Understand Fascism to Oppose Fascism (vs. Jimmy Dore). ⓐⓡ⊞ⓘⓞ

let's remember fashion what fascism is
fascism is when the business and government coalesce to further the interests of business and government not the interests of the people so what's the quotation false opinions rarely do any damage because everyone enjoys refuting them but false facts can be highly injurious because they last long right and similarly there's another line there's another line that the problem with with a lie or misrepresentation isn't the extent to which it's contrary to the truth the problem is the extent to which it resembles the truth and then passes by you know as as a for me yeah I mean lies that are ridiculous or outrageous lies such as Donald Trump might tell you or not the problem is I mean the reason I'm making this video is that Jimmy Dore fellow fellow political commentator here on YouTube a colleague of mine in fact what do you think about Jimmy Dore he uses this line of reasoning on fascism all the time and it's false I mean he completely means well he's not trying to deceive anyone but this is a really really misleading statement about about fascism so I got a comment not too long ago asking me aisel why are you always criticizing communism and the far left and and much more rarely am i using examples you know such as world war two the nazis well sorry world war two but specifically Nazis and fascism and I wrote back saying you know honestly the lessons to be learned from the critique of the far left I still really think are meaningful and important and applicable in a lot of our our political problems today mmm you know when I look at the mix of motivations and what people were trying to achieve and the particular ideals involved wanting to help the poor want to have a society based on equality wanting to address certain types of justice and injustice even you know workplace ethics how do you organize a union how do you how do you organize your placement how do you deal with the gap between rich and poor there are a lot of thematic concerns communism raises that are still really meaningful in people's everyday lives and when I look at the footage of that rally that unite unite the right rally in Charlotte VA Charlotte oh sorry Charlottesville that's that's be here for my sweet thank you God Willis off-camera Charlottesville not Charlotte Charles Oh Virginia is filming in Canada born and raised in Canada people all right yeah okay so hmm the footage of that I mean sorry if you see the footage there were three different rallies and one of them is overtly KKK people and one of them is overtly neo-nazi people I mean it's it's just laughable they're engaged in a political discourse then this sense I think has no applicable or incredibly little applicability to serious political problems people are still are still wrestling with today so this comes up less often on my channel you know we study history not for what it can subtract from the past but for what it adds to the present I mean that's why these things come up and you know look also even when you do have something in parallel so to give an example the Nazis the fascists in the mid 20th century they engaged in ethnic cleansing of a very dirac direct and overt form they massacred people they engaged in a mass murder indirect way Joseph Stalin how did he deal with the cats K ETS the cats are one of many indigenous peoples within the Soviet Union he dealt with them it's shocking how similar it has he deal with him in almost exactly the same way that Canada was dealing with its own indigenous people at that time not with gas chambers but with a system of forced assimilation separating children from their families through you know making them into orphans and adopting them forcing them to learn a new language forced them to give up their religion and culture it was a kind of slow-motion genocide and forced into an integration program I've also done some research on it as peoples of Sakhalin Island the furthest east you know fringes of the Soviet empire where you know how native people would appreciate that sign when you study the what it did that was so terrible there are useful parallels there are lessons to be learned that apply to what we were doing wrong in the West in the same period of time you know really directly whereas in some ways the evils of fascism are just just that little bit more outlandish where it's not easy to look at you know Treblinka the Treblinka was one of the death camps and see right away the parallels to the type of slow-motion genocide that the candidate was involved in whereas a lot of those left-wing regimes did engage in modes of repression forced assimilation slow-motion genocide that that we really should examine and we should examine our own record and so on - so that's why I engage you so much Christon doing now the other thing is I think everyone knows this but there were a lot of kind of memes about this like oh the minute someone mentions they don't fit learn well like that the discussion is over as soon as you start making comparisons to the Nazis you know the conversation is kind of dart on the toilet so I'm also against the sort of Lee's lazily invoking you know the memory of fascism and II don't Hitler to prove a point but that's not cheap Nora's problem what Jimmy Dore does is that he really fundamentally misidentifies or incorrectly defines fascism let's remember fashion what fascism is fascism is when the business and government coalesce I mean does this again and again and again he doesn't no way that's plausible enough that I'm concerned it will kind of influence people in the next generation as he says in this in this clip and not the first time ever and say it I don't know if I've heard him say it over a dozen times I think he considers to be fascism the integration of pardon me private sector and and government right now there's actually a totally different term for that school of thought and it's it's neither left-wing or right-wing or neither so it's syndicalism so syndicalism yeah my girlfriend's just looking to write syndicalism is one of the most important political philosophies of the 20th century that did not make it into the 21st century that's significant in its way right see here but someone who was a famous author for 20 or 30 years and then totally forgotten you know there's some interesting story there syndicalism made it big and syndicalism I mean you know to dumb it down a bit this is a period of time when a lot of people were enthusiastic about labor unions and a lot of people were enthusiastic about the workers taking over the means of production so some of those people were left-wing some of those people were nationalists or sometimes even you know right-wing or fascists there was nothing inherently left-wing or even liberal about the idea that the workers could take over the factory and that's itself the lesson worth learning you know the world could have paid more attention to that so syndicalism in general was was the the philosophy and there were several different leaders of it several different schools of thought within it the the most important by far I think is George Sorrell and I have read primary source of sure Sorrell so this is from memory but after your Sorel died as I recall both the fascists and the Communists offered to build a monument for his tomb to put up some kind of statue or pillow or something to commemorate him so both the left and the right were interested in claiming his legacy but if you were to ask why what why did syndicalism why was it such a big deal in the 20th century and then you know was it was of no interest in the 21st century I think part of the reason is that it was discredited by its flirtation with fascism or fascism flirtation with it whichever you want to look at it and also the the other philosophy that it was really socially with was was anarchism and people still use the term anarcho-syndicalism