Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

How far progress and regression are intertwined 

  Is it possible to stop people from becoming fascists?

While reading the features of fascism in the article below, I am tempted to list some of the internal signs that modern “liberal democracies” exhibit, and how it breeds fascism/lays the fertile ground for fascistic tendencies, especially when the economy enters into a crisis:  - the increase in the number of voters supporting Donald Trump in the last American election.   - the European Court of Justice rule in favour of banning the slaughtering of animals according to the Muslim and Jewish way in two regions of Belgium. - conformism: everybody must follow the liberal form in how they dress, for example in France. - redefining ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘secularism’ in order to repress and marginalise minorities, and ultimately to disable resistance. Example: France. - stifling dissent and alternative views and encouraging conformism:  the Department for Education guidance said schools in England “should not use any resources from organisations that had expressed a desire to end capitalism

"[Y]ou may observe the niceties of Holocaust Memorial Day, but still not have learned the lessons of history. You may be remembering to forget, practicing a spurious innocence, externalising evil, forgetting that, as Adorno argued, as long as we live in the conditions that could produce Auschwitz, we are all guilty . The only thing that could conceivably alleviate that guilt is to act against those conditions. Hence, Stone's preference for many and varied forms of memory, at different levels, detached from the rituals of the great and good. What are those conditions? The Trust identifies "racism and hate" in a general way, presumably intending to be as uncontroversial and therefore inclusive as possible. However, histories of Germany and fascism in recent decades, by Mark Mazower, Enzo Traverso, Jurgen Zimmerer, Isabel Hull, Sven Lindquist, Casper Erichsen, David Olusoga and Shelley Baranowski, to name just a few, have in common that they have foregrounded an emp

"[T]ere is something that still resonates about the work of the Frankfurt School. The insight to which it called its readers to awaken was that human consciousness in the age of mass society was becoming wholly enclosed within the walls of an ideological fortress, caught in the endless circulations of capitalist exchange and those repetitive entertainments and distractions that were designed to obscure the truth. Nothing about the theory of the culture industry lacks traction in a world where the commodity form reigns supreme. Blockbuster CGI movies; the relentless extrusion of Greatest Hits CDs by the megastars of the recording industry; the all-encompassing mania for video gaming, in which mature adults have been co-opted into the shamelessly infantile principle of mindless play; the transmutation of collectivity into social media’s mere connectivity: these are the lineaments of a culture that is not the spontaneous production of free human beings, but rather something done to

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