Tag: fascism

The Real Origin of the Nazi Salute

In the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the National Fascist Party (i.e., the PNF) in Italy and the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (i.e., the NSDAP or Nazi Party) in Germany both used a salute that consisted of a straight, rigid arm raised into the air above the shoulders with the hand parallel to the rest of the arm and the palm facing toward the ground. The Italian Fascists and the German Nazis both believed that this salute originated with the ancient Romans and tried to use the salute’s supposed Roman origins in order to bolster their own prestige and portray themselves as continuing the Roman legacy. Various modern-day fascists and Neo-Nazis have tried to do the same thing.

There is, however, no evidence that anyone in ancient Rome ever used the form of the straight-arm salute that was used by the Italian Fascists and German Nazis. The true origins of the Nazi salute are far more strange. The salute’s traceable history begins with a late eighteenth-century French Neoclassical painter. Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it became incorporated into numerous stage plays and films set in ancient Rome, leading the Italian Fascists to adopt it, believing that it was Roman. The Nazis, in turn, adopted it from the Italian Fascists.

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Tucker Carlson Is Using Controversy about Literature Classes to Promote Fascism

There is something of a culture war going on right now over which books students should be assigned to read in literature classes. I’ve been meaning to write an article on this subject for over six months now, but, until now, I haven’t had time. Sadly, I’ve been so insanely busy with the many other things going on in my life that I haven’t had much time for researching and writing articles lately. Now, however, recent events have compelled me to write an article about a different aspect of the controversy than I originally planned.

Many of my readers are probably already aware of Tucker Carlson. He is a far-right political commentator who has a long and well-documented history of promoting white supremacist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic ideas. He has his own show on Fox News called Tucker Carlson Tonight and, on 14 May 2021, he did an entire segment about the literature class controversy titled “Classic literature out. Sexual propaganda in.”

In this segment, Carlson first protests the removal of works that he considers “classic literature” from English syllabi and then pretends to be absolutely scandalized by the reading of explicit passages in young adult novels that have been approved for students to read in one public school in Loudoun County, Virginia. Carlson frames the controversy using a standard fascist narrative that misrepresents the issues and ignores many demonstrable facts, including the fact that many works of so-called “classic literature,” including many works that are often read in schools, are just as sexually explicit as the works he protests against—or, in some cases, even more explicit.

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