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I see you're a sockpuppet. I don't know if you're a venting lefty or a trolling righty or some other kind of bait, but there's something I've never seen talked about, and it's worth talking about. This topic is endless tragedy and comedy, tragic where the real villain of the 20th century, communism, wasn't vanquished, and comic where we explore the history of the word "fascism."
Other commenters here have already observed how "fascism" and "fascist" have become meaningless pejoratives, and that's what's funny: fascism has always been a meaningless pejorative. You can cite dictionaries but if you look at the original critiques by Marxists, be it Clara Zetkin or Trotsky or Georgi Dimitrov, you'd see it was meaningless when they wrote and spoke about it. It meant nothing. Well — almost nothing.
Zetkin:
Trotsky:
Dimitrov:
I actually laughed the first time I read Trotsky's full critique because it really is just "Fascism is when the fascists get in there and fascist all over the place."
When you pare away the rhetoric you see exactly what they're doing: Our righteous freedom fighters, their fanatical terrorists.
"Nuh-uh, you're the ones exploited by powerful people who hide the truth and want to take away all your rights!"
They hated their opposition because they were a proletarian revolt who wanted to fix the existing system instead of overthrowing it and implementing communism. That's it, that's literally all it has ever been, commies mad that people saw through their horseshit but recognized the power in banding together. What else would communists do but wordswordswords slander them as having dishonest motives? And dishonest motives, oh boy. Look at every communist government in the last 100 years. "Not true communism" yeah maybe, but the purpose of a system is what it does, and every communist party that has ever risen to firmly control a country has behaved in exactly the same way. Tyranny and genocide.
What's happened since Trotsky et al. is not what I would call classic leftist behavior so much as the inclination that begets leftism as a method of obtaining political power: control of language. I do feel this is an important distinction, because where I view leftism poorly is almost entirely on the ones who manipulate language to equivocate and ultimately deceive, not those of their voters who believe they're doing good and want to out of genuine altruistic impulse. Unfortunately the people who reach high power from the left frequently use those techniques. There are minor exceptions in parts of Europe but it's not the case in the major leftist establishments of the US, the UK, France, and Germany, and they influence their comrades elsewhere. They manipulate terms, they equivocate and deceive. Like "fascism." They've had a century to define it around Nazi villainy, and then they adjust and readjust the definition so it can always be used to slander their opposition. The changing definition also probably continuously adds to the social inertia against anyone who might stand up and say "Hey, wait a second, the original definition was what?"
It's taken on socioreligious power, it's analogous to religious conviction. For me to tell someone "That's not fascism" or especially "You don't know what fascism is" is like saying "Good is bad, bad is good." It's a fundamental difference in paradigm, so such a statement has negative weight. It's meaningless.
There are governments who called themselves fascist and that would mean something here if the relationship between communism and fascism were discussed honestly, but it's never been honest. Fascist persists as an insult because communists persist, entrenched in power, and being masters of manipulative language, had means after obvious motive to downplay the horrors of communism and play up the horrors of nazism (both bad, the former orders of magnitude and uniquely worse). And we're humans and we can't help but calling our enemies the worst names we know. From Truman likening Dewey to fascists to generations of kids matriculating under communist professors who see fascism in everything and it repeats and repeats and repeats.
It's about to stop.
If I called one of my irreligious friends a reprobate sinner they'd laugh. They'd think I was joking, the word has no meaning for them. That's happening again. We're in the cultural singularity and culture is progressing very fast indeed. In at most 10 years, fascism and racism and sexism and every other -ism and -ist and -phobe, having finished the sprint from "No we're not/You're the real fascists" to "If it's bad, so be it" to "u forgot the gigachad" will then move into pure mockery, just as I would face if I went to proselytize in ratheism by condemning their lives of sin.
I'd like to believe there's value still in arguing this, and maybe things change just right in the coming years and we can have a real discussion, but that's the best case for this idea, approaching it on its angle and in good faith. I'm not approaching this idea on its angle, but I do mean this in good faith. Every last bit of power is being wrung from those words, its a score of levers about to snap off their fulcrums, and all the people who hold to these need to understand this and be prepared for when those words they use to frame their very sense of politics and the world become meaningless.
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