We were entirely unhinged in 2008. You might have been buying into Obama’s Hope and Change rhetoric, but that was all just campaigning nonsense. Obama is a total neoliberal and kept most of Bush’s policies.
We were in lockstep on the path to fascism even then, though media only admitted it once Trump walked away with the Republican Party.
Do you understand that the point youre making is that it is not fascist to kill a vulnerable subgroup of the population that has been marked as undesirable?
Do you also understand that your point is directly contradictory to every single professional study of real, actual fascist organizations and governments?
Maybe we should make a list of things that aren’t fascist, it would save a lot of time. I mean if Obama doesn’t make the “not fascist” list, then what actually does make that list?
We should also consider compiling a list of actions that are not genocide, because that word seems to be slapped on everything nowadays too.
Or maybe we could create a fascist scale and grade every world leader past and present to prove that everyone is a little bit fascist and therefore fascism is nothing to worry about. “You know in some ways we could consider Obama to be a little bit fascist…”
Or maybe we should just focus on the fascists that a clear and present threat to democracy. Like Trump and Putin. Might make it a little easier to consider what needs to be done to prevent democracy from being ended by these assholes.
Except in this case, the US public (the press at least) has done the introspection. The transnational white power movement, and the Christian nationalist movement (there’s a lot of intersection) qualify for all of Umberto Eco’s fourteen properties of fascist ideology. They also adhere to Luis Britto García’s eight characteristics of Fascism. These movements also feature Emilio Gentile’s ten elements of fascism.
Now I understand in the age of internet discourse, we have to be mindful of Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies, so it may not be enough for us to simply say that the US state is fascist so much as we have to be explicit about how it compares, such as (a few examples out of dozens, if not hundreds):
The overconfinement of inmates by the federal and state prisons, or of extrajudicial detainees in detention centers without reasonable hygiene or living provisions so that disease runs rampantly through them, what came to light during the COVID-19 lockdown.
The lack of reasonable oversight of law enforcement allowing them to seize or kill at will, comparable to the Freikorps irregulars from which Rohm’s Sturmabteilung were recruited.
ICE’s defiance of orders to arrest and deport immigrants only if they were convicted felons, instead arresting and detaining them at will, often deporting them not to nations of origin but into the hands of human traffickers, and sometimes detaining American citizens that were insufficiently nationalized (e.g. didn’t speak English and were too dark) knowing they had a slim chance of ever getting back to home soil. Compare this to the Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst who was ordered only to arrest and detain undesirables that were already violent criminals. Not only did Heydrich ignore the violent criminal provision but also kept adding new qualifiers to the undesirables list that qualified for arrest. His batch of detainees ballooned so quickly as to turn from a warehouse in Berlin to the massive complex of concentration camps that we were taught about in school. And we know (or should know) how that story evolves.
I studied the holocaust in the aughts once the US started doing Are We The Baddies stuff, wondering if that process might be a thing to watch for, so if you aren’t sufficiently educated about the German genocide machine, and how it applies to the United States in the 2020s, there’s way too much to compare.
I could go on and on and on about the capture of the federal government, the denial of judicial confirmations to President Obama, so that a Republican president (Trump) could flood the Federal judiciary with Federalist Society judges, the countless judicial carve-outs of civil protections allegedly guaranteed by the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments to the Constitution of the United States, the bloated prison state that has more inmates (total or per capita) than any other penal system on the planet, including nations that are supposed to be scary and authoritarian like China and DPRK. And if you really were interested, I could go into the specifics as to how all that compares to the German Reich starting about a Century ago.
In 2013 when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA’s PRISM, XKeyscore and ESCHALON programs, we had learned they were over ten years in the making. I didn’t want to find out that the US is executing and incinerating people by the thousands per day, and find out we’ve been doing it for years now. So far we’re not there yet, but it is conspicuous how much latitude law enforcement and prison officers have when it comes to cruel treatment, violence or even killing.
So yes, the US is already doing fascism by the bunches, and a couple of huge, dangerous movements are established in state and national politics that are invoking a lot of fascist narratives. But now the Republican party is looking to neuter elections in the US, make it a one-party state and swap out any official (elected, appointed or hired) that doesn’t salute the new world order, as per Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation. It’s easy to websearch. That should scare the snot out of all of us regardless of whether the F-word is attached to it.
