Response to Counter-Currents on Fascism

A writer on Counter-Currents named Thomas Steuben recently wrote an article about my takes on fascism that I thought deserved a response. Steuben appears to be a rational and articulate person unlike the low-IQ spergnats who usually commentate on this topic with little more than dumb memes and ridicule so we’ll give what he wrote a fair hearing.

What I first noticed about the article is that it is mighty low on actual quotes from me and heavy on Steuben’s own polemics. He only quotes me briefly once at the beginning and then the rest is his own commentary. This tends to be the case when people are trying to rebuff what I’ve been saying about fascism. They don’t quote me in full context or they misrepresent my actual positions, usually resorting to making straw man arguments or assumptions about what I support. Normally this takes the form of putting any critic of fascism in the “libertarian” camp when this is not necessarily the case. I’ve pointed out before that this is a Vaushian debate bro tactic from the fascios when confronted with evidence of their intense similarities with Marxists and their ideology’s deep roots in Marxism (Mussolini was a staunch Marxist socialist before creating his hybridized Marxist-Fascism).

I’ll do Steuben the service of quoting him at length and responding to each point.

Steuben writes:

Recently, Martinez Politics, whose commentary I usually enjoy, assumed a strong stance against fascism. Here are a few snippets from his Telegram posts on this topic:

Same end goal: “everything in the State, nothing outside the State” aka Communism.

Fascism says the State is supreme and you cannot rebuke it. There’s no reason to believe that only means specific states that you selectively choose to be loyal to, but all States. . . . But the people touting this Supreme Statist ideology don’t apply any of these standards consistently, but selectively/tactically, because they don’t actually believe in these principles at all. If they’re only applied selectively, then they’re not real principles but tactics.

It is surprising how many people on the Right have fallen into the inaccurate leftist Bernie Bro/Chomskyite worldview where they think corporations that have no power to

1) initiate force

2) tax the populace

3) print money

. . . is somehow more powerful than the State which has all of those powers.

A fundamental distinction should be made between what I will call capital-F “Fascism” and lower case-f “fascism.” Capital-F Fascism is indeed “everything in the State, nothing outside the State,” with a perfect synthesis of state and corporate power. By contrast, lower case-f fascism is more of an aesthetic than an ideology. It is not particularly concerned with the dismal science of economics, which it correctly sees as merely a means and not as an end in itself.

I don’t really get the esoteric point being made here. Fascism is a pretty comprehensive ideology so there’s no need to split hairs about variants of it. Fascism actually is concerned a lot with the “dismal science of economics”. Mussolini seemed consumed almost exclusively by economic questions in his earlier days as a journalist and activist. He was a labour union organizer and strike leader. He advocated for Italy to enter World War I because he, like his prophet Karl Marx, believed the war could bring about revolutionary conditions that would facilitate a socialist takeover of the State. Everything he did was geared towards bringing about the economic order outlined in the Communist Manifesto.

This from Wiki:

Mussolini initially held official support for the party’s decision and, in an August 1914 article, Mussolini wrote “Down with the War. We remain neutral.” He saw the war as an opportunity, both for his own ambitions as well as those of socialists and Italians. He was influenced by anti-Austrian Italian nationalist sentiments, believing that the war offered Italians in Austria-Hungary the chance to liberate themselves from rule of the Habsburgs. He eventually decided to declare support for the war by appealing to the need for socialists to overthrow the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary who he said had consistently repressed socialism.[52] …. He argued that the fall of Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies and the repression of “reactionary” Turkey would create conditions beneficial for the working class… Thus he claimed that the vast social changes that the war could offer meant that it should be supported as a revolutionary war.

So even his split with the Italian socialists on this issue was not rooted in an abandonment of socialism but a commitment to it. Mussolini said Karl Marx was his prophet:

“It was inevitable that I should become a Socialist ultra, a Blanquist, indeed a communist. I carried about a medallion with Marx’s head on it in my pocket. I think I regarded it as a sort of talisman… [Marx] had a profound critical intelligence and was in some sense even a prophet.” 

