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)
I think this is the critique I share. A lot of leftists who seem to be from outside the US are putting on their theory and history caps and pointing out how bad the US is as an imperial power, ignoring that right now Americans who see what is happening would do anything to revert things to the way they were even if that was the neo liberal status quo. Sure could have used this analysis in more peaceful times when the Jakarta method wasn’t a real possibility facing socialist discourse. When facing fascism at home the last thing you care about is exactly the precise and correct way history should play out. In this sense I feel like the left absolutely fails constantly, for all the talk of international solidarity there sure is a lack of organizing. Can’t organize with anyone who isn’t a Marxist, I guess?
I also feel like saying the US was always fascist is skewing the definition of fascism and defanging it. “America was always fascist” makes it seem like the real fascism we are facing should be business as usual. Fascism is a distinct and brutal form of capitalism. Marxists have known about this, and I feel conflating with neo liberalism is revisionist.
The analysis is correct, in that America was always a force of oppression across the globe, but that doesn’t change the fact the local population enjoyed some sort of stability and predictability. Economically suppressed with a corporate two party system? Of course. Arbitrary overt censorship and rounding up of civilians? Not necessarily, and that is where we are going. Is it hypocritical to turn a blind eye to the suffering of people around the world? Sure, but most people are not aware of this, and doesn’t change the sheer terror you begin to feel when the oppression comes home.
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.
It is inevitable that capitalists will conquer their state, but with constant vigilance, for a time, capitalism can and is used as an engine to serve society, so long as it is heavily regulated and hobbled. The Nordic nations for example.
It’s when the capitalists begin to be allowed to influence their government, and convince the people THEY can live larger than their neighbors if it weren’t for all the social equity evil government enforces, capitalism’s signature siren call.
The Nordic countries still have free to roam policies. Capitalism here capturing their own regulators and being allowed to warp public opinion with blatant self serving lies through for profit media pulpits make some Americans eager to shoot other Americans.
I’m not for capitalism at all because it eventually leads here, to fascism, and eventually someone in power will be dumb or corrupt enough to let their guard down. But we let our capitalists conquer our government, as have several western nations. And here we are.
It is inevitable that capitalists will conquer their state
This I disagree. While we’re seeing it keep winning and winning, and we might be put through all sorts of unimaginable hell’s as it keeps winning, but human societies have been here before. A lot, in fact. People like to point at Mao’s communist China and how bad that was, without knowing about the capitalist warlord China that preceeded it. Conquering the state by their means, such as violence or compromising/begging in grand halls? No, we’ll never win, but nature always wins, it is the one true God we’re all at mercy to. Back in the day of native central-american hyper-capitalism/imperialism/monarchism such as the Mayans, Aztec’s, etc. where the population was literally everyone being enslaved to worship and human sacrifices, salt mines and pyramid building. While we don’t exactly know how it happened (probably plague, it’s always plague) but what is evident is that they consciously rejected hierarchy, dispersed into thousands of different tribes across the Americas, practicing amazingly complicated distributions of land and trade amongst eachother, totally free from any central forms of leadership but a series of central comittee’s, consciously rejecting individualism, consciously rejecting laws in favour of reason, consciously rejecting arbitrary authority, consciously choosing a discussion over coffee and tobacco before resorting to war, even consciously giving preferential treatment to slaves they captured. Instead of labouring over pyramids and mines, they built social housing literal fucking palaces that thanks to modern archaeology tech has unearthed these things by the hundreds of thousands. And even then, by the time all that was so ancient it was all buried and overgrown, when the Europeans first came over and saw the garden forests they’ve maintained for millenia, the remarkable intelligence displayed by people who couldn’t write or didn’t wear pants, that women had autonomy! It was quite enlightening to those Europeans, so much so that they wrote plays that questioned European authority through sock puppets and fictional natives used as vehicles to promote ideas such as liberty, freedom, and atheism, without being imprisoned or executed for heresy. It was so popular, so was tobacco and coffee, upon which these certain Natives would come and speak in these French salons, the very same ones that great European Enlightenment thinkers frequented. While European culture has yet to assimilate to (Native) American culture, it has been reeling since, and the European ideaology of Kings has been shaken ever since.
Keep pushing, act as if you’re already free.
None of these are specifically fascism. Get better examples
“You say we live indoors yet you pointed to four walls, a door, and a roof. None of these is specific to a building.”
Fucking hell
He’s right tho. The stuff in the meme are just things that happened under capitalism.
Let’s not whitewash capitalism by blaming its atrocities on fascism.
Well capitalism tends to lead you to fascism so idk how it’s white washing.
