Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Cre­ative Com­mons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the Nation­al Archives in Hol­land

One of the key ques­tions fac­ing both jour­nal­ists and loy­al oppo­si­tions these days is how do we stay hon­est as euphemisms and triv­i­al­iza­tions take over the dis­course? Can we use words like “fas­cism,” for exam­ple, with fideli­ty to the mean­ing of that word in world his­to­ry? The term, after all, devolved decades after World War II into the trite expres­sion fas­cist pig, writes Umber­to Eco in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fas­cism,” “used by Amer­i­can rad­i­cals thir­ty years lat­er to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smok­ing habits.” In the for­ties, on the oth­er hand, the fight against fas­cism was a “moral duty for every good Amer­i­can.” (And every good Eng­lish­man and French par­ti­san, he might have added.)

Eco grew up under Mussolini’s fas­cist regime, which “was cer­tain­ly a dic­ta­tor­ship, but it was not total­ly total­i­tar­i­an, not because of its mild­ness but rather because of the philo­soph­i­cal weak­ness of its ide­ol­o­gy. Con­trary to com­mon opin­ion, fas­cism in Italy had no spe­cial phi­los­o­phy.” It did, how­ev­er, have style, “a way of dressing—far more influ­en­tial, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benet­ton, or Ver­sace would ever be.” The dark humor of the com­ment indi­cates a crit­i­cal con­sen­sus about fas­cism. As a form of extreme nation­al­ism, it ulti­mate­ly takes on the con­tours of what­ev­er nation­al cul­ture pro­duces it.

It may seem to tax one word to make it account for so many dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al man­i­fes­ta­tions of author­i­tar­i­an­ism, across Europe and even South Amer­i­ca. Italy may have been “the first right-wing dic­ta­tor­ship that took over a Euro­pean coun­try,” and got to name the polit­i­cal sys­tem. But Eco is per­plexed “why the word fas­cism became a synec­doche, that is, a word that could be used for dif­fer­ent total­i­tar­i­an move­ments.” For one thing, he writes, fas­cism was “a fuzzy total­i­tar­i­an­ism, a col­lage of dif­fer­ent philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal ideas, a bee­hive of con­tra­dic­tions.”

While Eco is firm in claim­ing “There was only one Nazism,” he says, “the fas­cist game can be played in many forms, and the name of the game does not change.” Eco reduces the qual­i­ties of what he calls “Ur-Fas­cism, or Eter­nal Fas­cism” down to 14 “typ­i­cal” fea­tures. “These fea­tures,” writes the nov­el­ist and semi­oti­cian, “can­not be orga­nized into a sys­tem; many of them con­tra­dict each oth­er, and are also typ­i­cal of oth­er kinds of despo­tism or fanati­cism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fas­cism to coag­u­late around it.”

  1. The cult of tra­di­tion. “One has only to look at the syl­labus of every fas­cist move­ment to find the major tra­di­tion­al­ist thinkers. The Nazi gno­sis was nour­ished by tra­di­tion­al­ist, syn­cretis­tic, occult ele­ments.”
  2. The rejec­tion of mod­ernism. “The Enlight­en­ment, the Age of Rea­son, is seen as the begin­ning of mod­ern deprav­i­ty. In this sense Ur-Fas­cism can be defined as irra­tional­ism.”
  3. The cult of action for action’s sake. “Action being beau­ti­ful in itself, it must be tak­en before, or with­out, any pre­vi­ous reflec­tion. Think­ing is a form of emas­cu­la­tion.”
  4. Dis­agree­ment is trea­son. “The crit­i­cal spir­it makes dis­tinc­tions, and to dis­tin­guish is a sign of mod­ernism. In mod­ern cul­ture the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty prais­es dis­agree­ment as a way to improve knowl­edge.”
  5. Fear of dif­fer­ence. “The first appeal of a fas­cist or pre­ma­ture­ly fas­cist move­ment is an appeal against the intrud­ers. Thus Ur-Fas­cism is racist by def­i­n­i­tion.”
  6. Appeal to social frus­tra­tion. “One of the most typ­i­cal fea­tures of the his­tor­i­cal fas­cism was the appeal to a frus­trat­ed mid­dle class, a class suf­fer­ing from an eco­nom­ic cri­sis or feel­ings of polit­i­cal humil­i­a­tion, and fright­ened by the pres­sure of low­er social groups.”
  7. The obses­sion with a plot. “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fas­cist psy­chol­o­gy there is the obses­sion with a plot, pos­si­bly an inter­na­tion­al one. The fol­low­ers must feel besieged.”
  8. The ene­my is both strong and weak. “By a con­tin­u­ous shift­ing of rhetor­i­cal focus, the ene­mies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
  9. Paci­fism is traf­fick­ing with the ene­my. “For Ur-Fas­cism there is no strug­gle for life but, rather, life is lived for strug­gle.”
  10. Con­tempt for the weak. “Elit­ism is a typ­i­cal aspect of any reac­tionary ide­ol­o­gy.”
  11. Every­body is edu­cat­ed to become a hero. “In Ur-Fas­cist ide­ol­o­gy, hero­ism is the norm. This cult of hero­ism is strict­ly linked with the cult of death.”
  12. Machis­mo and weapon­ry. “Machis­mo implies both dis­dain for women and intol­er­ance and con­dem­na­tion of non­stan­dard sex­u­al habits, from chasti­ty to homo­sex­u­al­i­ty.”
  13. Selec­tive pop­ulism. “There is in our future a TV or Inter­net pop­ulism, in which the emo­tion­al response of a select­ed group of cit­i­zens can be pre­sent­ed and accept­ed as the Voice of the Peo­ple.”
  14. Ur-Fas­cism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fas­cist school­books made use of an impov­er­ished vocab­u­lary, and an ele­men­tary syn­tax, in order to lim­it the instru­ments for com­plex and crit­i­cal rea­son­ing.”

