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Meet today's almost fascists and learn the warning signs to intercept them on the road from populism to dictatorship. WithThe Wannabe Fascists, historian Federico Finchelstein offers a precise explanation of why Trumpism and similar movements across the world belong to a new political breed, the last outcome of the combined histories of fascism and populism: the wannabe fascists. This new type of populist politician is typically a legally elected leaderwho,unlike previous populists who were eager to distance themselves from fascism, turns to totalitarian lies, racism, and illegal means to destroy democracy from within. Drawing on almost three decades of research on the histories of fascism and populism around the world, this book lays out in clear language what the author calls the "four pillars of fascism"-xenophobia, propaganda, political violence, and ultimately dictatorship. Finchelstein carefully explains how and why wannabe fascists like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Modi embrace the first three pillars but don't quite succeed in dictatorship and total suppression of the popular vote. The Wannabe Fascists stresses the importance of preventing despots from reaching this tipping point and offers a clear warning for what's at stake

";There is no better book on fascism's complex and vexed relationship with truth.";—Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them In this short companion to his book From Fascism to Populism in History, world-renowned historian Federico Finchelstein explains why fascists regarded simple and often hateful lies as truth, and why so many of their followers believed the falsehoods. Throughout the history of the twentieth century, many supporters of fascist ideologies regarded political lies as truth incarnated in their leader. From Hitler to Mussolini, fascist leaders capitalized on lies as the base of their power and popular sovereignty. This history continues in the present, when lies again seem to increasingly replace empirical truth. Now that actual news is presented as "fake news" and false news becomes government policy, A Brief History of Fascist Lies urges us to remember that the current talk of "post-truth" has a long political and intellectual lineage that we cannot ignore

"The Myth of Fascism argues that fascism can be seen as a new and murderous form of modern political myth. Freud, Borges, and Schmitt linked violent desires with the return of the historically repressed, that is, with myths repressed at an early stage of a society's development. Fascism enacted mythology in its longing for a "remote past," a simpler time superior to the present. The legitimacy of myth became the foundation for modern politics: fascist regimes considered themselves as actualizations of classical violent myths that thrived in the unconscious and that moved throughout history but also transcended it; myth, not history, legitimated violent actions. The book delineates the political and theoretical paths that led these thinkers to ponder the conceptual and practical relations between the victims of trauma and the ideological myths of their perpetrators and argues that their theories can help us reevaluate the sources of modern political violence"--

"Argentina is famous for its ties with fascism as well as its welcoming of Nazi war criminals after World War II. At mid-century, it was the home of Peronism. It was also the birthplace of the Dirty War and one of Latin America's most criminal dictatorships in the 1970s and early 1980s. How and why did all of these regimes emerge in a country that was "born liberal"? Why did these authoritarian traits first emerge in Argentina under the shadow of fascism? In this book, Federico Finchelstein tells the history of modern Argentina as seen from the perspective of political violence and ideology. He focuses on the theory and practice of the fascist idea in Argentine political culture throughout the twentieth century, analyzing the connections between fascist theory and the Holocaust, antisemitism, and the military junta's practices of torture and state violence, with its networks of concentration camps and extermination. The book demonstrates how the state's war against its citizens was rooted in fascist ideology, explaining the Argentine variant of fascism, formed by nacionalistas, and its links with European fascism and Catholicism. It particularly emphasizes the genocidal dimensions of the persecution of Argentine Jewish victims. The destruction of the rule of law and military state terror during the Dirty War, Finchelstein shows, was the product of many political and ideological reformulations and personifications of fascism. The Ideological Origins of the Dirty War provides a genealogy of state-sanctioned terror, revealing fascism as central to Argentina's political culture and its violent twentieth century"--

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Transnational Fascism -- 2. The Argentine Road to Fascism -- 3. Fascism Discovers the Americas -- 4. A ''Christianized Fascism'' -- 5. Debating Global Totalitarianism -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Los estudios sobre la historia del psicoanálisis en América Latina, luego de décadas de espacios historiográficos inexplicables, han dejado su marca en tiempos más recientes y ya constituyen un desarrollo plural que trasciende naciones y temáticas.A diferencia de las historiografías del norte, en América Latina, la "psico-historia" (la vertiente historiográfica que proponía "psicoanalizar a las fuentes" desde Napoleón a Hitler) no tuvo una repercusión que fuera mas allá de lo anecdótico. Sí hubo, por supuesto, una vinculación entre método historiográfico y teoría psicoanalítica. Historiadores, sociólogos, politólogos y antropólogos latinoamericanos promovieron esta perspectiva que sigue iluminando la historia de nuestros países.