Especially when communists are on the table, they just always lean fucking fascist.
It all depends on the person’s material condition, most liberals (and most people in general) in the west tend to be white and middle class and fascism is less of a threat to them personally than communism. Opposing fascism for liberals comes from virtue signaling and general societal agreement that fascism is bad but communism directly threatens their livelihoods. Propaganda helps, sure but not even genocide, brainwashing and indoctrination from childhood can fight personal material interest. I’m from Indonesia and everyone in my family wants to kill “communists” but are still in unions, support subsidies and join protests against privatization. Their material class interest overrides all the indoctrination and brainwashing that they got.
in the west tend to be white and middle class and fascism is less of a threat to them personally than communism
as if the rich weren’t doing everything in the power since the 80s to make everyone but themselves poorer, regardless if its poor, working poor, or petty-bourgeois. the middle class libs are literally fucking themselves over and not realizing it. thats the funniest part to me.
watch how an entire generation of “learn to code bro” will slowly realize they are just as screwed as the filthy lazy unambitious tradesmen, and somehow they didnt end up as next musk or zuckerberg. and they will most certainly blame the system, not themselves. not like they havent been actively supporting and reinforcing the said system for their entire career life :)
[for the record, i currently work in IT, but was doing manual labor for years before i finally got to where i am. you could say i saw the both sides of the fence]
propaganda really did turn peoples mind and pride into mincemeat, didnt it? the neoliberal world order is not a threat to the white middle class. it has already destroyed them, years ago.
I think it’s also to do with the (explicit) fascist movement in places like America being smaller, less visible in media and less connected to riots and other things seen as threats to liberals. They probably think fascism is dead (well, unless they think Trump is a fascist).
Liberals are just closeted fascists, they are so narcisistic that they cant see they act exactly like fascists, but they constantly try to cover it up so they can feel better about themselves.
Liberals only oppose fascists that invade imperialist countries like in the two inter imperial war of Europe which are called world war 1 and 2 by Eurocentric Liberals. The liberals were rooting for Nazi Germany until Stalin sign a truce to recover from Russian civil war and industrialize Russia in preparation for war.
The liberals were rooting for Nazi Germany
Got any links for me to read into this? It seems unlikely to me, even pre-war.
I knew I’d get a chance to use these some day:
How the Allied multinationals supplied Nazi Germany through World War II
Fascist plots in the U.S.: Contemporary lessons from the 1934 “Business Plot”
Was Winston Churchill a supporter or an opponent of Fascism?
The organized and ‘civilized’ fascist approach to civilization was the darling of world leaders. They were wholly taken in by the aesthetics that acted as a thin veneer to the decay that fascism feeds on. Plus racists get along pretty well with other racists. It wasn’t until Germany revealed its expansionist interests (a necessity to keep the fascistic mode of production from imploding) that the Allies realized that their interests weren’t aligned with Hitler’s, moreso in geopolitical terms rather than ideological. And it was a struggle to keep Allied businesses out of Germany as explained in the links above.
The USSR, on the other hand, found fascism disgusting from the beginning. And Stalin instructed Molotov to be mistrustful of German promises when negotiating borders (Hitler wanted to sell the idea of the New World Order to Molotov but it didn’t hit when Molotov insisted on asking about Germany’s plans for eastward expansion). Eventually they’d bought enough time that when negotiations fell through, Russia’s productive forces were built up enough to survive the Nazi invasion.
Thank you comrade, I will very much be reading on these sources. Liberals, especially western ones, always were too fond of the fascist bastards for my liking. It’s time to establish why.
Although Churchill wanted Italy to become a democratic country, he considered that the monarchy and Marshal Pietro Badoglio, who became Italy’s prime minister after Mussolini was overthrown on July 25, 1943, were the best guarantors of the traditional social order and instrumental for the collaboration of the state apparatus in running occupied Italy, not the anti‐Fascists.
In Eritrea, the [British Military Administration] seemed to consider the anti‐Fascists mostly as troublemakers. For the BMA, the top priority was to avoid disorder in order to economize troops. Thus, the administration did not involve the anti‐Fascists in the government, but even placed obstacles to their activities, “in accordance to accepted policy of avoiding occasions for bitter political controversy,” as Military Administrator Stephen H. Longrigg explained in 1942. The point is that the BMA deemed “the Italian population [to] have remained, for the most part, Fascist,” and it was likely to be right.
Those are all great points and a good read, although I had assumed you were talking about the pro-liberal civilians in those nations rather than liberal leadership of them. I find the public are more likely to be idealist and might be more skeptical of nationalism and socialism (which the nazi party pretended to be)
I mean, Blackshirts were kind of a big deal in the UK and there was a Nazi rally held in Seattle, WA. Public opinion is swayed by what leaders and capitalists put in newspapers, so fascism wasn’t exactly unpopular. That said, control of information wasn’t so all encompassing and smoothed out in bias for liberalism as it is now, so you could have a big CPUSA branch and the German American Bund in the same town where Democrats were in the actual seats of power.
pre war many were, they were doing the whole “look how much of a strong leader he is” “look how he’s cleaning up his country” and other such false propaganda claims to suck their single testicle
If you still haven’t, read Richard Grunberger’s “A Social History of The Third Reich” - it’s an old book, but it is a book everyone interested in the topic of nazi germany should absolutely read.
