Saying anything with them.

While Pratchett makes a point to give Klatch space to breathe, and make it a country on its terms (though, admittedly, he falls into orientalist tropes), Uberwald is plagued by Western exceptionalist writing choices. Why does Pratchett connect ideas of the future to Ankh Morpork (a proto-capitalist state), and imply that Uberwald must be forcefully pulled along with it? Why are there multiple scenes about how much the people of Uberwald hate living there, that they want to go to ‘modern’ Ankh Morpork, without really scrutinizing Why that is? Why is the fact that Ankh Morpork has become Such a global economic power not explored in a critical way, at least not thoroughly? (Especially since I Know Pratchett is capable of it. He did it with Jingo.)

I think the biggest crime this book does, though, is with its characterization of Vimes. I can't fathom the ‘why’, but for some reason Pratchett leans into the hyper-masculine noir traits of Vimes' character. They’ve always been there, but while the other books took a satirical spin to it, there's a certain romanticizing of it in this book. Vimes’ violent, ‘beastly’ nature is bad and Scary, but oh, isn't it Cool and Dark and Edgy too? Look how this strong, bloody man frightens the townsfolk, smokes a cigar while he shoots a man to save his poor wife. This is tolerable in bite sized portions, but in Fifth Elephant it's like sickening sweet. Why does Vimes kill a man in the streets, on purpose, (the first time he does that in the climax of these books!) and it's hardly addressed! (Yes, Wolfgang deserved it. But when So Much of Vimes' character is delegated to Not giving in to the Easy Choice, why is this decision not given the space it needs? Especially RIGHT after Jingo!)

There's just this strange sense of a focus on masculinity in this book that wasn't in any of the others. Like, why is it that in the Uberwald book, we spend more time with Carrot chasing Angua then with Angua herself? Why the hell is this not an Angua book? Why, in every scene where she has to confront her problems, whether that be her family or otherwise, must she be saved by a man? 

And all of this is a shame because there Are some scenes I really enjoy in this book! I love when we see Sybil and the wedding pictures, I love Vimes getting chased by werewolves. I find Inigo a really fun character, and I LOVE MARGOLOTTA. The parallels between the clacks towers and modern day communication, the little crumbs here and there of spy media tropes, the addiction metaphors, the werewolf family! But that's the kicker! We never spend enough time with Any idea! And none of it connects well enough together! Which is crazy, because Jingo and Feet of Clay were both such Cohesive stories. 

Regardless. I’m looking forward to The Truth because I really missed Ankh Morpork in this book. And Also Vetinari. (who, funnily enough, is hardly in this book. I guess he took up too much space in Jingo).

My final thoughts: Vimes should have had a daughter instead. 

[anarchotolkienist]

Reading Joe Mulhalls' book about post-war British Fascism, and this formulation surprised me. Stealing ideas? As if fascists are somehow distorting and taking the ideas of these men from their legitimate inheritors (presumably some kind of non-Fascist political movement), when said men are, in order: An enthusiastic member of the Nazi party who remained a Nazi after the war, A racial theorist who criticised the Nazis from their right, A proto-Fascist and dedicated anti-Semite, the father of German nationalism, and An enthusiastic member of the Nazi party who created legal justification for Nazi crimes.

[communistkenobi]

im an undergrad student who was thinking about specializing in studying fascist movements in North America for my masters and ive really enjoyed reading your book commentary - you connect things that I'm not always aware of in ways that are really comprehensive and appreciate

Do you know of any researchers who are moving things on the topic right now (most of the books ive read are around 20+ years old, unfortunately)?

(sorry if any of this is unclear/grammatically incorrect/weirdly worded - I'm super sick rn)

thank you! I'm really glad to hear that :)

For contemporary writing, I'm currently working through some of Alberto Toscano's work - he has a really interesting article from 2021 on fascism from a Black radical/Marxist perspective where he summarizes various historical analyses of fascism from Black (particularly US) thinkers and activists. One thing I especially appreciate is that he complicates Aime Cesaire's formulation of fascism (i.e., "european colonialism come home") as incomplete when applied to settler colonial contexts, especially the United States - one of Cesaire's articulations of fascism is that (to paraphrase) "one fine day, the prisons begin to fill up, the Gestapo gets busy" and so on, and Toscano, working through Angela Davis and George Jackson, responds with (again I'm paraphrasing) "the prisons are already full! The Gestapo is already here!" etc. Toscano also has a new book that just came out in 2023 called Late Fascism, which explicitly addresses the current moment. I only have a physical copy of that so I can't share a pdf unfortunately, and I still need to get around to reading it lol.