Source: Talks With Mussolini, Emil Ludwig, Pg. 38

Steuben writes:

It is epitomized by the anarcho-fascist commune of Fiume, in which the government’s functions included poetry and fireworks; or by the Futurist Manifesto’s values or speed, youth, and militarism. This fascism could be summarized in a single word: life.

What Steuben is doing here is trying to extricate Fascism from its roots in Marxist economics and make it all about philosophy. But philosophy is a vague side point when it comes to politics. No amount of philosophizing will erase the fact that Fascism is, at its core, an economic and political doctrine of Total State authoritarian economic socialism, the same system brought about in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin.

Steuben writes:

Capital-F Fascism is a means, and lower-case fascism is the ultimate end. The end goal of Communism 1.0 was a materialist workers’ paradise in which death and dissolution are a means, and the end goal of contemporary “woke” Communism is dissolution and death, even if their stated goal is different. We can therefore rebuke the assertion that fascism and Communism have the same end goals. In fact, their goals are diametrically opposed.

The end goal of both Communism and Fascism was an egalitarian economic order of wealth redistribution and the elimination of economic classes, all Italians and Germans on equal footing. Both employed progressive discourse of “social and economic justice,” the same stuff you hear from modern progressives constantly whining about income pay gaps between men and women as well as Whites and non-Whites. Hitler appropriated that economic egalitarianism and applied it to one ethnic group (Germans) and Mussolini to one nationality (Italians).

Hitler said this in 1943:

“All the more so after the war, the German National Socialist state, which pursued this goal from the beginning, will tirelessly work for the realization of a program that will ultimately lead to a complete elimination of class differences and to the creation of a true socialist community.” – Adolf Hitler’s Speech for the Heroes’ Memorial Day (1943) 

Mussolini explained his political end goal of abolishing most free enterprise and private property in the 1943 Verona manifesto:

“On February 12, 1944, Mussolini’s cabinet approved a bill of “socialization” that spoke about the “Mussolinian conception on subjects such as; much higher social justice, a more equitable distribution of wealth and the participation of labor in the state life.” Mussolini claimed that Italian capitalists had betrayed him after they had gained immensely from fascism, and that he now regretted his alliance with them and rediscovered his old socialist influences. He claimed that he had intended to carry out a large-scale nationalization of property in 1939–1940 but that the outbreak of war had forced him to postpone it, and promised that in the future, all industrial firms with over 100 employees would be nationalized. Mussolini even reached out to ex-communist Nicola Bombacci, a former student of Vladimir Lenin, to help him in spreading the image that Fascism was a progressive movement.”

So by the 40s, both Hitler and Mussolini were making clear that the final destination of fascism and National Socialism was the complete State takeover of all private affairs, “nothing outside the State”. That’s not meaningfully distinct from Marxist-Leninism.

Steuben writes:

But despite the fact that one is a means and the other an ends, “Fascism” and “fascism” are not wholly compatible with one another. Julius Evola observed that many of the Italian Fascists who had been idealists in the beginning ended up as boring party apparatchiks. This fact would appear to support Martinez’s position. But it does not. Fascism was a means that went too far and became an end in itself. As with many issues, this issue can be easily resolved through Aristotle’s golden mean. Anything taken to an unnatural extreme becomes a warped parody of its former self. Additionally, a great amount of slack must be given to the Italian Fascists, who found themselves overwhelmed by hostile powers and who had less time to realize their dreams than the Communists ended up with.

This is overly verbose bafflegab. Fascism did become a parody of itself and ended up plunging Europe into a bloodbath because of the vainglory of Mussolini and Hitler who thought they could bend the whole world to their own selfish whims. That’s the inevitable outcome of unchecked State power. The fascists were not “overwhelmed by hostile powers” they were themselves hostile to any State that was not ideologically fascist, invading and seeking to overturn them. Fascists don’t believe in nation-states or sovereignty they only believe in the ideology. Those not of the ideology are “heretics” and any sort of violence is justified against them, similar to radical Islam.