We were entirely unhinged in 2008. You might have been buying into Obama’s Hope and Change rhetoric, but that was all just campaigning nonsense. Obama is a total neoliberal and kept most of Bush’s policies.
We were in lockstep on the path to fascism even then, though media only admitted it once Trump walked away with the Republican Party.
The problem with saying everyone is a fascist is it desensitizes everyone so they don’t know what an actual fascist is.
Unless that was your plan all along…
Are you a fascist?
You sound like a fascist, so you’re probably a fascist. If you’re probably a fascist that means you’re definitely a fascist.
When will you stop being a fascist?
Legalizing killing homeless people is pretty fuckin fascist my guy
You sound like Obama, who was also apparently fascist. You must be a fascist.
Do you understand that the point youre making is that it is not fascist to kill a vulnerable subgroup of the population that has been marked as undesirable?
Do you also understand that your point is directly contradictory to every single professional study of real, actual fascist organizations and governments?
Obama was violent, wasn’t he?
He did really like drone strikes, to the tune of more than 500 of them often involving civilian casualties.
People are crying fascist because fascist shit is happening.
Maybe we should make a list of things that aren’t fascist, it would save a lot of time. I mean if Obama doesn’t make the “not fascist” list, then what actually does make that list?
We should also consider compiling a list of actions that are not genocide, because that word seems to be slapped on everything nowadays too.
Or maybe we could create a fascist scale and grade every world leader past and present to prove that everyone is a little bit fascist and therefore fascism is nothing to worry about. “You know in some ways we could consider Obama to be a little bit fascist…”
Or maybe we should just focus on the fascists that a clear and present threat to democracy. Like Trump and Putin. Might make it a little easier to consider what needs to be done to prevent democracy from being ended by these assholes.
No one in this thread called Obama a fascist
The irony in this comment
Fascism is capitalism gone violent.
The problem? It’s you.
Except in this case, the US public (the press at least) has done the introspection. The transnational white power movement, and the Christian nationalist movement (there’s a lot of intersection) qualify for all of Umberto Eco’s fourteen properties of fascist ideology. They also adhere to Luis Britto García’s eight characteristics of Fascism. These movements also feature Emilio Gentile’s ten elements of fascism.
Now I understand in the age of internet discourse, we have to be mindful of Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies, so it may not be enough for us to simply say that the US state is fascist so much as we have to be explicit about how it compares, such as (a few examples out of dozens, if not hundreds):
I studied the holocaust in the aughts once the US started doing Are We The Baddies stuff, wondering if that process might be a thing to watch for, so if you aren’t sufficiently educated about the German genocide machine, and how it applies to the United States in the 2020s, there’s way too much to compare.
I could go on and on and on about the capture of the federal government, the denial of judicial confirmations to President Obama, so that a Republican president (Trump) could flood the Federal judiciary with Federalist Society judges, the countless judicial carve-outs of civil protections allegedly guaranteed by the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments to the Constitution of the United States, the bloated prison state that has more inmates (total or per capita) than any other penal system on the planet, including nations that are supposed to be scary and authoritarian like China and DPRK. And if you really were interested, I could go into the specifics as to how all that compares to the German Reich starting about a Century ago.
In 2013 when Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA’s PRISM, XKeyscore and ESCHALON programs, we had learned they were over ten years in the making. I didn’t want to find out that the US is executing and incinerating people by the thousands per day, and find out we’ve been doing it for years now. So far we’re not there yet, but it is conspicuous how much latitude law enforcement and prison officers have when it comes to cruel treatment, violence or even killing.
So yes, the US is already doing fascism by the bunches, and a couple of huge, dangerous movements are established in state and national politics that are invoking a lot of fascist narratives. But now the Republican party is looking to neuter elections in the US, make it a one-party state and swap out any official (elected, appointed or hired) that doesn’t salute the new world order, as per Project 2025 by the Heritage Foundation. It’s easy to websearch. That should scare the snot out of all of us regardless of whether the F-word is attached to it.