Fascism Can't Mean Both a Specific Ideology and a Legitimate Target

A surprisingly well thought out article for once. Was worth the read.

'But I don’t think the answer can be “violence is permissible when you can classify someone with a loaded term so vague that people regularly use it to describe expedited restaurant permitting”. '

This, I think, is the main point of the article. I don't disagree, and I tend to argue for at least trying to talk to people, but I admit that I am concerned about how much I am hesitating on even discussing some subjects with people.

We have an actual consistent way to define fascism. And yeah, people who throw that name as a slur for "something you dont like", helps nobody.

Now, how to define the metrics are outside of my comment, including the current administration. But Ive been seeing quite a few of these seem to match here in the USA for quite some time. And now, more seem to match quite well with historical fascist movements.

https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/fasci14chars.html

     1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
     2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
     3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
     4. Supremacy of the Military
     5. Rampant Sexism
     6. Controlled Mass Media
     7. Obsession with National Security
     8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
     9. Corporate Power is Protected
     10. Labor Power is Suppressed
     11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
     12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
     13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
     14. Fraudulent Elections

I think the issue is that Americans associate fascism with the Axis powers in WW2, but it’s difficult to see Trump mass murdering minorities or invading Europe even though his policies have some elements of fascism. Those elements seem to align with historic American isolationism and populism and thus be more benign than the conditions that led to WW2.

People hurling the word fascist around always seem to have some kind of authoritarian bent themselves. This makes sense because those people have to worry about how their own brand of authoritarianism is different from fascism so that they can adequately pitch it to others.

Meanwhile, most of us see policies that are obviously authoritarian, don't worry about which brand, and oppose them for the usual reasons: no one should have that power, or we don't know how to organize humans to use that power safely, or it will normalize giving away a different power, etc.

I guess the point is that we can torture this until it appears to be a mind-bending paradox.

Alternatively we might just remember the basics: "Even if you disagree very strongly, don't injure, imprison, or kill each other at will, like lunatics. Follow the law instead."

Political violence has never been entirely unacceptable in the US. The country was born and bred in violence, slavery and genocide. Descended upon and torn apart by European colonizers with the rabid ferocity of hyenas. America, perhaps alone, defines a free state by its capacity for political violence. Americans have romanticized political violence as an ideal for centuries in the archetype of the armed rural patriot, the New World version of ancient Rome's yeoman farmer, waxing romantic about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants. The US has blood soaked into its floorboards.

Political violence against fascists has only become morally questionable as fascism has become normalized. The article is correct that political violence is extremely bad, but it has also always been acceptable (or at least easy to culturally compartmentalize) against certain groups. That is the norm, not some idealized abstract notion of politics entirely encapsulated within rhetoric and debate, which has only recently been broken by "the left." A country that burns crosses and shoots up synagogues and bombs abortion clinics, where the police and ICE kidnap and kill with impunity, that sends the military into its own cities to kill immigrants and harass political dissidents, that builds concentration camps for "enemy combatants" in undeclared wars, has no right to clutch its pearls over actual white supremacists and neo-nazis - unambiguous fascists - taking what they themselves would freely give.

This is a tedious article re-iterating a common point that fascism is a catch all term. Political words and phrases are not going to be used in strict adherence to deductive syllogisms. People vary.

In any case, here is a quote from Stephen Miller, who inspired this blog post, naming and shaming a nebulous enemy:

> They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble. And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Isn't "political violence against fascists" basically a fallacy in practice, at least in the current US? Almost all the physical violence we've seen so far has been performed by the fascists. The Left are almost strictly defined by their desire to follow the laws and morals and work within the system. The Magas seem to revel in disrespecting those structures.

To suggest otherwise seems like a false equivalence.

"Morality" is about immorality, about justifying punishment/persecution, about drawing lines that someone is on the wrong side of.

Ethics is (nominally) universal; morality is about identity and therefore about exclusion. Morality is a weapon: that is why the people who like it like it.

It's fascinating seeing the extent to which Republicans have monopolized both violence and victimhood. The entire article seems to be a standard exercise in bad faith commonly seen from right-wing pundits.

Here, labeling certain individuals on the right as fascists is claimed to necessarily also be a call for violence against them. The only example provided for this claim is a reference to a musician in the middle of WW2 sporting a "This machine kills fascists" sticker on his guitar, as if wartime propaganda from 80 years ago is still relevant today.

I certainly haven't seen any relevant individual on the left calling for violence - whether that be people with significant followings in media and especially not among elected individuals.

In contrast, not only do I see pretty significant calls to violence from the right (e.g., Trump's rallies calling for violence against media members, his speech on 2021-01-06 whipping his crowd into a frenzy before the attack on the capitol, the "enemies within" speech he just gave to top military brass, etc.), but we're also seeing ICE becoming increasingly violent.

The claims about attacks on freedom of speech are similar.

Those on the left organize protests and boycotts against people they disagree with, thus exercising their own freedom of speech. Occasionally, such actions have resulted in individuals losing their jobs and their reputation. I won't claim that cancel culture doesn't go too far sometimes or get started over some incredibly petty things, but by and large, it's a movement that relies entirely on exercising speech as its mechanism.

Contrast this again with actions on the right. We have a sitting president launching lawsuits against anyone who says something he doesn't like. At the same time, he's directed his FCC secretary to threaten removal of broadcast licenses and interfere with business mergers of anyone using speech critical of Trump. That is textbook government censorship.

And no, Biden's administration requesting things on social media being taken down is not the same thing unless you can demonstrate said requests were also accompanied by threats of government action. It probably shouldn't have happened, and it definitely should have resulted in political consequences of some sort (it did), but it's not the same thing without threats being levied.

mallowdram, in a flagged dead post, noted:

> Logic is inapplicable here. Politics is arbitrary, and labels/categories are worse than arbitrary, they are random.

Broadly speaking, at some level, I agree with them.

There is no machine that will flash an indicator when pointed at a “fascist”. Yet certain intelligent people are always willing to use pure reason to confront a world that does not admit such scientific classification. The retort is always, “You know one when you see one.”

The is a definite humility that is lacking in such debate, as if everyone shares a logically necessary psychological reality.

None of these thinking persons, of any stripe, are prepared to do the work of articulating, with nuance, where the logical consequences of another contradict their own, and more tellingly, where interpretations of words/labels/categories are themselves foundational in arguments.

People, myself certainly included, are not free with their energies teasing these details out, and are instead more than ready to indicate, in laborious, technical detail, why they are right.

This is a very sick time in shared discourse. I want people to pause and ask if this intellectual turmoil is indeed useful in the present moment or is irrational behaviour forced by economic, social, and environmental anxieties of our time.

In my book using state power to abuse the weak is the essential thing to being fascist.

Isn't Stephen Miller behind the ICE raids?

Why did the mods turn off flags for this article?

Why did the mods not turn off flags for this other recent article, which garnered a lot more upvotes and had a pretty active discussion going? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45454026

This smells like yet another example of "enlightened centrist" moderation bias on this site. The userbase voted; leave it flagged, and leave your politics out of it.

One thing is certain, I can't remember a time in my life were this matter was a serious and regular debate by the general american public like today.