Steuben writes:

Additionally, if fascism and Communism had had the same goals, it would have been much less likely that they would have fought — and continue to fight each other — so vehemently. The Communists would have allied with the Falange against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Many of the Sturmabteilung had originally been Communists, just as many Alt Right fascists had originally been libertarian because they were disillusioned with the mainstream options presented to them. Nevertheless, the violence between the former two in the Weimar Republic was not a farcical misunderstanding.

This is a red herring. Remember that Hitler had severe bloody quarrels with other Natsocs and fascists, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives violent purge. Were those he purged not also Natsocs? Nazis assassinated Dolfuss of Austria, who was also a fascist, because he wanted to keep Austria independent of German rule. Mussolini nearly went to war with Hitler to defend the sovereignty of Austria. Stalin purged out scores of other Bolsheviks, culminating in the execution of Kamenev and Zinoviev and assassination of Trotsky, yet they were all communists. Ideologically similar groups often do bloody battle against each other, the same way gangs of a similar nature war over turf.

This source says that more than 50% of recruits to the SA in general were ex-communists and as many as 70% of new recruits to the SA in Berlin were communists, hence why they were called “Beefsteak Nazis”. Mussolini was a diehard Marxist socialist, Hitler was involved in the Soviet Bavarian Republic and attended the funeral of Jewish Marxist Kurt Eisner.

The Strasser brothers, both prominent members of the NSDAP who shaped the party’s ideology, were committed economic socialists of a Marxian bent. Goebbels said that next to Hitler, Vladimir Lenin was his greatest idol and that the difference between NS and Communism was “very slight”. Joachim von Ribbentrop, Germany’s foreign minister, said that Bolshevism was a “kind of National Socialism”. So if you have Nazis themselves attesting to their intense similarities with communists, then this debate is over.

Steuben says that, “The Communists would have allied with the Falange against the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War”. Let’s hear what Hitler himself said about this:

“Early in November 1937 Hitler told his staff that an outright Franco victory in Spain was not desirable: ‘Our interest is in maintaining existing tensions in the Mediterranean.’ That Franco was fighting the Communist-backed Republicans was of only secondary importance. In April 1938 Hitler would muse out loud to Reinhard Spitzy, Ribbentrop’s private secretary: ‘We have backed the wrong horse in Spain. We would have done better to back the Republicans. They represent the people. We could always have converted these socialists into good National Socialists later. The people around Franco are all reactionary clerics, aristocrats, and moneybags — they’ve nothing in common with us Nazis at all!”” – David Irving, Hitler’s War & the War Path

So Hitler himself secretly wanted to align with the Reds against Franco because Franco wasn’t economically socialistic enough for his Marxian tastes. But pragmatism brought him to support Franco, which he regretted later when Franco refused to appease Hitler’s war aims in the Second World War. The Soviets didn’t align with the Falange probably only because they incorporated Catholicism into its doctrine, but on economic questions, the Falange was indistinguishable from the Reds they were fighting. Steuben also fails to mention the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression and commerical trade pact of 1939 and Italo-Soviet friendship and trade pact of 1933 which aligned fascism with the USSR. If they were diametrically opposed, why the friendliness and collaboration?

Here’s a quote from a commenter on Steuben’s article illustrating my point:

As a Fascist at heart I agree with most of it. As a teenager I was a Socialist, of the eco-type who wanted only to provide support for the poor and stop the ravaging effects of global capitalism on the natural world. Nothing about that has ever changed. Then, as I grew up, I simply added to that list a desire to protect the native European peoples and their cultures, and voila, I was now a Fascist. The step from well-meaning Democratic Socialism to Fascism is much smaller than anyone dares admit. Looking through the early 20th century with clarity, it’s plain to see how Mosley came from Labour, Mussolini came from the Italian socialist party, the NSDAP came from the German Labor Party. Fascism is a labor movement.”

