So the thing is classical liberals were (and are) capable of a lot of damage without Fascism. Fascism is a specific ideology. Not the suffering people are capable of creating. It's important to understand that your normal democracy is perfectly capable of creating mass suffering.
i got a lot of downvotes last time i said it, but the definition of fascism is just "stuff i don’t like" right?
/s
Most Americans know America isn't immune to fascism. That's why we are on guard.
None of that is fascism. It's just run of the mill liberalism.
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.
I keep trying to tell people classical liberals were bastards. There's this perception that just because we can vote that means we can't be the bad guys. It's an ideological catechism that actually fits with the above picture. If Fascism is just whenever mass suffering and death is perpetrated but also World War 2 non voting systems run by strong men then it gives the modern person living in a democracy permission to stop paying attention. After all they can vote and their guy would never.
We need to get this through people's heads, stop putting flashy words on human rights violations and start holding leaders accountable. Because a culture of not being accountable is how you get actual Fascism.
Same difference, just one has a smile and bright colors.
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.
There's a joke that if you ask 10 people to define fascism, you'll get 10 different answers.
It's an imprecise term whose definition changes with every author who makes a try of it. Even the more popular lists of traits like Eco's or Paxton's have a lot of issues and contradictions which ppl have pointed out.
Any posts that even mention fascism always devolve into ppl trying and failing to agree on its definition, the point of this deflective practice enabling ppl to uphold their own liberal democracies as being sacred and less genocidal.
Its arguable that its better to define them by the intent of the ideology rather than just their outcomes.
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.
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.
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.
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)
You left off Hitler being impressed by Henry Ford.
Being very impressed by US segregation laws too.
The nazi's eugenics programs were copy-pasted from California's even, they were explicit about that.
And US scientific racism too
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.
Woa, hey now. Too close. I think I'm going to have to back up a truckload of apologia. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP - is it there? Is it up to the line? Good.
Unloads why republics should be ethnically pure, but spun in a way that vaguely unsharps the truths jagged edge, while pining for a time gone by and fear mongering to whatever would be mob that could dawn balaclavas and facemasks to terrorize local neighborhoods with bigoted chants and flags in hand.
I say no, fascist, back to hell with you - and stay there. That is your home, that is where you should stay, forever and ever and ever - and if for some reason they should be let back out, it's up to the entirety of the human species to slap them straight back down to the depths that they came from.
Give me liberty, or give me dead fascists - because the latter has a tendency to produce the former.
I feel like it's unamerican in regards to the values our country espouses, even though it completely and utterly fails to uphold them.
All men are created equal
IS SLAVE STATE
Always has been
Yeah dawg that's my point. We have the ideal of equality but also failed to actually follow through with it.
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.
"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)
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
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.
I get the feeling this is like a Mormon saying their church doesn't fit the description of a cult, despite checking every box.
Btw, I say this AS an ex-mormon, not just picking a random religious group to disparage.
