That fool Dawkins
Here is a review of Dawkins' intemperate book, the Fascism Delusion, that does a superb job of pointing out the flaws in that polemic.
Here is an extract,
… [Dawkins’s] sense of ‘Fascism’ is lamentably error-strewn. Dawkins has only a superficial knowledge of Mein Kamf Kampf, or the poetry of Marinetti; and he seems entirely ignorant of the much more subtle and intellectually stimulating work of Fascist philosophers such as Hermann Graf Keyserling, Alfred Baeumler, Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Gentile, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Alain de Benoist and many others. Only somebody who has mastered the complete works of all these thinkers could even conceivably be in a position to advance an anti-Fascist argument. The lack of that necessary body of knowledge fatally undermines Dawkins’s right to attack Fascism in the first place.
And my favourite,
Right from the get-go he makes the mistake of talking about ‘Fascism’ as if it were some unified quality. Of course the truth is that there are a great many varieties and flavours of Fascism. Do his generalisations refer to Italian Fascism? Hitlerian fascism? Islamofascism? Falangism? Crypto-Fascism? Brazilian Integralism? It is meaningless to extract an idealised, monolithic ‘fascism’ from this myriad patchwork of human practices, even for polemical purposes. Nor is it right to call Fascism ‘right-wing’ (what about the career of Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser?) or ‘militaristic’ (many Fascists are wholly peaceable).
Here is an extract,
… [Dawkins’s] sense of ‘Fascism’ is lamentably error-strewn. Dawkins has only a superficial knowledge of Mein Kamf Kampf, or the poetry of Marinetti; and he seems entirely ignorant of the much more subtle and intellectually stimulating work of Fascist philosophers such as Hermann Graf Keyserling, Alfred Baeumler, Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Gentile, Rafael Sánchez Mazas, Alain de Benoist and many others. Only somebody who has mastered the complete works of all these thinkers could even conceivably be in a position to advance an anti-Fascist argument. The lack of that necessary body of knowledge fatally undermines Dawkins’s right to attack Fascism in the first place.
And my favourite,
Right from the get-go he makes the mistake of talking about ‘Fascism’ as if it were some unified quality. Of course the truth is that there are a great many varieties and flavours of Fascism. Do his generalisations refer to Italian Fascism? Hitlerian fascism? Islamofascism? Falangism? Crypto-Fascism? Brazilian Integralism? It is meaningless to extract an idealised, monolithic ‘fascism’ from this myriad patchwork of human practices, even for polemical purposes. Nor is it right to call Fascism ‘right-wing’ (what about the career of Otto Johann Maximilian Strasser?) or ‘militaristic’ (many Fascists are wholly peaceable).