[maxbendick]

I can't help but feel too old for this piece post-Trump. Eco succeeds in helping us identify fascism, but this is not the problem.

The story of Eco's friendship with African American soldiers is odd to me. Eco sees them as cultured human beings who brought freedom to Italy. And yet he neglects to bring up the racial unfreedom they faced at home, including their future exclusion from the GI Bill. Is this irrelevant because the US is not strictly fascist?

I mean to say we should not ignore the real psychological and economic forces that fascism is composed of. Eco touches on these forces. But it's not enough to stop at classifying whether a state is fascist or not. The forces that compose fascism are always present in liberal democracy, even if they don't crystallize into a mass movement.

What's most disturbing is that the German and Italian masses were not tricked: they desired fascism (even if it was against their material interests). Infantilizing the masses gets us nowhere in our understanding. [1]

I may be critical, but this is still a great piece from Eco. It's full of insights about fascism, and it succeeds at what it says on the tin.

For further reading I highly recommend Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism

[1] Ripped this paragraph almost word-for-word from Anti-Oedipus