Why American Fascism Is On The Rise - Second Thought

[Preety_India]

@Space Lizard I have lived in America. My family also lives there for more than 20 years now. 

Plus I don't need media. 

The fact that someone like Trump even got elected is evidence enough of how things have turned from bad to worse. 

 

[abundance]

12 hours ago, vizual said:

The Fascism of the right is as much as a threat as the marxism on the left. Of course videos like these won’t acknowledge that because there’s always bias and agendas going on.

Curious to know when was the last time a legit marxist movement engaged in political violence. 

[vizual]

23 minutes ago, abundance said:

Curious to know when was the last time a legit marxist movement engaged in political violence. 

Haven't you seen the BLM vandalism and lootings? Not only in the USA, but also in Europe

[Scholar]

You call all of them fascists already, so what's the difference? If you demonize normal people and call them nazi's, who do you think benefits most from that? You are literally having the opposite effect of what you seek to achieve through the demonization.

[DocWatts]

21 minutes ago, vizual said:

Haven't you seen the BLM vandalism and lootings? Not only in the USA, but also in Europe

1) Marx is one of the most influential political philosphers in all of world history, and his critiques of exploitation under capitalism are worth understanding regardless of whether one considers themselves a 'Marxist'. If you consider BLM a Marxist organization, it sure sounds like you don't have any understanding of the things your criticizing.

You're basically sock puppeting recycled McCarthy era propaganda that was directed at the Civil Rights movement, which tried to discredit any and all social reform movements as 'Marxist' (and also claimed that Marth Luther King was the most dangerous person in America).

2) Sure sounds like you're equating vandalism and looting with terrorist violence, murder, and organized attempts to end democracy.

Edited January 8, 2022 by DocWatts

[DocWatts]

8 minutes ago, Scholar said:

You call all of them fascists already, so what's the difference? If you demonize normal people and call them nazi's, who do you think benefits most from that? You are literally having the opposite effect of what you seek to achieve through the demonization.

The benefit of calling out fascism is to push back against a violent fringe ideology becoming normalized in our culture. Subscribing to fascist ideology should remain as socially unacceptable as openly declaring that you're okay with pedophilia.

Fascists have been working to make this ideology more palatable for mainstream acceptance, and it's something that needs to be called out and pushed back against.

You can do that without dehumanizing people who've been manipulated and exploited by fascist ideology.

Edited January 8, 2022 by DocWatts

[Scholar]

5 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

The benefit of calling out fascism is to push back against a violent fringe ideology becoming normalized in our culture. Subscribing to fascist ideology should be as socially unacceptable as openly declaring that you're okay with pedophilia.

You can do that without dehumanizing people who've been manipulated and exploited by fascist ideology.

No, that's not the benefit. That's what you think the benefit is. I don't believe that benefit is real whatsoever. You are not calling out fascism when you are calling half of america fascists. And that's how trump supports feel like. They are being demonized, people say they are evil. If you get called a fascist, who do you think will come knocking on the door and invite you to join their club?

 

I don't think you are doing this without dehumanizing anything. I don't think there was a need to call out fascism, I think you created all of this by calling out fascism where there was not fascism. You have manifested your own fears into reality. And you continue playing the same game, seeing no results whatsoever, and making it worse. I just have no faith in the solution you are proposing, and I do not think that focusing on that will solve any of these issues whatsoever. You are playing whac-a-mole.

Instead of calling out fascism, and achieving literally nothing because nobody even knows what fascism means anymore, and nobody really takes you seriously when you call them a fascist, you could work on this from a higher tier perspective, and see how you can stop contributing to division, and instead work on resolving it. Your shame and fear tactics do not work in my opinion.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Scholar

[DocWatts]

1 hour ago, Scholar said:

No, that's not the benefit. That's what you think the benefit is. I don't believe that benefit is real whatsoever. You are not calling out fascism when you are calling half of america fascists. And that's how trump supports feel like. They are being demonized, people say they are evil. If you get called a fascist, who do you think will come knocking on the door and invite you to join their club?

 

I don't think you are doing this without dehumanizing anything. I don't think there was a need to call out fascism, I think you created all of this by calling out fascism where there was not fascism. You have manifested your own fears into reality. And you continue playing the same game, seeing no results whatsoever, and making it worse. I just have no faith in the solution you are proposing, and I do not think that focusing on that will solve any of these issues whatsoever. You are playing whac-a-mole.

Instead of calling out fascism, and achieving literally nothing because nobody even knows what fascism means anymore, and nobody really takes you seriously when you call them a fascist, you could work on this from a higher tier perspective, and see how you can stop contributing to division, and instead work on resolving it. Your shame and fear tactics do not work in my opinion.