So what he’s saying here is that fascists like himself remain economic Marxists and merely add a patriotic national sentiment to the discourse aka National Marxism.

Steuben writes:

Next, I completely agree that most fascists use Fascism selectively. I simply disagree with Martinez about whether this is the correct course of action, because fascism — or life and truth — should be our guiding principles, and not Fascism as a party program.

So if fascists use fascist doctrine selectively, then it’s not a doctrine of “truth” but cynical falsehood applied only when it’s convenient to do so. It’s like saying: “I believe in your free speech….but only when you agree with me”. I pointed this out about the fascist maxim of “States have rights over individuals (i.e. citizens)”. If applied universally, this would mean that right-wingers have no right to oppose our modern leftist States on anything they’re currently doing, like imposing transgenderism, diversity, hate speech provisions, wars, covid tyranny, etc. Fascists have no response to this philosophical quagmire because it nullifies the central premise of fascism, namely that the State is supreme and the citizen has no rights unless he agrees with the State (aka citizens can’t disagree with the State without severe punishment). If that logic doesn’t apply to all States, then it shouldn’t apply to any State.

Steuben writes:

For example, I have personally seen an anarchist punk skater become a bootlicking toady praising Ashli Babbitt’s executioner. I was initially shocked, but there is really no contradiction or hypocrisy. The enemy is a conduit of chaos, with dissolution as his ultimate goal. When they are out of power, they will be punk skaters; when in power, they will indulge in unmitigated anarcho-tyranny and statism. We should copy this winning strategy in the pursuit of fascism: While we are out of power, we should be libertarian in our methods; once in power we should, at least initially, be Fascists.

So when you’re out of power you will preach libertarian ethics? I don’t see many fascists actually doing this though, they ridiculed anyone on the Right who wasn’t gung-ho for “total Statism” in the face of covid tyranny and the scientific dictatorship being imposed by the WEF, UN and our national governments. They mocked the Canadian truckers and anti-vaxxers who opposed the “power of the State” to trample over the “liberal rights” of citizens. So by their own logic, the Great Reset tyrants have every right to jab your kid with Pfizer’s toxic brew because “the State has rights over individuals”. I don’t even disagree with the general sentiment that when we have power we should use it against the Left. That’s pretty much common sense, but we find ourselves in a moral quagmire by feigning beliefs we don’t actual hold.

Steuben writes:

This naturally leads to the argument that in doing so, we will become what we are fighting against. But statism is not like Sauron’s ring of power, regardless of what the libertarians claim. Otherwise, all of the governments in history would have descended into evil. The anti-statist sentiment which defines America is a relatively recent phenomenon spawned by the Enlightenment’s hatred of monarchy, which by the 1700s had degenerated into a parody of traditional kingship. This overreaction had some merit in its day, but is now an anachronism.

All governments have descended into some form of evil, actually, and only recently was their power checked. The greatest genocides in history were conducted almost exclusively by States with unchecked power to imprison, kill and enslave. Stalin’s Gulags, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s killing fields are classic examples of the end result of unchecked State power. The end result of Hitler and Mussolini’s unchecked State power was the bloodbath of the Second World War. I’m saying this not as a rejection of Statism but as an observable fact. States have a monopoly on the use of force and can take that to extremes if they wish to. With that said, States can also do good by protecting its citizens from foreign invaders and criminals. It all depends on who’s running the State. States in the right hands are necessary to sustain law and order and impose a moral guide for society, but States must also be regulated and checked by men of good moral character to keep it from going off the deep end into barbarism and tyranny. If business power must be checked, so must State power.

Steuben writes:

Furthermore, nature abhors a vacuum, especially in regard to power. The odd allergy to state power is only found on the Right. The Left has no qualms about it, and thus has had great success. The attitude that power corrupts only serves to ensure that those who are inherently corrupt wield power unimpeded while those who are virtuous render themselves unable to exercise their virtue in the political realm.

