The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it’s obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.
In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.
Note that it works because its instinctive. We don’t like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don’t have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.
Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don’t feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.
Otherwise, we’re going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they’ll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they’ll start a civil war.
If we don’t want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that’s what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.
Once civil war breaks out, though, or they’re harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.
rising genocide of transfolkAre you saying modern society is less accepting of trans people than a few decades ago? From my perspective, it seems to be the opposite.
Yes, people are saying that because it’s true:
Human Rights Campaign https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2022#introduction
ILGA-Europe Annual Review (under page 9, bias motivated violence) https://ilga-europe.org/report/annual-review-2023/
Anti-Defamation League https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/online-hate-and-harassment-reaches-record-highs-adl-survey-finds
For most of recent history, we were routinely beaten and raped by cops, and legally murdered by men who felt insecure in their masculinity. Things got better for about a decade, and now they want us to return to the way things were. If the GOP were trying to bring back sundown towns, forced labor for made up laws, Jim Crow laws, etc. we’d call that a genocide too.
Bringing back 1950s racial politics would be evil, but I’m pretty sure that even under the loosest definition, it’s not genocide. See, the idea was to oppress and use black people intergenerationally, not wipe them or even all their cultural practices from the face of the earth. Want to use the word “genocide” to make a political statement on the attempted democide of trans people? Go nuts. But check your definitions. There are lots of kinds of evil.
Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.
It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.
Do I know when it was last this bad? No.
Fascism was not defeated in WW2 only Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan. Everyone forgot about fascist Spain and Portugal. What’s more they even made deals with them. My country was left alone to suffer because the war was never against fascism.
Better to see WW2 as a war against fascist expansionism. But yes, Spain and Portugal were left to their own devices, and because of that, millions suffered under the rule of Franco and Salazar.
The only way to beat shitty people is to prove that you’re better at whatever dumbass game they’re playing than them. Evangelicals? Just pretend to be a DesNat/fundie. When someone is being violent towards you, the only way to “win” is by returning it 10 fold. Their worldview is based on superiority, do not let them delude themselves and others.
I saw a dude with nazi tats on the bus today and while I didn’t hit him what I told him after he got all huffy and in my face for saying “fuck you nazi” would probably get me moderated. But it involved a famous Inglorious Bastards reference and how it would be the centerpiece at a party I’d be arranging if he touched me.
“Peace in our time”
I heard this claim somewhere that the reason why Neville Chamberlain agreed to it was because UK was nowhere close to being ready for war. Something along the lines of having been instructed to secure peace at all cost.
In retrospect it’s easy to see the Munic Agreement as a mistake, but I have to admit that I am curious if he had any real alternative.
They learned the wrong lessons for this war from the previous one.
The UK was nowhere close to being ready for war, but in truth, neither was Germany. Chamberlain made his decision with noble intentions, but in retrospect, even just strategically, it was still the wrong decision.
I approve this message.
Have you ever heard the story of how people defeated mussolini by playing bowls?
Huh, the more you know. I thought they hung his body upside down. Must have been a fake AI image
I can get people wanting a “one-size fits all” solution where we peacefully resolve all problems and the violent one are obviously evil.
But the unfortunate thing is, you do have to fight for “the right beliefs”, and yes the right beliefs are technically subjective and this could be abused. But there’s just no alternative to taking a specific stance and physically fighting for it no matter what.
Contemporary Untermench Nazi Toilet Stains: We’re going to terrorize innocent people and threaten them with violence and jump them simply because they exist and we’re gonna celebrate past genocides with flags and marches and then we will overthrow the government and create the third reich with even more atrocities and and and…!!
Everybody else: Well, we’re going to fight you every step of the way and respond to your violence if necessary.
C.U.N.T.S: SO MUCH FOR THE TOLERANT LEFT!! I’M ENTITLED TO MAH OPINION!!1! YOUR OPPRESSING ME!!¤#!!! 😨😰😥😢😭😱😖😣😞😓😩😫😤😡😠🤬👿
The only solution.
It’s amazing how versatile a simple baseball bat is
“I want to take away your human rights.”
“Actually that is bad so can you please not do so?”
“Oh I see it now, you’re right, thanks for educating me!”removed by mod
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It is necessary to be intolerant of intolerance.
But intolerance of intolerance should be the last resort and not the default. You should try all the other methods of civilized discourse first.
But intolerance to intolerance should be the last resort and not the default. You should try all the other methods of civilized discourse first.
Not having civilized discourse with people whose political goal is to wipe me and those I love from the face of the earth. Also, “civilized discourse” requires at least two parties who are capable of such a thing.
