Metallica Teaches a New Masterclass on How to Build & Sustain a Band
Since its launch in 2015, Masterclass has not only expanded the variety of its online course offerings but sought out ever-bigger names for its teachers. Names don’t come much bigger than Metallica in the world of heavy metal, and indeed in the world of rock music in general. Hence the broad title of the new Masterclass “Metallica Teaches Being a Band.” Having been a band for 40 years now, they presumably know more than a little about everything involved in that enterprise: not just recording hit albums like Master of Puppets and songs like “Enter Sandman,” but also weathering dramatic changes in both the music business and popular culture while cooperating for the good of the group.
Not that, to the men of Metallica, such cooperation has always come naturally. “There’ve been times when it’s been fractured and it looks like we were on the verge of breaking up,” says guitarist Kirk Hammett in the trailer for their Masterclass above.
He joined the band in 1983, which means he has very nearly as long a standing in the band as its founders, lead vocalist/rhythm guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich. All of them, along with bassist Robert Trujillo, appear here as teachers to share their accumulated wisdom, have to do as it may with songwriting, performance, interpersonal communication, or the management of time and anger.
Like all Masterclasses, Metallica’s course is divided into many easily watchable video lessons, most with a practical slant. Musically inclined viewers, even those with no interest in becoming heavy-metal icons, will benefit from learning to work “From Riff to Song,” the principles of “Putting Together an Album,” and the art of “Navigating Egos.” But for Metallica fans in particular — whom, collectively, the band consider their fifth member — few lessons in any Masterclass could be as gripping as the deconstructions of “Enter Sandman,” “Master of Puppets,” and “One.” They do all this in a calmer, more reflective psychological place than the bitter, near-dysfunctional one in which the 2004 documentary Metallica: Some Kind of Monster found them — but not so calm and reflective that they can’t finish the course off with, as Hammett puts it, “a bad-ass performance.”
When you sign up to become a Masterclass member ($180 per year), you will have access to Metallica’s course plus 100 others.
Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
Related Content:
Metallica Is Putting Free Concerts Online: 6 Now Streaming, with More to Come
Who Invented Heavy Metal Music?: A Search for Origins
Carlos Santana & Tom Morello Launch Online Courses on How to Play the Guitar
Herbie Hancock to Teach His First Online Course on Jazz
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch the New Trailer for a Kurt Vonnegut Documentary 40 Years In the Making
When Kurt Vonnegut first arrived in Dresden, a city as yet untouched by war, crammed into a boxcar with dozens of other POWs, the city looked to him like “Oz,” he wrote in his semi-autobiographical sixth novel Slaughterhouse-Five. After all, he says, “The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.” When Vonnegut and his fellow GIs emerged from the bowels of the pork plant in which they’d waited out the Allied bombing of the city, they witnessed the aftermath of Dresden’s destruction. The city formerly known as “the Florence of the Elbe” was “like the moon,” as Vonnegut’s “unstuck” protagonist Billy Pilgrim says in the novel: cratered, pitted, leveled…. But the smoking ruins were the least of it.
Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners spent the next few days removing and incinerating thousands of bodies, an experience that would forever shape the writer and his stories. Whether mentioned explicitly or not, Dresden became a “death card,” writes Philip Beidler, that Vonnegut planted throughout his work. Death recurs with banal regularity, the phrase “So it goes,” peppered (106 times) throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, which Vonnegut credited to the French novelist Celine, whose cynicism tipped over into hatred. Vonnegut may have gone as far as generalized misanthropy, but his dry, wisecracking humor and his humanism stayed intact, even if it had picked up a passenger: the horror of mass death that haunted his imagination.
Vonnegut, like Billy Pilgrim, became “unstuck in time,” a condition we might see now as analogous to PTSD, his daughter Nanette says. “He was writing to save his own life,” as news from Vietnam came in and Vonnegut, a pacifist, found himself “losing his temper” at the television. “He saw the numbers, how many dead,” she adds, “that these kids were being conned, and sent to their deaths. And I think it probably set a fire under him to have his say.” A new documentary on the writer titled Unstuck in Time shows how much impact his “say” had on the country’s readers. Vonnegut wrote unbridled satire, science fiction, and social commentary, in thin books with irreverent doodles in the margins. As director Robert Weide says in the trailer above, holding a copy of Breakfast of Champions, “what high school kid isn’t gonna gobble this up?”