I don’t disagree with that statement and right-wingers should probably let go of their allergy to using State power in the name of good. But none of that changes the fact that unchecked State power does not usually bode well for anyone. If there must be limits on business, there must be limits on the State. Libertarians want a minimal state, fascists want a total state, and I reside somewhere in the middle there. So both of them try to throw me into the other camp because I reject the precept of both libertarianism and fascism.

Steuben writes:

The third point I wish to address is the idea that corporations cannot perform traditional state functions, such as the use of force and the enforcement of taxes. At first glance this appears to be a strong argument. But who ultimately wields more power, the President and Congress or the various private interests they must court to get elected and remain in office? Why run for Congress when you can make a Congressman your pet poodle? George Soros has worked to ensure that state power is used almost exclusively against his enemies, and rarely against his friends and pawns. And the fact that mega-corps design tax loopholes has become common knowledge even among the most apolitical.

The President and Congress undoubtedly wield more power and can do what they wish once in power. They don’t need to go begging to corporations to pass legislation, they just do it. The corporations are the ones who have to grovel before the politicians to get favours. If the corps had more power than politicians, then explain why the US Justice department just launched an anti-trust lawsuit against Google. The EU fined Google under its anti-trust laws. Microsoft nearly got broken up. AT&T was broken up under Reagan. If the corps had the power advantage here, none of that would happen. Soros can throw his money around at politicians, but so can labour unions, foreign country lobbies, charities like ADL and ACLU, etc. They’re all lobbying to get favours and laws passed, but none of them directly control the government. They must beg the State, not the reverse. Soros’ organizations were banned from Hungary, so obviously Soros is not dictating terms to every State, if he was then he’d just ignore Orban’s State orders and keep doing what he wants. It just happens that most of the political class agrees with the ideas of Soros on many issues.

Mega corps don’t need to design tax loopholes they just exploit ones that are already there. They get their fancy lawyers to pour through tax law to find the loopholes, which the government can then plug up at any time if it wants to. Average citizens can also try to exploit tax loopholes to shelter some of their own money from the tax authorities, it’s not only corps that are able to do that. If the corps had full control of the government, they’d just abolish the corporate tax, capital gains tax, etc. and not have to worry about finding loopholes to avoid paying. Still, you have not described how the State with its power to tax, wage war, print money, imprison citizens, and initiate force is less powerful than corporations. Corps can only wield such powers through the State, so the real power lies with the State.

Steuben writes:

There is also the matter of a potential power vacuum between the state and business. A perfect balance between state and corporate power would be ideal, but such a thing would be too delicate to last, anyway. One must eventually predominate over the other, like one side in a game of tug-of-war. It is simply the nature of the dynamic.

The State already predominates over business, if it didn’t then there’d be no anti-trust laws, regulations or taxes, all of which inhibit business. They’d all be abolished tomorrow. A perfect example is the covid tyranny. States forced all private businesses to close down for a year, causing thousands of them to fail. The ones who failed to comply were hit with fines. If businesses had power over States, then they’d have ignored all the lockdown orders and continued doing business. The State would have been powerless to enforce lockdowns if business had the upper hand.

Steuben writes:

The question is thus whether the state will rule business or vice versa, and to what extent. The threat of business conquering government is the Achilles’ heel of any liberal democracy. As Oswald Spengler explained in The Decline of the West, “It is symptomatic that no constitution knows of money as a political force, it is pure theory that they contain, one and all.” The state must rule business, or business will rule the state. It is a zero-sum game.

