It’s not like any candidate was actually good but they did pick the worst one.
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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It's too late.
Fascism isn't something on the horizon. Look at what is happening in Idaho. Within a year or two half of the US states will have criminalized abortion, and all you hear from federal legislators is how important it is that we shovel more money we don't have into other countries' wars.
It's over.
The only power you or I have left is in our immediate local communities, where you can still accomplish the general good.
All of those are aspects of fascism. Restricting individual freedoms is a core part of fascism.
Sad to see you got some downvotes, your takes here are very technically correct and aware of the big picture and actual facts of the mechanisms.
I hate having to tap the "calling the USSR or other AES states fascist is antisemitic" sign
https://jewishcurrents.org/the-double-genocide-theory
My surviving jewish family were freed from a nazi death camp by the people you call fascists. Equating the two is holocaust trivialization and antisemitic. I literally link you to a well known mainstream Jewish historian and activist about this issue. Do you think David Katz is a "tankie"?
You call me scum equivalent to a nazi in response. Have words lost all meaning to you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Soviet_Union
Oh my god there was antisemitism in the USSR, even among some leadership! Several doctors got killed!
You're right, a few incidences of antisemitism are the same as the holocaust, or the pogroms that the pre-soviet monarchy backed by western liberal democracies engaged in. Or the antisemitism in the post soviet union liberal democracies. /s
You are a deeply unserious person. And a holocaust trivializer if it "owns the tankies" apparently. Great priorities.
Can you point me to the exact sentence where I trivialised the holocaust? Hint: I didn't say anything about the holocaust. All I gave you is a link, the rest is your imagination.
You, OTOH, are severely trivialising antisemitism within the USSR. Stop fucking fanboying.
Please fucking what liberal democracies during Tsarist times? England, France, possibly, am I missing one? And none of that antisemitism was home-grown, it was all the fault of those evil foreigners making poor Russian nobles and priests do stuff? The country most busy with fucking with Tsarist Russia, specifically sending Lenin over mind you, was Germany, very much not a liberal democracy. The age of liberal democracies started after WWI.
Oh, so to clarify, you don't think that the USSR could be described as morally equivalent to fascism?
Only in the sense that it is trivial in scale compared to the alternative socioeconomic systems of the time.
Also a woman, stop being sexist by assuming a male default.
During the Russian Civil War the US, Britain and France sure militarily and financially supported those nobles and priests who did pogroms regaining power. They went so far as to invade the USSR. They had previous working relationships with them and wanted them back in power. The nobles and priests were antisemitic, as were their western partners.
Morally? I'm not talking about morally I'm talking objectively and no of course it was objectively fascist. So was Italy and they didn't do the Holocaust. So is Scientology, in case you're looking for an example of non-racist fascists. So are Kahanites and they definitely aren't antisemitic, being Jews and all that. Your point?
Okay, define fascism in a way that excludes liberal democracies and their colonies or neocolonies but includes the USSR. I dont think you know what fascism is.
They literally committed a genocide in Africa as part of their political project, they wanted to basically manifest destiny the Mediterranean, did you not hear about it because the victims weren't (conditionally) white? Do you think they didn't help the Germans do the Holocaust?
Okay this shows me you can't give a coherent definition of fascism. Also imagine not thinking scientology is racist. Lol.
Lolol are you seriously going to make that argument? Do I need to pull up photos of Jewish people who collaborated with the nazis?
My definition of fascism is the usual one you'll hear from any anarchist: People who send me to bed. But feel free to read Umberto Eco and observe how the USSR gets a score of 10 out of 14, where of course one would be sufficient for fascism to coalesce. Also how you were all too happy to display rejection of modernism by your implicit dissing of liberal democracies. Please, go ahead, tell me about the grand colonial empire of Estonia! Of Greenland! Of Samoa!
If your liberal democracy puts you into a mental health ward or gulag for your opinion about the system it's not a liberal democracy. ML states OTOH really like to do that. There's an inherent totalitarianism to them, they demand that everyone thinks precisely like some centralised decision organ decides, and you tankies will even defend that. Note here totalitarian vs. authoritarian: Thought itself is controlled, not just practical behaviour (fulfilling the quota won't help you, you still can't complain). That kind of monopolisation of the prerogative of interpretation is a practical sign of fascism, once it is coalesced. The Ur-fascism points are merely crystallisation points.
The very point that you can type all that in (presumably) a liberal democracy without getting disappeared means that you're not living under fascism.
It's really something, MLs having so shit takes that you make me defend liberal democracies.
This is a elementary school misreading of that text, it was explicitly not supposed to be a litmus test.
Marxism is literally a modernist philosophy, liberalism is rooted in the enlightenment era. Have you opened a history book in the last 5 years?
Marxist democracies > bourgeois oligarchy aka liberal democracy
Disagreement is treason (elementary school dismissal without argumentative engagement), reference to your precious cult of tradition (Nazism is also modernist you muppet) which you of course misread all the time that's another strike for Newspeak your "Marxist democracy" is neither of the two, lastly the equation of bourgeois oligarchy with liberal democracy (one does not imply the other), that's strike four, obsession with a plot and/or the enemy is simultaneously weak and strong, could go either way. Maybe just popular elitism.
As your lawyer I counsel you to continue posting.
Source?
Lol. Yes trying to return to an imagined past and having an intellectual tradition are the same thing /s
By that logic basically all ideology(including yours) is fascism, and to not be a fascist we cannot learn literally anything ever about politics.