Political scientists and historians haven't had any trouble defining and identifying fascism. Are experts on this subject just flat out wrong when they identify a number or early warning signs of fascism in a place like the United States?

I have to wonder if in your view enforcing social norms against harmful and destructive behavior has any utility at all, if you see identifying and calling out fascism as counter productive.

I do agree that we shouldn't treat fascists as 'The Other', but at the same time we also have a basic social responsibility to make sure that fascism isn't something that becomes socially acceptable.

Edited January 8, 2022 by DocWatts

[PurpleTree]

6 hours ago, Preety_India said:

@Space Lizard I have lived in America. My family also lives there for more than 20 years now. 

Plus I don't need media. 

The fact that someone like Trump even got elected is evidence enough of how things have turned from bad to worse. 

 

weren't you a Trump fan a while ago?

[Scholar]

40 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

Political scientists haven't had any trouble defining and identifying fascism.

I have to wonder if in your view enforcing social norms against harmful and destructive behavior has any utility at all, if you see identifying and calling out fascism as counter productive.

Being compassionate towards individuals doesn't mean giving individuals a free pass to indulge in harmful, destructive behavior (which trying to construct and reinforce dominator hierarchies definitely qualifies in my book).

If I see someone being racist (or homophobic) towards another person in public for example, the point at that moment isn't to get that person to have a change of heart, so much as it is to enforce basic social norms that that sort of behavior isn't going to be tolerated in a public place.

I do agree that we shouldn't treat fascists as 'The Other', but at the same time we also have a basic social responsibility to make sure that fascism isn't something that becomes socially acceptable.

The issue isn't political scientists having trouble identifying fascism, but the public identifying fascism. The reason why calling out fascism has become unproductive, and completely irrelevant, is because people have misused this dynamic. Why do we feel it is so important to identify fascism? Because fascism is extremely harmful. Most people don't use it that way, most progressives identify things as fascistic because they want to condemn it, rather than the other way around. By having normalized calling everything fascist, the word has been rendered meaningless colloquially. It holds no "force", you cannot enforce social norms this way anymore because the only people who will take you seriously are progressives, who are not the people you seek to change, Most people just roll their eyes if you use that word, and it's only going to get worse. I know people who are stage orange trump supporters, and all of them don't give two shits about whether you tell them they are fascist, because they think you are completely insane. Because sadly the progressives are just going completely overboard with this. It creates the opposite reaction, where people start to think that the fascists might be right because of the, from their POV, insane progressives who will call anything fascism. You are making an enemy out of half the nation, and you are literally uniting them. You are just feeding the monster.

People are not fascists, they have been lied to. If it was the case that the election was stolen, it is actually the current government that is fascistic, and it would be completely justified from a point of view of upholding democracy to use violence to protect your constitutions from corruption. That is literally anti-fascist. It makes no sense to call these people fascists. They are delusional, but just because they are willing to use force to protect democracy, from their point of view, does not mean they are fascists. Fascists don't care about elections. So either way you are misusing the term.

The amount of actual fascists is negligable and a complete non-issue.

 

You have a social responsibility to contribute to social harmony, which you are not. None of your Spiel is working. You can't use shaming on half of american. Using shame on stage orange individuals is just silly, they don't give a shit about your shaming tactics. They are spitting in your face, and infact they will hate you even more for wanting to shame them for what they belief. There is no fascist threat, that's just delusional. Isn't it funny how both sides call each other fascists? You both live in the same delusional paranoia, and you are literally just making it worse and worse.

 

The real threat here is division between groups of people with opposing viewpoints. You lost the ability to communicate, you lost the ability to listen to each other. Your mind is clouded by fear and paranoia, and the only tool you have is say "THIS IS BAD, REMOVE IT FROM SOCIETY!". Good luck with that.

Edited January 8, 2022 by Scholar

[DocWatts]

@Scholar I actually agree with many of the points in you bring up, and broadly speaking we may agree more than we disagree.

It's absolutely true that the public is poorly educated about fascism (not to mention socialism, marxism, and many other ideologies), something that fascist ideologies exploit by attempting to make thier arguments sound far more reasonable than they actually are (ie sanitizing white supremacist ideology as the far more benign sounding 'race realism'). In the minds of a majority of the public thier understanding of fascism doesn't go any farther than obvious and surface level associations with Nazi Germany.

So of course there aren't fascists so much as people who were manipulated and deceived by egoicly gratifying lies. And I also fully recognize that by thier own internalized values, people enacting the egoic power fantasy of fascism are (by thier own definition) righting the wrongs of the world: 'Garbage in, garbage out.' To add to that, an SS guard working at a concentration camp also believed that what they were doing was for the good of the world.