I don’t disagree that the State should have final say over business, but like I said, it already does in most countries other than extremely weak and lawless ones in the Third World. Business has influence on the State, just as labour unions, foreign countries, charities and voters do too, they’re all jockeying for influence with the State which has the powers to tax, print money, regulate, and initiate force. But the State has the upper hand over all the influence peddlers. Private citizens and private businesses must comply with State orders and laws, or they are punished, but the State doesn’t seem to have to follow its own rules. Only States can punish other States, like you saw at Nuremberg, but States rarely punish or regulate themselves. No Soviet mass murderer ever went to prison, unless put there by Stalin or one of his successors in a power struggle. You see that with the Intelligence Agencies and National Security State in many countries. They can get away with breaking the law (spying, assassinations, coups, war crimes) and few government law-breakers are punished, whereas even wealthy private citizens don’t often get away with murder, extortion, or other serious crimes. Justice even caught up with Epstein. There should be strong campaign finance laws and conflict of interest laws that separate the State and business as well as lobby groups of any kind.

Steuben writes:

It is therefore better to embrace a political order in which the state openly and honestly rules over business, but in which there are limits as to how it does so. Attempting to achieve a balance will invariably slide into the nearly absolute rule of the state by private business. The state being predominant is not a perfect option, but it is preferable, since government is nominally public and business is private.

We already have a political order where the State predominates. Maybe not to the extent you like, but that’s what we have. If we didn’t then why are the FBI and regulators telling Mark Zuckerberg what he’s allowed to have on his website? Hate speech laws and civil rights laws in Canada, Australia and Europe are directed by the State against private citizens and business, a clear case of the State being in control.

Here’s a very recent example of this:

Last week, a Manhattan jury awarded $11.25 million to 39-year-old Röbynn Europe, a black woman who sued her former employer, Equinox gym, saying she was unjustly fired for sexism and racism. Equinox claims she was fired for being late 47 times over 10 months, a fact that Europe acknowledged as true. According to the New York Times, Europe believed “her lateness was merely a pretext for discrimination.”

So the State has been weaponized by the privileged minorities against businesses. That is not a political order in which business predominates, but the State in favour of minority “rights,” in this case the right to be a lazy bum and not get fired for it.

Steuben writes:

One could counter that the current governments throughout much of the West are objectively evil, but this came about precisely because private interests of a Jewish nature were able to hijack the American government due to its weakness.

Jews can also hijack the government by directly entering the government, as they have done. By this logic we should abolish the government, so Jews can’t hijack it from within. Applying the term “private” to Jewish interests here seems superfluous. White nationalist organizations are also “private” since they’re not part of the State, but I doubt you’d argue against White nationalists exercising “private” rights to influence public discourse or policy. The issue with Jews is not one of public vs private, but of the battle of ethnic groups. Jews will infiltrate the State and use it to their own group advantage and they’ll do the same with business, and so should Whites. Preventing Jews from influencing Western States is a perfectly reasonable policy that I concur with. That has little to do with economic policy though, that’s in the realm of social policy.

Steuben writes:

A state should be an extension of the people. Our current government is indeed an extension of a people — the Jewish people, rather than its white founding stock. The US constitutional order abhors national government, and thus deracinated white business interests such as banks, railroads, and the industrial robber barons were able to corrupt it soon after its inception. The Founders’ naïve hope that ambition and private enterprise would check each other backfired and ultimately aggrandized those interests. As a result, these same greedy industrial interests hijacked the federal government in order to launch their war against the South, which permanently injured the states’ rights that the Constitution was ironically designed to protect. It was then quite easy for the Jews to insert themselves into this corrupt state of affairs a few decades later.

As far as I’m aware there was also Jewish influence in the American South, so framing the North vs South thing in Jewish terms is off base. The Jewish takeover of politics is the result of allowing Jews in politics. High-IQ Jews are able to take over any type of system, including authoritarian ones like the Soviet Union which they were predominant in. But they tend to thrive especially in the “liberal democratic” environment because it affords them the rights to organize for their interests. The remedy to this is not becoming communists who abolish business but becoming ethno-centrists aware that Jews do not share our interests and excluding them from the table of governance.

Steuben writes:

Furthermore, one of the best American presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, aptly wielded state power in domestic affairs in order to bust trusts, found the national park system, and pass the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug acts while increasing US naval power abroad. It would be accurate to describe President Roosevelt as a proto-ecofascist. That Teddy is remembered as a beloved leader and not as a dark lord should thoroughly rebuke the claim that the use of state power inherently corrupts.

