Why people always get fascism wrong, especially among progressives? - Discuss fascism and the constant misusage of the word and ideology (and why a larger percentage of that happens among the progressive crowd)

[NeroRisotto]

Wanna watch someone who faps to green m&ms try to explain fascism? No? Well fuck you here it is anyway.

 

[FamicomGorby]

Same reason socialists can't admit that the National Socialism means exactly what it says on the label. They can't accept that they believe in something that Hitler believed in, because Hitler bad, and therefore they will twist as many facts as possible to claim that the Nazi's weren't socialist even though they obviously were. So now we're at the point where the it's become so diluted and facism/nazi just mean "anything I don't like" to them.

 

[PeachDream]

People will use words just for their connotation all the time.

Calling a school shooter a coward is an interesting one. I mean, they're going to be killed or imprisoned for life for what they're doing and they know it, so are they really a coward? Evil yes, but not really cowardly per se.
Likewise calling some kid with cancer brave. Bravery / courage is the ability to make conscious decisions that have risks or put oneself in harms way for a greater purpose. If someone kind of just *gets* a disease they're not really brave per se.

Fascist is a word with a *really* bad connotation, so of course it'd be slapped on anything people dislike, but people right-of-center have no real right to complain about this.
Communism is after all a society with no state and no money, and has never really been tried. So why do right-wing people call Stalinism or the PRC communist?

 

[Insuficiencia renal]

Same reason socialists can't admit that the National Socialism means exactly what it says on the label. They can't accept that they believe in something that Hitler believed in, because Hitler bad, and therefore they will twist as many facts as possible to claim that the Nazi's weren't socialist even though they obviously were. So now we're at the point where the it's become so diluted and facism/nazi just mean "anything I don't like" to them.

Hitler's socialism is very different from Marx's thoughever.

 

[Unarmed Gunman]

That was part of Land's point: ideological flavor text aside, the gap between "fascism" and "actually existing communism " is negligible.

He's just describing authoritarianism, of which fascism and communism are two forms. Some tankie may claim communism is literally not authoritarian, but the road to get there is through socialism and the road from there to "actual communism" dead ends where power is supposed to be given back to the people, because that never happens. Anyway, here's the definition:

Fascism = Socialism - Jewish Influence

 

[Male Idiot]

It is odd that people don't link a nation to a state. Hungary belongs to Hungarians.

If all Hungarians suddenly died of alcohol poisoning, and lets say Austrians settled, it would become East Austria, even if it inherited all the infrastructure and land.

A peoples make a state. That has been the way for ages.

Now, lefties just call everyone fascist/Drumpf, Putdemort, etc because they are brainwashed npcs. Umberto Retardo basically made a checklist of "if it breathes its nazi" .

The 2D US political axis is only useful in the US. It very neatly describes republicans and democrats. But when applied to a non mutted state, it gets useless.

Fascists are collectivist, authoritatian regimes that have a regulated economy and a nationalist slant.

China is closest today. But lefties throw it around, at any type of authority figure. Lolbert Pm? Fashy! Conservative muslim king? Fashy! Russian-nationalist oligarch president? Fashy!

The leftists mind is full of wordplay and retardation. It simply doesn't get subtletly.

 

[mindlessobserver]

Pilgrims Pass did a really big break down on Fascism.

His conclusion for the reason why everyone applies the term everywhere is due to the fact that Fascism, just like Communism, Progressivism and Liberalism sprang from the same Enlightenment and Romantic era political thinking's of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its in effect "the bastard son of the enlightenment".

 

[Niggsworth]

Marxists literally cannot comprehend fascism
Strasserists are gay

 

[Among Us Gaming]

To answer OPs question, it is because it is an element of the founding myth of the west.
That used to be Christ rising from the grave
Then come enlightenment it became mans triumph over nature and religion
Then came WWII, and the founding myth is now the triumph of liberal democracy over the nazis.
Liberalism is the hero, and fascism, being what the nazis believed, is the devil.

When they call something "fascist" they do not intend and are not describing any coherent ideology. What they are instead doing is saying that whatever that thing is, is of the devil. This is how we get things like reducing government power being called fascist: its not about fascism, and it never was

 

[VisaMallgoth]

To answer OPs question, it is because it is an element of the founding myth of the west.
That used to be Christ rising from the grave
Then come enlightenment it became mans triumph over nature and religion
Then came WWII, and the founding myth is now the triumph of liberal democracy over the nazis.
Liberalism is the hero, and fascism, being what the nazis believed, is the devil.

