2/ You can the left doesn’t like it be Barbara Ehrenreich’s introduction (later author of “Nickeled and Dimed”) complains that it takes people too far into the psych of fascism, rather than retaining an external feminist & socialist critique. Ehrenreich extremely intelligent.
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3/ Early on we learn about Ernst Bluher, a founder of the wandervogel movement, and enthusiast for male clubs. He thought male-to-male love was the only apporipriate form for these clubs. And these clubs were the seedbed for the Freikorps and later Nazism.
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4/ Bluher, like today’s MGTOWs, hoped for the elimination of women. We see, of course, a recapitulation of the idea of the male club in the “Mannerbund” of Jack Donovan. Why does the left have difficulty countering this? They shot themselves in the foot ideologically.
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5/ “Totalitarianism and homosexuality go together,” observed Adorno. Maxim Gorky, & general left propaganda understood this quite well. But not anymore. Possibly the influence of W. Reich who emphasised the family as the source of fascism played a role here.
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6/ The left has concentrated on breaking the bourgeois family as a prototypical unit of fascism. Accordingly, they have been friendly to LGBT+ etc. But if Theweleit is right it’s not the family, but the male club you need to watch out for.
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7/ What is the last remaining male space in Western liberal societies? Gay clubs and venues. These, being a protected minority, are still allowed to exclude people(freedom of association only for persecuted minorities under liberalism).
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8/ These spaces (think Muscle Beach in LA) are also devoted to the body beautiful (aesthetics & fascism) and have a racial undertow. I once watched an Asian drag queen’s act, and she was quite angry about the racial discrimination she found on Grindr.
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9/ In an ironic dialectical reversal, the left’s cultivation of LGBT rights has also cultivated the male club most likely to form a fertile environment for fascism. What’s missing is the Freikorps aspect. The mercenary band of men at war.
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10/ The Freikorps tended to see women as a “toilet”, partly the result of growing up in WWI among prostitution. They were also petit bourgeois men w/ aristo sensibilities. Working class women & men were free & easy w/ sex. This inocntinece appalls the Freikorps.
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11/ Theweleit quotes a bourgeois writer who lived among the miners (bergarbeiter, mountain worker, I like the name) for a year, a bit like Orwell in Wigan. Writer describes everyone sleeping with everyone else, sex the only entertainment for the poor.
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12/ The Freikorps associated Communism with absorption into a feminine whole, a sort of great co-mingingly and nothingness. They had a point here, I think. We need to maintain boundaries (contra communism), just not rigid ones (contra Freikorps).
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13/ Theweleit has an interesting diversion where he notes Lenin speaking of the “double oppression” of prostitutes, & their eventual organisation into a union with a “trade newspaper”. If you think the term “sex work” is a postmodern left invention, think again.
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14/ What Theweleit can’t quite admit, being a product of the sexual revolution, is that both the Nazis and the Communists thought women & sex lowered battle capability. And even the sainted Brecht’s private correspondence is peeper with complaints about his lover being a “whore”.
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15/ Frankly, I think we’re all aware that at some level sexual release lowers energy potential. The question of masturbation before football games, boxing matches, & dates always comes up. There’s some psychic energy being damned up & released here. Left & right know, really.
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16/ Theweleit comes to the awful realisation that left and right are united...in their antipathy towards women, deeper than any intellectual stance. Interesting aside, Engels & IWA demanded “stable proletarian marriage” as weapon against prostitution. How the left changed!
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17/ The fascist places the sex struggle above the class struggle. This is why the “red pill” on women & MGTOW feed into fascist-type thought. The “incel” worships the machine, not the war machine of WWI but the video game machine of postmodernity.
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