The best Fascism books: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

According to the dictators handbook: https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

You should always pay your military.

Edit: if you are like me, then you will read this book and think HTF is Trump president when he is a complete idiot to these rules? Well, sadly, it all makes sense if Trump isn't the 'real' leader here..

He's the guy that wrote This (warning: amazon link, open in private browsing so it doesn't effect recommendations) book about how democrats are the real nazis. So you know this guy is grounded in reality.

You can't directly help, but there are things you can do: Learn. Understand why this is happening and how to fight it. Then, teach.

The book "The Dictator's Handbook" by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita (Amazon link (non-affiliate)) completely changed how I process information about these kinds of things. It talks at length about protests in dictatorships, why they happen, and why they sometimes don't happen. How governments fight them. How and why our own governments sometimes help and sometimes don't.

I really, really highly recommend it.

This book 'The Coming of the Third Reich' does a really good job of showing how it didn't just come out of nowhere. Ideas of racial superiority, purity etc. and their role in an ideal country were building from much earlier.

Also worth reading the book 'The American Axis' for a picture of how much currency such ideas gained in the USA at the time, including with Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh.

It is not uncommon for a fascist dictator to obtain power this way. The book How Facism Works: the Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley describes how this process works and gives examples from history.

The funny part is that the German people supported the Nazis because they wanted to be left alone. Hitler convinced the German people that Jews and communists were coming to take away their guns and free speech rights. Hitler promised to protect their freedumbs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Freedom_Movement

People in Nazi Germany thought they had more freedoms and liberties than under the Weimar Republic.

I'm at the point where I would actually pay right wing Libertarians money to read this book-

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left

Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party

You have to remember that Hitler was appointed chancellor by a democratically elected president. Genocide doesn't just happen in a week, nor does change.

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Happen-Here-Signet-Classics/dp/0451465644

Relevant reads

I've been posting the amazon link to that book at least once a day for the last month or two :).

Thank you for picking a superb section to post the actual text so people can see exactly why I'm so much in favor of ALL Americans reading this particular book right now. This isn't something that has never been seen before. Sure, it has never been seen like this in the United States, but we have seen it all before. Less than a century ago in fact, back in the 1930's, over in Germany, there was this guy you may have heard of, his name was Adolph Hitler....

ETA: https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

When I look at groups like Ancaps and the Boogs I become more and more convinced that the Fascist Creep is a thing that is growing.

>"Fascist creep" occurs when the right wing deploys corrupted versions of left-wing concepts like solidarity

The Proud Boys and Gadsen Flag waving like were at the Capitol Hill Putsch that Trump called for.

The thing that most Americans are too dumb to understand is that fascism comes in the name of freedumb and liburty. Fascists think they are fighting for freedumb. The Nazis thought they had increased personal liberties.

The Nazis always insisted on being called centrist and hated being called far right.

Hitler and the Nazis painted themselves as victims of media that had taken away their free speech. The German people supported Hitler because they thought communists and Jews would take away their free speech and guns.

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

I would not call Trump himself an outright fascist—but he's certainly a nativist anti-intellectual demagogue, with strong authoritarian tendencies, who's fanning and manipulating ethno-nationalist resentment.

I'd call Trumpism is a proto-fascist movement.

Here's Robert Paxton's definition from The Anatomy of Fascism—the best I've come across:

"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/Antifa-Anti-Fascist-Handbook-Mark-Bray/dp/1612197035

Not available yet on Barnes & Noble, but Bezo's little site had it available one day after Charlottesville. How interesting!

Strictly speaking, there is no Antifa organization anymore, originally "Antifaschistische Aktion", a pre-WW2 German antifascist movement, and it's basically an ideology and ways of organizing agaist fascism and racism.

Many left-wing socialist and anarchist groups have adopted their methods.

What the rightwing media is trying to push is that basically the Black Bloc is "Antifa", they're the ones with masks that people normally first think of whenever Antifa is mentioned and on the occasion doing the vandalism bits.

There are many other groups that do not do that and are aligned with Antifa views and methods, like Maledicte said.

Recommended reading: Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook by Mark Bray. He was on a podcast a while back explaining the basics, but I've forgotten what it was. I'll update when I remember/find it.

edit: Ah, here it is, it's on The Gist podcast from Slate, [here it is](www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/gist/2017/08/author_mark_bray_on_the_antifa_movement.html).

The interview with Bray starts at around 4min 40secs.

edit2: I just realized that my comment makes it sound that I'm down on the Black Bloc, but it's not as clear-cut as that. Yeah, I disagree with some of their methods, but they are Activists with a capital 'A' and they don't shy away from direct action which I can respect.

Always applicable quote from 'The Anti-Fascist Handbook':

"It is important to note, however, that the vast majority of people who oppose limiting free speech on political grounds are not free speech absolutists. They all have their exceptions to the rule, whether obscenity, incitement to violence, copyright infringement, press censorship during wartime, or restrictions for the incarcerated.

If we rephrase the terms of the debate by taking these exceptions into account, we can see that many liberals support limiting the free speech of working-class teens busted for drugs, but not limiting the free speech of Nazis. Many are fine when the police quash the free speech of the undocumented by hunting them down, while they amplify the speech of the Klan by protecting them. They advocate curtailing ads for cigarettes but not ads for white supremacy.

All of these examples limit speech. The only difference is that liberals pretend that their limitations are apolitical, while anti-fascists embrace an avowedly political rejection of fascism."

