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The only way to beat shitty people is to prove that you’re better at whatever dumbass game they’re playing than them. Evangelicals? Just pretend to be a DesNat/fundie. When someone is being violent towards you, the only way to “win” is by returning it 10 fold. Their worldview is based on superiority, do not let them delude themselves and others.
I saw a dude with nazi tats on the bus today and while I didn’t hit him what I told him after he got all huffy and in my face for saying “fuck you nazi” would probably get me moderated. But it involved a famous Inglorious Bastards reference and how it would be the centerpiece at a party I’d be arranging if he touched me.
Governments are inherently fascistic entities. Ruling by so-called democratic majority excludes too many, even when you pretend that the way propaganda works doesn’t completely extinguish the concept of democracy. We are all living in a conservative socioeconomic reality that for the most part has many many, many many fascistic elements.
If you strip them down to their base mechanics and throw in bigotry and elitism, then yeah, but that’s not what governments are. It’s like calling all people spooky pale skeletons. When you remove someone’s bones and dry them out they are, but inside a living person they are pink and only a part of the whole. Fascism refers to a particular state that a government can be in, but does not apply to all governments.
So in reality they inherently have many fascistic elements that are unavoidable is what you’re actually saying. On paper everything looks like roses.
The bigger issue is that the term fascism becomes less useful when applied to all governments, especially because fascism exists outside of government in religious institutions and in culture more broadly. Hell, if you think about it, anyone using violence to achieve a goal are using similar methods to fascists and therefore are fascists. Kind of breaks down when you focus on the mechanism rather than the intent. Government is just a mechanism of authority that can be used to enforce or reject fascism as history has shown.
I disagree, it is very useful to show how the tentacles of it are actually everywhere. It is the mechanism of it that is the bigger problem. The mindset of action disconnected from philosophy is the true battleground, before intent is even part of the conversation. I believe the whitewashing of fascism is a much bigger problem than the efficacy of the term; people understand they don’t want fascism in their lives, so if you point out and are able to show how insidious and ever pervasive it is in their own lives, and how they probably have been educated to overlook it; it is very useful. A bunch of scoffing conservatives and their apologists should not dictate the language used.
I guess it really comes down to how one feels about Anarchy. Anarchists may be spot on in general, but I don’t have faith in us jumping to a stable stateless society anytime soon. If anything, I believe we need global organizations to solve global challenges. I want people to understand the nature of the state, but I also believe that government is less trouble than it’s worth. How else are we going to provide resources for projects that benefit the common good. Are we going to have to build and disband organizations every time we need to build a new project? That would take so much time without a common agreed upon framework that everyone agreed to.
What’s really necessary is a united coalition built more democratically and with more teeth than the current UN but with checks on elitism. The issue is that building such a powerful tool is dangerous and could backfire, but I honestly don’t see a better way to tackle climate change, global capitalism, pandemics, space travel, and anything else that is large in scope.
I think a global state is far more likely than a stateless society, so I would want to make it as good as possible. After all, what really matters is that we work with what we have and try to build something better.
If we’re suggesting possible future organisations, I’m with you about a global authority, but I want it to be run and maintained by some sort of artificial intelligence. There are currently no humans that I can think of that cannot fall victim to their own desires and become corrupt when faced with power. Just take that worry completely out of the equation. I would like to think at the point that we have that level of AI, that that technology will have already found solutions to a lot of our current global problems.
Until then your proposal is sound!
Fascism is at its core about maintaining societal heirarchy. Bigotry and elitism naturally follow from the belief in heirarchies.
It’s no surprise that Mussolini advocated for “class collaboration” (and also coined the term himself), in direct opposition to the fundamentally leftist concept of class struggle.
Authoritarianism is not always fascism, even if I did accept your premise. Fascism isn’t just “governments I don’t like.” Perhaps read some political philosophy before coming in with metaphorical guns blazing?
Here’s a link to Ur-Fascism, to start. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
You’re splitting hairs and missing the point, your reading comprehension seems to be wanting and you are condescending as fuck.
I’m only condescending to people who deserve it. And language shapes cognition; it’s not my fault you don’t understand that.
No. States are inherantly authoritarian entities, but authoritarianism is not simply a synonym for fascism. Authoritarianism is essential to fascism and fascism is always authoritarian, but not all forms of authoritarianism are fascist.
Have you ever heard the story of how people defeated mussolini by playing bowls?
Huh, the more you know. I thought they hung his body upside down. Must have been a fake AI image
The only good fascist…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It is necessary to be intolerant of intolerance.
Fascism isn’t a legitimate political ideology so there’s nothing to tolerate. It’s just genocide in fancy window dressing.
But intolerance to intolerance should be the last resort and not the default. You should try all the other methods of civilized discourse first.
Not having civilized discourse with people whose political goal is to wipe me and those I love from the face of the earth. Also, “civilized discourse” requires at least two parties who are capable of such a thing.