That doesn't change the fact that just because that's what makes sense to people at a particular level of development, that the rest of the society should indulge thier delusional fantasies.

Social harmony is valuable insofar as it's to the benefit of everyone in the society, and allowing these narratives to go unchallenged and achieve a degree of tacit mainstream acceptance harms everyone in society.

I also agree that there are likely very few explicit fascists among Trump's Cult. The fascism among the far right is largely implicit and invisible, because it takes a degree of sociological understanding to see these things.

Trying to convince people who have an egoic attachment to fascist narratives is a waste of time IMHO. Not that it can't be done, just that it's not an efficient use of time, energy, and resources.  Hell, it took Germany losing a world war and a multi-generational process of introspection to begin to deal with the trauma of fascist narratives.

On a pragmatic interpersonal level, I think the best we can hope for is to make what's implicit explicit. And to work to ensure that fascist narratives aren't tolerated inside of whatever communities we happen to inhabit, be they physical or in the online space. That and to work towards greater social solidarity towards people who oppose these narratives, as part of a broader effort of democratization.

Edited January 8, 2022 by DocWatts

[Roy]

As someone who frequents studying history quite a bit, it's a little triggering seeing words like Fascism/Socialism thrown around so loosely and inaccurately in political conversation from both sides. People just eat up and use Academia narrative and trust that they have the best intentions of truth behind them just because it's "supposed" to be the body that is at the front of tackling these things. Sadly, that's not the case, as much as it's become a tired cliché to point that out.  

If you completely remove yourself from the cultural matrix and observe independently, you'll be shocked to notice it's actually modern far Leftists that have FAR more in common with historical Fascists than Trump morons.

Of course they don't want to hear that though and will deny it violently, nothing hurts more than the truth.

I say this as someone who is far socially left leaning on nearly every political issue, except maybe capitol punishment.

Another note I forgot to add to this post - There is a dire need to be more nuanced and committed to our definitions that cuts to the point unapologetically to peoples feelings and personal political stances. It doesn't take long after reading a few history books to notice that the Left-Right spectrum is fucking stupid and breaks down once we are honest about things.

[Scholar]

34 minutes ago, DocWatts said:

@Scholar I actually agree with many of the points in you bring up, and broadly speaking we may agree more than we disagree.

It's absolutely true that the public is poorly educated about fascism (not to mention socialism, marxism, and many other ideologies), something that fascist ideologies exploit by attempting to make thier arguments sound far more reasonable than they actually are (ie sanitizing white supremacist ideology as the far more benign sounding 'race realism'). In the minds of a majority of the public thier understanding of fascism doesn't go any farther than obvious and surface level associations with Nazi Germany.

So of course there aren't fascists so much as people who were manipulated and deceived by egoicly gratifying lies. And I also fully recognize that by thier own internalized values, people enacting the egoic power fantasy of fascism are (by thier own definition) righting the wrongs of the world: 'Garbage in, garbage out.' To add to that, an SS guard working at a concentration camp also believed that what they were doing was for the good of the world.

That doesn't change the fact that just because that's what makes sense to people at a particular level of development, that the rest of the society should indulge thier delusional fantasies.

Social harmony is valuable insofar as it's to the benefit of everyone in the society, and allowing these narratives to go unchallenged and achieve a degree of tacit mainstream acceptance harms everyone in society.

I also agree that there are likely very few explicit fascists among Trump's Cult. The fascism among the far right is largely implicit and invisible, because it takes a degree of sociological understanding to see these things.

Trying to convince people who have an egoic attachment to fascist narratives is a waste of time IMHO. Not that it can't be done, just that it's not an efficient use of time, energy, and resources.  Hell, it took Germany losing a world war and a multi-generational process of introspection to begin to deal with the trauma of fascist narratives.

On a pragmatic interpersonal level, I think the best we can hope for is to make what's implicit explicit. And to work to ensure that fascist narratives aren't tolerated inside of whatever communities we happen to inhabit, be they physical or in the online space. That and to work towards greater social solidarity towards people who oppose these narratives, as part of a broader effort of democratization.

I completely disagree with this. I don't think fascism is a threat whatsoever, the only way it will become a threat, on both the left and the right, will be due to division. There is alot of "fascism" implicit in popular left wing thought to, just give a listen to Vaush and people like him. This has nothing to do with people being secretly manipulated by some small group of genius fascist, this is a result of the social dynamics playing out at this current moment. No "calling out" fascism, or identifying it, or whatever you want to do about it, will do anything. Most of it is a complete waste of ressources and time, and much of it just makes the problem worse because you just sound like a conspiracy nut job from the point of view of a right wing individual.

