“Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes.”
Ur-Fascism (1995)
Context: Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easily for us, if there appeared on the scene somebody saying "I want to re-open Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares". Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and point the finger at any of its new instances — every day and in every part of the world.
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Umberto Eco 120
Italian semiotician, essayist, philosopher, literary critic… 1932–2016Related quotes
De Abaitua interview (1998)
Context: We only know the world as we have lived in it. A lot of things we thought were givens have turned out to be local and temporary phenomena. Capitalism and communism felt like they were always going to be around, but it turns out they were just two ways of ordering an industrial society. If you were looking for more fundamental human political poles, you’d take anarchy and fascism, for my money. Which are not dependent upon economic trends because they are both a bit mad. One of them is complete abdication of individual responsibility into the collective, and one of them absolute responsibility for the individual. I think these will both still be with us, but fascism becomes less and less possible. We have to accept that we are moving towards some sort of anarchy.
"Ghosts of Wind and Shadow" in Dreams Underfoot : The Newford Collection (2003), p. 183
Source: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 310.
Corteo a Reggio Emilia in memoria della strage del 1960 http://www.lariscossa.com/2019/07/07/corteo-reggio-emilia-memoria-della-strage-del-1960, 7 July 2019
“It certainly will be if you are still around.”
In response to Gershwin's query, "I wonder if my music will be played a hundred years from now"; as quoted in "George the Ingenuous" by Alexander Woolcott, in Cosmopolitan (November 1933); reprinted in Ch. IV: "'...A Young Colossus...'" https://books.google.com/books?id=ATcjgQTx0uIC&pg=PA45#v=onepage&q&f=false from Gershwin Remembered (1992) by Edward Jablonski, pp. 44-45
If George is around, it will. (This version was recounted by Howard Dietz in Dancing in the Dark (1974), p. 61, in response to a virtually identical query—i.e. as to whether Gershwin's music would still be played in 100 years—posed by Newman Levy.)