Tell me that you don’t know what fascism is without telling me you don’t know what real fascism.
What the USA has been for a long time is an oligarchy, and there are literal Princeton studies to support it. It’s only now that it’s following Russia into becoming full-fledged dictatorships.
Yeah, Trump’s movement is fascist, and I’m sure that we’ll be in some kind of fascistic autocracy if he wins the election, but I think what this meme is trying to describe is imperialism, not fascism.
In art i use tactics by bob ross, am i now as great of a painter as bob ross? Am i now bob ross? No! See how your argument is shit?
That still doesn’t prove the claim “America was always fascist”
Partially because being copied by the Nazis doesn’t intrinsically mean you’re fascist (they copied a hell of a lot of things, including but not limited to fascism)
And partially because that doesn’t cover the “always” part at all
Yeah, but in the case of The U.S. the things the Nazis copied were the fascist things.
The Nazis were inspired by the American Eugenics movement. Fun fact the Eugenics movement was probably more popular in the U.S. than it was in Germany.
They were also inspired by segregation for black people. I think most people would agree that at the time racial segregation was an improvement over how The U.S. treated black people at the founding of the country; when there was an even more intense form of racial hierarchy in the form of chattel slavery.
The U.S. was also founded on the genocide of the Native Americans. That continued past the founding in the form of manifest destiny. More fun facts Hitler justified his invasion of Russia in the terms of manifest destiny.
That’s a short list of some of the fascist things the Nazis took from the U.S. that stretch back to its founding.
What did the Nazis take from America that wasn’t fascist?
A lot of racist, fascist shitbags have cooped a great many things over the years.
If it was fascist at that time, would it have been less fascist when America had legal, designated concentration camps of black slaves?
I understand the instict to dismiss it and maybe “always” will be a step too far but i think a lot of Americans are in denial the extensive cross over between early 20th century USA and nazi Germany. I’m not even just talking about how hitler literally based the Jewish ghettos and anti Jewish laws on the black ghettos and Jim crow or Germany’s Eastern expansion and extermination for land being modeled on Americas Western expansion:
The economics of fascism is croney capitalism, with mass privatisation of public assets, ultra low tax for the rich, pitiful wages and endless toil for everyone else, huge corporate subsidies, handouts to the rich and a merger of the corporate and the state. Some of the state might even be outsourced. Whatever way they set it up, the result was always that.
I’m not even saying that from a presumed position of my country being better. I’m from the UK and the East India company/royal west African company being a corporate state is about purest form of fascism you can get. Thats before you get to all the rest of it. Our biggest export is class subjugation.
they even copied the segregation tactics the us was using against blacks, except they used it against jews.
it was rightly treated as worth of national shame for generations for nazis, but when it comes to the us it was just an oopsie sorry but we aint doing it anymore. except they kind of are at home and moreso abroad.
Doesn’t really prove much. If the meme said “the US has always beaten down its minorities” or something like that, we wouldn’t be quibbling over the wording here.
I’m sorry but how is that unique to the US, that’s literally all of human history and all humans in human history have always had an “other’”.
What makes the US of any more note, if anything, is just the level and formalization of such disgraceful treatment of the “other” that, started with the colonialization of America and the slave trade that boosted it.
Do I think it could be said that this is not the first time that such a thing has happened in history? It’s just this cycle, who knows how long these Cycles go, and hopefully it’s when we eventually evolve to get off of.
Don’t know why you’re getting down voted. Hitler literally said he looked to the US Army’s genocide of Native Americans as a proof of concept for his own Jewish Holocaust.
So I’ve had this issue too, it’s because we can’t agree on the definition.
I use the definition in the dictionary and based on that, US could fall under it, kind of loosely but technically correct.
Which dictionary are you reading? A key component of fascism is a dictatorship. You can argue about controlling oppositional voices or segmentation of society in the US, but a dictatorship is pretty core to fascism in any definition I’ve seen. And yeah, our voting system sucks that still doesn’t make it a dictatorship.
