this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.
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Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.
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I can distinguish the definition for each, which is why I'm applying the label. I'm just using a different definition than you.
To perpetuate supremacy and keep an in group and out group amongst all it's colonies and populations, something that they found necessary in order to be able to extract colonial goods and maintain property, they had to build a hierarchy. That hierarchy was partially based on race. The US was a colonial state and actively engaged in the genocide of the native americans, both before and after, so much so that hitler took notice and said, gimme a slice of that. This happened with basically every colony that England took, even their first ones, like ireland, where now a very slim population actually speaks irish. I don't really feel bad in calling that kind of behavior to be like, prototypically fascist.
Maybe if you were to define fascism as integrally privatizing other public goods, like mussolini and hitler did, then that might swing things a little bit, but america and england both went and did that later on and historically have had no problem with doing that. There's really not a good definition of fascism that I've ever heard that doesn't apply to america or england, other than "oh, well, those countries were super authoritarian", and then somehow they don't recognize, say, that america has 1% of the world's prison population and a massive police state, and the level at which we propagate authoritarian governments globally in order to further our own interests. The semantic argument that people try to hash out over definitions of fascism, it's not the real crux of the issue there, it's just a kind of obfuscation of the real talking point, which is that people aren't realizing the massive amount of bullshit the imperial core has been engaging in on a near constant basis for like the past couple hundred years, and precisely how bad it really is.
Why are we creating our own definitions for words? Fascism is a term used to describe a very specific form of governance characterized by elements not included in your description. Chief among them is ruling by a dictatorship and exclusive single party.
The things you described are indeed bad things, some which have been adopted and implemented by fascist regimes as well. But just because two people engage occasionally in the same practices it doesn't make them twinsies by definition. Sometimes me and my buddy wear the same shirt, but he's a communist and I'm a liberal. Just because we wear the same shirt sometimes it doesn't suddenly make him liberal or me communist.
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race
There is a strange fetishization of this word online and it has since lost any meaning it used to originally have because now every bad thing has become a fash. It's meaningless.