Sunday, March 31, 2019

Origins Of Fascism--Stirner?

I was watching an online YouTube video on Max Stirner. The woman thinker and intellectual Marxist has an 8 minute and 44 second video on Max Stirner. It was still available on 3-31-19 online. I cannot find her name. I think she is Dewi Ratna, an Armenian intellectual. The videos is excellent.

This is the second video of 3, a series on (Introduction to the Concept of the Ego), was labeled Marx vs the Egocentrism of Max Stirner.I am beginning a book on egoist ethicist, of which Stirner is one.

Stirner conceives of the individual as an existing subject, concrete, existing and aware of his own existence as pure consicousness. He is the antithesis to Hegelian willingness to subordinate the individual to being the tool or instrument of the state, the Absolute, some abstract general idea.

Marxism, fascism and socialism are radical majoritarians, that elevate group rights in the service to the state as the only ambition that the private and individual person should own. Public life is private life as the collective and the group are the only life and future for the individual citizen.

Ratna points out that Stirner deeply influenced German anarchists, existentialists, but she also attributes to his philosophy of egocentrism an influence on the rise of fascism that may not be true. She blames Stirner for smashing all collective, modern and traditional structures that tie the individual to community or the whole, or some abstract, general concept.

As he urges egoists to sever and smash all communal bounds that alienate the egoist from living an authentic life as a free person, he has made it possible for these unanchored egoists to dissolve all historical and national ties that restrain them. These dissolved, restraining ties free up the masses of egoists to champion an asocial egoism with artificial bonds and relationships promoting utter servility, complete obedience to and a sever conformity to belong to a mass movement or a totalitarian state to further their personal needs and ends. In short, she suggests that Stirner's philosophy of egoism directly supported and ideologically made possible the rise of fascism in Europe and Germany in particular.

Ratna appears to be an avowed Marxist, so she  would naturally want to accuse egoists, capitalists, Westerners and individualists as conservatives whose radical selfishness, greed for power and lust for violence redounds to their support for, and resulting in the rise of fascism in the world, and currently expressed in America as alt-right nationalism, white supremacy and American imperialism.

But, conservatives refute this accusation that fascism grows out of individualism and capitalism. Rush, Prager and Dinesh D'Souza counter that fascism or national socialism is much closer aligned with Marxism than with egoism and liberal democracy.

Prager U and D'Souza prove that Fascism comes from the Left, and that its creator was Italian political philosopher, Givanni Gentile. Gentile, a Marxist, sneered at liberal democracy in countries like America as too centered on individual rights, individual liberty and other selfish concerns.

For Gentile true democracy, or Fascism, was a national family under which the individual subordinated the self to the needs of and in service of the state. Fascism combine class consciousness with militant nationalism under a totalitarian demagogue or dictator. Capitalism was now run by the state. Totalitarian fascism and totalitarian Communism can now be revealed as sister ideologies that grew out of Marxism.

Ratna is refuted.

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