These are also a couple random articles I found insightful:

Carnut (2022). Marxist Critical Systematic Review on Neo-Fascism and International Capital: Diffuse Networks, Capitalist Decadence and Culture War - does what it says on the tin

Daggett (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire - talks about car culture as a site of modern reactionary political movements, links climate denialism with (proto-)fascist movements

Parmigiani (2021). Magic and politics: Conspirituality and COVID-19 - this one does not mention fascism explicitly, but imo the intersection between new age spirituality, anti-vaccine sentiment, and qanon/q-adjacent conspiracies are pretty important to understanding contemporary fascist social movements, so I'd still recommend reading this

Finally, this isn't an article but I found this recorded lecture about the history of Qanon pretty interesting. I don't think the author gives particularly insightful answers on how to solve the problem of far right conspiracies in the Q&A portion but I found it to be a helpful summary

Otherwise I've been focusing a lot on decolonial scholarship more so than fascist scholarship - this is again guided by Cesaire's argument that Europe/The West broadly is inherently fascist. These works aren't contemporary, but you can look at this post for some of the readings I linked on decolonial scholarship if you want to go that route. Those are serving me more for theoretical frameworks to guide contemporary analysis, not analysis of contemporary events directly

also idk if I need to put this disclaimer, but just in case this leaves my blog: this isn't a full throated defense of/apology for everything in these articles, I'm not claiming they're sufficient to understanding the present moment, these are just some of the things I've been reading recently and have found helpful in some way or another. a lot of contemporary work I have read (much of which isn't linked here because I don't think its very good/do not have it on hand) focuses on populism and authoritarianism as central analytical terminology, which i think does a lot of work to exceptionalize and mystify fascism as a historical and political process/project originating from European colonialism & Western imperialism, but these terms are endemic to the field so you have to contend with them no matter what

good luck with your studies!

[methed-up-marxist]

it's good then that you were so upfront about loving fascist cock and thinking i was a piece of shit and yelling at me for being uncomfortable with you saying having sex with fascists that hated you was the best. you don't hide it by saying it's a joke, you just straight up hated me for thinking that sounded like something you were doing to hurt yourself and ESPECIALLY for me saying i would not want to do it myself

Anyway look at all I've written here on the body-fascism of certain quasi-heterosexual community's of heterosexual* men who are clearly deeply interested in trans women and yet aren't in dialogue with our specific discourses of identity.

Combined with my drawing out, in a delezian way, the ways in which we are all fascist a little bit and how these micro-fascisms work through mobilising sexual desire.

Can you see how a conversation about me having sex with a meth head who frequently threatened me with extremely intense violence due to paranoid structure in his mind produced by stimulant psychosis lead to an account of the semi-fascist nature of that paranoia while still needing to allow this struggling poor, queer, drug addicted crossdresser trying to take care of his Maori girlfriend but unable to do much for her because of what drug addiction had done to him.

And yes I took account of my sexual investment in this situation even as I tried to take care of him and tried to help him get back to some semblance of normality - I cooked for him because he'd been starving himself, I helped tidy his room because it was causing him immense distress, I held him as he cried because he wished he was a girl. And I enjoyed it and I refuse to deny my enjoyment of it.

You are taking the psychic structures I had to build so as I could be there for someone at the bottom of his life - structures of enjoyment - so yes I enjoyed being with someone who was experiencing proto-fascist modes of relating to the world (paranoid thinking, imagining secret enemies who control everything, outbursts of violence against people he doesn't understand his co-connection with)

This guy wasn't any more of a racist than you or me, he took care of a Maori lesbian who he loved and loved to the best of his abilitys.

If you see me being exhilirant and estatic about how my proximity to a set of micro-fascisms provided me the libidinal investment to be able to take care of this person even as he threatened me with explicit violence and just conclude I'm in some simple alignment with the more macro-fascisms. idk where to begin a dialogue with you, it seems my potential to be a person has been completely evacuated

I don't know who you are but you clearly know a lot about me as a person and that you can deploy this complex chapter in my life into me just being some prolific fucker of like commited fascists is well its precisely the fascist logic where any proximity to the unclean makes you unclean yourself.