I’m all with you that you have to gauge the person you’re interacting with. But if intolerance becomes the goto solution then we give up what we’re fighting for. If my son shows intolerance to people of other skin color I will try civilized discourse first and not throw him out of my house at the age of 10. If he’s an adult and all discourse has failed then I might show intolerance.
Children should not be held to the same standards as adults in many things. This is no exception. If that’s your argument, you’re stretching.
Tolerance for fascism is like trying to negotiate with cancer.
I agree but I wasn’t referring to fascism but the principle.
What I didn’t agree with about your post is that intolerance is an attitude. So it’s not something we need to tolerate.
We can tolerate our racist uncle but we shouldn’t tolerate the racism. Because the attitude is like cancer and if we don’t put it in check it will spread.
But intolerance of intolerance should be the last resort and not the default. You should try all the other methods of civilized discourse first.
It’s always good to point out that that is philosophy, not science (neither political or any other kind).
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306 rowan atkinson (mr bean) has an interesting opinion about it, I’d recommend watching the whole video.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
These people never seem to realize that even at its most basic level, ensuring equal rights and freedoms requires a level of forfeiting individual freedoms. In order for everyone to have equal right to physical safety, you forego your freedom to punch them in the face without consequence.
These people go to talk about democracy, describe anarchy, then get upset when reality doesn’t meet their expectations. Your expectations don’t meet reality, bud.
They also don’t understand that protecting rights usually means defending awful people being awful. Rights are meaningless if only the right people get them.
It depends on your definition of awful. People with opposing opinions, perfectly within their legal bounds? Yes. People violating the rights and safety of others? Absolutely not.
Someone somewhere said something smart:
View Tolerance as a contract. If someone is tolerant of others, tolerate them too. But if someone is intolerant towards others, they don’t get to be tolerated either.
If it’s the same writing I’m thinking of I’ll try to remember to link it when I get home.
"Tolerance isn’t an ideal, it’s a contract you’re automatically entered into at birth. The contract protects all involved who agree to the contract, but if you break the binds of the contract you are no longer entitled to it’s protections. To be intolerant of an intolerant person does not break ones commitment to the contract because the intolerant person is no longer protected by the contract. "
Paraphrased AF
I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your ‘opponent’ is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.
most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.
It gets easier to comprehend when it’s tempered by the knowledge of global literacy rates. In the US, for example, 54% of adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.
More than half the planet can barely analyse the nuances between two similar statements, let alone comprehend anything that takes a formal education to learn. As a result many people lack the communicative skills that enable us to avoid conflict because they literally lack a conceptual understanding of the many words they don’t know or understand correctly.
Hell, try even explaining concepts like context and nuance to many people and their eyes glaze over. I’d like to think it’s a largely fixable problem due to insufficient education, but another side of me remembers all my classmates in highschool who failed English.
Ah, you get what you give rule.
AKA: Fuck around and find out.
removed by mod
Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s
Replace the word with “fascists” and it makes so much more logical sense. And this is why wording matters
That makes even less sense or do you think there aren’t any fascists left? Fascism as a dominant ideology ended in countries that still (continuously to this have) have fascists in them.
Saying they defeated fascists doesn’t imply there are no more fascists left.
I can say I hunted deer, that doesn’t mean there are no more deer left in the wild.
By referring to “fascists” (the people) rather than fascism (the ideology) you narrow your description to more accurately present the scope of your statement. The German Nazi party were fascists. They were defeated. We defeated fascists that day. There are more fascists, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t fight and defeat some number of fascists.
I was about to agree with you but then I reread the statement you responded to and it’s:
So your suggestion is to put it:
Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not a native speaker but that’s a weird phrasing. For me it implies (or rather implicates) that all fascists ended because to end is a very strong verb semantically when applied to humans. And honestly, I wouldn’t use it at all.
I meant in the original post haha. Since their comment was that fascism didn’t end in 1945. If the post had said “winning against fascists”, it would make more logical sense
In internet slang the /s means they were making a sarcastic statement, so they were being sarcastic when they said “Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s”.
Yes I know. I was referring to the answer:
Which I interpreted as … well you know. I’m not going to perpetuate this argument.
Millions of Nazis were permanently cured of fascism through the noble efforts of the Allies. :)
You are making jokes about it but there is actually a measurement to proof this: a lot of former fascists got high positions in post war Germany in politics, economy, jurisdiction, media, … and if a former fascist gets an influential position in a liberal democracy like post war Germany, there is no doubt they are cured. /s (if not obvious)
There’s a much better measurement for how many were cured of Fascism
Not everyone who was forced to fight in the military was a fascist. I was talking about influential figures who were influential during and after the Third Reich. That’s a whole different story
I’m trusting the doctors more than you on this one, buddy
Random person: Hey Hitler, can you please stop doing the Holocaust.
Hitler: Nein.
Random person: Damn, guess I can’t do anything. If I used force to stop Hitler from committing a genocide I would be just as bad, because everyone knows killing a Nazi who wants to kill every Jew and killing an innocent Jewish person are equal moral acts.
