Disgusting IMO, but possibly correct

[Sommerswerd]

openly embrace every tenet ... as long as he doesn't accept the label

This comment is so on the money. Thanks for that.

 

[Tristan_C]

Some examples of fascists:

Female dogs - they despise weakness in potential mates
Tuning forks - relentless purists
Planets - they reverentially orbit a leader object and aspire to eons of security
RNA - arrogant molecules that treat living creatures as mere vessels for their ideology
Wednesday - Odin is a fascist, so his Day is, too


Anyway. Which do you think has set the human race further back? Mussolini during the war, or the word fascist, as a handy, melodramatic word for anything that isn't you, in the 70 years since. Essays and books continue to be written about how stupid this word is.

 

[Samson]

Which do you think has set the human race further back? Mussolini during the war, or the word fascist, as a handy, melodramatic word for anything that isn't you, in the 70 years since. Essays and books continue to be written about how stupid this word is.

I think just for the invasion of Ethiopia (nearly 1 million killed or wounded) Mussolini has it, and there is plenty more to add on if that is not enough.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Anyway. Which do you think has set the human race further back? Mussolini during the war, or the word fascist, as a handy, melodramatic word for anything that isn't you, in the 70 years since. Essays and books continue to be written about how stupid this word is.

Definitely Mussolini.
That's like asking if it's worse to call somebody a racist, or to torture a black teenager to death for (allegedly) whistling at a white woman.

 

[warpus]

That's half my point. The more important half is that some 40% of the population, to varying degrees, is actively approving the unlabeled badness. They refuse to follow "these are the tenets of fascism, these are Trump's positions, notice they are all the same" to the obvious conclusion because apparently taken one by one they like the tenets of fascism.

I mean half of them didn't understand that ACA and Obamacare are the same thing, they're not a very bright bunch. Trump is also doing a lot of stuff that Republicans have always been doing - kicking down the poor, setting up kickbacks for the rich, plus stuff Republicans wish they could have been doing. So it's not like he's doing all this wildly unexpected stuff, he's just taking a lot of Republican positions to their logical conclusion.

 

[GoodEnoughForMe]

Weird to argue that a marriage of state and capital isn't happening under a president who has 6 Goldman Sachs members, a billionaire donor, and a fast food CEO now helping run the show, and whose spokesperson went on Fox & Friends to tell people, from the White House briefing room, to buy the president's daughter's stuff.

 

[Tristan_C]

I think just for the invasion of Ethiopia (nearly 1 million killed or wounded) Mussolini has it, and there is plenty more to add on if that is not enough.

If, in the average, everyone since 1945 had lost 1 hour per year dealing with this crap (accusing others or being wrongly identified as an agents of Mussolini), that's 40 million years of production, rising geometrically at the moment. Of course current-day voters, politicians, media, and internet bozos basically spend their lives calling each other fascists, making the thought-control crisis unquestionably closer-to-home, and rectifiable, than the invasion of Ethiopia.

Whatever though. Keep calling people bad names. Good therapy.

Definitely Mussolini.
That's like asking if it's worse to call somebody a racist, or to torture a black teenager to death for (allegedly) whistling at a white woman.

What if hundreds of millions of people toss irrelevant accusations at each other for generations, using the notion that other people are racists in an effort to avoid self-examination. The human condition versus the single event. Which would you rather undo? Which affects you here and now?

 

[W|M]

Yeah, irrelevant accusations of Nazism are the plague of modern socie--wait, what's this? Alt-rightists espousing the 14 words which are very much associated with Neo-Nazism? Well, I never

 

[Omega124]

What if hundreds of millions of people toss irrelevant accusations at each other for generations, using the notion that other people are racists in an effort to avoid self-examination. The human condition versus the single event. Which would you rather undo? Which affects you here and now?

Pretty sure I'd still want to undo the genocide and the second world war. I'd much rather deal with badpolitics than literal genocide. I'm honestly struggling to see why anyone would ever argue otherwise.

 

[Tristan_C]

Pretty sure I'd still want to undo the genocide and the second world war. I'd much rather deal with badpolitics than literal genocide. I'm honestly struggling to see why anyone would ever argue otherwise.

That's a fairer comparison; though, in this you could still be choosing between cure and treatment. The problem with letting doublespeak or "badpolitics" run rampant is... where do Fascism and Nazism come from?

 

[GoodSarmatian]

What if hundreds of millions of people toss irrelevant accusations at each other for generations, using the notion that other people are racists in an effort to avoid self-examination. The human condition versus the single event. Which would you rather undo? Which affects you here and now?

Nonsensical strawman scenario.
What we have now is that the word fascism is sometimes over- and misused and the people who misuse it are generally of the politically irrelevant far left. Sometimes annoying, a few times amusing, and generally harmless.

 

[W|M]

That's a fairer comparison; though, in this you could still be choosing between cure and treatment. The problem with letting doublespeak or "badpolitics" run rampant is... where do Fascism and Nazism come from?

Wait are you saying that the reason fascists commit genocide is because people call them fascists? Seems to be a bit of an overreaction to me

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I'd much rather deal with badpolitics than literal genocide. I'm honestly struggling to see why anyone would ever argue otherwise.

