Russian security forces raided gay clubs and bars across Moscow Friday night, less than 48 hours after the country’s top court banned what it called the “global LGBTQ+ movement” as an extremist organization.
Police searched venues across the Russian capital, including a nightclub, a male sauna, and a bar that hosted LGBTQ+ parties, under the pretext of a drug raid, local media reported.
Eyewitnesses told journalists that clubgoers’ documents were checked and photographed by the security services. They also said that managers had been able to warn patrons before police arrived.
I’m pretty sure this is just a fundamental way to understand groups, any groups. How would a group exist without an “us” and a “them”?
The error in that argument is oversimplification.
It’s not just the grouping people, it’s the how its done.
For starters, it only makes logical sense to group people on actions they actually commit or committed - say, “this person has repeatedly stollen things, hence he is a thief” - because it’s a judgement on their actions, while it makes no logical sense group them on something else and then judge them as a group for something unrelated - say, “this person was born with a certain skin color hence he is a thief” - because it’s quite literally prejudice (the judging somebody for acts they have not committed).
The second part is simplifying it into “us” and “them” - it’s quite literally mathematically impossible to, in any situation with more than 2 humans, have 2 or fewer generic classifications (worse, as people actually change how they act as their life experiences change them, so they would change classification). This is because there are so many different things of importance in which people can chose to act in different ways (and for many such important things there are even more choices than merelly 2), that any realistic grouping of humans on anything more generic than a single behaviour - such as thieving - would yield billions of groups (pretty much one per person) because there are just way too many combinations of preferred choices.
It’s not possible to have a genuine division of humans in a general sense into a mere 2, “us” and “them”, and the lie in such division is further compounded when action judgements are passed on all individuals of an entire group which was defined by any criteria other than having commited said actions.
And then to top all this up, they cast those 2 groups as adversarial, thus justifying violence by their group against the other group.
PS: By the way, it’s not just Fascists who do this kind of prejudiced grouping of people, but what’s more unique about that ideology is the tendency for the splitting to immediatelly or eventually end up with a mere 2 groups which are deemed in opposition to each other in everything that matters and were the Fascists are all in the group (“us”) that’s pre-judged as “good” and the others are in the group (“them”) prejudged “bad”.
You’ll see, for example, Liberals also doing the grouping of people on arbitrary non-action characteristics, complete with “good” and “bad” prejudgements based on group membership (though the words used are usually “victim” and “oppressor” rather than “good” and “bad”), but they’re usually divided into many groups (an ever growing list, even) and the group in which the Liberal individual is not necessarilly one of the groups deemed “good” (whilst the Fascists will always put themselves in the “good” group).
Exactly
Well, when there’s only so many people in the group you know them and that’s enough. Even if one lives on an island with population of 20 and knows nothing about outside world, one would recognize those 20 as his group, I’d wager