• Lvxferre
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    11 months ago

    (I don’t care about USA enough to discuss its specificities. I’ll talk about fascism.)

    It’s a mistake to conflate two enemies. Even if you hate both for the same reasons, once you conflate them, you lose the ability to fight against at least one of them.

    And what the video describes as “friendly fascism” has barely anything to do with fascism. And it has already a name - plutocracy, or “government of the rich”.

    Once you disregard witch hunters and their brainfarts, fascism has a rather consistent bundle of traits:

    1. “strength through union”
    2. conflation between a government, its population, and a “nation”
    3. persecution of minorities as “harming our unity”
    4. a “strong leader” taking decisions for you
    5. hate against separatist movements
    6. emphasis on traditional values
    7. a discourse of a “glorious past” to return to
    8. usage of force to silence dissidence

    By far #0 is the most important trait of fascism, as the others come from it. In the meantime plutocracy (or “friendly fascism”) would fit #3, arguably #7. And the contempt for liberalism and electoral politics appears for different reasons for both - ideological and pragmatic respectively.


    Once you make this distinction, this video becomes specially interesting to watch, as it allows you to notice how one of your enemies is using the other to kill you with a borrowed knife.