Weide, like most lovers of Vonnegut, discovered him as a teenager. At 23, the budding filmmaker contacted his literary hero about making a documentary. Over the course of the next twenty-five years, Weide– best known for his work with Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm (and as a meme) — filmed and taped conversations with Vonnegut until the author’s death in 2007. The resulting documentary promises a comprehensive portrait of the writer’s life, LitHub writes, from his “childhood in Indianapolis to his experience as a prisoner of war to his rise to literary stardom to the fans left in the wake of his death, all through the lens of Vonnegut and Weide’s close friendship.”
As the relationship between filmmaker and subject became part of the film itself, co-director Don Argott joined the project “to document the meta element of this story,” says Weide, “as I continued to focus on Vonnegut’s biography.” Forty years in the making, Unstuck in Time, evolved from a “fairly conventional author documentary” to what may stand as the most intimate portrait of the author put on film. Perhaps someday we’ll also see the publication of an 84-page scrapbook recently sold at auction, a collection of Vonnegut’s wartime letters, news clippings, and photographs of the ruined German city that he never fully left behind.
Related Content:
Why Should We Read Kurt Vonnegut? An Animated Video Makes the Case
Watch a Sweet Film Adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Story, “Long Walk to Forever”
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...When The Who Saved New York City After 9/11: Watch Their Cathartic Madison Square Garden Set (October 20, 2001)
A little more than a month after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, with the nation and world still reeling from that day, Madison Square Garden hosted The Concert for New York City. A benefit concert of the first order, it was also a thank you to the sacrifice of NYC’s fire and police departments, which had lost many members during that day. (The former had lost 343 firefighters.) But like a lot of things about that day twenty years later, it has sort of vanished down the cultural memory hole.
However, if you need reminding, the Who came out of retirement and delivered what some considered the set of the night. Tom Watson, writing in Forbes magazine, called it “The Night The Who Saved New York.”
The concert was free to any firefighter or policeman who came in uniform. Watson describes the vibe thus:
“To say that occupancy laws were stretched that night is to undersell the size of the place. Picture a Knicks game, then double the crowd. From the start, the building ran on a river of emotion and beer, which, if you wore a uniform — or your late loved one’s cap — was free. The thousands of cops in attendance studiously ignored thousands of other cops and firefighters lighting up a little reefer. Large bottles of high proof spirits were produced. The Garden was the biggest Irish wake in history.”
In a moment like this, a lot of the artists headed towards jingoism. It was understandable. Songs about America (David Bowie), songs about New York City (Billy Joel), songs about freedom (Paul McCartney), songs about heroes (also Bowie). But, what the crowd wanted that night was catharsis, and that’s what the Who brought.
The set is the Who at their most anthemic, but also the most representative of the classic rock radio these uniformed men and women and their families grew up with: “Who Are You,” “Baba O’Reilly,” “Behind Blue Eyes,” and ending with “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” However the line “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” is quietly deleted. Not this time, cynicism.
The concert was exactly what was needed for the grief of the community. And death hangs over the whole event, as camera cut to family members holding up photos of lost loved ones, while the World Trade Center rubble still smoldered.
And then there’s what nobody knew at the time: this would be bassist John Entwistle’s last gig before his fatal heart attack eight months later. So many of the remaining first responders would die from the toxic chemicals breathed in on 9/11, and still they fight for some recompense from the government that honored them at first. Mayor Giuliani…well, we know what happened to him. And that ass whoopin’ we promised the Middle East wound up kicking America’s economy in the butt instead.
Twenty years later the performance still holds up, a moment in time just before we all got fooled again.
Related Content:
Keith Moon, Drummer of The Who, Passes Out at 1973 Concert; 19-Year-Old Fan Takes Over
Keith Moon’s Final Performance with The Who (1978)
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.