Because as I said...A (to me) horrific number of people embrace the tenets of fascism even though they reject the word.

In a way Tristan is right that we have tied the baggage too firmly to the word and not to the tenets. So much so that we have a poster who's chosen avatar is a cop talking about lost production as the greatest evil and defending "orbiting a leader object" as the natural order while apparently thinking that fascism is just a loaded word for racism. As long as the bad baggage "goes" with the word he is perfectly comfortable defending and embracing every tenet of fascism.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Definitely Mussolini.
That's like asking if it's worse to call somebody a racist, or to torture a black teenager to death for (allegedly) whistling at a white woman.

To be fair he didn't ask which was worse, he asked which had set the human race further back. While I wouldn't exactly agree that people slinging the word "fascist" around wantonly is particularly setting the human race back, I also wouldn't really think that Mussolini particularly set us back either.

 

[Akka]

Strength, security, stability, making the trains run on time; all the same old selling points still sell.

I don't see why they wouldn't. They aren't exclusive to fascism, and they ARE things that people value. Fascism also put an emphasis on being able to feed the population, it doesn't make it bad by default.
Fascism's bad points aren't these terms - these terms are, as you said, "selling points", because they aren't bad in themselves.
Fascism's bad points are how the individual is a sacrificial cog, the glorification of brute strength and of "the leader" and the mythification of nationalism to give some mystic-based "right" to dominate and conquer.
Notice that the exact same points except the last one were also used by communism, and unsurprisingly the hate between fascism and communism was precisely about nationalism (one wanting to destroy it, the other making it the absolute core of its values).

 

[Traitorfish]

If, in the average, everyone since 1945 had lost 1 hour per year dealing with this crap (accusing others or being wrongly identified as an agents of Mussolini), that's 40 million years of production, rising geometrically at the moment. Of course current-day voters, politicians, media, and internet bozos basically spend their lives calling each other fascists, making the thought-control crisis unquestionably closer-to-home, and rectifiable, than the invasion of Ethiopia.

"Using words in a way I don't like is literally worse than the Holocaust"?

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I don't see why they wouldn't. They aren't exclusive to fascism, and they ARE things that people value. Fascism also put an emphasis on being able to feed the population, it doesn't make it bad by default.
Fascism's bad points aren't these terms - these terms are, as you said, "selling points", because they aren't bad in themselves.
Fascism's bad points are how the individual is a sacrificial cog, the glorification of brute strength and of "the leader" and the mythification of nationalism to give some mystic-based "right" to dominate and conquer.
Notice that the exact same points except the last one were also used by communism, and unsurprisingly the hate between fascism and communism was precisely about nationalism (one wanting to destroy it, the other making it the absolute core of its values).

Problem is that those same bad points are in the Trump package, and to substantial numbers of people they also still sell as "fair costs" to get the good points.

 

[Yeekim]

Is it ok to punch people who wish for trains to be on time?

 

[red_elk]

Is it ok to punch people who wish for trains to be on time?

But next time they'll ask for order and security. It's a slippery slope.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Strength, security, stability, making the trains run on time; all the same old selling points still sell.

I don't have my thoughts fully worked out on the questions raised by the OP, so I guess I'll clarify them by writing this post--know what I think once I see what I say.

Security always sells. Every presidential campaign has only two selling points: security and prosperity. Trump hit both hard. Clinton scarcely talked about either.

What seems concerning, and inclines me toward your view that western civilization is right now prone toward a fascistic turn, is what people seem willing to give up for security right now. With the Patriot Act, which Kyr identifies as an early precursor to our present troubled times, there was at least debate about how much freedom might have to be surrendered, with the whole Franklin quote on Safety and Freedom and those who deserve neither frequently bandied about. What I was astonished by in the Trump victory was how many of their usual core principles Republicans were willing to handwave for the wall-and-factories that Trump promised: constitutionalism, religious conviction and moral character of the candidate, even just minimal levels of human civility. You might say all of those things were just empty pieties in the first place, and sure there's some of that, but I don't think that's the whole story. I think people have just lately been willing to surrender other things that do in other circumstances really mean something to them for the promise of security.

All I can guess is that the steady stream of news of terrorist incidents from around the world really has gotten to people. The terrorists have won, as we would say, following out the logic of "If they get us to change our ways, the terrorists have won."

The one thing I'll say is what I've said in other threads: in contesting this turn, the word "fascist" doesn't serve us at all. People tune it out both because they're too historically ignorant to see the similarities and too complacent to believe that it could happen here. So the person using it always just comes across as alarmist.

Therefore, I actually think it all just needs to be combated on an issue-by-issue basis, by reminding people of the other values they hold. How much do you admire a military commander who refused to be released until all of the men under his command were as well? Then how much do you admire someone who denigrates that person's heroism? Would you like someone who boasted of grabbing women's pussies to coach your 14-year-old's soccer team? Then how do you feel about that person being in charge of women's health resources? Should Ivanka get free advertising for her company from White House spokespeople? Remind people that they have other values than the one to which Trump tries to reduce everything: not having those brown people blow you up.

Still pondering why there seems such a fascistic-inclining mass hysteria of late.