- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- memes@lemmygrad.ml
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None of that is fascism. It’s just run of the mill liberalism.
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.
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.
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…
All of which are American dreams…
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.
For me it’s Germany Italy Spain USA Portugal
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 SocietyHot take: forcing children to pledge allegiance should be more concerning than the exact posture they are ordered to make while doing so.
Didn’t they quickly stop this after it became the Nazis favorite thing?
They only changed it in 1942, which is 9 years after Hitler rose to power and 3 years before his reign ended.
The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
When the United States entered WWII, the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, bemoaned that his country was fighting the wrong enemy. The Nazis, as he explained, were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the true enemy was godless communism and its resolute anti-capitalism. After all, the U.S. had, only some 20 years prior, been part of a massive military intervention in the U.S.S.R., when fourteen capitalist countries sought—in the words of Winston Churchill—to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib.” Dulles understood, like many of his colleagues in the U.S. government, that what would later become known as the Cold War was actually the old war, as Michael Parenti has convincingly argued: the one they had been fighting against communism since its inception.
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.
I get the frustration with unrestrained capitalism and the real harm it can do—wealth concentration, exploitation, and rampant inequality are major issues that can breed extremist movements. However, to claim fascism is an inevitable “fruit” of capitalism ignores a whole host of other historical, cultural, and political factors that shape authoritarian regimes. There are plenty of capitalist societies that have never slipped into fascism because democratic institutions, social safety nets, and regulations acted as guardrails.
It’s also important to remember that while corporations can capture political systems, it takes more than greed to sustain a fascist state—there’s often a strong dose of nationalism, militarism, and scapegoating of minorities involved. Lumping all of these under “capitalism leads directly to concentration camps” oversimplifies a complex issue. Yes, we should criticize harmful capitalist excesses, but we need to be precise in how we analyze the broader political environment that actually fosters fascist ideologies.
You left off Hitler being impressed by Henry Ford.
Being very impressed by US segregation laws too.
And US scientific racism too
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)
Removed by mod
None of these are specifically fascism. Get better examples
Militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation, and strong regimentation of society are all characteristics of fascism listed in the meme.
“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.
This doesnt even mention nationalism or belief in a natural social hierarchy
It would be closer to saying that pointing to four walls, a door and a roof disprove the statement “this is not a building”
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.
Huh…so we passed on all 14…which is a fail…at least from my perspective. Maga perspective may differ.
Yes, perfectly modeling fascism is a failure. I didn’t want to suggest that we hit bottom just because we checked some boxes. There’s still plenty of room for things to get worse if we don’t do anything to stop it.
I feel like it’s unamerican in regards to the values our country espouses, even though it completely and utterly fails to uphold them.
The purpose of a system is what it does
“American values” are just a smokescreen, they aren’t failed, more they serve their purpose of obfuscation well.
Nah man, Americans have values. Freedom, perseverance, independence, self expression. It’s just that we have utterly failed to uphold those values in our actions. Even in the beginning, talking about slavery being terrible but still allowing it for political reasons right at the founding.
Those values only really served as a way for the ruling class that founded America to justify itself. They weren’t genuine.
“Espouses but fails to uphold” sounds more like negligence to me. Negligence would be allowing fascism through inaction (like democrat administration). But the US does far worse than that (funding genocide and propping up fascism elsewhere)
Nah, I liked how I phrased it. We’ve been failing to uphold our ideals since the beginning, even Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite who hated slavery but sure as hell did a lot of it.
Feels like imperializem merits to be further down the line, if not the last panel.
But yes, good memetics in this meme, gg.
I think the point you’re making is true, but the titular argument could still be useful rhetoric to the misguided patriot.
The title is sarcasm
No, this is Patrick
