How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them

Author: Jason Stanley
Reviewed by: Romi Mahajan
Available at: Penguin Random House India Private LImited, 7th Floor, C, Infinity Tower, DLF Cyber City, DLF Phase 1, Sector 24, Gurugram, Haryana 122002. www.amazon.in/
Review:

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (Jul 9, 2019, Sabrang India)

…Jason Stanley reminds us that we are in fact slouching towards fascism as we normalize the invidious rhetoric of racism, misogyny, otherization, false-victimhood, and Orwellian turns of phrase. Carrying the enormous emotional baggage associated with his own parents’ struggles as refugees and victims of Nazism coupled with the logic of a learned philosopher, Stanley has produced a clear, readable, and important treatise on fascism and how it grows and ultimately engorges itself on normalized lies.

In fact, Stanley organizes the book in 10 chapters, each with illustrates a key pillar of fascist strategy. … Fascism movements are alike in that they invoke these 10 categories to create a state of mind in which people are primed and softened in a way that makes their acceptance of fascism appear natural.

Stanley intelligently offers examples: the US under Trump, India under Modi, Hungary under Orban, and others to show that the methodologies employed cross boundaries; he invokes Hitler and Mussolini as well and shows that the language employed by today’s fascists is structurally similar to that of these famous and genocidal fascists of the mid-twentieth century.…

https://www.sabrangindia.in/article/how-fascism-works-politics-us-and-them