I’m all with you that you have to gauge the person you’re interacting with. But if intolerance becomes the goto solution then we give up what we’re fighting for. If my son shows intolerance to people of other skin color I will try civilized discourse first and not throw him out of my house at the age of 10. If he’s an adult and all discourse has failed then I might show intolerance.
Children should not be held to the same standards as adults in many things. This is no exception. If that’s your argument, you’re stretching.
Tolerance for fascism is like trying to negotiate with cancer.
I agree but I wasn’t referring to fascism but the principle.
What I didn’t agree with about your post is that intolerance is an attitude. So it’s not something we need to tolerate.
We can tolerate our racist uncle but we shouldn’t tolerate the racism. Because the attitude is like cancer and if we don’t put it in check it will spread.
These people never seem to realize that even at its most basic level, ensuring equal rights and freedoms requires a level of forfeiting individual freedoms. In order for everyone to have equal right to physical safety, you forego your freedom to punch them in the face without consequence.
These people go to talk about democracy, describe anarchy, then get upset when reality doesn’t meet their expectations. Your expectations don’t meet reality, bud.
They also don’t understand that protecting rights usually means defending awful people being awful. Rights are meaningless if only the right people get them.
It depends on your definition of awful. People with opposing opinions, perfectly within their legal bounds? Yes. People violating the rights and safety of others? Absolutely not.
Someone somewhere said something smart:
View Tolerance as a contract. If someone is tolerant of others, tolerate them too. But if someone is intolerant towards others, they don’t get to be tolerated either.
If it’s the same writing I’m thinking of I’ll try to remember to link it when I get home.
"Tolerance isn’t an ideal, it’s a contract you’re automatically entered into at birth. The contract protects all involved who agree to the contract, but if you break the binds of the contract you are no longer entitled to it’s protections. To be intolerant of an intolerant person does not break ones commitment to the contract because the intolerant person is no longer protected by the contract. "
Paraphrased AF
Ah, you get what you give rule.
AKA: Fuck around and find out.
I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your ‘opponent’ is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.
most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.
It gets easier to comprehend when it’s tempered by the knowledge of global literacy rates. In the US, for example, 54% of adults read below a 6th grade comprehension level.
More than half the planet can barely analyse the nuances between two similar statements, let alone comprehend anything that takes a formal education to learn. As a result many people lack the communicative skills that enable us to avoid conflict because they literally lack a conceptual understanding of the many words they don’t know or understand correctly.
Hell, try even explaining concepts like context and nuance to many people and their eyes glaze over. I’d like to think it’s a largely fixable problem due to insufficient education, but another side of me remembers all my classmates in highschool who failed English.
It’s always good to point out that that is philosophy, not science (neither political or any other kind).
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306 rowan atkinson (mr bean) has an interesting opinion about it, I’d recommend watching the whole video.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Fascism isn’t a legitimate political ideology so there’s nothing to tolerate. It’s just genocide in fancy window dressing.
I also remember how we got to WW2 by appeasing the rising fascism instead of debating and disassembling it word for word. If we need to get to the physical violence and war to fight the evil, then we failed the early stages of disproving and debating why it’s evil. And then, just like now, its mere idea will rear ist ugly head
it’s that you have to disprove it to everyone. the ideology that “our tribe is better than theirs” is a cancer in and of itself so the more people think that and are programmed to tell others the same thing, the harder you have to work you suppress it
Yep, that is how wars of ideas work. You will have to fight generations of reactionaries and debate against those ideas point for point. Before fascism and ultra-nationalism there was the religious “our religion is better than yours”. This fanaticism still fuels religious tensions and wars in Middle East, but the reason why in Europe we have so much fewer of these tensions is due to hundreds of years of fighting both in ideas and in wars and revolts. And you should give them no quarter, because they will gather their strength and adepts and will push these ideas again. Education is the best prevention against this cancer
Fascism was defeated in the UK by some clever jokes and having a monarchy.
The UK helped defeat a couple of fascist Regimes through spending the last power of the Empire on it.
Fascist Regimes were defeated, not the concept of fascism.
The concept of fascism is not defeated through violence, it is through education and debate.
You think some young nazi is going to wake up from a baseball to the head and think “oh wow, I was so wrong about the concept of ‘might makes right’”
Fascists don’t believe in might makes right. If they did, they’d all be liberals and communists, according to the end of WW2. What fascists believe is that their ‘enemy’ can be crushed because the enemy is too weak and effete to fight back. The proper way to dispel such a notion is to crush them and look fabulous doing it
People have been doing that for years and it’s obvious to anyone with any insight that they won’t listen and don’t care.