I would never fuck a police officer, I would never fuck a fascist, I would never fuck anyone whose racism takes the form of out right statements of racism.

I don't know who u are, but u know who I am and it should lead you to some respect for the complicated situation u are clearly using to attack me

[determinate-negation]

as someone who knows the frankfurt school much better than the average tumblr user, i was wondering...so many of the frankfurt school writers are harshly critical of irrationality and untruths in this era of late-stage capitalism/proto-fascism or whatever, but also criticize empiricism/positivism/"scientific" approaches as limited (but don't many progressives and socialists rely on scientific analysis?). do any of these writers present a clear middle ground or alternative to this dichotomy? or is someone like say adorno so focused on critique you can't really find a way out from his writings

read dialectic of enlightenment! thats probably where this is all summed up the most, especially with regard to the critical aspects of the enlightenment that continue in marx. but essentially what they say is the alternative is dialectical materialism. they explain a lot of things about the dialectics and philosophy but they rarely extend this to a practical alternative, they were not politicians and were not interested in the sphere of political action. so its up for the readers to figure that out

but yeah dialectic of enlightenment has this, its probably my favorite book by anyone from the frankfurt school and its dense but i really recommend it, heres a summary if you scroll down thats helpful

also marcuse wrote this great essay on the philosophical aspect of marxism and what distinguishes it from bourgeois economics that i think adds to this general understanding of the alternative to capitalist rationality

The Foundation of Historical Materialism

[ceasarslegion]

From what i know about WW2 history as well as film history i do wonder if the "giant monsters, big mechs, advanced tech, existential threats to the whole of mankind, and the children will save the world" trope that is so ubiquitous in anime has anything to do with shifting social polarities in post-war Japan. I never really noticed it until a Kingdom Hearts boss guide pointed it out to me, but you don't really see that trope much in western media, unless it's media clearly inspired by anime like how Pacific Rim is basically a third culture kid director's live action take on Neon Genesis Evangelion. Meanwhile, that kind of larger-than-life existential sci-fi is in absolutely everything in Japanese pop culture.

Anime culture really came about in post-war Japan. You can see a lot of proto-anime in their cinema before and during the war, but anime really became ANIME afterwards, with all the unique forms of storytelling and artistry that is specific to anime. It's not like other forms of animation, it's really it's own beast, right down to the art style that isn't used anywhere else.

And I mean, it makes a weird sort of sense, if you think about it. You don't come out of what Japan went through without some serious nation-wide intergenerational... something. Isolationism, imperialist fascism, 2 atomic bombs, realizing they need to change with the world or it will leave them behind, thrusting themselves into the tech sector to try to get away from that sordid past, but the foundations that created that sordid past are still there in their grind culture that is somewhat reflective of the old samurai. There is undoubtedly a weird pull there, where one side is pulling them towards the future, while the other towards tradition, meanwhile if you live in modern Japan your grandparents probably remember being A-bombed.

Technology is rarely if ever portrayed as anything less than positive progress in anime. It's always a tool to destroy this organic monstrous enemy homegrown in Japan. Even if there's some really bad caveat to its use (like in, again... Neon Genesis Evangelion. I wish I could turn my shitty coworkers into LCL), it's the ONLY way to defeat it. It's a necessary evil, and therefore a public good. Technology usually represents the future in sci fi, and the fact it's usually teenage and young adult heroes who wield it I don't think is a coincidence.

And then you grow this media presence that becomes known for its use of giant monsters and fighting robots and kid heroes who spit in the face of tradition to rip them apart with laser beams. The jokes about Dragon Ball Z super saiyan fire balls are funny, but I wonder how much those things come from this desire among the younger post-war generations to break from this isolated traditionalism that led to their role in the axis atrocities of WW2, and how much they've been uncritically looking to the future to do so, by any means necessary?

Godzilla is the personification of both the Nazism and the bombings it led to, after all. Like he wasn't just a big scary lizard, he was the monster they had to defeat to preserve themselves from destruction.

[thatdebaterguy]

Hey, don't bitch at me just because the current Israel is built on pillars of lies. Especially since the father of zionism, Theodr Herzl, was an ally to Proto-Nazism.