When they call something "fascist" they do not intend and are not describing any coherent ideology. What they are instead doing is saying that whatever that thing is, is of the devil. This is how we get things like reducing government power being called fascist: its not about fascism, and it never was

The Holocaust replaces the Passion, the Nazis were the Pharisees and Romans, all the alleged Holocaust survivors are the martyred saints, and fascism replaces heresy, yet Jerusalem is still sacred - the center.

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

He said one thing that sticks out in fascism and in Trump is "silencing the media," as he said. I think that's a combination of advocating for congress to defund NPR, being rude to reporters in person, and also trying to start Truth Social.

You know who else silenced the media? Abraham Lincoln. The guy suspended habeas corpus (although so did the confederates. Everything goes out the window during civil war), had newspaper offices raided and reporters arrested for materially supporting the South. He pretty much violated every principal of America (including the right to self govern) to maintain the current union. Rageaholic did a decent video on it, if you can stand him. Europeans newspapers at the time viewed him as a tyrant. Even a lot of people in the union feared him.

It's kind a joke in the mockumentary/alt-history The Confederate States of America where Lincoln lives out his days as a fallen man in Canada, but had the South succeeded in succeeding, that's likely the way he'd be viewed. Had Hitler stopped, made some treaties and ended the war, he'd be viewed more as Xi Jinping today. The victors determine the morality of the next age.

We don't have trial by combat in court cases in western nations with function (or pretending to be functioning) courts. That sounds craze compared to evidence and juries. But it's exactly how we define States and even the correct God/religion. The one who succeeded must be morally right, right?

Fascism is a useless denunciation of an era that lost and is now considered a moral bankruptcy.

Under fascism, usury and rent-seeking are evil. Only productive capital, money paid for services physically rendered, is of value. This is where a great deal of the antisemitism intrinsic to fascism comes from, due to the perception that Jews were the beneficiaries of economic rent and did not labor (sound familiar?).

In David Graber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, he talks a lot about how any type of interest was considered immoral by a lot of different religious groups, including various Christians/Catholics during large parts of history. Specifically it was the idea of using monetary instruments themselves to make more money being disgustingly immoral. It's still considered so by many Islamic nations, but Christianity seems to have totally forgotten that core morality about money and actual value, perhaps due to the influences of Zionism.

"Ur-Fascism" which is eco's idea of fascism is basically paranoid schizophrenia but applied to a political system.

I feel like any negative definition of fascism would also be fascism. It's the inverse of itself in the weird ideological way it's perceived. The non-religious right may claim to fight for x, y, z, but the means to it always involves the same types of suppressive techniques and moralism they claim to stand against. Fascism is a non-nonsensical inverse of itself; a morality or ideology that must define itself by some type of suppression rather than speech and debate. When moral and culture wars degrade to a certain point, both sides see everything as some kind of imperative and existential threat ... because .. it kinda is.

I'll leave here this video by Pilgrims Pass. Personally, I'm more annoyed at people who do this crap in fiction than anything else.

Communism is after all a society with no state and no money, and has never really been tried. So why do right-wing people call Stalinism or the PRC communist?

Star Trek is such an interesting thing to comment on. I've been rewatching The Next Generation. It's weird watching it as an adult, because the acting and story in most of it hasn't really held up. The moral complexities feel kinda shallow and hollow today. But it is important to note: The Federation was weirdly militaristic. The Prime Directive was the Commandment of a religious doctrine. The only reason it could be made to work was the fact they were in a post-scarcity economy. They had near infinite energy and the ability to replicate everything (the idea of non-replicated food tasting better, even though it was literally the same atom-by-atom, is such a weird emotional connection to the value of work to contribute to friendships and bonding).

Calling the Earth government in ST fascist is simplistic and non-nonsensical. The government of Earth had an elected leader, but the relation between it and Starfleet is never really clear. People could resign from Starfleet, sure. But then why even bother obeying orders? For the status of being a good officer? Why bus a table at Ben's restaurant when a hologram could do it? A lot of things breakdown when you really start to look at it. Is a starship an authoritarian construct? I think it's a system that would never evolve or work, because the infinite growth would always outpace the infinite resources. Someone's got to run the robots in the di-lithium crystal mine.

A society with no money would look a lot more like The Expanse than it would look like Star Trek.

