An expert opines: Russia is fascist

Timothy Snyder is a prominent scholar who studies how democracies fall and how tyrannies work. He wrote a 2017 book, On Tyranny, that described concrete steps average people can take to oppose the fall of democracy to tyrants. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, We Should Say It. Russia Is Fascist, he writes:

Fascism was never defeated as an idea.

As a cult of irrationality and violence, it could not be vanquished as an argument: So long as Nazi Germany seemed strong, Europeans and others were tempted. It was only on the battlefields of World War II that fascism was defeated. Now it’s back — and this time, the country fighting a fascist war of destruction is Russia. Should Russia win, fascists around the world will be comforted.

We err in limiting our fears of fascism to a certain image of Hitler and the Holocaust. Fascism was Italian in origin, popular in Romania — where fascists were Orthodox Christians who dreamed of cleansing violence — and had adherents throughout Europe (and America). In all its varieties, it was about the triumph of will over reason.

Because of that, it’s impossible to define satisfactorily. People disagree, often vehemently, over what constitutes fascism. But today’s Russia meets most of the criteria that scholars tend to apply. It has a cult around a single leader, Vladimir Putin. It has a cult of the dead, organized around World War II. It has a myth of a past golden age of imperial greatness, to be restored by a war of healing violence — the murderous war on Ukraine.

Many hesitate to see today’s Russia as fascist because Stalin’s Soviet Union defined itself as antifascist. But that usage did not help to define what fascism is — and is worse than confusing today. With the help of American, British and other allies, the Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany and its allies in 1945. Its opposition to fascism, however, was inconsistent.

Before Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the Soviets treated fascists as just one more form of capitalist enemy. Communist parties in Europe were to treat all other parties as the enemy. This policy actually contributed to Hitler’s ascent: Though they outnumbered the Nazis, German communists and socialists could not cooperate. After that fiasco, Stalin adjusted his policy, demanding that European communist parties form coalitions to block fascists.

Stalin’s flexibility about fascism is the key to understanding Russia today. Under Stalin, fascism was first indifferent, then it was bad, then it was fine until — when Hitler betrayed Stalin and Germany invaded the Soviet Union — it was bad again. But no one ever defined what it meant. It was a box into which anything could be put. Communists were purged as fascists in show trials. During the Cold War, the Americans and the British became the fascists. And “anti-fascism” did not prevent Stalin from targeting Jews in his last purge, nor his successors from conflating Israel with Nazi Germany.

Because Mr. Putin speaks of fascists as the enemy, we might find it hard to grasp that he could in fact be fascist. But in Russia’s war on Ukraine, “Nazi” just means “subhuman enemy”— someone Russians can kill. Hate speech directed at Ukrainians makes it easier to murder them, as we see in Bucha, Mariupol and every part of Ukraine that has been under Russian occupation. Mass graves are not some accident of war, but an expected consequence of a fascist war of destruction.

Fascists calling other people “fascists” is fascism taken to its illogical extreme as a cult of unreason. It is a final point where hate speech inverts reality and propaganda is pure insistence. It is the apogee of will over thought. Calling others fascists while being a fascist is the essential Putinist practice. Jason Stanley, an American philosopher, calls it “undermining propaganda.” I have called it “schizofascism.” The Ukrainians have the most elegant formulation. They call it “ruscism.”

Spiritual but not religious...

“Spiritual but not religious.” Many people are claiming that designation these days, when asked about their religious affiliation.

Q1: How would you define that "spiritual" designation?  What’s the difference between those two designations?  Is it some kind of non-sequitur?  A cop-out?  Pure nonsense?  An attempt to insult/belittle orthodox religions?  What exactly are the missing/included ingredients that sets those two designations apart?

Q2: Have you ever experienced spirituality without religion?  If so, tell us your story.

Thanks for thinking about it, posting and favoriting.

Regarding the relationship between atheism, rationality and religious belief

An article at OnlySky by social science researcher Will Gervais examines the state of the science. The article, The treasured atheist idea that reason undercuts faith just doesn’t hold up, looks at recent research on the science of atheism and religious belief. Current data sets indicate that (i) a person’s rationality is not a source of atheism, and (ii) applying reason-based arguments against religion does not convert religious people to atheism. 

In 2012, Gervais and fellow researcher Ara Norenzayan published a paper in the prestigious journal Science, Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief. That paper got significant public and researcher attention. That paper, plus another with similar results, sparked further research to confirm or deny and further explore relationships, if any, between atheism, rationality and religious faith.

Long story short, Gervais’ original data did not hold up to more rigorous experimentation with larger groups of subjects. He and his research partner disavowed their 2012 paper and its conclusions. The results were a false positive based on too small a sample size and a sloppy research protocol. Recent research data also indicates that instead of appeals to reason (the conscious mind), when one appeals to intuition, emotion and bias (the unconscious mind), that also does not nudge people toward religious beliefs and/or away from atheism.

Science still does not know what factors lead people into atheism or religious belief. Most atheists claim that reason led them to atheism, but the data suggests there is self-delusion in that for most. I thought that reason reinforced my own pre-existing atheism** decades ago, but maybe that is more false than true. Among Americans, there is a small correlation between people who score high on tests of rationality and atheism, but among humans everywhere, the correlation drops from small to negligible. 