Read More...The Human Brain: A Free Online Course from MIT
From MIT comes The Human Brain, a series of 18 lectures presented by Professor Nancy Kanwisher. They’re from a course that “surveys the core perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human mind and asks how they are implemented in the brain. Key themes include the representations, development, and degree of functional specificity of these components of mind and brain. The course will take students straight to the cutting edge of the field, empowering them to understand and critically evaluate empirical articles in the current literature.”
Watch all of the lectures above, and find them added to our list of Free Biology Courses, a subset of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
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!
Read More...Play a Kandinsky: A New Simulation Lets You Experience Kandinsky’s Synesthesia & the Sounds He May Have Heard When Painting “Yellow-Red-Blue”
Wassily Kandinsky could hear colors. Maybe you can too, but since studies so far have suggested that the underlying condition exists in less than five percent of the population, the odds are against it. Known as synesthesia, it involves one kind of sense perception being tied up with another: letters and numbers come with colors, sequences take on three-dimensional forms, sounds have tactile feelings. These unusual sensory connections can presumably encourage unusual kinds of thinking; perhaps unsurprisingly, synesthetic experiences have been reported by a variety of creators, from Billy Joel and David Hockney to Vladimir Nabokov and Nikola Tesla.
Few, however, have described synesthesia as eloquently as Kandinsky did. “Color is the keyboard,” he once said. “The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.”
That quote must have shaped the mission of Play a Kandinsky, a collaboration between Google Arts and Culture and the Centre Pompidou. Enlisting the compositional services of experimental musicians Antoine Bertin and NSDOS, it gives even us non-synesthetes a chance to experience the intersection of sound and not just color but shape as well, in something of the same manner as the pioneering abstract painter must have.
As explained in the Listening In video above, Kandinsky heard yellow as a trumpet, red as a violin, and blue as an organ. An image of sufficient chromatic and formal variety must have set off a symphony in his head, much like the one Play a Kandinsky gives us a chance to conduct. As an interface it uses his 1925 painting Yellow-Red-Blue, each element of which, when clicked, adds another synesthetic layer of sound to the mix. These visual-sonic correspondences are based on Kandinsky’s own color theories as well as the music he would have heard, all processed with the formidable machine-learning resources at Google’s command. “What was he trying to make us feel with this painting?” Play a Kandinsky asks. But of course he didn’t have just one set of emotions in mind for his viewers, and making that possible was perhaps the most enduring achievement of his journey into abstraction.
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An Artist with Synesthesia Turns Jazz & Rock Classics Into Colorful Abstract Paintings
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...The Story of the Edsel, Ford’s Infamously Failed Car Brand of the 1950s
For 60 years now, the name Edsel has been synonymous with failure. In a way, this vindicates the position of Henry Ford II, who opposed labeling a brand of cars with the name of his father Edsel Ford. The son of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, Edsel Ford died young in 1943, and thus didn’t live to see “E Day,” the rollout of his namesake line of automobiles. It happened on September 4, 1957, the culmination of two years of research and development on what was for most of that time called the “E car,” the letter having been chosen to indicate the project’s experimental nature. Alas, all seven of Edsel’s first models struck the American public as too conventional to stand out — and at the same time, too odd to buy.
You can hear the story of Edsel in the two videos above, one from transportation enthusiast Ruairidh MacVeigh and another from Regular Car Reviews. Both offer explanations of how the brand’s cars were conceived, and what went wrong enough in their execution to make them a laughing stock still today. No Edsel postmortem can fail to consider the name itself, a choice made in desperation after the rejection of more than 6,000 other possibilities presented by the advertising firm of Foote, Cone & Belding.
Its manager of marketing research also unofficially sought the counsel of modernist poet Marianne Moore, whose suggestions included “Utopian Turtletop,” “Resilient Bullet,” “Mongoose Civique,” and “The Impeccable.”