This example contradicts your previous claim that business is more powerful than the State. If it was, then Teddy Roosevelt would not have been able to bust trusts or pass regulations that harmed business interests. That’s proof that the State was in control and that big business power does not overtake the State. Roosevelt’s also known for aggressively supporting the Spanish-American war with the dubious sinking of the USS Maine. So once again we have unchecked State power taking its usual course towards war and expansion.

Theodore Roosevelt, as the U.S. rapidly built a powerful naval fleet of steel warships in the 1880s and 1890s. Roosevelt served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897–1898 and was an aggressive supporter of an American war with Spain over Cuban interests.

Steuben writes:

One could point to numerous examples of businesses having to kowtow to woke ideas such as diversity and equity, which had already been around in less virulent forms for decades in the form of human resources commissars. Isn’t this an example of government bullying business? Actually, no — it is woke businesses bullying other businesses that are not in lockstep with their agenda. Such enterprises simply fall outside the current Fascist synthesis of state and corporate power.

There are examples of both government and other woke businesses bullying other businesses to “go woke”. But that all started with the 1964 Civil Rights Act which forced businesses to kowtow to diversity and inclusion ideas, making it illegal to discriminate. That was replicated in Britain with the 1965 Race Relations Act and the Canadian Employment Equity Act, all of which are State-mandated diversity and wokeism. The Democrats and Labour were the ones who passed these acts in the US and UK, both of which lean towards anti-business economic socialism. Another recent example is the British government nudging the big CEOs to start diversifying their companies, which State enterprises in the UK like NHS and BBC already do.

To suggest that the State isn’t involved in imposing this is clearly wrong and it’s no surprise that fascists are the most enthusiastic deniers of the State’s role in this since they are ideologically pro-State and anti-business, hence their attempts to scapegoat leftism on business and absolve the State. Everything from gay marriage, transgender and LGBT equality laws, anti-racism, hate speech, feminist supremacy, foreign wars and mass immigration are achieved through the State and have clear benefits to politicians. I don’t deny that largely Jewish-run big businesses have co-signed these leftist agendas, often for ideological reasons and not purely economic factors since they’re willing to take temporary losses to push some of this stuff, but I don’t buy into the fascist argument that the solution is to abolish all private business and hand over unlimited powers to the State. If the State is run by leftists, then this achieves nothing. If it’s run by right-wingers, then we can achieve all the social stuff without banning private enterprise. By the same logic the solution is abolishing the State so it can’t impose any of this stuff on us. But I don’t think that’s the solution either.

Steuben writes:

A point which Martinez did not bring up but which I wish to address is the claim that “the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.” There is actually some truth to this when Fascism abandons the Aristotelian golden mean and goes awry. All things else being equal, it is more efficient for issues to be handled at the lowest level possible — i.e., by the citizenry or local government. But civil society in America has all but withered today. Government overreach is one reason for this, but not the sole reason. One need only live for a brief time in a European country to observe the marked contrast.

Fascism negates localism and self-rule. It’s all about stiff centralization of power in a Federal Government. There are no provincial or states rights under fascism. If leftists control this type of State, there’s no opting out of their agendas.

Steuben writes:

The inverse of this dictum is also true. The lack of civil society requires a strong government to kick-start it, and then gradually back off. For example, the Third Reich enriched its people through sporting and cultural events following the social devastation of the Weimar era. A responsible nationalist government would do the same in the US today, and encourage people to be free and happy to the extent that state encouragement is needed.

You don’t need a fascist style of government to have sporting or cultural events. Even our left-wing States have ministries of culture that subsidize cultural events and projects.

Steuben writes:

I do not claim that Fascism is an ideal form of government. However, no ideal government can exist in the Kali Yuga — or in the post-modern/post-industrial world, if one prefers to discard Traditionalist metaphysics. But Fascism is at least functional, which is the best we can currently hope for. And while Fascism comes with the danger of falling into excess, the excesses of liberal democracy and unfettered capitalism have proven to be far worse, both in probability and magnitude. It is they who have become indistinguishable from Communism.

