Excellent quotation from Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism:

If asked what manner of beast fascism is, most people would answer, without hesitation, “fascism is an ideology.”
The fascist leaders themselves never stopped saying that they were prophets of an idea, unlike the materialist liberals and socialists. Hitler talked ceaselessly of Weltanschauung, or “worldview,” an uncomely word he successfully forced on the attention of the whole world.
Mussolini vaunted the power of the Fascist creed. A fascist, by this approach, is someone who espouses fascist ideology—an ideology being more than just ideas, but a total system of thought harnessed to a world-shaping project.
It has become almost automatic to focus a book about fascism on the thinkers who first put together the attitudes and patterns of thought that we now call fascist.
It would seem to follow that we should “start by examining the programs, doctrines, and propaganda in some of the main fascist movements and then proceed to the actual policies and performance of the only two noteworthy fascist regimes.”
Putting programs first rests on the unstated assumption that fascism was an “ism” like the other great political systems of the modern world: conservatism, liberalism, socialism. Usually taken for granted, that assumption is worth scrutinizing.
The other “isms” were created in an era when politics was a gentleman’s business, conducted through protracted and learned parliamentary debate among educated men who appealed to each other’s reasons as well as their sentiments.
The classical “isms” rested upon coherent philosophical systems laid out in the works of systematic thinkers. It seems only natural to explain them by examining their programs and the philosophy that underpinned them.
Fascism, by contrast, was a new invention created afresh for the era of mass politics. It sought to appeal mainly to the emotions by the use of ritual, carefully stage-managed ceremonies, and intensely charged rhetoric.
The role programs and doctrine play in it is, on closer inspection, fundamentally unlike the role they play in conservatism, liberalism, and socialism.
Fascism does not rest explicitly upon an elaborated philosophical system, but rather upon popular feelings about master races, their unjust lot, and their rightful predominance over inferior peoples.
It has not been given intellectual underpinnings by any system builder, like Marx, or by any major critical intelligence, like Mill, Burke, or Tocqueville.
In a way utterly unlike the classical “isms,” the rightness of fascism does not depend on the truth of any of the propositions advanced in its name.
Fascism is “true” insofar as it helps fulfill the destiny of a chosen race or people or blood, locked with other peoples in a Darwinian struggle, and not in the light of some abstract and universal reason.
ADDENDUM:

This whole introduction should just be read if you appreciate the quote, but here's one more especially poignant bit:
Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics.
And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war.

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More from @ZachWeiner

1 Nov
Thoughts on Beowulf scholarship from a non-expert:

There are all these theories on why the story loops and digresses so much, e.g. "it has story-rings just like there are rings in the story!"

It seems to me these people have never watched anyone channel-hop on TV?
Or go online for that matter. I bet you could find browser histories that exactly reproduce the structure of Beowulf:

1) Here's some interesting history
2) I'm gonna watch a big fight
3) Oh, and a rematch
4) Here are some classic fights
5) Ooh, a story about an evil leader

etc.
I get that there's this Aristotelian concept of organic unity, but it's not clear to me that it's a thing actual consumers of stories want.

Similarly, people ask why the Beowulf-Grendel fight gets repeated (I believe 4 times!). Like... have you heard of re-runs?
Read 5 tweets
15 Oct
Some interesting history:

So, there's a story often told that the German Army invested in rockets post-WWI because the Versailles Treaty didn't anticipate rockets and thus didn't forbid them.
According to one of the leading scholars on German spaceflight history, Michael Neufeld, this probably isn't true. In fact, the Germans regularly violated the treaty by finding loopholes.
Neufeld: “The degree to which violation of the treaty was taken for granted in secret rearmament projects, and the intimate relationship between illegal chemical weapons and the early army rocket program, casts much doubt on the oft-repeated cliche that Ordnance’s interest in
Read 4 tweets
14 Oct
Can we agree that admitting Puerto Rico would result in a much more interesting number of states? It's prime factorization is 17*3 !
It's also 16+17+18.

Come on guys! Don't let politics ruin this!
Oh my GOD it's also 3^3 + 3^3 - 3.
Read 4 tweets
13 Oct
From Chuck Yeager's autobiography:

Atrocities were committed by both sides. That fall [1944] our fighter group received orders from the Eighth Air Force to stage a maximum effort.
Our seventy-five Mustangs were assigned an area of fifty miles by fifty miles inside Germany and ordered to strafe anything that moved. The object was to demoralize the German population.
Nobody asked our opinion about whether we were actually demoralizing the survivors or maybe enraging them to stage their own maximum effort in behalf of the Nazi war effort. We weren't asked how we felt zapping people.
Read 9 tweets
27 Sep
Here's Yves, Béon, survivor of Dora labor camp, where the death rate was 1 in 3, and the V-1s and V-2s were built. From his book, Planet Dora, 1985, originally in French.

“But these men at Dora, Ellrich, Harzungen, in the small kommandos or during the evacuation, had held on.
Even dead, burned, or thrown upon a pile of human trash, they were victors. They had shown and proved with their martyred bodies that human beings must never give in, never surrender, never submit to tyranny.
They had proved it our after hour through agonized weeks, months, and centuries.
Read 7 tweets
23 Sep
Literary Fun Fact: Before he was a famous author, Arthur Conan Doyle had formative experiences as a doctor on a whaling ship. Here's a particularly funny passage from his memoirs "Memories and Adventures."
To appreciate a woman one has to be out of sight of one for six months. I can well remember that as we rounded the north of Scotland on our return we dipped our flag to the lighthouse, being only some hundreds of yards from the shore.
A figure emerged to answer our salute, and the excited whisper ran through the ship, "It's a wumman!" The captain was on the bridge with his telescope. I had the binoculars in the bows. Every one was staring.
Read 5 tweets

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