One detail of Eco’s essay that often goes unre­marked is his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the Ital­ian oppo­si­tion move­men­t’s unlike­ly coali­tions. The Resis­tance includ­ed Com­mu­nists who “exploit­ed the Resis­tance as if it were their per­son­al prop­er­ty,” and lead­ers like Eco’s child­hood hero Franchi, “so strong­ly anti-Com­mu­nist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups.” This itself may be a spe­cif­ic fea­ture of an Ital­ian resis­tance, one not observ­able across the num­ber of nations that have resist­ed total­i­tar­i­an gov­ern­ments. As for the seem­ing total lack of com­mon inter­est between these par­ties, Eco sim­ply says, “Who cares?… Lib­er­a­tion was a com­mon deed for peo­ple of dif­fer­ent col­ors.”

Read Eco’s essay at The New York Review of Books. There he elab­o­rates on each ele­ment of fas­cism at greater length. And sup­port NYRB by becom­ing a sub­scriber.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2014.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism: Rick Steves’ Doc­u­men­tary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envis­ages a Hor­ri­ble Brain­less Empire” (1940)

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

Wal­ter Ben­jamin Explains How Fas­cism Uses Mass Media to Turn Pol­i­tics Into Spec­ta­cle (1935)

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

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How the Influential Time-Travel Movie La Jetée Was Made (Almost) Entirely out of Still Photographs

In a future where human­i­ty has been dri­ven under­ground by an apoc­a­lyp­tic event, a pris­on­er is haunt­ed by the child­hood mem­o­ry of see­ing a man gunned down at an air­port. A group of sci­en­tists make him their time-trav­el­ing guinea pig, hop­ing that he’ll be able to find a way to restore the soci­ety they once knew. In one of his forced jour­neys into the past, he falls for a strange­ly famil­iar-look­ing woman who con­vinces him not to return to his own time peri­od. Alas, things go wrong, cul­mi­nat­ing in the final real­iza­tion that the death he had wit­nessed so long ago was, in fact, his own.

You may rec­og­nize this as the plot of Ter­ry Gilliam’s 12 Mon­keys, from 1995, and also as the plot of Chris Mark­er’s La Jeteé, from 1962. 12 Mon­keys, a full-scale Hol­ly­wood pic­ture star­ring the likes of Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, attained crit­i­cal acclaim and box-office suc­cess. But La Jeteé, which inspired it, stands as the more impres­sive cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ment, despite — or per­haps owing to — its being a black-and-white short com­posed almost entire­ly of still pho­tographs. That unusu­al (and unusu­al­ly effec­tive) form is the sub­ject of the new video above from Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer.

“When you think about it, Ter­ry Gilliam is using still images too,” says Puschak. “It’s just that he’s using 24 still images every sec­ond, while Mark­er uses, on aver­age, one image every four sec­onds.” In La Jeteé, we’re “forced to sit with every frame,” and thus to notice that “they’re dead: all move­ment is gone, and we’re left with these life­less frag­ments of time, an appro­pri­ate thing in a world oblit­er­at­ed by war.” Mark­er “shows us that the move­ment of mov­ing pic­tures, even though it resem­bles life, is illu­so­ry; it’s real­ly just anoth­er form of mem­o­ry, and mem­o­ry is always frag­men­tary and life­less, re-ani­mat­ed only by the mean­ing we impose on it from the present.”

Yet this pho­to-roman, as Mark­er calls it, does con­tain one mov­ing image, which depicts the lady with whom the pro­tag­o­nist gets involved wak­ing up on one of their morn­ings togeth­er. Puschak describes it as “in the run­ning for the most poignant bit of motion in all of cin­e­ma” and inter­prets it as say­ing that “love, human con­nec­tion some­how tran­scends, some­how escapes the trap of time. It may be cliché to say that, but there is noth­ing cliché about the way Mark­er shows it.”  Mark­er’s inven­tive nou­velle vague col­league Jean-Luc Godard once called cin­e­ma “truth 24 times per sec­ond” — a def­i­n­i­tion bro­ken wide open, char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly, by Mark­er him­self.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet William Gib­son

Under­stand­ing Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci-Fi Film La Jetée: A Study Guide Dis­trib­uted to High Schools in the 1970s

Petite Planète: Dis­cov­er Chris Marker’s Influ­en­tial 1950s Trav­el Pho­to­book Series

David Bowie’s Music Video “Jump They Say” Pays Trib­ute to Marker’s La Jetée, Godard’s Alphav­ille, Welles’ The Tri­al & Kubrick’s 2001

A Con­cise Break­down of How Time Trav­el Works in Pop­u­lar Movies, Books & TV Shows

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

 

Launch Your Project Management Career with Google’s AI-Enhanced Professional Certificate

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Back in 2021, Google released a series of cer­tifi­cate pro­grams, includ­ing one focused on Project Man­age­ment. Designed to give stu­dents “an immer­sive under­stand­ing of the prac­tices and skills need­ed to suc­ceed in an entry-lev­el project man­age­ment role,” the cer­tifi­cate pro­gram fea­tures six cours­es over­all, includ­ing:

  • Foun­da­tions of Project Man­age­ment
  • Project Ini­ti­a­tion: Start­ing a Suc­cess­ful Project
  • Project Plan­ning: Putting It All Togeth­er
  • Project Exe­cu­tion: Run­ning the Project
  • Agile Project Man­age­ment
  • Cap­stone: Apply­ing Project Man­age­ment in the Real World

More than 1.7 mil­lion peo­ple have since enrolled in the course sequence. And Google has now updat­ed the cours­es with 6 new videos on how to use AI in project man­age­ment. The videos will teach stu­dents how to boost project man­age­ment skills with AI, iden­ti­fy poten­tial project risks with gen AI, use AI to improve project com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and more.

The Project Man­age­ment pro­gram takes about six months to com­plete (assum­ing you put in 10 hours per week), and it should cost about $300 in total. Fol­low­ing a 7‑day free tri­al, stu­dents will be charged $49 per month until they com­plete the pro­gram.

All Google career cours­es are host­ed on the Cours­era plat­form. Final­ly, it’s worth men­tion­ing that any­one who enrolls in this cer­tifi­cate before Novem­ber 30, 2024 will get access to Google AI Essen­tials at no cost.

Note: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. If read­ers enroll in cer­tain Cours­era cours­es and pro­grams, it helps sup­port Open Cul­ture.

Hear Edgar Allan Poe’s Horror Stories Read by Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, James Earl Jones, William S. Burroughs & Others

Here on Hal­loween of 2024, we have a greater vari­ety of scary sto­ries — and arguably, a much scari­er vari­ety of scari­er sto­ries — to choose from than ever before. But what­ev­er their rel­e­vance to the spe­cif­ic lives we may live and the spe­cif­ic dreads we may feel today, how many such cur­rent works stand a chance of being read a cou­ple of cen­turies from now, with not just his­tor­i­cal inter­est but gen­uine chills? With each Hal­loween that brings us near­er to the 200th anniver­sary of Edgar Allan Poe’s lit­er­ary debut, the works of that Amer­i­can pio­neer of the grotesque and the macabre grow only more deeply trou­bling.

“The word that recurs most cru­cial­ly in Poe’s fictions is hor­ror,” writes Mar­i­lynne Robin­son in the New York Review of Books. “His sto­ries are often shaped to bring the nar­ra­tor and the read­er to a place where the use of the word is justified, where the word and the expe­ri­ence it evokes are explored or by impli­ca­tion defined. So crypts and entomb­ments and phys­i­cal mor­bid­i­ty figure in Poe’s writ­ing with a promi­nence that is not char­ac­ter­is­tic of major lit­er­a­ture in gen­er­al. Clear­ly Poe was fas­ci­nat­ed by pop­u­lar obses­sions, with crime, with pre­ma­ture bur­ial” — obses­sions that haven’t lost much pop­u­lar­i­ty since his day.

Exam­ined more close­ly, “the hor­ror that fas­ci­nat­ed him and gave such dread­ful uni­ty to his tales is often the inescapable con­fronta­tion of the self by a per­fect jus­tice, the expo­sure of a guilty act in a form that makes its rev­e­la­tion a recoil of the mind against itself.” This is true, Robin­son writes, of such still-wide­ly-read works as “The Fall of the House of Ush­er,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

You can hear all of those sto­ries and more in the Youtube playlist above, nar­rat­ed by a vari­ety of per­form­ers imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able by voice alone: Christo­pher Lee, Vin­cent Price, William S. Bur­roughs, Orson Welles, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rath­bone, and the late James Earl Jones.

Whether read aloud or on the page, Robin­son notes, Poe “has always been reviled or cel­e­brat­ed for the absence of moral con­tent in his work, despite the fact that these tales are all straight­for­ward moral para­bles. For a writer so intrigued by the oper­a­tions of the mind as Poe was, an inter­est in con­science leads to an inter­est in con­ceal­ment and self-decep­tion, things that are secre­tive and high­ly indi­vid­ual and at the same time so uni­ver­sal that they shape civ­i­liza­tions.” While there are civ­i­liza­tions, there will be tell-tale hearts; and while there are tell-tale hearts, there will be an audi­ence respon­sive to Edgar Allan Poe’s brand of hor­ror, on Hal­loween or any oth­er night.


Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Why Should You Read Edgar Allan Poe? An Ani­mat­ed Video Explains

7 Tips from Edgar Allan Poe on How to Write Vivid Sto­ries and Poems

Hear the 14-Hour “Essen­tial Edgar Allan Poe” Playlist: “The Raven,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” & Much More

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Read by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Faith­ful & More

Watch a Strange Ani­ma­tion of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” Vot­ed the 24th Best Car­toon of All Time (1953)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Watch The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the Influential German Expressionist Horror Film (1920)

Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

In ear­ly 1920, posters began appear­ing all over Berlin with a hyp­not­ic spi­ral and the mys­te­ri­ous com­mand Du musst Cali­gari wer­den — “You must become Cali­gari.”

The posters were part of an inno­v­a­tive adver­tis­ing cam­paign for an upcom­ing movie by Robert Wiene called The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari. When the film appeared, audi­ences were mes­mer­ized by Wiene’s sur­re­al tale of mys­tery and hor­ror. Almost a cen­tu­ry lat­er, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari is still cel­e­brat­ed for its rare blend­ing of low­brow enter­tain­ment and avant-garde art. It is fre­quent­ly cit­ed as the quin­tes­sen­tial cin­e­mat­ic exam­ple of Ger­man Expres­sion­ism, with its dis­tort­ed per­spec­tives and per­va­sive sense of dread.

Like many night­mares, Cali­gari had its ori­gin in real-life events. Screen­writer Hans Janowitz had been walk­ing late one night through a fair in Ham­burg’s red-light dis­trict when he heard laugh­ter. Turn­ing, he saw an attrac­tive young woman dis­ap­pear behind some bush­es in a park. A short time lat­er a man emerged from the shad­ows and walked away. The next morn­ing, Janowitz read in the news­pa­pers that a young woman match­ing the descrip­tion of the one he had seen had been mur­dered overnight at that very loca­tion.

Haunt­ed by the inci­dent, Janowitz told the sto­ry to fel­low writer Carl May­er. Togeth­er they set to work writ­ing a screen­play based on the inci­dent, draw­ing also on May­er’s unset­tling expe­ri­ence with a psy­chi­a­trist. They imag­ined a strange, bespec­ta­cled man named Dr. Cali­gari who arrives in a small town to demon­strate his pow­ers of hyp­no­tism over Cesare, a sleep­walk­er, at the local fair. A series of mys­te­ri­ous mur­ders fol­lows.

Janowitz and May­er sold their screen­play to Erich Pom­mer at Decla-Film. Pom­mer at first want­ed Fritz Lang to direct the film, but Lang was busy with anoth­er project, so he gave the job to Wiene. One of the most crit­i­cal deci­sions Pom­mer made was to hire Expres­sion­ist art direc­tor Her­mann Warm to design the pro­duc­tion, along with painters Wal­ter Reimann and Wal­ter Röhrig. As R. Bar­ton Palmer writes at Film Ref­er­ence:

The prin­ci­ple of War­m’s con­cep­tion is the Expres­sion­ist notion of Bal­lung, that crys­tal­liza­tion of the inner real­i­ty of objects, con­cepts, and peo­ple through an artis­tic expres­sion that cuts through and dis­cards a false exte­ri­or. War­m’s sets for the film cor­re­spond­ing­ly evoke the twists and turn­ings of a small Ger­man medieval town, but in a patent­ly unre­al­is­tic fash­ion (e.g., streets cut across one anoth­er at impos­si­ble angles and paths are impos­si­bly steep). The roofs that Cesare the som­nam­bu­list cross­es dur­ing his night­time depre­da­tions rise at unlike­ly angles to one anoth­er, yet still afford him pas­sage so that he can reach his vic­tims. In oth­er words, the world of Cali­gari remains “real” in the sense that it is not offered as an alter­na­tive one to what actu­al­ly exists. On the con­trary, War­m’s design is meant to evoke the essence of Ger­man social life, offer­ing a pen­e­trat­ing cri­tique of semi­of­fi­cial author­i­ty (the psy­chi­a­trist) that is soft­ened by the addi­tion of a fram­ing sto­ry. As a prac­tic­ing artist with a deep com­mit­ment to the polit­i­cal and intel­lec­tu­al pro­gram of Expres­sion­ism, Warm was the ide­al tech­ni­cian to do the art design for the film, which bears out War­m’s famous man­i­festo that “the cin­e­ma image must become an engrav­ing.”

The screen­writ­ers were dis­ap­point­ed with Wiene’s deci­sion to frame the sto­ry as a flash­back told by a patient in a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. Janowitz, in par­tic­u­lar, had meant Cali­gari to be an indict­ment of the Ger­man gov­ern­ment that had recent­ly sent mil­lions of men to kill or be killed in the trench­es of World War I. “While the orig­i­nal sto­ry exposed author­i­ty,” writes Siegfried Kra­cauer in From Cali­gari to Hitler: A Psy­cho­log­i­cal His­to­ry of the Ger­man Film, “Wiene’s Cali­gari glo­ri­fied author­i­ty and con­vict­ed its antag­o­nist of mad­ness. A rev­o­lu­tion­ary film was thus turned into a con­formist one — fol­low­ing the much-used pat­tern of declar­ing some nor­mal but trou­ble­some indi­vid­ual insane and send­ing him to a lunatic asy­lum.”

In a pure­ly cin­e­mat­ic sense, of course, The Cab­i­net of Dr. Cali­gari remains a rev­o­lu­tion­ary work. You can watch the com­plete film above. Or find it list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the First Hor­ror Film, George Méliès’ The Haunt­ed Cas­tle (1896)

Watch the Quin­tes­sen­tial Vam­pire Film Nos­fer­atu

Watch the Cult Clas­sic Hor­ror Film Car­ni­val of Souls (1962)

Mar­tin Scors­ese Names the 11 Scari­est Hor­ror Films: Kubrick, Hitch­cock, Tourneur & More

Mythology Expert Reviews Depictions of Greek & Roman Myths in Popular Movies and TV Shows

It’s safe to say that we no longer believe in the gods of the ancient world — or rather, that most of us no longer believe in their lit­er­al exis­tence, but some of us have faith in their box-office poten­tial. This two-part video series from Van­i­ty Fair exam­ines a vari­ety of movies and tele­vi­sion shows that have drawn on Greek and Roman myth since the mid-twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry, includ­ing Jason and the Arg­onautsClash of the Titans, Troy, and Dis­ney’s Her­cules. Offer­ing com­men­tary on their faith­ful­ness to the source mate­r­i­al is Peter Mei­neck, Pro­fes­sor of Clas­sics in the Mod­ern World at New York Uni­ver­si­ty.

Not that he insists on hold­ing these enter­tain­ments to rig­or­ous stan­dards of accu­ra­cy. “I would not use the term ‘accu­ra­cy’ at any point in Xena: War­rior Princess, because it’s fan­tas­tic,” he says at one point. But then, when it comes to the sto­ries told by ancient Greeks and Romans, we’re deal­ing with rather fan­ta­sy-rich mate­r­i­al from the start.

Height­ened, aug­ment­ed, refined, and syn­cretized over many gen­er­a­tions, they’ve come down to us in forms that reflect more or less eter­nal­ly human notions about the forces that gov­ern real­i­ty and its vicis­si­tudes — ready made, in some cas­es, to incor­po­rate into the lat­est twen­ty-first-cen­tu­ry super­hero spec­ta­cle.

Pos­sessed of dis­tinc­tive phys­i­cal traits, tem­pera­ments, super­hu­man pow­ers, and even grudges, the many gods of the poly­the­is­tic antiq­ui­ty were, in their way, the com­ic-book heroes of their time. And just as we have dif­fer­ent “uni­vers­es” of char­ac­ters to choose from, dif­fer­ent eras and cul­tures had their own line­ups of deities, none quite the same as any oth­er. “At the pin­na­cle of this teem­ing numi­nous uni­verse were the Olympians, the twelve gods head­ed by Zeus and Hera,” says ancient-his­to­ry Youtu­ber Gar­rett Ryan in the Told in Stone video above. “The Greeks influ­enced Roman reli­gion vir­tu­al­ly from the begin­ning. By the time Rome emerged into the full light of his­to­ry, the Roman gods had been assim­i­lat­ed to their Greek coun­ter­parts.”

Hence our rec­og­niz­ing Greek Olympians like Posei­don, Artemis, Athena, and Diony­sus, but also their Roman equiv­a­lents Nep­tune, Diana, Min­er­va, and Bac­chus. “There seems to have been lit­tle doubt in Romans’ minds that their chief gods were the same as those of the Greeks,” Ryan says. “The Greeks, for their part, gen­er­al­ly accept­ed that the Romans wor­shipped their gods under dif­fer­ent names — while also being “eager col­lec­tors of exot­ic deities,” many of which could be found with­in their own vast empire. The result was a bewil­der­ing pro­fu­sion of gods for every occa­sion, Greek-inspired or oth­er­wise: an omen of the more-is-bet­ter ethos that the Hol­ly­wood block­buster would embrace a cou­ple of mil­len­nia lat­er.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Ara­bic Trans­la­tors Helped Pre­serve Greek Phi­los­o­phy … and the Clas­si­cal Tra­di­tion

How Rome Began: The His­to­ry As Told by Ancient His­to­ri­ans

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Athens: Fly Over Clas­si­cal Greek Civ­i­liza­tion in All Its Glo­ry

The Beau­ty & Inge­nu­ity of the Pan­theon, Ancient Rome’s Best-Pre­served Mon­u­ment: An Intro­duc­tion

Behold Ancient Egypt­ian, Greek & Roman Sculp­tures in Their Orig­i­nal Col­or

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Painful Lessons of the 20th Century

From Rick Steves comes a thought-pro­vok­ing doc­u­men­tary that revis­its the rise of fas­cism in Europe, remind­ing us of how charis­mat­ic fig­ures like Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni and Adolf Hitler came to pow­er by promis­ing to cre­ate a bet­ter future for their frus­trat­ed, eco­nom­i­cal­ly depressed countries–a future that recap­tured the glo­ry of some mythol­o­gized past. Once in pow­er, these fas­cist lead­ers replaced democ­ra­cy with a cult of per­son­al­i­ty, steadi­ly erod­ed demo­c­ra­t­ic norms and truth, ratch­eted up vio­lence, and found scape­goats to victimize–something facil­i­tat­ed by the spread of con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and pro­pa­gan­da through mod­ern media. They would lead their nations into war, and ulti­mate­ly ruin, but not before cre­at­ing a play­book for oth­er charis­mat­ic auto­crats who entice vot­ers with sim­plis­tic solu­tions to com­plex prob­lems.

Orig­i­nal­ly aired on tele­vi­sion, Steves has released the doc­u­men­tary on YouTube, hop­ing that 21st-cen­tu­ry cit­i­zens can “learn from the hard lessons of 20th-cen­tu­ry Europe.” The text accom­pa­ny­ing his doc­u­men­tary reads as fol­lows:

In this one-hour spe­cial, Rick trav­els back a cen­tu­ry to learn how fas­cism rose and then fell in Europe — tak­ing mil­lions of peo­ple with it. We’ll trace fas­cis­m’s his­to­ry from its roots in the tur­bu­lent after­math of World War I, when mass­es of angry peo­ple rose up, to the rise of charis­mat­ic lead­ers who manip­u­lat­ed that anger, the total­i­tar­i­an soci­eties they built, and the bru­tal mea­sures they used to enforce their ide­ol­o­gy. We’ll see the hor­rif­ic con­se­quences: geno­cide and total war. And we’ll be inspired by the sto­ries of those who resist­ed. Along the way, we’ll vis­it poignant sights through­out Europe relat­ing to fas­cism, and talk with Euro­peans whose fam­i­lies lived through those times. Our goal: to learn from the hard lessons of 20th-cen­tu­ry Europe, and to rec­og­nize that ide­ol­o­gy in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

The Sto­ry of Fas­cism (which will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries) is rec­om­mend­ed for stu­dents and adults alike. With World War II fad­ing from liv­ing mem­o­ry, we could use a good reminder, says Steves, of how “nation­al­ism can be chan­neled into evil, and how our free­doms and democ­ra­cies are not indestructible…in fact, they are frag­ile.”

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rick Steves’ Europe: Binge Watch 9 Sea­sons of America’s Favorite Trav­el­er Free Online

Are You a Fas­cist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Author­i­tar­i­an Per­son­al­i­ty Test Cre­at­ed to Com­bat Fas­cism (1947)

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es

Wal­ter Ben­jamin Explains How Fas­cism Uses Mass Media to Turn Pol­i­tics Into Spec­ta­cle (1935)

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

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Marcus Aurelius’ 9 Rules for Living a Stoic Life

This week, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams pro­filed Ryan Hol­i­day, a one-time pub­lic-rela­tions whiz-kid who’s rein­vent­ed him­self over the past decade as a speak­er for the dead: specif­i­cal­ly Epicte­tus, Seneca, and above all Mar­cus Aure­lius, the fig­ure­heads of the ancient school of phi­los­o­phy we now know as Sto­icism. It “cen­ters on four virtues: courage, tem­per­ance, jus­tice and wis­dom,” Williams writes. “Mar­shal­ing these will give you com­plete self-con­trol, enabling you to react with equa­nim­i­ty to all out­side stim­uli, and not whine about stuff.” Wealth “should mean noth­ing to the sto­ic, which makes it iron­ic that some of the rich­est peo­ple on Earth claim to live by sto­icism.”

That last line comes as an obvi­ous jab at Hol­i­day’s pop­u­lar­i­ty among not just sports stars and celebri­ties but big mon­ey-mak­ers in Sil­i­con Val­ley as well. But then, Sto­icism was meant to work for any­one, no mat­ter their socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus: Epicte­tus was a slave, after all, while Mar­cus Aure­lius ruled over the Roman Empire. And it is Mar­cus’ col­lect­ed writ­ings the Med­i­ta­tions (avail­able free as an eBook or audio­book) that inspired Hol­i­day’s video above from his Youtube chan­nel Dai­ly Sto­ic. In it, he presents “nine Sto­ic rules for a bet­ter life,” open­ing with an exhor­ta­tion that “life is short: do every­thing as if it was the thought or action of a dying per­son.”

The rules begin with “put peo­ple first,” which Mar­cus once demon­strat­ed as a leader by sell­ing off the impe­r­i­al palace’s fin­ery dur­ing the eco­nom­ic hard­ships of the Anto­nine Plague. Sec­ond, “anoth­er path is always open” — or, as expressed in the title of Hol­i­day’s first book about Sto­icism, “the obsta­cle is the way.” Even if you feel stuck, “you always have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to prac­tice virtue, prac­tice excel­lence, to change in some form or anoth­er based on what’s hap­pen­ing.” Third, “take it step by step”: famil­iar advice, per­haps, but a wel­come reminder that what stops us from begin­ning a project or process of change is nev­er a lack of infor­ma­tion, but a sim­ple lack of action.

Fourth, “dis­card your anx­i­ety,” which may feel caused by out­side cir­cum­stances, but in Mar­cus’ view, comes whol­ly from inside our­selves; Hol­i­day speaks of Mar­cus’ dec­la­ra­tion that he “dis­card­ed anx­i­ety because it was with­in me.” Fifth, “well begun is half done” — or as they put it in Korea, where I live, “the start is half.” No mat­ter where in the world you hap­pen to be, you can put into prac­tice Hol­i­day’s prac­ti­cal inter­pre­ta­tion of this rule: get up ear­ly in the morn­ing so as to “own the day from the begin­ning,” just as Mar­cus did. Sixth, “be strict with your­self,” even as you remain tol­er­ant with oth­ers: “leave every­one else and their mis­takes and their way of doing things to them.”

Sev­enth, “don’t resent peo­ple,” even if, like Mar­cus, you don’t par­tic­u­lar­ly like them. Your ene­mies offer you a hid­den oppor­tu­ni­ty to “be good in spite of oth­er peo­ple, to be just in the face of injus­tice, to be tem­per­ate in the face of intem­per­ance that’s being reward­ed. Eighth, “ask your­self, ‘Is this essen­tial?’ ” Whether you’re a Roman emper­or or a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry “knowl­edge work­er,” life tends to fill up with press­ing but not ulti­mate­ly impor­tant tasks, at least with­out con­stant vig­i­lance about how much they real­ly mat­ter. Ninth, keep these three mantras in mind: “Amor fati,” or “embrace your fate”; “It’s about what you do for oth­er peo­ple”; and “Memen­to mori,” or “remem­ber that death is inevitable.” The orig­i­nal Sto­ics have been gone for com­ing on two mil­len­nia now, but they still set an exam­ple for us today. How many of us can fore­see the same for our­selves?

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Is Sto­icism? A Short Intro­duc­tion to the Ancient Phi­los­o­phy That Can Help You Cope with Our Hard Mod­ern Times

The Sto­ic Wis­dom of Roman Emper­or Mar­cus Aure­lius: An Intro­duc­tion in Six Short Videos

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Sto­icism, the Ancient Greek Phi­los­o­phy That Lets You Lead a Hap­py, Ful­fill­ing Life

How to Be a Sto­ic in Your Every­day Life: Phi­los­o­phy Pro­fes­sor Mas­si­mo Pigli­uc­ci Explains

Three Huge Vol­umes of Sto­ic Writ­ings by Seneca Now Free Online, Thanks to Tim Fer­riss

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Destino: The Salvador Dalí — Walt Disney Animation That Took 57 Years to Complete

In 2003, Dis­ney released a six minute ani­mat­ed short called Des­ti­no, final­ly bring­ing clo­sure to a project that began 57 years ear­li­er. The sto­ry of Des­ti­no goes way back to 1946 when two very dif­fer­ent cul­tur­al icons, Walt Dis­ney and Sal­vador Dalí, decid­ed to work togeth­er on a car­toon. The film was sto­ry­board­ed by Dalí and John Hench (a Dis­ney stu­dio artist) over the course of eight months. But then, rather abrupt­ly, the project got tabled when The Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny ran into finan­cial prob­lems.

Now fast for­ward 53 years, to 1999. While work­ing on Fan­ta­sia 2000, Walt Dis­ney’s nephew redis­cov­ered the project and 17 sec­onds of orig­i­nal ani­ma­tion. Using this clip and the orig­i­nal sto­ry­boards, 25 ani­ma­tors brought the film to com­ple­tion and pre­miered it at The New York Film Fes­ti­val in 2003. Des­ti­no would receive an Oscar nom­i­na­tion for the Best Ani­mat­ed Short Film, among oth­er acco­lades from crit­ics.

The clip runs 6+ min­utes and fea­tures music writ­ten by Mex­i­can song­writer Arman­do Dominguez and per­formed by Dora Luz. In our archive, we also have anoth­er ver­sion that fea­tures a sound­track by Pink Floyd.

NPR has more on the Dis­ney-Dalí col­lab­o­ra­tion. Lis­ten to their audio report here.

Note: this video orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in 2011.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes Sal­vador Dalí’s Icon­ic Sur­re­al­ist Paint­ing “The Per­sis­tence of Mem­o­ry” a Great Work of Art

How Walt Dis­ney Car­toons Are Made: 1939 Doc­u­men­tary Gives an Inside Look

Disney’s 12 Time­less Prin­ci­ples of Ani­ma­tion

Take a Jour­ney Through 933 Paint­ings by Sal­vador Dalí & Watch His Sig­na­ture Sur­re­al­ism Emerge

The Hand: An Anti-Totalitarian Animation, Banned for Two Decades & Now Considered One of the Greatest Animations (1965)

For obvi­ous rea­sons, most art pro­duced under oppres­sive regimes comes off as painstak­ing­ly inof­fen­sive. For equal­ly obvi­ous rea­sons, the rare works that crit­i­cize the regime tend to do so rather oblique­ly. This was­n’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech artist and stop-motion ani­ma­tor Jiří Trn­ka, “the Walt Dis­ney of East­ern Europe.” In its cen­tral con­flict between a hum­ble har­le­quin who just wants to sculpt flower pots and a giant, inva­sive gloved hand that forces him to make rep­re­sen­ta­tions of itself, one sens­es a cer­tain alle­go­ry to do with the dynam­ic between the artist and the state.

“Trnka’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence of total­i­tar­i­an­ism under the com­mu­nist regime is pro­ject­ed and reartic­u­lat­ed in the mean­ing and knowl­edge he trans­mits through his short,” writes Renée-Marie Piz­zar­di in an essay at Fan­ta­sy Ani­ma­tion. “The state-run stu­dios had the pow­er to approve or cen­sor cer­tain top­ics and con­trol fund­ing accord­ing­ly. Trn­ka was thus depen­dent on their fund­ing, yet resis­tant to their pol­i­tics, and this ambi­gu­i­ty lim­it­ed the free­dom of expres­sion in his work.”

