When things get extreme they get similar.

‘Extreme’ is a vague word, but when you’re talking about communism and fascism (or more generally ‘far-left’ and ‘far-right’ ideology), that’s a false generalization known as ‘horseshoe theory’.

There are many clear counter-examples when talking about communism, like the entire school of anacho-communist ideologies and the existing societies stemming from them (including the Zapatista territory in Mexico with a population of around 360,000, or the FEJUVE federation in Bolivia, or the many anarchist communes around the world).

As for the more authoritarian versions (Stalinist, Maoist and related ideologies), despite their strong one-party systems, they are still extremely different to fascist ideologies in their goals and how they use their strong state to achieve them. To say ‘they are the same in many respects’ would apply just as equally to liberal capitalist states like the USA and allies, with their infamously militarized police, constant wars and imperial militarism, strong cult of nationalism (for the US, it’s centered on the Founding Fathers), mass imprisonment and state interference in bodily autonomy.

But I still like the unix motto, about doing one thing well

I prefer this because it does give me more (<_< , >_> , <_<) liberty to choose what my devices do. I want to control my computers. For my phone, I avoid many apps because I don’t their company to have my personal information, or because I don’t trust them. I consider having banking apps on my phone to be a risk I don’t want to take. It also seems like bundling could have security implications, such as having a messaging app and finance app so interconnected that a flaw in one could facilitate access to the other (but I do say that naively, this is not security advice or insight).

We also see a lot of people saying “I don’t use Facebook, but I just have [Facebook Messenger/Marketplace]”, so there is a very real-world case where people don’t want the whole package bundled.

But I certainly acknowledge the downsides of this. I abandoned Debian partly due to outdated apps, but also partly because my disparate preferences created a Frankensteinian mess which didn’t have the smooth interoperability of a DE-centres OS (like Ubuntu-flavours or Mint) or the interoperability we see in that video, where the map is connected smoothly to the ride hire. I can see the metaphor of the collectivism/individialism dichotomy at play there too.

If the citizens weren’t tacitly benefiting, in any way from the resource extraction of the bourgeoisie, maybe you’d have a point there; but since they do, you don’t

Someone tacitly benefiting from a state’s imperialism doesn’t stop them simultaneously being victims of the absolute horror that is capitalism. That’s a big part of why even in the most exploitative regimes there are millions of anti-capitalists who engage in international solidarity. The capitalist class like to pretend there’s some national unity at play when they screw over the proletariat, but it’s all clearly bullshit.

Just fuck off if you’re gonna go to bat for a settler before you waste any more of both of our time.

I don’t bat for settlers. I’m publicly replying to your public reply, because it was sectarian in a way which is harmful to the international socialist movement. If you think this conversation is wasting your time, then just ignore it.

Nice resource, thanks for finding it for us!

There was a similar investigation in… I want to say Australia and their current major neo-Nazi org. An undercover infiltrator was able to film an older member admitting to being a higher-up manager in a casino earning six-figures and discriminating against employees based on race. Afterwards they got fired. You can also find various antifascist blogs where they publish dox of neo-Nazis and often you see them getting fired as a result.

Remember: this causes real, material damage to their operations. Some try to buy rural property to use for training or buy places to use as ‘active clubs’, some will use hire cars/trucks and some will want to fund core members to be full-time activists, so taking away their income makes this all harder.

Cool slogan, but that is an extremely tough thing to do in any capitalist state, let alone the USA.

As long as workers are armed, the state will demand the cops are armed tenfold. And what solution is there except organizing enough to actually threaten the state? This is actually that tough.

If I remember correctly, the admin (a US Lolbertarian) finally closed it down, among other reasons, when they realized the resident nazis there were not just joking to troll da libs and actually believed the things they were saying about ‘jewish shapeshifters’. They wanted a free speech haven, and so they got the people we collectively told to shut up.

Why would it? It seems like it would just be similar to the circlejerk forums they’ve have for decades, alienated from the mainstream and unable to normalize their ideas and recruit so easily.

It sounds as if you’re using the atrocities of the French bourgeoisie as a way to excuse nationalist bigotry against a people. The French state is imperialist and colonist, the French citizens are mostly victims of capitalism, not the settlers.

Obviously it’s a different situation with French people overseas, but we’re not in that context.

They hide their faces because antifascists put in the effort to let the community know who they are. Many a fascist has lost a six-figure job or been kicked out of home, so they’re scared alright.

I don’t know about this group specifically (‘Blood Tribe’) although most neo-Nazi orgs have one or a few leaders, perhaps ex-military, but are primarily recruiting nerdy alienated teens who spend most of their time online. There are leaked Patriot Front training videos and if you haven’t already seen their Philadelphia march, they did crumble like a burnt cookie when the community came out and started punching them back into their U-Haul vans.

Not sure how it would go with guns, but I have little faith in them fighting off more than just spraying a few bullets into a crowd.

should

Well, who is going to do it? (if you aren’t already, get organized!)

I don’t understand why they have no fear of this at all.

Most people don’t want to go to prison or be shot. Even in WWI there were many trenches who organically decided not to shoot each other. So the odds that someone would just open fire are small, even if real. That’s also why armed antifascists are also comfortable enough to provide defense at marches and events.

It’s a tough two-sided situation, because open-carry laws were what allowed the Black Panthers to defend people against police.

This time, the problem isn’t the guns but that Nazis are there and comfortable enough to get together and hold them. If there were no guns, it would still be a problem, they just make it worse.

I don’t believe that fascism can be defined as an ideology, because fascists aren’t ideologically coherent.