 

[Nigger Respecter]

When DeSantis was called a fascist by supposedly smart people for not enforcing everyone in Florida to wear masks was when I knew the term just meant “bad politics guy who doesn’t do exactly what I want.” Like, you can very easily disagree with his lifting of the mandate without calling him a fascist. You can just say “I don’t like this for X reasons.” But that’s not how political discussion is done nowadays. The bad guys have to be evil. They cannot just have a different idea on how to run things, it has to be sheer evil

 

[Drain Todger]

In David Graber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, he talks a lot about how any type of interest was considered immoral by a lot of different religious groups, including various Christians/Catholics during large parts of history. Specifically it was the idea of using monetary instruments themselves to make more money being disgustingly immoral. It's still considered so by many Islamic nations, but Christianity seems to have totally forgotten that core morality about money and actual value, perhaps due to the influences of Zionism.

I was always fond of Graeber. He could see the rat race for what it really was. A colossal waste of human time and energy. Almost an engineered time-wasting machine. And the worst part? The tendrils of High Finance in everything. The key problem with modern economics is how much importance we assign to speculation, arbitrage, and rents. These things are not valuable in and of themselves. They are alchemy. They merely transmute one kind of value into another.

Nobody likes to labor intensely for many years for very little reward while hearing that asset-hoarders sit on huge piles of money they basically didn’t work for. Modern society is deeply demoralizing in that way. The powers-that-be expect the rich and the poor to mingle without resentment. An impossible ask. The arbitrageurs are not discreet. They flaunt their luxuries openly.

 

[IAmNotAlpharius]

Abraham Lincoln. The guy suspended habeas corpus

Abraham Lincoln was not based enough. He should’ve hung all the democrat civil leadership, pardoned the military, and then deported the slaves while he had the chance.

The irony of me saying this in this thread is not lost on me and I don’t care.

 

[skykiii]

Question for thread:

Is fascism left-wing or right-wing?

If you were trying to convince someone fascism is left wing, what sources would you cite?

Because so far the only source I've heard argue its left-wing is a Dennis Prager video and, ya know, he's not exactly credible.

 

[nym]

Is [anything] left-wing or right-wing?

People need to start by doing what no one ever wants to do: defining left-wing and right-wing.
Only once you do that can the analysis be done.
I usually think the Wikipedia definitions work well-enough as a basis

although I find it's far harder these days to get people to agree on such simple shit as the idea that "the left v right distinction is a question of analysis of hierarchies"... that is, a typical right-winger will instead attempt to take anything that the majority says is bad and call it left-wing [and vice-versa], then argue from that point -- case-in-point, a very recent change in this discourse is for rightists to claim that "small government is right-wing and a powerful central government is left-wing", and this is a very commonly repeated mantra by even prominent, supposedly-intelligent and -educated rightists.
Of course, this cannot possibly be reconciled with the origin of the right v left dichotomy, the right-wingers being the monarchists & aristocrats.

Again, I say that's a useful position: right-wingers think hierarchies are both natural and useful. Hierarchies are to the net benefit of society. Left-wingers say they're unnaturally imposed on the weak to society's greater detriment. I think if we're honest... we can recognize both of these positions are true, at least in part (or at least see why some would argue that.) So then it becomes a question of values, which aspect one thinks is most important, and with a given policy, which effect of the policy should be focused on for analysis. Some things, strangely enough, can appear to be right-wing from one perspective, and left-wing from another, which is probably why these arguments can never come to an end (German National Socialism, for example, which appears like "progressive left-wing values, but only for ethnic Germans who are of course at the top of the hierarchy, so therefore, it's ackshyually right-wing").

Similarly, I don't actually believe fascism clearly falls in a simply-defined spot on the left-right axis. Different breeds of fascism in different countries I think could vary wildly. I could imagine a distinctly right-wing fascism in England where everyone believes to act in nationalistic unison of restoring a monarchy and aristocracy, and a distinctly left-wing fascism in a commie Russia that strongly believes in the superiority of their own Motherland, perhaps imperialism of their way of life, but with heavy indoctrination via education of everyone instilling values of trying to make everyone as equal as possible, where they all say that any inequality has to be abolished as an insult to their national identity.

So of course we arrive at a conclusion that should be obvious, that there isn't just one political axis, but many political axes.

But it's important to recognize any time we see words that are morally loaded, like "fascism" and "nazism", and even "right-wing" and "left-wing" (but certainly "far-right", "alt-right" etc) -- these words often aren't being used to actually refer to the thing they classically referred to, but instead, to particularize and otherize some specific group, especially as "bad people and therefore targets of our ire".
In a sense, today, this purpose of demonization is quite possibly the most common usage of these terms.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

"fascism" doesn't mean fascism; it means other side and bad.