The European Tribune is a forum for thoughtful dialogue of European and international issues. You are invited to post comments and your own articles.
Please REGISTER to post.
So, does that mean that fascism and radical racism can only take root in a society which is 'rationalist/communitarian (Kant/Hegel' :)
Twisted Cross
Or if we prefer Catholicism, how about the twentieth century Spanish incarnation of the Church Militant eagerly supporting the crusade against modernity.
As for Catholicism, I don't think that anyone has ever argued that Catholicism has an easy relationship with modernity. (I was raised Russian Orthodox, and I think that Orthodoxy has an even less easy relationship with modernity.) In Hegel's view, the impetus that produced modernity was Protestant. Catholicism accommodated itself to the new conditions (not entirely successfully, some would say), but did not play a role in producing them. A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns
I suppose it is fair to say that there is a correlation between rationalism/communitarianism and fascism (the Nazis), but I would claim that anything in Kant or Hegel only condemns fascism, rather than supporting it. The way I would look at it is that German idealism and Nazism have some common antecedents, the way that liberalism and fundamentalism do. (By the way, after Hegel's death, there was a gradual decline in German philosophical culture (and the effort to regain that culture is being carried out mainly in the US, not in Germany) which I still don't understand. Thus, at the time when Germany started taking its wrong turn (after Bismarck's death), the German idealist tradition was not very influential any more.)
I would consider American slavery to be a form of radical racism, wouldn't you? And then there is the genocide of the native Americans... Thus I don't think rationalist/communitarian societies have a monopoly on that.
As a final note, one might speculate that fundamentalism might be the anglophone equivalent of fascism, as you were getting at. Certainly, when I look for something comparable to fundamentalism's anti-rationalism in modern Europe, the first thing I think about is the Nazis. A bomb, H bomb, Minuteman / The names get more attractive / The decisions are made by NATO / The press call it British opinion -- The Three Johns
by gmoke - Nov 28
by gmoke - Nov 12 7 comments
by Oui - Dec 41 comment
by Oui - Dec 2
by Oui - Dec 118 comments
by Oui - Dec 16 comments
by gmoke - Nov 303 comments
by Oui - Nov 3012 comments
by Oui - Nov 2838 comments
by Oui - Nov 2712 comments
by Oui - Nov 2511 comments
by Oui - Nov 24
by Oui - Nov 221 comment
by Oui - Nov 22
by Oui - Nov 2119 comments
by Oui - Nov 1615 comments
by Oui - Nov 154 comments
by Oui - Nov 1319 comments
by Oui - Nov 1224 comments
by gmoke - Nov 127 comments
by Oui - Nov 1114 comments