At this time of his death in 1904, Proto-Nazism didn't exist, nor did fascism, which would be introduced by Benito Mussolini in the 1920s. Nazism wouldn't come around until the 30s, which blames Jews for basically everything. Why would a Jew who supposedly blames Jews for everything in the world, create a state for the Jewish peoples. Your argument is so flawed it's unreal. And I'm not being a bitch about things, you tried justifying October 7th by saying 2 more numbers to the death count makes the entire event debunked.

I believe what you're trying to say is that Hitler also agreed that Jerusalem was the rightful place for the Jews, and the region of Palestine is where they should be, however that's purely because Hitler was a Jew hating genocidal maniac who said all Jews weren't German, shouldn't live in Germany, and should go back to their homeland, which he considered a hotbed of inferior races anyway, including Jews and Muslims. However, that's like saying since me and Osama Bin Laden both have enjoyed playing CSGO, that I'm also a big fan of 9/11. Having a single thing to agree on doesn't suddenly make Herzl a Proto-Nazi, the same way I'm not a Nazi for also agreeing that Jerusalem is the homeland of the Jews, the same way I'm not a Christian just because I agree with some of the moral values Christianity encourages. What you meant to say is, Theodor Herzl was a nationalist for the Jewish people. He was more right wing than left. But right wing doesn't automatically mean Nazi or Proto-Nazi since I'm more conservative in many aspects, which is right wing, but also have a fair amount of social libertarian policies.

Don't throw around big words to get an emotional response, like what people are doing with 'genocide' and 'fascists' and 'nazis' when as of this today none of the actions taking place in Israel fit the dictionary definition of those words. Make sure you actually know what you're talking about. If you wanna talk about 'debunked' then that's what I've just done to you, not whatever you tried to do with October 7th. Pointing out the lie of an individual doesn't explain an entire event or movement, since I've seen thousands of Palestine supporters spread misinformation but in no way do I think that suddenly makes all Palestinians guilty. Educate yourself.

[tanadrin]

re: “Remember when saying ‘Nazis are bad’ wasn’t a political statement?”

I have bad news about WW2 and something the US seems to have memory-holed as a culture: fascism was extremely popular in the run-up to WW2. Charles Coughlin’s Nazi-supporting anti-semitic radio program peaked at around ~20 million by some estimates, which is ~15% of the entire country at the time, the German-American Bund (an openly Nazi organization) had a rally at Madison Square Gardn in 1939, the Nazi government used members of the U.S. congress to distribute Nazi propaganda, and after the war, some conservative politicians opposed the Nuremberg trials as being too harsh a treatment for the Nazi leadership.

Pearl Harbor and the subsequent defeat of Germany definitely took some of the shine of fascism generally and Nazism specifically, but there has always been a fascist strain in American politics. Which shouldn’t be surprising; the strategy of the South after its defeat in the Civil War was to run an insurrection aimed at establishing a proto-fascist political order, and after the Compromise of 1877, this strategy was basically successful: white southerners maintained Jim Crow through terror and apartheid, while conducting foreign policy with the rest of the country through the Democratic Party. It’s not a coincidence that Hitler was inspired openly by American racial apartheid, nor that the U.S. was using concentration camps in Cuba decades before WW2.

The U.S. didn’t invent racial apartheid, or concentration camps, or any of the political tactics that would get canonized under the label “fascism” in the lead-up to WW2; this isn’t a “the U.S. is the source of all human evil” kind of post. But there are a lot of very bleak chapters in U.S. history, and we impose an artificial kind of moral clarity on some of them in retrospect. I think WW2 and the period immediately prior is just such a chapter. American fascism has never been a fringe phenomenon, and I don’t think Americans can really understand the danger it represents if they think of it as arising from currents entirely alien to the political mainstream.

[racefortheironthrone]

Kinda of random but what do you think of Alan's Moore comments about people liking comic book movies could lead into fascism? Seems like bitter old man territory but what do you think?

I think it's fair to say that fascism has been something of an obsession of Alan Moore's and a recurring although not omnipresent theme in many of his works.

While Miracleman is technically an expy of Captain Marvel, I would argue that the series is Moore's most extended commentary on Superman instead and especially the idea of the ubermensch. In Miracleman, our protagonist is initially thought to have been made into a superhero by a benevolent enlightened scientist, but eventually we learn that Miracleman is the product of an Operation Paperclip Nazi science project called the Zarathusa Project designed to create the literal Nietzschean Ubermensch, complete with a fixation on "blond gods" and a eugenicist breeding program. A superhero fight in the midle of London causes mass civilian casualties on the scale of an atomic bomb going off. Ultimately, Miracleman effectively overthrows Thatcher's government and rules as an enlightened despot before eventually leaving Earth for space.

