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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34907 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I'm with AOC on it making fascism look benign

This part really threw me when she said it, and since you seem to agree I'd like to ask: What? How? Is Christianity fascism now?

Because these days the word "Fascist" is not understood as describing a specific variety of totalitarian technocratic socialism (IE the politics of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Et Al). It is understood as a "boo-light" indicating any political position that a progressive college professor or media personality might disagree with, and by those criteria mainline Christianity is very obviously "fascist".

It’s because she watches The Handmaid’s Tale.

Is Christianity fascism now?

Isn't everything to the right of the far-left fascism (in the rhetorical eyes of the far-left)?

No.

If I'm not mistaken, didn't the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries in Russia also align themselves against the Church (Orthodox or otherwise), seeing it as an element of the oppressive Empire? That probably didn't help the relationship between Christianity and the Left.

"The poor you will always have with you" doesn't work so well for economic leftism either.

More generally, though, Leftist salvation is physical, while Christian salvation is spiritual. That's not a difference that can be papered over, and it will always resolve one way or the other.

I'd add that the vatican, on some issues, is aligned with left wing position. For example it has been very pro immigration for many decades. It has also opposed every war in the past 60 or so years which was usually considered a left wing position (not so much recently).

In principle, no. In present-day United States culture, I think yes. It didn't have to be this way, but it turned out this way. Kind of analogous to how the "we take covid super duper serious" position didn't have to be left-coded (and at first it wasn't), but in the US at least that's how it shook out.

There is... I don't have the number, but I keep seeing them pop up in forums all over the place(and for several years), so there's at least an amount of left-aligned individuals whom are absolutely convinced that America is only One Bad Day away from getting turned into a Christian Theocracy.

AOC is presumably one of those people.

I think they're not entirely wrong, but if I had to put money on it, I'd predict that, in the event of FedGov collapse/takeover, things would actually continue as normal and not go fascist at least for a while--maybe even long enough for things to return to something resembling the status quo ante. America is big and spread-out enough to keep all of it from going all red-banners-everywhere.

To back this up: Imperial Germany collapsed economically and politically in 1918, and Weimar Germany never obtained political stability (rapidly emerging and disintegrating governments) but it didn't succumb to totalitarianism until the early 1930s. For most of the intervening period, the social democratic left pushed for reforms, and even the (significantly large) authoritarian right almost all pined for the good old days of pre-WWI Germany, rather than the totalitarian revolution of Nazism.

I believe this was most lucidly established in the Hulu documentary "The Handmaid's Tale".

Didn't find it especially persuasive, myself, but have no shortage of female friends and relations who whisper about it in hushed tones with many significant glances.

Then again, I could possibly be described as a Christian theocrat.

I've seen the argument touted about for far longer than Hulu's version of the Handmaid's Tale, so. (And I won't go into a minor aside regarding Margaret Atwood, or the fact that said book was taking pages from what happened in Iran, or...)

I think it's a fairly silly take, myself.

She's saying this is fascism and that the ads make it look benign. I'm saying that the ads make fascism look benign, in a joking sense, that the ads represent a similarly totalitarian, all-encompassing worldview.

I was having a hard time parsing that, too.

I think it’s because the group behind these ads is explicitly Lausanne-Covenant evangelist.

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