Another factor cited as a cause of Edsel’s disappointing sales is its cars’ signature vertical grille, derided early on for its shape resembling a horse collar — among other, less mentionable things. Such aesthetic missteps may not have sunk the brand on their own, but they certainly didn’t counteract the effects of other, more mundane conditions. These included persistent assembly-line problems (without a dedicated factory, Edsels tended occasionally to come out with parts improperly installed or absent) and a 1957 economic recession that made upper-middle-tier automobiles of this kind unappealing to the American driver. Even the top-rated CBS television special The Edsel Show — despite its performances from the likes of Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney, and Louis Armstrong — drummed up little public enthusiasm.
Edsel lasted only from 1958 to 1960, in which time Ford manufactured 118,287 of its cars in total. Six decades after the mark’s retirement, fewer than 10,000 Edsel cars survive — most of them as sought-after collector’s items. For Edsels now have their appreciators, as evidenced by the video above from professional mid-century Americana enthusiast Charles Phoenix, who marvels over every feature of a 1958 Citation, Edsel’s top-of-the-line model, from its Teletouch push-button gear selector to its customizable speed-warning indicator. (Seatbelts came standard, despite being optional extras on other cars of the day.) Current Edsel owners also include lifestyle guru Martha Stewart, who showed off her mint 1958 Roundup in a recent video with Jay Leno — though she seems rather prouder of also owning Edsel Ford’s house.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...Watch Django Reinhardt & Stéphane Grappelli Play Masterfully Together in Vivid Color (1938)
Few jazz guitarists today could claim to be entirely free of the influence of Django Reinhardt. This despite the fact that he lost the use of two fingers — which ultimately encouraged him to develop a distinctive playing style — and that he died 68 years ago. The unfortunate abbreviation of Reinhardt’s life means that he never built a substantial body of solo work, though he did play on many recorded dates that include performances alongside Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. It also means that he left even less in the way of footage, though we do get a crisp and illuminating view of him and his guitar in the 1938 documentary short “Jazz ‘Hot,’ ” previously featured here on Open Culture.
“Jazz ‘Hot’ ” also features violin-playing from Stéphane Grappelli, who founded the group Quintette du Hot Club de France with Reinhardt in 1934. As they deepened their knowledge of jazz, the two influenced each other so thoroughly as to develop their own style of music.
Grappelli lived long enough to play with the likes of Jean-Luc Ponty, Paul Simon, Yo Yo Ma, and even Pink Floyd. Still, more than a few jazz fans would surely claim that none of his professional collaborators was more important to his musical formation than Reinhardt. Now you can see them playing together in color, and fairly realistic color at that, in the clip at the top of the post.
The original black-and-white footage (which appears just above) was colorized with DeOldify, a deep learning-based application developed to restore photographs and motion pictures from bygone times. Perhaps you’ve seen the previous DeOldify colorization projects we’ve featured here, which run the gamut from musical numbers in Stormy Weather and Hellzapoppin’ to scenes of 1920s Berlin and even an 1896 snowball fight in Lyon. Granted access to a time machine, more than a few jazz-lovers would no doubt choose to go back to the Paris of the 1930s to see the Quintette du Hot Club de France in action. Technology has yet to make that a viable proposition, but it’s given us a next-best-thing that no appreciator of jazz guitar — or jazz violin — could fail to enjoy.
Related Content:
Jazz ‘Hot’: The Rare 1938 Short Film With Jazz Legend Django Reinhardt
Django Reinhardt Demonstrates His Guitar Genius in Rare Footage From the 1930s, 40s & 50s
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Read More...New Research Confirms That the Vikings Landed in North America 471 Years Before Columbus & Exactly 1,000 Years Ago
“We have to celebrate Columbus because he discovered America.”
“No he didn’t. Leif Erikson got there first.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Uh-huh….”
etc…
I paraphrase here from the halls of my elementary school circa sometime in the late 20th century, when many of us were convinced the first Europeans to set foot on the continent were not the Spanish and their bloody-minded, treasure-seeking Italian captain, but what we thought of as bloody-minded, treasure-seeking Vikings. Which side was right?
Our grade-school objections to Columbus were not necessarily moral or intellectual. Most of us chose team Viking for the helmets (more on that later). But evidence that Vikings landed in North America dates back hundreds of years to historical accounts and sagas about Leif’s father, Erik the Red. These accounts tell of a place called Vinland, identified as lying somewhere along the Northeastern coastline where the Norse found wild grapes.
