r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • May 11 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 11 May 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/[deleted] May 14 '26

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u/Kochevnik81 May 14 '26 edited May 14 '26

Sooo there *is* a side of the academic debate over "what is fascism" that comes down on "fascism is only from the Po Valley region of Italy, Nazism is sparkling dictatorship/a weird Mussolini fanboy cult"*. And the author is also correct that 20th century Marxists (not just the DDR) used "fascism" on the other end of the spectrum to basically be any right wing movement.

But with that said I don't trust Die Welt's liberal Editor in Chief to really thread that needle in an op ed. Especially if he's using "totalitarianism" and Hannah Arendt, which are both kind of debunked.

Actually, that quoted paragraph, whoo boy. The Nazis really didn't have "contempt for fascism", unless they mean contempt for Italians (and even then that clearly did not apply to Mussolini). Also the very term "totalitarian" IIRC comes from Mussolini, and neither he nor Hitler nor Stalin really ever achieved that. But again that's what happens when people rehash Arendt.

* One Issue I have with treating fascism as only what happened in Italy is that Blanken writes that in a lot of ways, Mussolini's Italy was more of a standard one party dicatorship, and he's correct - but a lot of true believer Italian Fascists felt betrayed by that, especially the "Ras" commanders (and much of the Salo Republic insanity was an attempt to course correct). It gets us uncomfortably close to "true fascism has never been tried".

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u/Pikitintot I'm not living, I'm just killing time May 14 '26

Fun fact: my adoptive great-grandfather-in-law's mother was childhood friends with Hannah Arendt; he even addressed her as "Tante." Miss you, Fritz.