• stebo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    12·
    4 hours ago

    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.

  • Allonzee@lemmy.world
    471·
    10 hours ago

    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.

    • Hazefugger@sopuli.xyz
      3·
      45 minutes ago

      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.

    • Wrrzag@lemmy.ml
      1·
      60 minutes ago

      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.

  • JohnDClay
    11·
    11 hours ago

    You left off Hitler being impressed by Henry Ford.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
    406·
    15 hours ago

    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.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      26·
      14 hours ago

      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.

      • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
        21·
        13 hours ago

        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)

  • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
    122·
    12 hours ago

    I feel like it’s unamerican in regards to the values our country espouses, even though it completely and utterly fails to uphold them.

    • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
      2·
      1 hour ago

      “American values” are just a smokescreen, they aren’t failed, more they serve their purpose of obfuscation well.

    • AES_Enjoyer@reddthat.comEnglish
      4·
      5 hours ago

      “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)

      • disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world
        8·
        15 hours ago

        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.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
    6·
    13 hours ago

    Feels like imperializem merits to be further down the line, if not the last panel.

    But yes, good memetics in this meme, gg.