I was talking about the forceful oppression of opposition. That is an element that has existed in the US for a long time.
US has had no dictator yet but a president has much more power than a prime minister.
If you consider fascism to be a spectrum, then US has always had these elements. Dictatorship is basically the end of said spectrum.
dictatorship was happening outside their own borders for the longest time. kind of why you guys pay so much money to keep a military almost bigger than every other in the world combined.
inside the us the blacks have seen the boot way more. ask any awake black person if its been a democracy for them.
or ask central, south america, africa and east asia if the repeated coups over the decades are anything less than dictatorial.
Which dictionary are you reading?
I like Umberto Eco on this one. I’m in my 50s. We’ve checked many of these boxes throughout my life, and for some others you can point to various moments in our history, many but not all of them recent. Certainly enough to satisfy the meme.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco
Umberto Eco’s Ur Fascism definition I think is pretty good. Often times, the “dictionary definition” isn’t the best definition to use, especially when it comes to topics like political ideologies, which tends to be a bit more complex and nuanced than what can be encompassed in a simple colloquial dictionary definition.
Imma post the ur fascism aspects here.
1.“The cult of tradition”, characterized by cultural syncretism, even at the risk of internal contradiction. When all truth has already been revealed by tradition, no new learning can occur, only further interpretation and refinement.
2.“The rejection of modernism”, which views the rationalistic development of Western culture since the Enlightenment as a descent into depravity. Eco distinguishes this from a rejection of superficial technological advancement, as many fascist regimes cite their industrial potency as proof of the vitality of their system.
3.“The cult of action for action’s sake”, which dictates that action is of value in itself and should be taken without intellectual reflection. This, says Eco, is connected with anti-intellectualism and irrationalism, and often manifests in attacks on modern culture and science.
4.“Disagreement is treason” – fascism devalues intellectual discourse and critical reasoning as barriers to action, as well as out of fear that such analysis will expose the contradictions embodied in a syncretistic faith.
5.“Fear of difference”, which fascism seeks to exploit and exacerbate, often in the form of racism or an appeal against foreigners and immigrants.
6.“Appeal to a frustrated middle class”, fearing economic pressure from the demands and aspirations of lower social groups.
7.“Obsession with a plot” and the hyping-up of an enemy threat. This often combines an appeal to xenophobia with a fear of disloyalty and sabotage from marginalized groups living within the society. Eco also cites Pat Robertson’s book The New World Order as a prominent example of a plot obsession.
8.Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as “at the same time too strong and too weak”. On the one hand, fascists play up the power of certain disfavored elites to encourage in their followers a sense of grievance and humiliation. On the other hand, fascist leaders point to the decadence of those elites as proof of their ultimate feebleness in the face of an overwhelming popular will.
9.“Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy” because “life is permanent warfare” – there must always be an enemy to fight. Both fascist Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini worked first to organize and clean up their respective countries and then build the war machines that they later intended to and did use, despite Germany being under restrictions of the Versailles treaty to not build a military force. This principle leads to a fundamental contradiction within fascism: the incompatibility of ultimate triumph with perpetual war.
10.“Contempt for the weak”, which is uncomfortably married to a chauvinistic popular elitism, in which every member of society is superior to outsiders by virtue of belonging to the in-group. Eco sees in these attitudes the root of a deep tension in the fundamentally hierarchical structure of fascist polities, as they encourage leaders to despise their underlings, up to the ultimate leader, who holds the whole country in contempt for having allowed him to overtake it by force.
10.“Everybody is educated to become a hero”, which leads to the embrace of a cult of death. As Eco observes, “[t]he Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.”
11.“Machismo”, which sublimates the difficult work of permanent war and heroism into the sexual sphere. Fascists thus hold “both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality”.