In the 20th century came the suggestion that Vinland might have been located in Canada, at a site called L’Anse aux Meadows in what is now Newfoundland. Between 1960 and 1968, an excavation by Norwegian archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad and her husband, explorer Helge Ingstad, found the remains of the “only conclusively identified Viking site in the Americas outside of Greenland,” writes Katherine Kornei at The New York Times.
Eight timber-framed buildings at the site look very much like similar structures in Greenland built for Erik the Red. And yet, exactly when the settlement arose has been a mystery; “radiocarbon measurements of artifacts from L’Anse aux Meadows span the entire Viking Age, from the late eighth through the 11th centuries.” That is, until new results just published in Nature which claim to have “decisively pinned down when the Norse explorers were in Newfoundland: the year A.D. 1021, or exactly 1,000 years ago.”
Scientists obtained this date from three pieces of wood lately unearthed from what is known as the site’s “Viking layer” — a stump, a log, and a branch. “These artifacts were significant finds for two reasons,” notes the CBC. “One is that they showed cut marks made by metal blades, specific to Vikings, not Indigenous stone blades. The second reason is that all three artifacts still had the outermost layer of the tree intact,” allowing archaeologists to conclusively tell their age.
A host of unanswered questions remain. We cannot say for certain this new data confirms the ancient stories of Vinland or Leif Erikson. Although the structures, tools, and other artifacts at the site are unquestionably Norse, researchers don’t know who, precisely, settled at L’Anse aux Meadows, or whether it was a long-term settlement or a temporary outpost. (Evidence published in 2019 suggests that “Norse activity at LAM may have endured for a century.”)
At the top of the post, see a short explainer from Nature showing not only how archeologists confirmed that Vikings landed in North America, but also how they learned exactly when — 471 years before Columbus. As for why there’s no Leif Erikson day in the U.S.… well, there is, it turns out — October 9th — though no one gets a holiday. And about those helmets? Stereotypes that first appeared in Wagnerian opera.
As even video games recognize these days, the Vikings may be some of the most misunderstood peoples in ancient history. Learn more about their time in Newfoundland, and maybe points further south, in the episode of America Unearthed from the History Channel, above, and read the Nature article on the most recent artifacts here.
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Archaeologists Find the Earliest Work of “Abstract Art,” Dating Back 73,000 Years
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...Become a Project Manager Without a College Degree with Google’s Project Management Certificate
As we first mentioned last year, Google has launched a series of Career Certificate programs that allow students to gain expertise in a field, ideally enough to start working without a 4‑year college degree. This initiative now includes a Certificate in Project Management, which consists of six courses.
- 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
Above, a Program Manager talks about “her path from dropping out of high school and earning a GED, joining the military, and working as a coder, to learning about program management and switching into that career track.” An introduction to the Project Management certificate appears below.
The Project Management program takes about six months to complete, and should cost about $250 in total. Students get charged $39 per month until they complete the program.
You can explore the Project Management certificate here. And find other Google career certificates in other fields–e.g. UX Design and Data Analytics–over on this page. All Google career courses are hosted on the Coursera platform.
Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Coursera. If readers enroll in certain Coursera courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture.
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Read More...Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 10 Tactics of Fascism: The “Cult of the Leader,” Law & Order, Victimhood and More
What is fascism? Fascism is an ideology developed and elaborated in early 20th-century Western Europe and enabled by technology, mass media, and weapons of war. Most of us learned the basics of that development from grade school history textbooks. We generally came to appreciate to some degree — though we may have forgotten the lesson — that the phrase “creeping fascism” is redundant. Fascism stomped around in jackboots, smashed windows and burned Reichstags before it fully seized power, but its most important action was the creeping: into language, media, education, and religious institutions. None of these movements arose, after all, without the support (or at least acquiescence) of those in power.