So you admit it’s not the ideal form of government and lends itself to overreach and tyranny, but advocate for it anyway because you can’t think of anything better. There are many more options than “fascism or liberal democracy,” narrowing politics down to these two options is a red herring. We don’t have unfettered capitalism today, we have some of the most regulated, taxed and socialized economies we’ve perhaps ever had. There are no income taxes, capital gains taxes, corporate taxes, property taxes, sales taxes and a regulatory agency for every industry under the sun in “unfettered capitalism”. What we have now are Keynesian mixed economies, which ironically is what some fascists claim to support, so we already have the “third position” they aspire to yet they’re still unsatisfied because they’re not even Keynesians they’re Marxists.

Steuben writes:

I am writing this partly out of respect for Martinez Perspective, and so would like to humbly and cautiously offer an explanation for his strong criticisms of Fascism. Recently, a number of individuals of the “zigger” community have become obnoxiously loud in praising Russia’s vanilla statism and casting Putin as a savior. This is particularly annoying given that Russia Today constantly runs anti-white propaganda, such as by attacking Daniel Penny for exercising his right to defend himself. The only justification offered is dismissive handwringing over geopolitics.

The strong support for Putin among fascists gives away the mindset they have. They want a powerful dictator with unchecked State power who wages war on his neighbors for Lebensraum. There’s very little difference between Putin’s Lebensraum and Hitler’s Lebensraum, one is cultural and the other ethnic. Fascism glorifies war as a form of national rebirth and rejuvenation, another maxim they use selectively since they’re always going off with Third Worldist rants about how much they hate American and Israeli war-making. They love Putin’s war-making because they believe it’s being done in opposition to the “liberal order,” even though Putin is himself a multiculturalist opposed to the neo-Nazism these people profess, giving away the accelerationist nihilism of these modern neo-fascist supporters of Putinism and Eurasianism. They don’t care about White people and will co-sign and vengefully justify any violence against White people done by governments not aligned with America and NATO.

Steuben writes:

A blanket dismissal of “statism” might trigger ziggers on Telegram, but it is not a serious position for a race-conscious white to take. There is no non-statist solution to the problems whites face today. If Martinez wishes to criticize Fascism, he is entitled to do so. Quite frankly, those who advocate Fascism and National Socialism today often tend to rest on other people’s laurels. But this will not be a serious debate until Martinez offers a statist alternative that better serves the interests of whites. Otherwise, he risks retreating into stale libertarian and conservative talking points.

I’ve never made a blanket dismissal of “Statism,” quite the contrary. Once again the fascios misrepresent my position to straw man it. If I rebuffed Statism en toto then I wouldn’t be supporting Ron DeSantis in his war against Disney, which is a case of the State lording it over woke business. I believe that the State in the right hands should impose a moral order, including over business, but that need not necessitate the fascist-communist program of “nothing outside the State”.

I believe that only through the State can we solve many of these social problems we face today, which would make me a “Statist” in the eyes of Libertarians. Immigration and the social order can only be solved on a wide scale via the State, but that doesn’t mean I want a Totalitarian State that can get hijacked by bad actors and turned against us.

I’ve also critiqued the apathy of Libertarians towards the plight of the West and Whites and their lack of moral direction. But because I also rebuff the hyper-Statism of the fascios, they put me in that camp in an attempt to hollow out the middle ground between Total Statism and Libertarian Anarchism. A competent and morally-grounded State need not be tyrannical or averse to the views of the common man. I don’t believe that the State has inherent rights over citizens, it only has the raw power to enforce its will insofar as citizens are inclined to obey it or powerless to oppose it. When the State oversteps its bounds, the citizens can and should rebel against it. If fascios don’t believe that then they should give up their current rebellious trajectory against our modern States and just obey like the good cattle that they are.