Likewise, I think Watchmen is Moore's most extended commentary on masked vigilantism and thus on Batman. In Watchmen, the phenomenon of vigilantism is repeatedly associated with right-wing politics: Hooded Justice is a German circus strongman who has pro-Nazi politics; Captain Metropolis wanted his superhero teams to target "black unrest," "campus subversion," and "anti-war demos;" and the Comedian is a brutal nihilist who ultimately joins the U.S security state where he cheerfully follows orders to assassinate JFK and Woodward and Bernstein, commit atrocities in Vietnam, kill protesting hippies, etc. Finally, there's Rorschach, Moore's most famous mis-interpreted creation - Rorschach is a paranoid conspiracy theorist who's an anti-communist, anti-liberal, militant and militaristic nationalist, homophobe, misogynist, and avid follower of the John Birch Society-like New Frontiersman.

And then there's V for Vendetta, which I would argue is Moore's attempt to create a masked vigilante superhero with his own anarchist politics. In this story, the vigilante isn't a crimefighter but rather a revolutionary who seeks the overthrow of a fascist state and the creation of an anarchist utopia.

Moreover, his more recent comments about comic book movies being linked to fascism are arguably just part of his much longer-running commentary that superheroes as a concept are at the very least proto-fascist.

Having read a lot of Moore's work and interviews on the subject, I don't find his critique compelling. I think his definition of fascism is far too loose, I think his lens on the superhero genre is overly narrow, and I think his mode of analysis tends to neglect the vital area of historical context.

Definitions

So let's start with Moore's definition of fascism. I think Moore tends to really over-emphasize the whole idea of the Nietzschean ubermensch and the use of force to solve problems, and more recently he's been on this weird kick of saying that nostalgia and a childlike desire for easy solutions leads to fascism. I have several problems with this definition:

the first is that, as I've talked about in the past, fascism is a very complex historical phenomenon that can't be boiled down to a single idea, and in particular the idea of the ubermensch is a pretty small part of the German case (and even then how do you balance it against Nazism's more anti-individualistic aspects, like the mass party and the mass party organization).

the second is that the idea of a larger-than-life individual using physical prowess to solve problems is not unique to fascism. After all, during the 30s, you also had the Soviet Union promoting the heroic ideal of Stakhanovitism and the depiction of the heroic male factory worker in socialist realism. More importantly, the idea of a "larger-than-life individual using physical prowess to solve problems" is basically the same description for any number of literary figures from pulp cowboys to the Greek heroes of the Iliad and the Oddessy to the epic of Gilgamesh.

the third is that I think Moore's definition overlooks the actual drivers of the rise of contemporary fascism. Anti-semitism, racism, homophobia and transphobia, misogyny - all of these are real social and cultural forces that are actually motivating people to join the ranks of the alt-right, to commit massacres, to riot at the Capitol, and so forth. It is incredibly self-involved to think that superheroes and superhero movies are worth discussing in the same breath. At the end of the day, they're harmless entertainment compared to the real political issues that need to be tackled.

Moore's Model of Superheroes

Here's where I'm going to say something that's going to be a bit controversial - I don't think Alan Moore has read widely enough in the superhero genre to make an accurate assessment of its relationship to fascism. If we look at his comics work, and we look at his writings, and we look at his interviews, Moore's mental model of the superhero really only includes two figures, Superman as the representative of the superpowered ubermensch and Batman as the representative of the masked vigilante crimefighter. Notably, Moore hasn't really touched the last of the Big Three - Wonder Woman, a superhero with a strong legacy of radical left-wing politics. I do think we have to mention, given Moore's somewhat troubled history when it comes to issues of gender, that Moore's model of the superhero doesn't include any female superheroes (or for that matter, any superheroes of color or queer superheroes). (EDIT: I should clarify - Promethea is Moore's version of Wonder Woman, but she doesn't really come up in his discussions of fascism, and her thematic profile has more to do with Moore's interests in magic.)

And other than Captain Britain, Moore never worked with any Marvel character and basically ignores them.