But fascism wss also heavily defeated by a world war and that didn’t stop it.
So if you’re picking things that don’t work, then violence also doesn’t work.
It’s almost as if you are more interested in ideating about committing violence than actually solving the problem.
Fascism defeat still omitted Spain, they remained like so until Franco’s death in 1975.
Believe it or not, fascism was not about just the violence and the racial commentary. It is a reactionary and grotesque metamorphosis of the earlier imperialistic, domination and moralistic ideas. Many of the fascists regimes kept their monarchs as figureheads (Italy, Romania, Japan) and Franco post-humously reinstated the monarchy in Spain. And the fascists regimes heavily used forced work camps, even if they used them primarily for extermination. But, if one such regime would have been created 100 years ago, they would surely have traded slaves with the US South. So you can’t destroy the fascism without squashing its parent ideology, the imperialism
It did stop it. You’re just more interested in ensuring the left, minorities, women and other vulnerable groups stay vulnerable by taking away the only option they have left, because you’re just a shill who cares more about stymieing the left via nonviolence than you do about their lives, or the lives of women, minorities, or any vulnerable group.
It’s almost as if you are more interested in ideating about committing violence than actually solving the problem.
Violence is never going to be immoral in this context no matter how much you want it to be, grow the fuck up. And I AM going to focus on it as a meaningful solution because it IS a vitally important one, because the bigots turning the legal system against their victims in the U.S. WON’T listen, and you’re not going to shame me or make me feel guilty or afraid for saying so.
You’re running the same old playbook, exploiting fears I used to have of losing your approval or your moral blessing, of you turning other people against me, or convincing others to not like me, or depriving me of social standing, or telling me off and humiliating me as scumfucks like you did my entire life for every dumbass reason under the sun and like you did EVERY time I tried to tell you we needed to solve these problems violently on Reddit, and you didn’t listen back then, so here we are. You’re STILL playing by the same miserable, cynical, manipulative, cruel and twisted playbook, still repeating the same talking points thinking you’re going to convince me and the left violence is immoral and we cannot do it while bigots use it non-stop as they please and you do not bat an eye, because you care more about guaranteeing left nonviolence than you do about solving the problem and saving their lives.
Well, guess what buttercup, it’s a new age and you can’t dominate political discussion or completely shut down debate on the use of violence to stop fascists anymore. And you can’t bully me using words anymore; my stance by its nature means I don’t have to listen to you anymore, and the defederated web means I don’t have to fear getting banned anymore for telling the truth.
You can’t silence me, or censor me, or intimidate me by using your pathetic manipulative tricks and you can’t do that to the rest of the left anymore, and I’ll make sure you can’t.
And that’s the end of the “debate”.
Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s
Millions of Nazis were permanently cured of fascism through the noble efforts of the Allies. :)
You are making jokes about it but there is actually a measurement to proof this: a lot of former fascists got high positions in post war Germany in politics, economy, jurisdiction, media, … and if a former fascist gets an influential position in a liberal democracy like post war Germany, there is no doubt they are cured. /s (if not obvious)
Not everyone who was forced to fight in the military was a fascist. I was talking about influential figures who were influential during and after the Third Reich. That’s a whole different story
Replace the word with “fascists” and it makes so much more logical sense. And this is why wording matters
That makes even less sense or do you think there aren’t any fascists left? Fascism as a dominant ideology ended in countries that still (continuously to this have) have fascists in them.
Saying they defeated fascists doesn’t imply there are no more fascists left.
I can say I hunted deer, that doesn’t mean there are no more deer left in the wild.
By referring to “fascists” (the people) rather than fascism (the ideology) you narrow your description to more accurately present the scope of your statement. The German Nazi party were fascists. They were defeated. We defeated fascists that day. There are more fascists, but that doesn’t mean we didn’t fight and defeat some number of fascists.
I was about to agree with you but then I reread the statement you responded to and it’s:
Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s
So your suggestion is to put it:
fascists really ended in 1945
Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not a native speaker but that’s a weird phrasing. For me it implies (or rather implicates) that all fascists ended because to end is a very strong verb semantically when applied to humans. And honestly, I wouldn’t use it at all.
I meant in the original post haha. Since their comment was that fascism didn’t end in 1945. If the post had said “winning against fascists”, it would make more logical sense
In internet slang the /s means they were making a sarcastic statement, so they were being sarcastic when they said “Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s”.
Yes I know. I was referring to the answer:
Replace the word with “fascists” and it makes so much more logical sense. And this is why wording matters
Which I interpreted as … well you know. I’m not going to perpetuate this argument.