12.“Selective populism” – the people, conceived monolithically, have a common will, distinct from and superior to the viewpoint of any individual. As no mass of people can ever be truly unanimous, the leader holds himself out as the interpreter of the popular will (though truly he alone dictates it). Fascists use this concept to delegitimize democratic institutions they accuse of “no longer represent[ing] the voice of the people”.
13.“Newspeak” – fascism employs and promotes an impoverished vocabulary in order to limit critical reasoning.
Edit: numbered
i mean theyve always been openly couping and subjugating the rest of the world. its just been successfull for their own population for most of this time.
as the meme says, its just ran out of space to expand and its now fucking over their own people and allies instead.
what fascists are doing right now in the us is not much different from what they have been doing to south america, africa and east asia for quite some time now.
Imperialist ≠ fascist
America was often imperialist, only had periods of fascist political movements and has been transitioning for a while.
they are not the same thing per se, but imperialism is a fascist strategy. genociding brown people or otherwise oppressing them for money sounds pretty fascistic to me.
its just that its on a worldwide stage now, so the in-group is even more insulated from seeing it.
Terrorist shithole doing terrorist shithole things. They had a good run for over a hundred years. I hope Trump burns it to the ground.
Are you under the impression that Trump’s destruction of the US won’t involve him doing 10 times more terroristic things all over the world?
Or that the powers that will invade the power vacuum left by a US collapse wouldn’t instantly start resuming the exact same terrorism, and worse, that you are (with every righteous reason) opposing when the US is doing it?
He must be in the “but I did nothing, for I was not _____” stage.
A lot of people seem to be under the impression that if open fascists spouting fascist rhetoric at every opportunity take full control of THE MOST EXPENSIVE MILITARY IN THE WORLD, that it will just self-implode into a nice neat little controlled demolition.
Lmao that is naive at best. And actually wishing for it is downright stupid. I don’t want Russia to collapse and kill itself, I want the scum leading their politics and militaries to be dealt with in the only manner befitting such filth. Anyone wishing different for the US or Russia, or ANY current or former world superpower that still has massive amounts of sway and firepower, is just wishing for collateral damage.
When shit hits the fan, it goes everywhere. When their backs are against a wall, they will strike out and take what they want, to hell with the fallout. Possibly literal.
A sad number of people just go “[large country] bad lol die” like their lives will be unaffected by such a massive global power shift.
100% right. It is the temptation for easy solutions.
Turns out all that was needed to eliminate war and oppression was to pick out one semi-democratic country that’s doing it, and don’t vote in their elections, and bingo! Fascists take over, country collapses, no war and oppression anymore. I am amazed it was so easy the whole time and people were wasting their time with all these other more complicated structures and efforts to get it done.
The innocent people who will suffer thank you for your total lack of humanity/empathy
As if the world gives a fuck about the innocent.
We (the lucky ones) exploit every vulnerable country there is, but pat ourselves on our backs for having ‘humanity’. Child labour, slavery, inhumane conditions in almost every supply chain.
Forget about the 3rd world, how about US outlawing being homeless?
They’re just casualties of his war of principles. He might as well be a billionaire - he’s calling for the war but it won’t really affect him and he doesn’t care who it hurts. He’ll just watch from his couch while eating popcorn.
Be me
Moran (sic)
“Lmao, when the US collapses, they totally won’t make it everyone’s problem”
Imagine it looking like Russia’s collapse if Russia’s military was the most expensive in the world with the among the best logistics, and 800 military bases across 70 countries. That’s about the future of it.
America is sitting on enough nuclear ordinance to end the earths period of habitability… if she falls then who knows what happens with those nukes, is that really a future you want to risk?
No but we have to be very careful about handling Russia because of it. The world was terrified when the Soviet Union collapsed because of all the nuclear ordinance they were sitting on now being potentially insecure. Luckily it didn’t get dispersed and used by random warlords fighting in a power vacuum, that time, there’s no guarantee the same happens if Russia or America fail as states now
People seem to forget that we actually maintain those things, and we are the only ones that have ever used one, well two. The only way the American collapse goes softly for the rest of the world is under a liberal or leftist government. They’ll focus internally. Trump literally tried to use nukes multiple times in his last administration.
