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I did not expect this tiny book from the 1990s to be as good as it is. The book is about the continuity of fascist ideology in German scientific discourse and general society. It shows extremely well how biologizing societal issues lies at the core of far right ideology. The book's central argument is about ableism (which the author calls "social racism" because it was the 90s). This is ableism understood not only as othering and violence against the disabled, but as a general ethics of ability/usefulness as a virtue: the ableist violence of the Nazi state was directed at the disabled but also the homeless, the unemployed, drug addicts, queers, etc. Ableism, the author argues, is as essential to fascism as racism and antisemitism, but most people including antifascists don't recognize it as such because they would have to confront the ableism baked into their own worldview. I think that is at least as correct now as it was 40 years ago. This book is extremely thought provoking and feels way ahead of its time - in my narrow view at least. I can't wait to reread it in a few months.

This is a journalistic work: it's very thoroughly researched, contains little generalizations and even less analysis, focuses on specific organizations and people. This means that it will be outdated in a few years (the book is from 2020). But for now, this is a well made deep dive into the connections between fascist organizations and combat sports in Germany and internationally. The book is well written, the structure makes sense and no time is wasted. I found the guest-authored chapters on other countries (Italy, Poland, Russia, France and Greece) especially interesting. The only aspect I didn't like is where the author tries to draw some extremely thin connection between neoliberalism and fascist ideology. I think this is an analysis that can make sense in some very specific contexts, but here it's not well made. The observation (made by the author) that both ideologies value individualistic self-improvement doesn't justify the claim that fascism follows from neoliberalism in some fundamental way. For one, fascism predates neoliberalism by half a century! A better conclusion from that observation could be that the specific strain of fascism that the book describes (self disciplined, ascetic and macho) combines the fascist hero ethos with neoliberal ideology in a way that's unique for our neoliberal era. That's not what the author is saying though. But this was just a few paragraphs out of an otherwise excellent book.