You said I was rejecting modernism by rejecting liberal democracy, which is literally rooted in enlightenment ideas. I was saying you are not making sense, because you are saying I'm rejecting modernism when I'm rejecting enlightenment era ideology.
How about another strike for literally knowing what words mean and using them properly? You did not say modern, you said modernism. If you didn't want to be misinterpreted, do not use language that conveys an entirely different meaning.
I wish I had the confidence to make such bold claims with so little knowledge. Have you even ever read about "dictatorship of capital"? Do you even know what that term means? How about you explain it in your own words for me.
Loling at popular elitism.
Also I will never claim that the current state of capitalism is weak.
Also again you are misreading the 14 points as some litmus test.
Me. And Eco. You just can't let it go, can you, that someone disagrees with your precious ideology.
I never said that. I said that you think that all truth has already been revealed by Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and possibly Mao. At least one of which you misread but that's another topic.
You are rejecting the rational development that started with the Enlightenment, aka modernism. Nazism and Marxism-Leninism are both part of that and reject it in their own ways, in a sense anticipating post-modernism. Neither are theologies or whatever, both reject democracy, both reject actually scientific socialism, the proper rational strain to follow, aka Anarchism. Something something complexity theory I'll let you do your own research can't be arsed to feed that to a tankie.
How's the GINI coefficient where you're from? Maybe that's the reason. Over where I am, struggle-wise, the labour aristocracy is actually kinda more of a headache than capital because capital is so easy to see.
What is the proper application in your mind then, pray tell? Can you explain it?
There's a reason I said "one would be sufficient for fascism to coalesce around", not "one is sufficient for fascism". Otherwise post-modernism would be fascist which makes no sense. At the very least you need an ideological group which corrals around a specific instantiation of those points, a particular way to gloss over the inherent contradictions, really, and engages in political action.
Eco claims disagreement was treason in the USSR? What supporting evidence does he use?
Bwahahahahaha this is really funny, literally reading a book on expanding marxist concepts into the sphere of transness
Marxism is a living intellectual tradition about ruthless critique, which includes of past leaders and thinkers.
Lol, sure, you can define words to mean whatever you want.
On democracy- literally every socialist state has more democracy than bourgeois democracies, because the people are (imperfectly) represented by politicians, the politicians are not there to serve capital.
Tell me how your anarchist projects in Catalonia and Ukraine were actually based anti-authoritarians when they did labor and concentration camps. Or when Ukraine was basically a military dictatorship, and enabled kulaks to massacre Jewish people.
Oh, or tell me about your more modern projects (the ones that actually claim to be anarchists, not indigenous resistors in Central America who don't claim to be socialist or anarchist)
"Anarchism is a coat that only leaks when it is wet. "
Wait, so your argument is that the labor aristocracy actually controls your country? You are responding to me asking you if you could define dictatorship of capital.
Then what youre saying holds no water? Sufficient to coalesce around isn't the same as a definition of.
Also Marxism doesn't really fit any single point in the definition.
I don't even. He wrote about fascism in general, not about specific regimes short of Italy which he uses for some anecdotes, unsurprising given that he's Italian.
The rest of what you wrote makes just as little sense, so goodbye. Talk to me when you're grown up.
Ah, so we are at the part where the pigeon shits on the chess board, declares victory, and flies off.
The US, Britain. France.
The US, France, Britain, and other countries literally invaded the USSR to try to restore the monarchy.
My point is that the amount of antisemitism in the soviet union wasn't even approaching the level of pogroms, which was much smaller scale than the holocaust.
Why don't you call me woke next, CHUD.
I completely agree with your gist but
Dude, don't do philology dirty like that. They're reading dusty old tomes all day long and you need a lot of historical knowledge to make proper sense of them. We couldn't read hieroglyphics without their work, and their extrapolations have been proven by Hittite (which was discovered after the reconstruction of proto-Indo-European and looks exactly as expected). The two disciplines feed into each other. Dr. Daniel Jackson is a philologist and at least as cool as Indiana Jones and do I need to mention J.R.R. Tolkien.
Okay, so people who support liberal "democracies" like the US currently backing genocide should be shot on sight then? Or just the governments responsible?
The problem with "those genocidal communists" is that liberal democracies are significantly more genocidal. You want to go with the least bad system.
Take the notion that man-made famine counts as genocide. 8 million people starve under the capitalist world order every year.
Nazi Germany actually had a more liberal view of abortion than the laws that a lot of Republican states are now passing (for reasons that you can probably imagine, but still)
Nazi Germany isn't the only form of fascism, and had other individual freedoms even more restricted. Nazi Germany was a far-right, reactionary state that violently suppressed Workers and stripped their freedoms, just like American conservatives are attempting to do and are working towards.
How liberal was their view of social equality in regards to varying races?
You DO see how disingenuous your example is, right?
The Nazi stance on abortion wasn't "liberal", that's ludicrous. It ranged from being forbidden for parents of German blood to encouraged or even forced in other cases, it was all about their ideas of racial hygiene. Not even the GOP is that racist, or can you imagine them mandating abortions for mixed-race couples?
The only case where this might be true is even the ban on abortion for German couples did not mean a ban on abortions in medical cases. German (not just Nazi) law generally considers it, as is proper, self-defence. Honestly I don't think a legal system which doesn't consider it such can consider itself a legal system at all, Radbruch and everything.