• umbrella@lemmy.ml
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      6 months ago

      i mean theyve always been openly couping and subjugating the rest of the world. its just been successfull for their own population for most of this time.

      as the meme says, its just ran out of space to expand and its now fucking over their own people and allies instead.

      what fascists are doing right now in the us is not much different from what they have been doing to south america, africa and east asia for quite some time now.

    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      So I’ve had this issue too, it’s because we can’t agree on the definition.

      I use the definition in the dictionary and based on that, US could fall under it, kind of loosely but technically correct.

      • Gigasser@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism definition I think is pretty good. Often times, the “dictionary definition” isn’t the best definition to use, especially when it comes to topics like political ideologies, which tends to be a bit more complex and nuanced than what can be encompassed in a simple colloquial dictionary definition.

        Imma post the ur fascism aspects here.

        1.“The cult of tradition”, characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.

        2.“The rejection of modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.

        3.“The cult of action for action’s sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.

        4.“Disagreement is treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.

        5.“Fear of difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.

        6.“Appeal to a frustrated middle class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.

        7.“Obsession with a plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.

        8.Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.

        9.“Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” because “life is permanent warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.

        10.“Contempt for the weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.

        10.“Everybody is educated to become a hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”

        11.“Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”.

        12.“Selective populism” – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people”.

        13.“Newspeak” – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.

        Edit: numbered

        • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          I should have scrolled further before replying. IMO you nailed it. Umberto Eco is my go-to whenever this comes up.

      • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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        6 months ago

        Which dictionary are you reading? A key component of fascism is a dictatorship. You can argue about controlling oppositional voices or segmentation of society in the US, but a dictatorship is pretty core to fascism in any definition I’ve seen. And yeah, our voting system sucks that still doesn’t make it a dictatorship.

        • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          dictatorship was happening outside their own borders for the longest time. kind of why you guys pay so much money to keep a military almost bigger than every other in the world combined.

          inside the us the blacks have seen the boot way more. ask any awake black person if its been a democracy for them.

          or ask central, south america, africa and east asia if the repeated coups over the decades are anything less than dictatorial.

          • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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            6 months ago

            Yeah, that’s grasping really hard. Even if we assume the it isn’t a democracy because voting was unfair, it still isn’t a dictatorship because power was being passed around to different people. Also, outside has nothing to do with the definition of a dictatorship.

            • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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              6 months ago

              its not. look up your own history of installing brutal dictatorships in the aforementioned places.

              and of bullying the third world into neoliberal capitalism with very exploitative terms or else. it doesnt matter we have “elections” if the us is the one always calling the shots.

              • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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                6 months ago

                Dude, that is not fascism. That’s imperialism. Those are totally different things and Fascists are not the only imperialists, nor are Fascists imperialist by definition. Fascism is something specific, not just “evil” government.

                • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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                  6 months ago

                  they do implement fascism out here. both sides of the same coin.

                  fascists are the only ones to practice imperialism to nearly this extent after the industrial revolution.

                  • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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                    6 months ago

                    fascists are the only ones to practice imperialism to nearly this extent after the industrial revolution.

                    How did you come to this conclusion? This is absolutely made up to make your argument seem stronger than it is.

        • octopus_ink@lemmy.ml
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          6 months ago

          Which dictionary are you reading?

          I like Umberto Eco on this one. I’m in my 50s. We’ve checked many of these boxes throughout my life, and for some others you can point to various moments in our history, many but not all of them recent. Certainly enough to satisfy the meme.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco

          https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html

          • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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            6 months ago

            Yeah, those are traits of fascism, not a definition of fascism. Anyway, yeah the US has met many of them throughout its history. So has almost every other nation. The term is useless if you just call everyone fascist. The US has not met most of them at any one particular time. You can’t just take that list and say some traits were met in this period, some others in this other period, etc. and then say they covered all the traits at some point in time so must be fascist. That’s not how that works.

        • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          I was talking about the forceful oppression of opposition. That is an element that has existed in the US for a long time.

          US has had no dictator yet but a president has much more power than a prime minister.

          If you consider fascism to be a spectrum, then US has always had these elements. Dictatorship is basically the end of said spectrum.

    • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      6 months ago

      Original Nazi party literally used USA tactics as an example to follow

      • xor@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 months ago

        That still doesn’t prove the claim “America was always fascist”

        Partially because being copied by the Nazis doesn’t intrinsically mean you’re fascist (they copied a hell of a lot of things, including but not limited to fascism)

        And partially because that doesn’t cover the “always” part at all

          • xor@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            6 months ago

            I assume you’re referring to couping, as opposed to storing chickens

            Your statement may be true, but also doesn’t prove the original claim

            The definition of fascism is not when someone is racist, or when someone does a coup

            The whole “fascism is when thing I don’t like” is exactly the thing the commenter above me was complaining about

        • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works
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          6 months ago

          Yeah, but in the case of The U.S. the things the Nazis copied were the fascist things.