There are differences between Italian Fascism, German Nazism, and their various nationalist descendents. Mussolini secured power chiefly through intimidation. But once he was appointed prime minister by the King in 1922 he began consolidating his dictatorship, a process that took several years and required such dealings as the creation of Vatican City in 1929 to secure the Church’s goodwill. Some later fascist leaders, like Augusto Pinochet, came to power in coups (with the support of the CIA). Others, like Hitler, won elections, after a decade of “creeping” into the culture by normalizing nationalist pride based on racial hierarchies and nursing a sense of aggrieved persecution among the German people over perceived humiliations of the past.
In every case, leaders exploited local hatreds and inflamed ordinary people against their neighbors with the constant repetition of an alarming “Big Lie” and the promises of a strongman for salvation. Every similar movement that has arisen since the end of WWII, says Yale University Professor of Philosophy Jason Stanley in the video above, has shared these characteristics: using propaganda to create an alternate reality and paying obeisance to a “cult of the leader,” no matter how repugnant his tactics, behavior, or personality. “Right wing by nature,” fascism’s patriarchal structure appeals to conservatives. While it mobilizes violence against minorities and leftists, it seduces those on the right by promising a share of the spoils and validating conservative desires for a single, unifying national narrative:
Fascism is a cult of the leader. It involves the leader setting the rules about what’s true and false. So any kind of expertise, reality, all of that is a challenge to the authority of the leader. If science would help him, then he can say, “Okay, I’ll use it.” Institutions that teach multiple perspectives on history in all its complexity are always a threat to the fascist leader.
Rather than simply destroying institutions, fascists twist them to their own ends. The arts, sciences, and humanities must be purged of corrupting elements. Those who resist face job loss, exile or worse. The important thing, says Stanley, is the sorting into classes of those who deserve life and property and those who don’t.
[O]nce you have hierarchies set up, you can make people very nervous and frightened about losing their position on that hierarchy. Hierarchy goes right into victimhood because once you convince people that they’re justifiable higher on the hierarchy, then you can tell them that they’re victims of equality. German Christians are victims of Jews. White Americans are victims of Black American equality. Men are victims of feminism.
The appeal to “law and order,” to police state levels of control, only applies to certain threatening classes who need to be put back in their place or eliminated. It does not apply to those at the top of the hierarchy, who recognize no constraints on their actions because they perceive themselves as threatened and in a state of emergency. It’s really the immigrants, leftists, and other minorities who have taken over, “and that’s why you need a really macho, powerful, violent response”:
Law and order structures who’s legitimate and who’s not. Everywhere around the world, no matter what the situation is, in very different socioeconomic conditions, the fascist leader comes and tells you, “Your women and children are under threat. You need a strong man to protect your families.” They make conservatives hysterically afraid of transgender rights or homosexuality, other ways of living. These are not people trying to live their own lives. They’re trying to destroy your life, and they’re coming after your children. What the fascist politician does is they take conservatives who aren’t fascist at all, and they say, “Look, I know you might not like my ways. You might think I’m a womanizer. You might think I’m violent in my rhetoric. But you need someone like me now. You need someone like me ’cause homosexuality, it isn’t just trying for equality. It’s coming after your family.”
Stanley offers several historical examples for his assessment of what he breaks down into a total of 10 tactics of fascism. (See an earlier video here in which he discusses 3 characteristics of the ideology.) Like Umberto Eco, who identified 14 characteristics of what he called “ur-fascism” in a 1995 essay, Stanley notes that “not all terrible things are fascist. Fascism is a very particular ideological structure” that arose in a particular time and place. But while its stated aims and doctrines are subject to change according to the psychology of the leader and the national culture, it always shares a certain grouping, or “bundle,” of features.
Each of these individual elements is not in and of itself fascist, but you have to worry when they’re all grouped together, when honest conservatives are lured into fascism by people who tell them, “Look, it’s an existential fight. I know you don’t accept everything we do. You don’t accept every doctrine. But your family is under threat. Your family is at risk. So without us, you’re in peril.” Those moments are the times when we need to worry about fascism.
Below we’re adding Stanley’s recent interview where he explains how America has now entered fascism’s legal phase. You can read his related article in The Guardian.
Related Content:
Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism
The Nazis’ 10 Control-Freak Rules for Jazz Performers: A Strange List from World War II
Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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