I think the issue here is our larger cultural context, and I think it is delusional to think that any of this has to do with fascism whatsoever. Fascism is a symptom, not a cause, and even if you remove and forbid all of fascistic thought, there will be some other dysfunctional narrative and ideology that will take root.

[AlterEgo]

16 hours ago, Hardkill said:

I actually am very seriously considering buying some kind of gun and a bulletproof vest. I definitely want to make a panic room. The more I think about what has happened to our country the more I realize how dangerous it has gotten. I know you guys say that there probably isn’t going to be a civil war within the foreseeable future, but I actually think that as long America seems to no longer be a safe country for anyone to live in given the skyrocketing right wing terrorism in the US. 

This... is exactly what a conspiracy theorist says.

[PurpleTree]

26 minutes ago, Roy said:

As someone who frequents studying history quite a bit, it's a little triggering seeing words like Fascism/Socialism thrown around so loosely and inaccurately in political conversation from both sides. People just eat up and use Academia narrative and trust that they have the best intentions of truth behind them just because it's "supposed" to be the body that is at the front of tackling these things. Sadly, that's not the case, as much as it's become a tired cliché to point that out.  

If you completely remove yourself from the cultural matrix and observe independently, you'll be shocked to notice it's actually modern far Leftists that have FAR more in common with historical Fascists than Trump morons.

Of course they don't want to hear that though and will deny it violently, nothing hurts more than the truth.

I say this as someone who is far socially left leaning on nearly every political issue, except maybe capitol punishment.

Another note I forgot to add to this post - There is a dire need to be more nuanced and committed to our definitions that cuts to the point unapologetically to peoples feelings and personal political stances. It doesn't take long after reading a few history books to notice that the Left-Right spectrum is fucking stupid and breaks down once we are honest about things.

Nice answer.

Although i think capitol punishment is a horrible backwards thing.

[Preety_India]

2 hours ago, PurpleTree said:

weren't you a Trump fan a while ago?

 could you please enlighten me when? Ever since I joined the forum I only remember talking negative about Trump. Please enlighten me when I was positive, I would be quite delighted. 

 

[PurpleTree]

4 minutes ago, Preety_India said:

 could you please enlighten me when? Ever since I joined the forum I only remember talking negative about Trump. Please enlighten me when I was positive, I would be quite delighted. 

 

before you joined the forum

i think you talked about it

or was it someone else

 

[Fleetinglife]

Serbian Fascism is on the rise here as well, war criminal Ratko Mladic murals painted on most places across the Capital and elsewhere in Serbia and Republika Srpska, also protected by government loyal and controlled police, from being removed by anti-fascist activists or ordinary local citizens and building apartment owners calling on cleaning service to their residential building where they were painted by hooligans connected with orgs connected with government and is a very traumatic and harmful genocidal figure for most Bosniaks or people of Muslim descent or background living here or in this region openly celebrated and displayed here as a war hero and whose legacy is being rewritten and historical revisionism being actively done to suit an ideological worldview is actively done by the government propaganda filled to the brim with former war profiteers also.

 

Edited January 8, 2022 by Fleetinglife

[DocWatts]

50 minutes ago, Scholar said:

I think the issue here is our larger cultural context, and I think it is delusional to think that any of this has to do with fascism whatsoever. Fascism is a symptom, not a cause, and even if you remove and forbid all of fascistic thought, there will be some other dysfunctional narrative and ideology that will take root.

Of course fascism is a symptom and not a cause, one that arises for sociological and developmental reasons. Anyone with literacy in these subjects should be able to tell you as much, and I wasn't trying to imply otherwise (quite the opposite in fact).

Yes, fascism is a symptom of other long term systemic issues having to do with socio-economic factors, widespread polarization, and declining social solidarity. But lest we forget, symptoms still need to be attended to or they can be fatal to the patient while you're busy addressing root causes (which takes time).

Also I think you have the impression that I'm approaching this from a conspiratorial angle, when my perspective is sociological and developmental. Address the systemic sociological issues, and you'll begin to address the polarization that's fueling extremism.

Edited January 8, 2022 by DocWatts

[Preety_India]

Just now, PurpleTree said:

before you joined the forum

i think you talked about it

or was it someone else

 

Yea before joining the forum, I wasn't exactly a fan, but I admired the hard work he put in into his 2016 campaigning, can't deny that. But once I joined the forum, my views about trump changed upon further digging into his past and observing his role as a president, a far cry from what he appeared during the campaigning days. I was never a fan but once I saw how he handled things as a president, suffice to say I developed an intense dislike for him. He is quite delusional and a freak.