Of all the definitions of fascism, Paxton’s would fit Russia the least of them.
You haven’t read it. It’s really obvious. Fuck off.
Righto.
Let me tell you something about the book you haven’t read but are citing like the wanker you are.
Half of it is a description of why even Franco’s Spain shouldn’t be considered fascist.
But you, the wanker, haven’t read it and you don’t know that. You don’t know the book you’re citing is explicitly about drawing boundaries and lines to delineate fascism from other forms of bourgeois dictatorships, militarism, and other forms of authoritarianism.
You fucking wanker. You haven’t read the book. Haha and you’re being all “wrongo” smug about it.
The problem with citing works you blatantly have not read is that many people here have.
And those of us who actually have read a book think you’re an idiot.
Let me remind you that Robert Paxton has now reached a point where he argues that trumpism constitutes a form of fascism in the US and that under Trump the US was fascist in a way it wasn’t before and after. So the idea that his definition and understanding of fascism is an inherently very narrow one is just pointless.
Robert Paxton argued that fascism comes from a specific confluence of events in which the traditional elite relies on a radical right wing to maintain their power due to having lost legitimacy or needing power to suppress the left, forming a coalition between traditional stake holders in the state (Like capitalists, clergy, nobility, what have you. In the Russian case this would be the capitalist class who bought out the state during the shock doctrine) and right wing nationalism which tends towards a mass movement character. This movement co-opts the popularity of the movement into a suppression of “actual democracy” (Really liberal bourgeois dictatorship of course) and maintains power by balancing the powers of the coalitions. This movement then either decays into generic “authoritarian” rule under the traditional elite, or is increasingly radicalized towards genocidal redemptive violence.
Russia of course decayed into oligarchic fascist rule by the traditional power brokers.