It very clearly can’t be one coherent ideology, just like liberalism isn’t, just like communism isn’t. I’m definitely not trying to claim even those individual types (e.g. Italian Fascism, Nazism) are consistent, internally logical, or any of that. Rather, there are common themes, ideas and features which group them together and distinguish them from other ideologies. These groups form a model of relationships between values, ideas and behaviors.

The reason I bring historical circumstance into this is because this model acknowledges attributes like militarism and class collaboration as core components of fascism, with the implied question: why did militarism and class collaborationism take hold in some cases (where a fascist regime rose) and not in others (where it fizzles or is defeated)? Historical factors like World War I and the subsequent wave of communist uprisings are related to why fascist ideologies were developed and were supported by many ex-military and bourgeois. And that is why the conservative racist chauvinism in the neoliberal US and Europe is taking remarkably different shapes to the fascist movements of the 1920s, despite those similarities which guide your definition all being present.

An example of this is neo-Nazi movements like Patriot Front and their international equivalents, which do not receive the blessing of the owning class, which are floundering and failing worse than the British Union of Fascists. There are reasons why they can’t replicate the same political strategy and tactics as they did before, and some of those reasons are because we now have different environmental factors. They can’t recruit defeated ex-servicemen en masse, so they now primarily recruit vulnerable alienated nerdy teen boys. They can’t yet (and often don’t want to) earn the blessing of the bourgeoisie at scale because the populations have shifted in a more progressive direction. So then we see neo-Nazi ‘Siege’ tactics emerge, which are inspired by late-1800s Propaganda of the Deed anarchist tactics, and that is not going well for them either.

Then, we have White Nationalist and/or Christian Nationalists as politicians and billionaires. They often don’t want militarism or have military values. They probably don’t want class collaboration (because they’re winning in the class struggle). So like their goals, their tactics and strategies will overall differ to the fascist movements, despite the shared chauvanism.

If you have suggestions on how to adjust or change the definition, it would be helpful.

I worry that it is too broad, discarding what makes fascist movements unique. I believe the part about violence is ultimately redundant, as I assume systematic chauvinism itself makes individual violence and violent repression likely. The definition, in my view, is really just describing a strategy of using chauvinistic hierarchy, and I don’t understand why that is special enough to be called ‘fascism’, if anything that will just trivialize fascist movements and make the word itself banal, since for example xenophobic chauvinism is a strategy used by almost all governments worldwide, and which does lead to domestic violence.

Carl and the Aqua Team make their position on piracy very clear.

https://inv.us.projectsegfau.lt/watch?v=MCTlcJMCSpM

Don’t know why you’d give a joke answer at all, but there’s nothing wrong with unsweetened yogurt (e.g. greek) on potato. Put chives on there, maybe some zataar. Or use it to offset a chilli sauce, make a barbecue sauce creamy. I’d even just have it by itself on fries.

How is that Stalinist? Censorship isn’t some unique rare policy, even 5EYES countries regularly challenge the legality of E2EE.

I wonder if it’s useful to characterize fascism as a political strategy, as it seems this might ignore the historical conditions which form it and guide it (e.g. returning military, petit-booj resistance to the labor movement to preserve their class interests) and therefore inform us of how other classes will generally act as the labor movement grows.

How would you describe fascism as a political strategy? Does this mean, for example, using scapegoats (like racial minorities and queer folk) as a threat to rally for dictatorial powers?

1) Ideologies are frameworks which guide actions, not a list of symptoms.

Ideologies are formed by material conditions in history, not just a group of ideas put together. That’s why neoliberalism and fascism are also distinct, despite all the surface-level similarities we can see around the world.

Fascism wasn’t just invented by someone saying ‘why doesn’t one person have all the power and get rid of minorities’. Fascism grew out of the conditions of the 1910s in Europe during a wave of socialist and communist uprisings which threatened the bourgeois, quelled by returning soldiers from WWI. That’s why it’s militaristic and ultranationalist, that’s why it’s anti-communist and anti-liberal.

2. This list ignores other core traits, including those listed in the very next sentence after that quote, such as anti-communism anti-liberalism and anti-democratic ideas, class collaborationist, traditionalism w/ selective modernism, primary support base among the petit bourgeois, denouncement of ‘[haute] bourgeois capitalism’ despite often working alongside the haute booj to subdue the lower class.

Fascism is born out of anti-communist sentiment in the petit-bourgeoisie (lower owning class), while two of those countries are ruled by communist parties. Russia is a haute-bourgeoisie capitalist state, not class collaborationist or petit-bourgious. China and North Korea openly dominate the haute booj rather than vice versa. Contrast these all against fascist states.

3. Saying ‘Check’ for cases which clearly don’t check:

• The CPC (‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’) and WPK (Juche) are not far-right. They’re both generally considered far-left, and certainly not far-right (FWIW, ‘left’ and ‘right’ are a poor model for understanding politics).

• Ultranationalism is not ‘lots of nationalism’, it’s when a country “asserts or maintains detrimental hegemony, supremacy, or other forms of control over other nations (usually through violent coercion) to pursue its specific interests.” North Korea clearly doesn’t have control over other nations.

• China does not believe in militaristism.

• What natural social hierarchy do these states believe in?

• Russia is individualist, not collectivist.

• What regimentation is there?

Some of those other points are debatable (such as congress party structures with a president being dictatorships, where fascists explicitly denounce that as liberalism), but these are some which are just blatant.

I’m being pedantic because lives are at stake, and recognizing different ideologies is how you learn to combat them.

But if you want to treat it like a joke, go ahead. [edit: redacting petty insult]