Notizen zu Texten von Quinn Slobodian und Bruno Latour

Saudi-Arabien als Vorbild

Durch einen Essay bin ich auf Quinn Slobodian aufmerksam geworden. In Does Trump Want America to Look More Like Saudi Arabia? (2025) stellt er dar, wie sehr Donald Trump Saudi-Arabien verehrt und wie eng Trumps Beziehungen dorthin sind. Slobodians These, die ich zuerst als nur ironisch missverstanden habe, ist: Wenn man ein Vorbild dafür sucht, wie Trump die USA umgestalten will, ist Saudi-Arabien wichtiger als die Faschismen der 20er und 30er Jahre. Die fossilen Größenphantasien Trumps (Slobodian nennt es nicht so; sein Fokus ist hier nicht die Klimaproblematik) gleichen denen des saudischen Kronprinzen Mohammed bin Salman.

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I seem to recognize the eternal premises of fascism precisely in being provincial, therefore, in the lack of information, in the lack of awareness of problems which are concretely real, in the refusal to go deeper into matters of life out of laziness, prejudice, convenience, and presumption. To brag about being ignorant, to seek to affirm ourselves or our group not with the strength that comes from real skill, from experience, but instead with boastings, with affirmation of the self for their own sake alone, the unfolding of feigned qualities rather than true ones. For instance, sexual exhibitionism is also fascism. It should be an emotion, and, instead, it is danger of becoming a show, someting clownish and useless, an ugly thing which women endure passively and dumfoundedly. One cannot fight fascism without identifying it as that aspect of us which is stupid, shabby, weak-willed: an aspect which has no party-affiliation, of which we should be ashamed and for the repulsion of which it is not enough to declare, „I serve in an antifascist party,“ because that aspect is inside of us, and already once in the past, fascism has given it expression, authority, standing.

[Fellini, F. (1978). Amarcord: The Fascism within us. An Interview with Valerio Riva. In: Federico Fellini, essays in criticism (S. 20–26). Oxford University Press. Original italienisch (online nicht gefunden): Fellini, F. (1974). Il fascismo dentro di noi, Intervista di Valerio Riva. In: Il flm ‘Amarcord’ di Federico Fellini, ed. G. Angelucci and L. Betti, Cappelli, Bologna, 1974, p. 103.]

Die Quelle für die englische Version ist im Internet Archive zugänglich.