          The Nazis were inspired by the American Eugenics movement. Fun fact the Eugenics movement was probably more popular in the U.S. than it was in Germany.

          They were also inspired by segregation for black people. I think most people would agree that at the time racial segregation was an improvement over how The U.S. treated black people at the founding of the country; when there was an even more intense form of racial hierarchy in the form of chattel slavery.

          The U.S. was also founded on the genocide of the Native Americans. That continued past the founding in the form of manifest destiny. More fun facts Hitler justified his invasion of Russia in the terms of manifest destiny.

          That’s a short list of some of the fascist things the Nazis took from the U.S. that stretch back to its founding.

          What did the Nazis take from America that wasn’t fascist?

          • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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            6 months ago

            Those are fascist things, but they do not make fascism. Dictatorial rule is pretty core to fascism. Yes, it shares similarities to fascism, but it is not fascist. It also shares traits with a ton of other political idiologies that it does not totally meet the definition of.

            For an example of insufficient conditions, Skyrim is a first person game where you fight enemies, sometimes while shooting. It is not a first person shooter though, even though they share traits it it. You must meet all traits to be that thing, not just some of them.

            • SailorMoss@sh.itjust.works
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              6 months ago

              At this point we’re just begging the question. If fascists could get what they want and call it democracy. They would do that. Throughout most of American history with rare exceptions our “democracy” has been captured by capitalists/corporate interests.

              Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. — Benito Mussolini

              If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck then it’s a fucking duck.

              Look if this is something that makes people who still hold onto American exceptionalism uncomfortable then I would say perhaps America has not “always” been fascist. There have been times of exception. However I want to emphasize those have been the exception rather than the norm.

              Basically the only exceptions have been during times of intense civil unrest. During the civil war, the civil rights movement and, perhaps WWII on an international level.

              It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters. It didn’t cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote. And the things that we are calling for now would mean that the nation will have to spend billions of dollars in order to solve these problems. —MLK

              The BLM protests were the largest movement of civil unrest in american history. We got Nancy Pelosi kneeling in kente cloth and Genocide Joe as president in response. The question remains if the U.S. can shed what remains of its fascist history. Because to do so would cost those corporate/capitalist interests something.

        • undergroundoverground@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          If it was fascist at that time, would it have been less fascist when America had legal, designated concentration camps of black slaves?

          I understand the instict to dismiss it and maybe “always” will be a step too far but i think a lot of Americans are in denial the extensive cross over between early 20th century USA and nazi Germany. I’m not even just talking about how hitler literally based the Jewish ghettos and anti Jewish laws on the black ghettos and Jim crow or Germany’s Eastern expansion and extermination for land being modeled on Americas Western expansion:

          The economics of fascism is croney capitalism, with mass privatisation of public assets, ultra low tax for the rich, pitiful wages and endless toil for everyone else, huge corporate subsidies, handouts to the rich and a merger of the corporate and the state. Some of the state might even be outsourced. Whatever way they set it up, the result was always that.

          I’m not even saying that from a presumed position of my country being better. I’m from the UK and the East India company/royal west African company being a corporate state is about purest form of fascism you can get. Thats before you get to all the rest of it. Our biggest export is class subjugation.

      • SeattleRain@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Hitler literally said he looked to the US Army’s genocide of Native Americans as a proof of concept for his own Jewish Holocaust.

      • TrickDacy@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

        Doesn’t really prove much. If the meme said “the US has always beaten down its minorities” or something like that, we wouldn’t be quibbling over the wording here.

        • kora@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 months ago

          I’m sorry but how is that unique to the US, that’s literally all of human history and all humans in human history have always had an “other’”.

          What makes the US of any more note, if anything, is just the level and formalization of such disgraceful treatment of the “other” that, started with the colonialization of America and the slave trade that boosted it.

          Do I think it could be said that this is not the first time that such a thing has happened in history? It’s just this cycle, who knows how long these Cycles go, and hopefully it’s when we eventually evolve to get off of.

      • umbrella@lemmy.ml
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        6 months ago

        they even copied the segregation tactics the us was using against blacks, except they used it against jews.

        it was rightly treated as worth of national shame for generations for nazis, but when it comes to the us it was just an oopsie sorry but we aint doing it anymore. except they kind of are at home and moreso abroad.

      • Goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        6 months ago

        In art i use tactics by bob ross, am i now as great of a painter as bob ross? Am i now bob ross? No! See how your argument is shit?

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          6 months ago

          I don’t think your argument is making the point you want to make 😆

          • TheFonz@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Parts of the definition do not make the definition. Are you intentionally obfuscating? Just because some actions share fascistic traits doesn’t de facto a fascist country make. Perhaps educate yourself on the definition of fascism?