Even if a collapsing America doesn’t use it, I would be very concerned about all of it ending up in the hands of whatever successor state(s) and what they might do with it. A major concern of the world with the Soviet Union collapse was the status of the nukes and making sure random warlords and terrorist groups didn’t somehow get ahold of the nukes or fissile materials from the nukes since they likely couldn’t attain the nuke and launch code
And this is why 405000 Americans lost lives fighting against nazism and Japan imperialism? I do not belive how this is both offensive and stupid.
I seriously recommend you to read about imperialism. Imperialist nations (i.e. late stage capitalistic, industrialized nations, with sufficient accumulation of capital and sufficient development of monopolies, trusts and cartels, to the point of the most profitable action being the export of capital to other, poorer nations, with or without the consent of the locals), clash with each other in these attempts to expand their sphere of influence. This happened in WW1, WW2, and we’re seeing it again with the Russian-NATO conflict which led to the Ukraine invasion.
Primarily the Russian government’s fault, but of course NATO is partly at fault. Belonging to NATO isn’t a human right, and the expansion of NATO further east than Germany shouldn’t have taken place. If European countries wanted a military alliance, they should have made their own. I don’t believe I need to preface every comment saying “I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of the fascist Russian government in Ukraine”, which I do, as much as I don’t preface my comment saying “I wholeheartedly condemn the actions of NATO in Iraq”, which I also do.
They did it to uphold Anglo imperialism. That’s why they intentionally let the Holocaust happen and were fully prepared to integrate Nazi Germany into the international order after their invasion of Poland.
Also why they spent the next 60 years fighting to keep colonies from gaining independence.
Right, and the heroic Soviets also fought to combat the evil that were the Nazis, because they were natural enemies, no other reason no… /s (just in case it wasn’t obvious.)
Being a facist doesn’t stop you from fighting other fascists, especially when those other fascists are fucking with your shit. The only difference until now was that the two parties managed to deadlock each other needing the support of an uncaring populace to gain total power. Once one ultimately wins, this whole “pillar of democracy” thing is over. Having literally only 2 parties for centuries is a bad omen for democracy.
In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism as “a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation” and that “The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.”
While this resonates with trump, could you tell me how this fits to other American presidents? What traits US poses to call it “fascist”?
Before I get to your question…that’s a really weird definition. I mean it excludes most stereotypical fascist regimes, like nazi Germany for example. A communist revolution wasn’t really on their list of fears or even concerns. In Weimar Germany they even shared voters. Most communist party voters became nazi voters once they became a thing, they run on the same platform. It’s in the bloody name, Nazi = National Socialism. This definition seems to deliberately only target America, the US is the only one that goes fucking ape-shit when socialism let alone communist is at all mentioned.
Anyways, to your question. We weren’t really talking about presidents specifically, tho most of them fit the bill. Both democrats and republicans say the fucking “you’re with me or against me” shit, like really??? The US generally has a rich history of violently shutting down competing powers, be it domestic or abroad (a 2 party system IS NOT natural for a democracy!). American imperialist wars are pretty much build on forcefully spreading American culture at any cost (especially if it involves killing anybody claiming to be socialist or not christian). From a young age US citizens are indoctrinated, the shit where they swear loyalty to the flag every morning is creepy as fuck, also the flash everywhere. Like christ, just look at how Americans treat foreigners. Didn’t even mention the police yet…
brain dead take.
Always a racist slave state? sure. A military cult since like 1910? sure. A broken oligarchy? sure.
Fascist? defs heading that way. Not always.
Not the guy you replied to, but we hit most of Umberto Eco’s points IMO:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco
