Is North Korea fascist? (user search)
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  Is North Korea fascist? (search mode)
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Author Topic: Is North Korea fascist?  (Read 12215 times)
Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« on: December 21, 2011, 08:40:28 PM »

Fascism is technically a syncretic political ideology but is more commonly considered right than left for reasons of, among other things, historical affinity in the countries where it was most prominent.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #1 on: December 22, 2011, 03:59:24 AM »

The sole aim and end of the North Korean power structure is to remain the North Korean power structure (true of most power structures, but the North Korean one is particularly explicit and severe about it). This isn't technically fascist, although a lot of the rhetoric produced for domestic consumption is redolent of that of Japanese para-fascism, mixed with decreasing amounts of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and increasing amounts of a sort of homegrown almost Romanesque (terminal decline Rome, not Five Good Emperors Rome) god-emperor-worship*.

*Japanese para-fascism also involved god-emperor-worship, of course, but it wasn't the same kind.
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Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.
Nathan
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« Reply #2 on: December 22, 2011, 12:04:05 PM »
« Edited: December 22, 2011, 05:59:00 PM by Nathan »

The sole aim and end of the North Korean power structure is to remain the North Korean power structure (true of most power structures, but the North Korean one is particularly explicit and severe about it). This isn't technically fascist, although a lot of the rhetoric produced for domestic consumption is redolent of that of Japanese para-fascism, mixed with decreasing amounts of Marxist-Leninist rhetoric and increasing amounts of a sort of homegrown almost Romanesque (terminal decline Rome, not Five Good Emperors Rome) god-emperor-worship*.

*Japanese para-fascism also involved god-emperor-worship, of course, but it wasn't the same kind.

Calling the Shōwa state fascist also seems wrong to me, although there were certainly elements that approached fascism (more nearly than in the North Korean case, because of the direct influence of fascist parties). But I'm sure you know much more about this field than I do.

That's why I'm using the term para-fascism. It's not universally accepted but it's a fairly broadly used term for governments that appropriated extensive fascist elements but can't be described as fascist as such due to lacking the interbellum European political/cultural background of 'true' fascism.

From a Japanese perspective, Taisei Yokusankai was a right-wing national-supremacist 'sonno joi' sort of party. It wasn't anywhere near as ideologically new (or new-seeming) to Japan as the fascist parties in Europe were; its main innovations were its expansionism and appropriation of a certain degree of race-rhetoric (Japan had certainly been a racist state in the past, but at least after the retreat of the Emishi into Hokkaido and Hideyoshi's death in Korea had been so in an isolationist rather than imperialist context) and the fact that quite simply it was, rhetorically and functionally, nastier than many previous Japanese ideologies of its general kind. Domestically it wanted to be perceived as being of a piece with the kokugaku cultural movement of the late eighteenth century, but I can't think of any serious figure in Asian studies who would argue that kokugaku posed any threat to countries other than Japan, and a lot of us are actually inclined to have a fairly positive view of kokugaku as nationalist ideologies go.
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