** Pre-existing atheism means I think I was an atheist from early childhood (before my rationality kicked in), but maybe that is a personal illusion.

Gervais makes some useful observations. He writes:

Maxine Najle, Nava Caluori, and I recently published a study in which we tested various predictors of atheism against each other in a nationally representative sample of US Americans. We were able to conduct a statistical analysis to specifically pinpoint the relationship between rationality and atheism among those who were most strongly exposed to religion while they were growing up. And among these people most culturally brought up to be religious, the correlation between rationality and religious disbelief dropped to zero.

 
That’s right: among those folks with the most exposure to religion, there’s no reliable correlation between rationality and atheism. This means that among those with strong religious upbringings, the ones who are most rational are no more likely to end up as atheists than are those who are most inclined to trust their intuitions. Far from rationality being a key factor that leads people away from strongly religious upbringings and towards atheism, it turns out that rationality isn’t even modestly correlated with atheism among this subset of people. There is no relation whatsoever.

Rational atheism is (more or less) a myth.

What does it mean that rational atheism is largely a myth? Should freethinkers stop promoting rationality? Hardly! The promotion of rationality may intrinsically bring its own rewards and should be pursued on its own merits without any pseudoscientific pretensions that it will convert believers to atheism. I also firmly believe that abandoning the rational atheist myth may pay secondary dividends if it leads New Atheist allied thinkers to stop trying to use science and rationality to undermine religious faith. These efforts are incredibly unlikely to succeed. Worse still, they have substantial potential to backfire. Dawkins and others have long tried to use science and rationality to pry people away from religion, but they’ve misdiagnosed the source of atheism in the first place. Their efforts in all likelihood do more to drive believers away from science than they do to attract anyone to atheism.

That stuff is good to know. It helps keep atheists from getting too arrogant for their own britches. Two take-home points come to mind:

• Social science research is incredibly complex and difficult because humans are incredibly complex and messy. Scientific results on humans need to be replicated, and data needs to be obtained in well-controlled protocols and analyzed by rigorous statistical analyses. Unconscious human bias must always be kept in mind as a potential confounding factor that gives rise to false positive and false negative data interpretations. Reasonable humility is a good thing to have when doing science, especially science on humans.

• Once again, larger sample sizes show that positive results often melt away into small or non-existent cause and effect outcomes. The positives are an illusion. That has recently been shown for brain scan data, rendering many or most of those research findings suspect. I interpret this to mean that the human brain operates diffusely with thoughts, emotional impulses and biases operating not just unconsciously, but also in large areas of the brain. That makes it tricky to pinpoint small regions of the brain that are believed to cause or at least correlate with behaviors under study.

Who is disrespecting and threatening whom?

A complaint that defenders of the rising neo-fascist Republican Party cite as justification to hate political opposition and targeted out-groups is that the feelings of conservatives have been disrespected and insulted. Yeah, in these days of vulgarity and disrespectful political discourse, that happens occasionally or maybe often. Manners and adult restraint are falling away. Sacred radical right ends morally justify all means. Hillary called some conservatives “deplorable.” What an outrage and emotional hurt. Lock her up!

Obama pointed to guns, bibles and personal frustrations in his comments: “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” That caused a mega backlash among conservatives. Their fee-fees were hurt. Lock him up!

That’s the kind of rhetorical horrors usually coming from the Dems. Nasty business indeed, even though there is some truth in some of it.

But waddabout the nasty business coming from the radical right? There is some viciousness and bitterness in some of it. For example:

Christian hate-preacher Greg Locke told the people in his Tennessee tent church today, "You cannot be a Christian and vote Democrat in this nation!"

He later threatened Democrats watching him, "You ain't seen [an] insurrection yet." pic.twitter.com/UDlqYVAEDF

— Hemant Mehta (@hemantmehta) May 16, 2022

One does not hear any complaints from Republican elites about publicly stated death threats like those coming from the gentle preacher, Mr. Locke. His flock cheers, not boos, his incitement to a bloody American civil war against Democrats. And, our wussified, useless IRS lets him keep his tax exempt status. What an effing insult and moral outrage. The only thing the IRS is good for is taxing the crap out of the middle income classes and letting the wealthy sail their mega yachts serenely through massive tax loopholes that rich bought and wrote to benefit themselves. 

To be honest and transparent, my fee-fees are hurt. And they are very angry and resentful. As an atheist, the gentle Mr. Locke insulted me and my morality. I’ve been bigly disrespected. If there was a hell, Locke would go there and burn eternally in screaming agony for his hate, bigotry and lies. The real God isn’t a rage and hate factory. God is very much unlike Locke and his evil ilk. That ilk is evil, not just immoral because there is real malice in the death threats. 

Or, am I over-reacting? After all, this is just one deranged crackpot preacher spreading divisive lies and slanders while fomenting his lunatic rage, hate and bigotry. It’s all legal. So are his tax exemptions. In the eyes of the law and justice, he is a good boy. 

Question: Which side is generally more disrespectful of political opposition, radical right Republicans, Christian nationalists and their propagandists, or everyone else?

Be careful, the blind watery tart with the sword 

sometimes pokes the wrong person