To me, this is like having a career as a painter and never working with colors. Moore's model of the superhero leaves out the Fantastic Four and how their flawed psychologies revolutionized the industry and the whole idea of the superhero-as-explorer, it leaves out Spider-Man and the idea of the superhero-as-everyman whose central struggle is about work-life balance and altruism, and most importantly it leaves out the X-Men and the idea of the mutant metaphor.

If as a critic you're going to make grand pronouncements about something as morally evil as fascism, I think it really is incumbent on you to have read and analyzed widely rather than cherry-picking a couple of case studies. Especially if you have something of a tendency to mis-characterize those case studies by ignoring historical context.

Historical Context

So let's talk about Superman and Batman and their emergence in the 1930s. One vital bit of context is that the U.S experienced a significant crime wave in the 1920s and 1930s as Prohibition encouraged the rise of organized crime and then the Great Depression spurred the rise of kidnapping and bank robbery gangs. Moreover, municipal police forces tended to be wildly corrupt, accepting bribes from organized crime to let them operate with impunity, while not letting up in the slightest in their brutal oppression of workers and minorities.

In this context, I think the idea of vigilantism - while it has an undeniably racist legacy dating back to Reconstruction - is not purely a conservative phenomena. It's also an expression of a desire for help from somebody, anybody when the powers that be are of no help. And at the end of the day, unsanctioned use of force can equally be traced back to left-wing self-defense efforts from the Panthers back to the Communist Party's streetfighting corps to unions packing two-by-fours on the picket line - so I don't think we can simply equate punching a bad guy with racist lynch mobs and call it a day.

So let's talk about Superman and the ubermensch. I think Moore has a bad tendency to focus on his nightmare scenrio of a godlike being tyrannizing and destroying hapless humanity, while minimizing the actual ideas of Siegel and Shuster. He tends to take their use of the Nietzschean as a straighforward invocation instead of the clear subversion it was intended to be - rather than a blond god who imposed tyrannical rule with horrific violence, Siegel and Schuster made their Superman a dark-haired Moses allegory, who rather than solely fighting crime acted to stop wife-beaters, war profiteers, and save the life of death row inmates, and whose secret identity was of a crusading journalist who uncovered corrupt politicians.

To be fair, Alan Moore admits that Superman started out as "very much a New Deal American” - but because this kind of does near-fatal damage to his argument, he quickly minimizes that by saying that Superman got co-opted and thus it doesn't count. This is some No True Scotsman bullshit - Moore knows that his example just imploded so he tries to wriggle out of it by arguing that Superman sold out to the Man. If we go back to the actual historical evidence, we can see that at the outset of the Red Scare, the Superman radio show went on a crusade against the Klan, and throughout the conservative 1950s, Superman was used to propagandize liberal values of religious and racial equality:

So much for selling out.

On the other hand, Batman is a tougher case, given that his whole deal is being a masked vigilante who wages an unending war on crime to avenge his murdered parents. So is Batman an inherently fascist figure, a wealthy sadist who spends his time brutally beating the poor and the mentally ill when he could be using his riches to tackle social issues? I would argue that this version of Batman is actually pretty recent - very much a legacy of the work of Frank Miller and then the post-9/11 writings of Christopher Nolan, Johnathan Nolan, and David Goyer - and that there have been many different Batmen with very different thematic foci.

For example, the early Batman was as much a figure of horror as he was of superheroics - he fought Frankensteins and Draculas, he killed with silver bullets, etc. Then in the 40s and 50s, you got the much more cartoony and light-hearted Batman who pretty much exclusively fought equally oddball supervillains in such a heightened world of riddles and giant pennies and mechanical T-Rexes that I don't think you can particularly describe it as "crime-fighting." Then in the 1960s, you have the titanic influence of the Batman TV show, where Adam West as Batman was officially licensed by the Gotham P.D (so much for vigilantism) and extolled the virtues of constitutional due process and the Equal Pay Act in PSAs and episodes alike. You can call the 1966 Batman a lot of things, but fascist isn't one of them.

Conclusion

I want to emphasize at the end of the day that I'm a huge Alan Moore fan; I've read most of his vast bibliography, I find him a fascinating if very odd thinker and critic, I've even tried to read his mammoth novel Jerusalem (which is not easy reading, let me tell you). At the same time, it's important not to treat creators, even the very titans of the medium, as incapable of error. And in this case, I think Alan Moore is simply wrong about fascism and superheroes and people should really stop asking him about it, because I don't think he has anything new to say about it.