I decided on my better judgment not to allow myself to become mired as I envisioned ending up in the same place with those who are setting out with an original ingrained pre-conception of the Eden parable, but I must say, Rei, that I thoroughly enjoyed your Melek Taus analogy, although I imagine it escaped some.
For the liberal, the fascist and communist are joined in part for being too mechanical. For the communist fascism and liberalism both ignore the material too much; for the fascist, the communist is absurdly mechanical and the liberal sells his soul for a machine.
Sweet and to the point. I couldn't agree more with this assessment, Goon.
But each views things through a very different lens. Stalin, for a Stalinist, is a respected symbol of an ideology that differentiates itself, if even slightly, from Ebert or Trotsky. It is not rooted to, nor related, to the same kind of iconography a fascist may use. Any liberal that says otherwise may as well look at his dollar bill and describe all ideologies the same for the veneration of Washington.
At any rate, I appreciate this discussion in this thread—it's always nice to learn a little more about fascism. If nothing else, when I teach it, I like to underline a few things the students don't know.
I was actually referring to Starman's personal veneration of the person of Joseph Stalin despite the fact he declares himself a wholist (a term coined to represent a variant of neo-fascist thought, people who seek to borrow from fascism yet firmly break with both esoteric thought and notions of ethnic solidarity) rather than a Stalinist, but I appreciated and enjoyed your analysis nonetheless, Goon.
I agree that cults of personality exist in all these ideologies. And while Noam Chomsky has some interesting things to say, there is certainly a fair bit of blind worship of both his words and person coming from an ideology (anarcho-syndicalism) which favors a break from the glorification of individualism associated with right-anarchism and actualized mass socialization. George Washington is held up as a liberal icon in the United States just as Mao is in modern China, despite the fact that the actual ideologies and collection of thoughts from both those men have been largely shamelessly abandoned by those two states and are now used as rallying symbols more than anything else. In this sense, blind obsession with the cult of one person carried for generations even after a person physically perishes becomes destructive in a societal sense, because it extends the legitimacy associated with a specific personality (one who may have perished either decades or even centuries ago) to a present-day regime whose incarnation may in actuality be in opposition to both said personality's political vision and the blood and soil interests of modern working people. Ataturk is venerated in Turkey, but it doesn't seem to have successfully prevented the Turkish republic from veering toward a rigidly socially conservative Islamic democracy under Erdogan now that the Cold War is over. This is perhaps why many leading German National Socialist figures, including the Strasser brothers, had poignant grievances with the Führerprinzip despite the fact that Hitler was still alive and well. If the war had ended differently, he would have retired to Linz, Austria, a couple years after its conclusion and probably died shortly after owing to a series of medical conditions, not least among them a heart condition. What the German state was never supposed to be was an entity set up to worship the person of Hitler one hundred years after his death with no creation of new ideas; that would have bred the type of sterile degeneracy liberals today refer to as Orwellian. It's a cartoon version of fascism, but not actual fascism. This is also largely why, I imagine, Khruschev endeavored to distance the Soviet Union from the continuation of mass Stalin worship after Stalin had already passed away. Damning aspects of his political legacy after the euphoria following the Great Patriotic War was probably the only way to achieve that.
At any rate I'm glad you have been enjoying the discussion. Though I don't hold a professorship, this is also why I occasionally browse the sub-forums discussing communism and even anarchism, although I rarely offer comment. There is nothing wrong at any time ever with increasing one's understanding, particularly of a rival camp, eh Goon?
"I am never guided by a possible assessment of my work" - President Vladimir Putin
"Nations whose nationalism is destroyed are subject to ruin." - Muammar Qaddafi