The thing I can't get over is the fact that there is an actual Antifa Handbook out there which actually details the ideology of prominent antifa groups as well as their histories and how they operate. But if the guy who made this actually read this book his head might explode once he realizes how reasonable it is

If any of you are curious about life in North Korea and the difficulty and danger in defecting, I'd highly recommend <em>Nothing to Envy</em>.

It contains the tales of a number of defectors, the reason they left, and how they escaped.

The one that always sticks in my head is the doctor who was starving to death in North Korea, but snuck across the border to China to steal food, and then planned to come back home. She was so brainwashed that even when starving to death, the thought of actually defecting was unimaginable to her. What ultimately broke her was when she found a bowl of rice and meat just sitting outside some Chinese home; she was completely dumbfounded because she hadn't had rice in years and couldn't understand why someone would literally leave such a bounty outside. She eventually realized what it was: table scraps for the family dog. Only once she realized that a dog in China ate better than a doctor in North Korea did she finally make the decision to defect.

Hell of a book, and some incredible stories.

The best one I've seen so far is Robert Paxton's definition from The Anatomy of Fascism:

>"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

It is being drained, not of corruption in the technical sense but of corruption of the idea about what a president or an all-American individual should be.

This is why your average republican saw Hillary as deeply corrupted, but they are unfazed by allegations of Trump secretly paying porn stars to fuck them. It’s all about the strong white man image and what it represents to these people.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Fascism-Works-Politics-Them/dp/0525511830

If you’re looking for another great book, I’m loving “They Thought They Were Free”; written in 1955, by an American Jewish journalist who went “undercover” in Germany to befriend 10 Germans as a way of understanding how the common man became nazified.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0226511928/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_awdb_imm_t1_jaESFb6Z9HFMP

How Facism Works: the Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley. Currently reading this book and find it describes current Republican behavior to a T.

It is actually more like she is BEING A FASCIST here instead of "describing fascism". Hitler told the German people that Jews and communists were coming to take away their guns and free speech. Hitler promised to protect Germans from Jews and communists who would nationalize their property. Hitler succeeded because he promised to protect the German people FROM BIG COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT.

People in Nazi Germany were terrified of communist, totalitarian government, so they trusted Hitler to protect them from big government. Ironic, yes, the best fascist have used Libertarian propaganda to fool people into authoritarianism.

https://www.amazon.com/They-Thought-Were-Free-Germans/dp/0226511928

It would be naive to assume he's actually killing drug dealers. I recommend The Dictator's Handbook before making any assumptions about why a dictator is allowing violence against a group.

https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

For example, let's say an earthquake hits your country and affects 100,000 people on the verge of starvation. Let's say 50,000 support you and 50,000 don't. Guess who isn't getting a single dollar of relief regardless of how much money streams in from Western charities.

> He seems to have a vested interest in assuming Nazis are left-wing, no matter what the actual historiography has to say on the matter, which is causing him to argue in bad faith.

I'm going to guess the poster read/heard something about the latest historical perversion from vaunted intellect-for-hire and convicted felon Dinesh D'Souza. Just another useful idiot who doesn't know how to sort fact from propaganda.

The reason I hate the Nazi analogy, besides the fact that it’s overused, is that it just is not apt. 1920’s Germany was pro-Jewish, only compared to other countries. Being anti-Semitic was not a career ending move and plenty of people in power vocally hated them, even if something like Holocaust was not on their mind. People should actually learn something about early Nazi history before making this comparison. Even if they weren’t popular before right before their rise to power, they were considered more like rabble rousers, not pariahs. I recommend The Coming of the Third Reich by Richard Evans to get an understanding of what led to their assuming and consolidating power.

I'm reading How Facism Works: the Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley. It exactly describes the behavior of our right wing politicians and media and their effect on people who listen to them. It also looks at facism around the world and in history. Instead of merely being shocked at shit the Republicans pull to empower themselves, like voter suppression, I now understand it's the expected and very predictable behavior fascists engage in to solidify their control of the political system. For me, most important takeaway from the book is that fascists do not abide by any rules. They literally will do anything they can get away with to empower themselves. They always use hatred of one or more groups of people. Lies, hypocrisy and cheating are merely tools to achieving power. They will tilt the playing field beyond all recognition. They trick their followers into thinking they are going to benefit when the fascists are in power. They sometimes benefit in the short run but they are merely tools used by fascists to gain power. Once they aren't needed, they too are discarded.

Trump has learned a lot from authoritarian, corrupt leaders throughout history. His playbook is literally from stuff like this https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Politics/dp/1610391845

For reference, here's Prof. Robert Paxton's excellent definition from The Anatomy of Fascism:

>"A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."

We're not there yet, but this thing is blossoming.

How Facism Works: the Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley. Currently reading this book and find it describes current Republican behavior to a T.

> The U.K. has an armed ruling class and disarmed citizenry, which supports this. > > So... Like most of the world outside of the US?

I'm fairly certain that's not true. An armed citizenry raises the opportunity cost of establishing martial law, which is good for helping establish a government with more freedoms. Soldiers willing to shoot at and be shot by their neighbors cost more than soldiers who aren't willing to do that.

you make it sound as if I personally take some EU funds. And you have a really condescending attitude. "You take our money, we helped you, so you must listen as we tell you". From my perspective (I am Czech), it was Germany and Russia who fucked my country up 80 years ago. One side Nazis killing slavic people because they were untermenschen, on the other side fucking USSR. If it were not for these two countries, communism would not have decimated eastern Europe. You need some history lessons

https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stalin/dp/0465031471

and nowadays we see history repeating itself. Gemany is no more nazistic and imperialistic, but it is spineless and enabling another fascist Regime, which is current Russia. Russia is again threatening other countries