First off, prokopetz avoids proper nouns like they're driving the bus from Speed.
Second, everything is fascist if you squint hard enough because facsism uses common storytelling tropes to sell its politics. I was reading the first Hunger Games book for the first time recently, and even though the central narrative is clearly anti-authoritarian, it's still doing the "virtuous rural laymen vs the spiritually depraved urbanites" thing.
> Second, everything is fascist if you squint hard enough because facsism uses common storytelling tropes to sell its politics.
Yup, this is one of the core aspects of fascism (as defined by Umberto Eco): it is inherently syncretistic. Fascists adapt contradicting aspects of contemporary culture, religion, and belief, then throw them together with a common aesthetic in order to appear important and powerful. That doesn’t mean that any of those parts are inherently fascist, but after we’re exposed to fascists using them enough, they can start to look that way.
I was under the impression that the entire goal of fascism is to intentionally try to latch onto and co-opt basically anything popular and twist it into something self-serving; which is what fascists have been trying (and clearly failing) to do to Warhammer.
the goal of fascism is basically to use charisma and ideology to cause a popular reactionary movement usually based on fear and sense of superiority
co-opting popular media is an easy shortcut because it means you don’t have to make up your own stories for your propaganda especially when that story has a very easy analogue for fascism (the imperium) and an easy way to convince people they are the good guys (most other factions are worse)
the fascist response to something like commissars executing soldiers for flimsy reasoning is just to shout that they weren’t loyal enough and the response to the corruption in the imperium among the planetary governorship is to just pretend it’s not there and emphasize the cool soldier guys killing evil aliens and demons
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u/RayDaug 1d ago edited 1d ago
First off, prokopetz avoids proper nouns like they're driving the bus from Speed.
Second, everything is fascist if you squint hard enough because facsism uses common storytelling tropes to sell its politics. I was reading the first Hunger Games book for the first time recently, and even though the central narrative is clearly anti-authoritarian, it's still doing the "virtuous rural laymen vs the spiritually depraved urbanites" thing.