• aidan@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    Were the confederates fascist? Racist oligarchies exist before fascism as a concept existed(like the confederacy). But I think fascism also requires certain economic and political policies that idk if the CSA had.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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      1 month ago

      If the Confederacy existed today you’d call it a fascist state with zero mental conflict, but Orwell actually addressed a similar situation with criticizing Kipling that he resolved by simply calling him a pre-fascist.

      No, they do not meet a technical definition of the term on a policy level, but if they’d been around in 1930 you bet your ass they’d have been babbling about Autarky and such.

    • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      There is also a huge emphasis on military worship in fascist societies, sometimes even trying to make civilians dress and act like the military does. Which, once again, confederates didn’t do.

      • Hamartia@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        A big problem with how people conceptulise fascism is that they only look at a couple of full grown animals. This causes them to overlook the nascent stages and to discount regional variances caused by the different environments they grew up in.

        Whether they have been propagandised to frame this perception this way because most Right Wing movements utilise fear, anger and devisiveness in a discomfortingly similar way, is worth pondering.