The western democracies have never taken fascism seriously. The story that Britain and America tell themselves is that they led a great crusade against it in World War II. This is bollocks. They were dragged into WWII through the way military alliances fell and not out of any kind of principled opposition to what Germany, Japan and Italy were doing politically. That's just a story they tell themselves to soothe national egos.
Indeed, afterwards they did almost nothing to prevent it taking root in their own societies, beyond trying to construct welfare states. As carrot and stick approaches go, this was the carrot. There was no stick, and fascism needs a stick to keep it down.
The welfare state model held it at bay for a few decades, until the kids of the people who built it grew up and realised they could vote in the people who would dismantle it for cash and hand enough of it over to them to drive a Faustian bargain that fucked their own children.
There was never any systemic attempt to build political resilience against fascism in those societies because, frankly, fascist sympathies are too heavily embedded within the ruling classes and security services of those countries, and removing them would involve a level of pain and commitment to principle that those in a position to actually do so are not willing to entertain.
What should be, at a bare minimum, in place is a commitment to uncovering and removing fascism from all levels of public life, backed by robust and mandatory civics education.
Western democracies are utterly incapable of doing this, and instead think that they can accommodate their own fascist undercurrents without them becoming overwhelming.
But with the dismantling of their own welfare states, they have nothing to fall back on, and so when economic shocks hit, the shit they have been hiding rapidly bubbles to the surface.
We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
One day there won't be.
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“We live in societies of rulers causally throwing lit matches at pools of petrol surrounding their ankles, and relying on the fact that there's enough breeze to blow them out before they land.
One day there won't be.”
Idealistic Pragmatist :mstdn:
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in reply to Llwynog • •@Llwynog It has to be a continuous process, because if there's one thing that these bastards can do, it's play the long game.
But first, they need to root them out of their own parties.
Second, they need to fucking condemn shit which is currently being normalised or presented as "legitimate concerns".
Third, they need to divert significant resources into proper civics education to create a populace that is politically literate and able to spot and critically analyse their rhetoric and dog whistles.
And fourthly, there needs to be an understanding that it is an utterly illegitimate political stance, that is not to be tolerated in a society that values human rights. There need to be laws that proscribe fascist organisations. They need to be enforced, and the courts overseeing them need to kept free of the sort of creeping political influence that has caused institutional capture in the US.
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in reply to Sarah Brown • • •With time a transnational facility might include this structure that has been gaining traction slowly against the will of fascists and empires
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respon…
international political doctrine
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the "western democracies" haven't taken fascism seriously because they were instrumental in its creation. they didn't try to lessen the influence of fascism after the second world war because they created it in the first place. they won't try to reduce it because fascism is essential to "western democracy".
John A. MacDonald, the first prime minister of canada, inspired Hitler with his white supremacist screeds about "Aryan race".
the nation states who pretend to be a bolster against fascism did absolutely nothing to stop it when they had the chance. canada and USA gave no official support to the revolutionaries of the Spanish civil war. the Stalinists in Spain worked to prevent revolution, which fed dead antifascist bodies to Franco, who had Hitler's military support. the Mackenzie-Papineau Brigade, which came from canada, an anti-fascist volunteer brigade which went to Spain to fight Franco, received no support. most of them didn't come back.
canada turned away thousands of Jewish refugees trying to escape Germany. canada had also put thousands of Japanese immigrants into concentration camps. nevermind the "residential schools" and what the reserve system for Indigenous people used to be. (guess who Hitler learned to use concentration camps from
the "welfare state" has always been a fascist idea. it was social democrats, read: reformers of capitalism, not socialists, who created things like welfare and universal healthcare which, while they seem like good ideas on their face, just look at what's happening now when the capitalists decide to dismantle these systems, which was bound to happen.
if you want to learn a quick history of "social democracy", find out who the Bolsheviks really were, and who had no problem with letting the NSDAP march in Germany.
it's not an accident that the ruling class is fascist. they invented this shit. it serves no purpose other than to uphold a white supremacist ruling status quo.
if you hate fascism, ask your doctor if tyrranicide is right for you!! ​
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