Nicholas

“fascist politicians themselves are invariably vastly more corrupt than those they seek to supplant or defeat. As the historian Richard Grunberger writes in his book The 12-Year Reich, It was a paradoxical situation. Having dinned it into the collective consciousness that democracy and corruption were synonymous, the Nazis set about constructing a governmental system beside which the scandals of the Weimar regime seemed small blemishes on the body politic. Corruption was in fact the central organizing principle of the Third Reich—and yet a great many citizens not only overlooked this fact, but actually regarded the men of the new regime as austerely dedicated to moral probity.2”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“The plan (Dalet) included the following clear reference to the methods to be employed in the process of cleansing the (Palestinian) population:

'Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously... Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
― Ilan Pappé, Ten Myths About Israel

“Fascist politics replaces reasoned debate with FEAR and ANGER. When it is successful, its audience is left with a destabilized sense of loss, and a well of mistrust and anger against those who it has been told are responsible for this loss. Fascist politics exchanges reality for the pronouncement of a single individual, or perhaps a political party. Regular and repeated obvious lying is part of the process by which fascist politics destroys the information space.”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

“… in the fascist imagination, the past invariably involves traditional, patriarchal gender roles… The function of the mythic past, in fascist politics, is to harness the emotion of nostalgia to the central tenets of fascist ideology – authoritarianism, hierarchy, purity and struggle. … While fascist politics fetishizes the past, it is never the actual past that is fetishized. These invented histories also diminish or entirely extinguish the nation’s past sins. It is typical for fascist politicians to represent a country’s narrative concocted by liberal elites and cosmopolitans to victimize the people of the true “nation”. [...] When it does not simply invent a past to weaponize the emotional of nostalgia, fascist politics cherry-picks the past, avoiding anything that would diminish unreflective adulation of the nation’s glory”
― Jason F. Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them