I honestly don’t understand how people think like this. All they do is enable fascism and the imperial ambitions of more aggressive nations. As long as we live in a world with sovereign nations, some of those nations may do something extremely wrong that requires a war to stop, and that doesn’t mean you just let them do it. Ultimately, war is bad but genocide is worse and sometimes sacrifices have to be made (exclusion existing for nuclear war, which would render humanity and most of life on Earth extinct).
Your problem is comparing Hitler’s holocaust to anything self proclaimed nazis do today. It’s far more effective to just ridicule the handful of them instead of trying to be violent.
It is absolutely an apt comparison. Genocide is a favored tool of fascists because it’s an effective way of quickly wiping away dissident civilians and destroying the mythical enemy they have in their heads. The Nazis alive today would absolutely do the Holocaust again given the ability, and fascism is too popular in too many countries for ridicule alone to work.
Something they might do isn’t worth worrying about. They don’t have any means to actually commit genocide on an organized scale. You lose credibility when you overreact or overstate reality.
Sounds like the kind of thing non-Nazi Germans would’ve said in 1930
You’re correct, they currently don’t have enough concentrated power. But that’s the thing, if they did the genocide would begin immediately. No fascist movement came to power instantly, they built their power slowly through a mixture of government-sanctioned and illegal political activity and when they had accumulated enough power, in a quick strike decapitated their respective democratic governments. You can’t afford to be reactive here because, by the time their regime starts in earnest, it’s already too late. These ideologies need to be destroyed while they’re still fledgling, ridicule only works at the very beginning and we’re too entrenched for it.
They were taught their whole lives that violence is always wrong. That it’s never the correct solution. They can’t concieve of it being the only way out. When you trust liberals to run an education system, you get people with ingrained useless liberal ideas.
*To be clear, using “liberal” from a leftist perspective.
Neoliberalism is how people think like this. In order to stop the wave of strikes, protests, and violent demonstrations for workers rights the capitalist ruling class started heavily pushing the doctrine that “All acts of violence are always morally wrong”. They indoctrinate children into it through the education system and mass media. The intent was to stall the progress of workers rights movements in the long term, and it worked exactly as they intended.
The biggest thing people don’t understand is that governments exerting control necessitates violence, as laws are only recommendations otherwise.
The question of whether something should be a law should always consider: “Is this worth using violence to enforce?”
You’re correct, it’s just a bit demotivating. There must be some way to reinvigorate the labor movement both in the United States and globally, but I’m not entirely sure how. I think the labor movement in the U.S. has recovered a bit from the massive damage that the Reagan administration caused it, but it’s slow-moving.
People have taken the line “violence is not the answer” to the extreme. It is true that violence is rarely the answer. However, there are times when violence is the only answer, because words will literally never work.
Violence is the last answer, when all avenues of negotiation have failed
Thank you for expressing my sentiment in a much more articulate (and concise) manner.
Similar energy:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
I can get people wanting a “one-size fits all” solution where we peacefully resolve all problems and the violent one are obviously evil.
But the unfortunate thing is, you do have to fight for “the right beliefs”, and yes the right beliefs are technically subjective and this could be abused. But there’s just no alternative to taking a specific stance and physically fighting for it no matter what.
Fascism was not defeated in WW2 only Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan. Everyone forgot about fascist Spain and Portugal. What’s more they even made deals with them. My country was left alone to suffer because the war was never against fascism.
Better to see WW2 as a war against fascist expansionism. But yes, Spain and Portugal were left to their own devices, and because of that, millions suffered under the rule of Franco and Salazar.
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The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it’s obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.
In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.
Note that it works because its instinctive. We don’t like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don’t have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.
Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don’t feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.
Otherwise, we’re going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they’ll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they’ll start a civil war.
If we don’t want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that’s what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.
Once civil war breaks out, though, or they’re harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.
rising genocide of transfolkAre you saying modern society is less accepting of trans people than a few decades ago? From my perspective, it seems to be the opposite.
Yes, people are saying that because it’s true:
Human Rights Campaign https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2022#introduction
ILGA-Europe Annual Review (under page 9, bias motivated violence) https://ilga-europe.org/report/annual-review-2023/
Anti-Defamation League https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/online-hate-and-harassment-reaches-record-highs-adl-survey-finds
Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.
It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.
Do I know when it was last this bad? No.
For most of recent history, we were routinely beaten and raped by cops, and legally murdered by men who felt insecure in their masculinity. Things got better for about a decade, and now they want us to return to the way things were. If the GOP were trying to bring back sundown towns, forced labor for made up laws, Jim Crow laws, etc. we’d call that a genocide too.
Bringing back 1950s racial politics would be evil, but I’m pretty sure that even under the loosest definition, it’s not genocide. See, the idea was to oppress and use black people intergenerationally, not wipe them or even all their cultural practices from the face of the earth. Want to use the word “genocide” to make a political statement on the attempted democide of trans people? Go nuts. But check your definitions. There are lots of kinds of evil.
“I want to take away your human rights.”
“Actually that is bad so can you please not do so?”
“Oh I see it now, you’re right, thanks for educating me!”