So the thing is classical liberals were (and are) capable of a lot of damage without Fascism. Fascism is a specific ideology. Not the suffering people are capable of creating. It's important to understand that your normal democracy is perfectly capable of creating mass suffering.
i got a lot of downvotes last time i said it, but the definition of fascism is just "stuff i don’t like" right?
/s
Never forget, the fruit of the tree of capitalism is fascism.
Capitalism unrestrained and left to do its thing, as it has, always leads to fascism. Fascism is the takeover of the state by the capitalists.
This is why fascism is blooming all over the western world. The global capitalist economy is simply in full bloom sitting on entirely captured nation states and fruiting.
The fruit being concentration camps, war, poverty, and scapegoating. Anything to blame literally anyone and everything else for all the inhuman malice the capitalists are doing to attempt to satiate their unquenchable greed.
If anyone still cares about maybe not ending the world for humanity, the capital markets must be destroyed, and speculative investment by passive robber barons not actively participating in laboring to produce products and services must be outlawed. But don't worry, we'll fade into the oblivion of greed made climate change out of cowardice. We'll probably be grateful to die to that after the Fascists have had their fun.
Fascism is the takeover of the state by the capitalists.
What. Capitalism is already the takeover of the state by capitalists. The state apparatus is just the means by which the dominant class exerts its power.
USA 1941:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
The German Nazis loved the whole salute to the flag thingy.
Also Henry Ford - The International Jew
Also American Eugenics Society
Hot take: forcing children to pledge allegiance should be more concerning than the exact posture they are ordered to make while doing so.
when I think of fascism I first think of America, then Nazi Germany
Not that Nazi Germany wasn't far worse but America is a right now thing, not an 80 years ago thing.
From a lemmygrad post on fascism
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially "adopting parliamentary democracy”. They haven't changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Make no mistake about it: parliamentary / bourgeois democracy is not only a more stable form of government, it's also far more effective at carrying out colonialism, and killing millions of innocent people.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
While the criticism is on point, I think you're underselling the legitimate dire fear modern leftists have when they see the brutality of the periphery returning home. We have to recognize that - individually - we're incredibly weak in the face of a mobilized police state. And we have every reason to be horrified of The Jakarta Method being visited on LA or Atlanta or Houston, particularly if we're members of that domestic political underclass so often targeted for abuse.
Any opposition must be a unified and organized resistance. But we are also plagued by mass surveillance, structural alienation, and a profound sense of vulnerability cultivated over decades of "War On" maximalist state propaganda. So we're feeling weak, we don't know who we can trust, and we see this horrifying inevitability cresting over our heads like a tsunami.
This isn't a betrayal of comrades abroad but a reflection of our own dismal moral, disunity, and despair. It represents one more hurdle for a modern western left to overcome and should be received as such, rather than used as a bludgeon to degrade left-wing moral even further.
Far better to be awake and aware and justifiably afraid of the threat of fascism than blind to it as the unaligned, compromised by it as the liberals, or enthusiastically participatory as the conservatives.
I think you’re underselling the legitimate dire fear modern leftists have when they see the brutality of the periphery returning home.
Liberal democracies have historically been as brutal to their domestic populations as any historical fascist formulation. You can look at how the US treated (and still treats) it's internal colonies / minorities. Nazi Germany explicitly wanted to carry out in eastern europe, what the US successfully carried out against native peoples, and failed.
Even outside of internal colonies, if you look at how the US or Britain treated its workers or its poor of their own races(they arguably entirely defeated its domestic working class movement, rebased their countries on finance capital, and exported class struggle to the global south), it doesn't look any different than how the historical fascist countries also defeated their working class movements.
To me, the basis of this is western chauvinism, and belief that "liberal democracy" isn't far worse. By pointing a finger at fascism, they get to keep their belief in the supremacy of their mode of government, that continues to wreak havoc on not just the globe, but internally also. It's a subtle form of western-supremacist scapegoating (pointing a finger at a settler-colonialism that dared to attack western countries also)
Yes I know my enemies. They're the teachers that taught me to fight me. Compromise. Conformity. Assimilation. Submission. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Brutality. The Elite... all of which are American dreams...
None of that is fascism. It's just run of the mill liberalism.
Anyone downvoting this, should be able to explain why what the the US and European powers did to Africa, Asia, and the americas during the 1700-1900s, was any better or fundamentally different than what fascist formulations from 1920-1945 did. And those atrocities were all done using a far more stable form of government: bourgeois parliamentarism / liberal democracy.
People really need to read Losurdo's - Liberalism, a counter-history. Liberals invented the slave trade, and the victorian holocausts. The only difference between them and the fascists, are that they're far better at colonialism and genocide than the fascists were.
I keep trying to tell people classical liberals were bastards. There's this perception that just because we can vote that means we can't be the bad guys. It's an ideological catechism that actually fits with the above picture. If Fascism is just whenever mass suffering and death is perpetrated but also World War 2 non voting systems run by strong men then it gives the modern person living in a democracy permission to stop paying attention. After all they can vote and their guy would never.
We need to get this through people's heads, stop putting flashy words on human rights violations and start holding leaders accountable. Because a culture of not being accountable is how you get actual Fascism.
While not exclusive to it, they are elements of fascism.
It's funny that we have all these lists and essays and books on how fascist ideology and policy is a confluence of many such elements, yet people still act as tough "is this person/party/state fascist?" is a simple yes or no question with no gray area.
There's a joke that if you ask 10 people to define fascism, you'll get 10 different answers.
It's an imprecise term whose definition changes with every author who makes a try of it. Even the more popular lists of traits like Eco's or Paxton's have a lot of issues and contradictions which ppl have pointed out.
Any posts that even mention fascism always devolve into ppl trying and failing to agree on its definition, the point of this deflective practice enabling ppl to uphold their own liberal democracies as being sacred and less genocidal.
It's not quite that ambiguous. I find that when you're willing to engage with fascist rhetoric and the underlying worldview, you can see the patterns emerge that these scholars have pointed out.
I absolutely agree that (neo)liberal western societies usually only engage with it in order to isolate differences to feel better about themselves. That was my whole point actually. If you understand it's possible that a society or movement partially but not entirely meets the criteria for fascism, that's an actual starting point for a conversation to counteract it. Rather than doing the fig leaf thing mentioned above to say "see we're technically not fascist" as an excuse to shut down that sameconversation.
The White House’s new exertion of control over the media finally gets us a perfect 14/14 score according to Britt’s Characteristics of Fascism. Granted, it’s not pass/fail. Things can still get far worse.
You left off Hitler being impressed by Henry Ford.
Being very impressed by US segregation laws too.
The nazi's eugenics programs were copy-pasted from California's even, they were explicit about that.
And US scientific racism too