In the har­le­quin, “Trn­ka crafts a char­ac­ter through which he not only por­trays him­self as the artist, but any free-think­ing indi­vid­ual who gets robbed of their agency and induced into fol­low­ing and act­ing accord­ing to an ide­ol­o­gy and regime.”

Com­plet­ed in 1965, The Hand would turn out to be Trnka’s final film before his death four years lat­er, by which time the rulers in pow­er were hard­ly eager to have his ani­mat­ed indict­ment in cir­cu­la­tion. 1968 had brought the “Prague Spring” under Alexan­der Dubček, a peri­od of lib­er­al­iza­tion that turned out to be brief: about a year lat­er, Dubček was replaced, his reforms reversed, and the Czechoslo­vak Social­ist Repub­lic “nor­mal­ized” back to the ways of the bad old days. Banned after Trn­ka died in 1969, The Hand would remain not legal­ly view­able in his home­land for two decades. But today, it’s appre­ci­at­ed by ani­ma­tion enthu­si­asts the world over, and its expres­sion of yearn­ing for cre­ative free­dom still res­onates. In the late six­ties or here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, fear the gov­ern­ment that fears your pup­pets.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch The Idea, the First Ani­mat­ed Film to Deal with Big, Philo­soph­i­cal Ideas (1932)

The Hob­bit: The First Ani­ma­tion & Film Adap­ta­tion of Tolkien’s Clas­sic (1966)

Watch the Sur­re­al­ist Glass Har­mon­i­ca, the Only Ani­mat­ed Film Ever Banned by Sovi­et Cen­sors (1968)

4 Franz Kaf­ka Ani­ma­tions: Watch Cre­ative Ani­mat­ed Shorts from Poland, Japan, Rus­sia & Cana­da

An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czecho­slo­va­kia (1930–1989)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

The Isolated Bass Grooves of The Grateful Dead’s Phil Lesh (RIP)

This past Fri­day, the bassist of The Grate­ful Dead, Phil Lesh, passed away at age 84. Almost imme­di­ate­ly the trib­utes poured in, most rec­og­niz­ing that Lesh was­n’t your ordi­nary bassist. As Jon Par­e­les wrote in the New York Times, Phil Lesh held songs “aloft.” His “bass lines hopped and bub­bled and con­stant­ly con­versed with the gui­tars of Jer­ry Gar­cia and Bob Weir. His tone was round­ed and unassertive while he eased his way into the coun­ter­point, almost as if he were think­ing aloud. [His] play­ing was essen­tial to the Dead’s par­tic­u­lar grav­i­ty-defy­ing lilt, shar­ing a col­lec­tive mode of rock momen­tum that was teas­ing and prob­ing, nev­er blunt­ly coer­cive.”

My first encounter with the Grate­ful Dead came when I was 16 years old. I vivid­ly remem­ber the guy who played bon­gos on my friend’s head when we arrived at the show. I also remem­ber the spin­ners trip­ping on acid, danc­ing down the halls and short-cir­cuit­ing my lit­tle mind. But the con­cert itself remains only a hazy mem­o­ry. And cer­tain­ly the artistry of Lesh, Gar­cia, Weir, and the drum­mers was lost on me. Only years lat­er, did it all start to click. That’s when I dialed into the Bar­ton Hall con­cert at Cor­nell (May 8, 1977) and encoun­tered Lesh’s bass lines at the start of “Scar­let Bego­nias.” Once you hear them, they’re hard to shake. The video above zooms into that per­for­mance, explor­ing the devel­op­ment of Lesh’s bass play­ing through­out the spring of ’77. The next video down lets you hear the com­plete Bar­ton Hall per­for­mance of “Scar­let Bego­nias” in all of its glo­ry.

When oth­ers try to cap­ture what made Phil, Phil, they’ll fea­ture anoth­er beloved show–Vene­ta, OR (6/27/72). Below, you can hear iso­lat­ed tracks of Phil’s bass work on “Bertha” and “Chi­na Cat Sun­flower/I Know You Rid­er.” (Click the links in the pri­or sen­tence to hear Lesh and the band per­form­ing the songs together–so you can hear how the bass ties in.) Trained in free jazz and avant-garde clas­si­cal music, Lesh infused rock with the influ­ences of Coltrane, Min­gus, and Stravinsky–not to men­tion oth­ers. And, with that, the bass was nev­er the same.

For any­one want­i­ng to get fur­ther into the Phil Zone, read his excel­lent mem­oir Search­ing for the Sound: My Life with the Grate­ful Dead.

Bertha

Chi­na Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rid­er

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Grate­ful Dead’s “Rip­ple” Played By Musi­cians Around the World (with Cameos by David Cros­by, Jim­my Buf­fett & Bill Kreutz­mann)

The Grate­ful Dead Pays Trib­ute to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in a 1982 Con­cert: Hear “Raven Space”

When the Grate­ful Dead Played at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

 

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