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: 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 “becoming british colonialists.” 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.
I remember my hottest take among my “libertarian socialist” friends at one point was when I said that nations preaching the ideology known as liberalism have been behind far more direct deaths than genuine actually-existent-fascism could even aspire to. Told it was bad optics to be comparing liberals to fascists, told it was ahistorical, yada yada. It’s materially true, though. Liberalism has been effectively whitewashed of its bloody, horrific history of violence and neglect because “fascism” emerged as a much scarier seeming alternative, a perfect slippery-slope bogeyman to excuse all of the deadly failings of liberalism.
Upvoted, because I largely agree, but I think there is a significant difference between them. Mainly that fascism is unstable. Liberalism and it’s rise were far more stable. It’s that very stability that makes it so much more dangerous. Liberalism is about the export of the suffering and death that capitalism requires while fascism is about embracing it. That difference doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the reason liberalism has given us an imperial core while fascism has been unable to achieve that.
I think westerners largely fear fascism because it would mean we have to experience the same thing liberalism has doled out to the rest of the world.
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: 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 “becoming british colonialists.” 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.
I remember my hottest take among my “libertarian socialist” friends at one point was when I said that nations preaching the ideology known as liberalism have been behind far more direct deaths than genuine actually-existent-fascism could even aspire to. Told it was bad optics to be comparing liberals to fascists, told it was ahistorical, yada yada. It’s materially true, though. Liberalism has been effectively whitewashed of its bloody, horrific history of violence and neglect because “fascism” emerged as a much scarier seeming alternative, a perfect slippery-slope bogeyman to excuse all of the deadly failings of liberalism.
Upvoted, because I largely agree, but I think there is a significant difference between them. Mainly that fascism is unstable. Liberalism and it’s rise were far more stable. It’s that very stability that makes it so much more dangerous. Liberalism is about the export of the suffering and death that capitalism requires while fascism is about embracing it. That difference doesn’t seem like much, but it’s the reason liberalism has given us an imperial core while fascism has been unable to achieve that.
I think westerners largely fear fascism because it would mean we have to experience the same thing liberalism has doled out to the rest of the world.