Monday, May 10, 2004

The Beast Reawakens:
Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists
The Amazon reviews for this book are pretty funny. So far it's a pretty good book though.

It is becoming frighteningly evident that unspeakable evil can take the stage again," Swedish prime minister Goran Persson declared at a recent conference on resurgent racism and neofascism in Europe. The ghastly miscarriage of free market restructuring in much of Eastern Europe and the Third World, the abdicaton of the socialist Left as a vehicle for discontent in Western Europe, and the homogenizing juggernaut of soul-les transnational capitalism across the globe -- all are elements of a potent witches brew that feeds the poisoned ground where flowers of evil bloom and propels mainstream governance further and further into the politics of resentment.

Shortly before he died in 1987, Primo Levi, a Holocaust survivor who had been imprisoned at Auschwitz, warned of the advent of "a new fascism ... walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names." This new fascism is a decidedly contemporary phenomenon that looks different in many ways from its antecedents. When Hitler came to power he took the world by surprise. Those who reamin fixated on images of the fascist past, and neglect the growing dangers of the present, may be taken by surprise again.