and you know the results were not promising you can still to this day meet people on the internet who will absolutely swear that for a period of three years and echoes anarcho-syndicalism in Spain and Catalonia operated a couple factories and it wasn't so bad and so on and so forth there are people who will go to their graves saying that anarcho-syndicalism is a a way to reorganize society but what it comes down to it what jimmy dore is criticizing here as as fascism is not fascism it's the related important and separate economic improved political philosophy of syndicalism and quite possibly it's specifically sur le and syndicalism that you can look it up there a couple other schools and cynical ISM and today everyone's forgotten about it and nobody doesn't matter uh fascism right so I was actually now return to the book to the library I was gonna show on camera you know that the symbol of fascism there was understanding what fascism is partly to find I had a copy here of cicero's the Republic and on the cover of that on both sides of the title there was a very peculiar symbol and that symbol was the belt that the fashions of ancient Rome bound up in a bound up with a leather cord I believe right and this is the same symbol that's used on the the fascist flag of Italy and mutatis mutandis with with with variations the fascists in Spain other countries all all claim this symbol this symbol and even the word fascism comes from comes from the fasces these were the rods that were carried by basically aristocrats in Rome walk especially when walking to the Senate and there were rods that be carried in front of them and anyone who got in their way could be beaten with them now you know what what a lovely symbol for pi Oh pickle the rods used to be people but the idea was that when these aristocrats met at the meeting they would each set down their rod and we bound together in a bundle representing with the men inside we're not going to raise arms against each other while though the meeting progressed so the other thing was striking me I didn't know this until I read Cicero I always just thought okay so the rod was meant to be people and that's the end of the story but no within the history of Rome it was actually seen as progress when the aristocrats stopped carrying axes when they took the axe heads off the axes and just went out with roughly the rod was a was a less violent alternative to the earlier symbol there I don't know privilege and power which was going around with an accident I don't even think is that the men would care cells their slaves or their servants of their guards will be walking ahead of them holding an axe or or a rod wouldn't wouldn't stave so look understanding what fascism really is and where it came from historically for me was difficult because they were really we talked with us off-camera a couple days ago a really interesting example of bias in education my education about World War two in the 20th century was totally focused on Germany it was specifically the history of fascism in Germany and if you only study that you'll really never understand what fascism was or what it is because the origins of fascism in Europe are almost uniquely Italian so something everyone knows is that the word Nazi is a contraction of National Socialists though most people don't know is how is it that the term socialist came to be combined with nationalist and not to mean a left-wing group but to mean an extreme right-wing group and the the ideology that the sequence of events to understand you absolutely must study Italy it's specifically uniquely under the conditions in Italy basically there there were many socialists who were genuinely at the start of this story were genuinely left-wing socialist socialists in the same sense that that we used the word today but during World War one so World War one in case you don't know was an unpopular war especially for people that weren't winning it but the body count was incredibly high during World War one broadly speaking the left was anti-war critical of the war especially as the war as the years went by as the body count piled up so within Italy there were socialists and at least at the start of the story I think they probably were sincere socialists they were socialists who want to identify themselves as pro war as nationalists and this was the origin of the term National Socialist and there was the unique and bizarre historical figure of his political career is really impossible to summarize of Mussolini and Mussolini made the switch from being I think not just a socialist but a communist he went from being a far left demagogue to being a an extreme right demagogue and indeed he did we now have the archival research publish people didn't know but we actually know exactly when he first became anti-semitic when he first took on other other aspects of fascism you know properly called he had very different you know perspectives on politics and other in other periods of his life so I just say understanding what fascism really was and what it really is um you know nobody in my education system was trying to lie to me about this it wasn't like the Canadian public school board wanted to mislead me but I think there's a real sense of discomfort well I grew up around a lot of Italians I'm very sorry where I was intended wrong with a lot of Italians you know new immigrants as well as as a whole community and so on there's there was a real reluctance I think to make the Italians into the villains of World War two I think there was a real reluctance to trace the origins of fascist ideology to Italy but it surely is utterly and ineluctably is does originate in Italy and it originates in a unique you know set a political circumstances sure just like in where do our terms left left-wing and right-wing come from it's worth understanding in the French Revolution after version creating the first problem in France and so on revolution from all these unique conditions and using unique associations for the terms that then lasted you know centuries thereafter they've been they've been tremendously long-standing their influence has been tremendous long-standing in the same way that were really unique and bizarre political conditions in Italy during World War one that then shaped the emergence of fascism proper in the interwar years and that in turn shaped the history of Germany and and shaped history of the world and that is how we've ended up with this I mean the literal symbol of the fasces of the rod and this very eclectic mix of ideas that don't seem to naturally fall together I mean you know eugenics racism but indeed as jimmy dore mentions syndicate isn't is an aspect of it you know the aspect of shall we say removing the intermediaries dis removing the barriers between government and industry whether you think of that as government taking over industry or the workers taking over industry or what-have-you there are definitely different schools of thought in that this eclectic mix of ideas and really a set of excuses of convenience ultimately for how it was the people like Mussolini ended up crossing the aisle and going from the extreme left wing to the extreme right wing and at that time remember they would be taking over the right wing from what had been traditional monarchists traditional Christians and Catholics people who were traditionally hysterically anti-communist and these were really people taking ideas from left-wing syndicates communism and socialism and bringing in bringing them into the right wing as as never before and transformed the history of the Western world before okay so shout out to Jimmy Dore as Jimmy Dore always likes to say he's just a nightclub performer he doesn't research on these things every so often somebody asked him a question about Marxism and he says hey look you know he's just a nightclub performer and this is I think an example of lazy thinking that's kind of crept into his act [Music]