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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34277 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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The inherent issue is that pretty much all national-level politics resembles Fascism at most levels these days.

The larger the Federal Government grows the more influence it has on every aspect of life. The tighter it gets tied in with large private corporations and favors their interests (this is the closer definition of Fascism, if you ask me). The more it does favors for those it prefers and makes life difficult for those that oppose it. And the government is constantly attempting to expand and solidify its own power. So fascism looks a lot like what any 'normal' government does as it expands its own scope of authority.

I think the factors that would make a given party the most "Nazi-like" would be:

  • Emphasis of the superiority of some identifiable subgroup of the human population and based on said superiority, insist that said group has an inherent right to rule. This needn't even be race-based, but its easy to default to that.
  • The intentional oppression, especially the internment or imprisonment, of dissenting groups solely on the basis of their dissent.
  • Extreme Nationalism to the point of paranoia that any adjacent nations are looking to attack them and thus justification of pre-emptive invasion or similar actions. I directly differentiate this from extreme isolationism where they will vigorously defend their borders against incursion, but I admit these lines get fuzzy.

Safe to say there are no real identifiable Nazi-like parties with national sway in the U.S., to me.

This is everyone's reminder that George Orwell, writing in 1944 before we even finished defeating the Nazis, argued that there was no clear definition of the term fascist and that the term had been used so widely and to describe so many fundamentally different things that it had already lost any real meaning; https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc

We love our floating signifiers, don't we folks?

But as I said in my other comment, I (perhaps wrongly) don't think of Hitler's defining characteristic as having been a fascist dictator, but has having been a fascist dictator who started WWII and the Holocaust. If the Hitler comparison is just a fascist dictator claim with only a ... following it, I think that's disingenuous.

I'm not defending fascism. But if the argument isn't that he'll use fascism to commit specific atrocities comparable to Hitler's, but only that fascism is the atrocious end in itself, the specific Hitler comparison feels weak to me. There have been other fascists and dictators in history too.

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