I’ll put it on my list
Maybe is the scratchy thingy
I see it, but I am still amazed by it. Why? Why are they so unable to just self-critique themselves? What the fuck? This feels like the Church again. Everyone just a fucking mouthpiece with no real will, but the will of the “prophets” and “disciples”. Their mindset is so colonized they enforce the will of their masters without their influence even being present. All while their leader steals from them and bleeds their money and soul dry.
Well… Speaking of churches… Indoctrination is actually very powerful… This is why liberalism is so idealist, static, lacking of self awareness and reactionary behavior, only “going against” reactionary “extemists” of their own and other reactionary groups as makeup but never honesty… It works like a religion.
Shit we need to make everything state atheist now my god nothing will change
Gonna spam more stuff: there’s also Why Fascism? by Conze and Wilkinson, written in 1935 when fascism had become a normal part of Europe.
[T]he central task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative which will place the blame for the meltdown not on the global capitalist system as such, but on secondary and contingent deviations (overly lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions, and so on). Likewise, in the era of Really Existing Socialism, pro-socialist ideologists tried to save the idea of socialism by claiming that the failure of the “people’s democracies” was the failure of a non-authentic version of socialism, not of the idea as such, so that existing socialist regimes required radical reforms rather than overthrow and abolition. It is not without irony to note how ideologists who once mocked this critical defense of socialism as illusory, and insisted that one should lay the blame on the very idea itself, now widely resort to the same line of defense: for it is not capitalism as such which is bankrupt, only its distorted realization…
Against this tendency, one should insist on the key question: what is the “flaw” in the system as such that opens up the possibility for such crises and collapses? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one: as we have noted, after the dotcom bubble burst, the decision, taken in a bipartisan fashion, was to facilitate real estate investment in order to keep the economy going and prevent recession — today’s meltdown is thus simply the price being paid for the measures taken in the US to avoid recession a few years ago. The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one which, instead of awakening us from a dream, will enable us to continue dreaming. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and US interventionism in order to keep the motor of the economy running, or at least to use the crisis to impose further tough measures of “structural adjustment.”
An exemplary case of the way the economic collapse is already being used in the ideologico-political struggle concerns the conflict over what to do with General Motors — should the state allow its bankruptcy or not? Since GM is one of those institutions which embodies the American dream, its bankruptcy was long considered unthinkable. An increasing number of voices, however, now refer to the meltdown as providing that additional nudge which should make us accept the unthinkable. A New York Times column entitled “Imagining a G.M. Bankruptcy” begins ominously with: ''As General Motors struggles to avoid running out of cash next year, the once-unthinkable prospect of a G.M. bankruptcy filing is looking a lot more, well, thinkable." After a series of predictable arguments (the bankruptcy would not mean automatic job losses, just a restructuring which would make the company leaner and meaner, better adapted to the harsh conditions of today’s economy, and so on and so forth) the column dots the 'i’s towards the end, when it focuses on the standoff “between G.M. and its unionized workers and retirees”: “Bankruptcy would allow G.M. to unilaterally reject its collective bargaining agreements, as long as a judge approved.” In other words, bankruptcy should be used to break the backbone of one of the last strong unions in the United States, leaving thousands with lower wages and thousands of others with lower retirement incomes. Note again the contrast with the urgent need to save the big banks: in the case of GM, where the survival of tens of thousands of active and retired workers is at stake, there is, of course, no emergency, but, on the contrary, an opportunity to allow the free market to operate with brutal force. As if the unions, rather than failures of managerial strategy, were to be blamed for GM’s troubles! This is how the impossible becomes possible: what was hitherto considered unthinkable within the horizon of the established standards of decent working conditions now becomes acceptable.
In his Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that bourgeois ideology loves to historicize: every social, religious, and cultural form is historical, contingent, relative-every form except its own. There was history once, but now there is no longer any history:
Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural . The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production — are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.
Replace “feudalism” with “socialism” and exactly the same holds true of today’s apologists for liberal-democratic capitalism.
- Slavoj Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
zizek is okay sometimes
He’s very much a marxist purist, but his and Badiou’s analysis of Capitalism is spot on. His whole premise for this section and the sections surrounding it has to do with the adage “people can imagine the end of the world before they can imagine the end of capitalism.” Sure, the existing system sucks but imagine how much worse it would be if capitalism didn’t keep these self-destructive tendencies in check. You’d go full Kim Jong Un authoritarian collapse communism no food.
oh the horror
Because – and this is going to be difficult to accept – they don’t like communism/socialism and don’t ever want to live within a million miles of where it stands a snowball’s chance of ever happening.
Some of that has to do with the fact that, once socialists tend to feel empowered, they don’t give anyone the option of not living in that manner.
If your home is infested with cockroaches, those wildfires stop looking like disaster and a little more like a solution.
This doesn’t answer the question.It does. The wildfires stop looking like a disaster, and start looking like a solution.
Point taken, I missed that last line.