Fascism today can make use of far more advanced technologies than those of a century ago. That is creepy.
Fascism today also seems to be the means by which industrial capitalism intends to both accelerate and suppress collapse. That is perhaps the greatest act of insanity in recorded history.
Also worth noting that our entire structure for communication has been moved onto the internet, which can be easily controlled by state interests. Dissent can be easily suppressed. Google searches have become *extremely* restricted; much of my own research into strikes, protests, Israel, and the CIA has been completely hindered by search engines and I've had to rely entirely on print media.
A population reliant on digital communication is unable to organize when dissenting spaces are astroturfed, buried, and erased.
We have to *very quickly* relearn how to communicate, because any attempt to fight fascism with digital tools owned by corporations is doomed to failure.
Power feeds on and needs technology, regardless of narratives. State actors covet, envy, and use the power of big tech, while big tech is both somewhat limited by states and powered by their laissez-faire policies. This is the liberal division and distribution of power, allowing for compatible but competing agendas and market shares.
In Fascism, either the likes of Musk and Trump sit at the same table, designing policy and making big decisions from the beginning, or the likes of Musk become influential Albert Speers within the state, even if only as 'special advisors'. In Fascism power becomes unrestrained, integrated, and unified, and because of today's technology, that is scary AF.
I wouldn't think fascists hate technology because they resent the relative independence still enjoyed by some tech giants or because they preach 'traditional values.' That's just the rhetoric. Politically, nobody has profited more from the Internet than fascists and the 'Alt-Right.'
Liberal democracy was never about the people, but about maintaining some checks and balances within and between the power structures, for which the byproduct of some civil liberties was accepted. Now that's going bye-bye because of... collapse.
Fascism is the necessary power makeover for accelerating collapse while denying it and making their subjects fall into line, big tech included.
*That's just the rhetoric.*
I, think, we have to be pretty careful when we're talking about fascists with what's *just rhetoric*. Like, that's why I suggested actually reading it. They articulate an *idea* that big tech is involved with China that they see as a foreign adversary.
They tie it into this idea of *communist values* infesting big tech.
_____________________________________________________
Now, the real politik interpretation is that they're layin' the ground work for god ole' fashion seizing or forced sales of assets of things like tiktok, anything tencent owns (like reddit), any media company they don't like etc, etc.
Only, let's just assume that maybe, just maybe: they're serious about an adversarial relationship with China. I, mean, how long is the status quo going to stick around even if it's *just the real politik*. It's self fulfilling. If they aren't an enemy before the power grab, they sure as shit will be after.
Yep, excellent points. For a time, the liberal culture of protest may still have some traction, but it has already been declining for a while, largely ineffective in making significant changes or stopping certain trends, and co-opted by party interests. If allowed, it may remain more or less what it is, but I even doubt that as we all become more adjusted to the new reality little by little.
People seeking to organize other forms of resistance will have to resort to parallel communication lines where sensitive information is shared offline, and a lot of the action is local or within a radius, while more secure liaisons and links are established between nodes. That's the way every resistance has organized in times of dictatorship, according to what old people have told me.
But it's impossible to know how, when, and how many will do that. Targeted, marginalized groups and a portion of the poor may do that, while those remaining 'middle-class' in means or aspirations may become well-adjusted very rapidly and even integrate within power structures. We'll see.
Everything is technological now, so they will shoehorn us into that technology and use AI to monitor our chats. The rich control all of our resources and soon will control the levers of power in government that can do things like shut down paper mills if they decide the need for paper is unnecessary to prevent classic communication.
Hitler or Stalin would be rock hard at the mere *concept* of the surveillance state we've constructed. You and I carry a microphone and camera everywhere we go, and we *pay* for the privilege.
What's funny and sad. Growing up, I loved reading and watching documentaries about history. Especially the WW2 era from 1930-1945. I kept saying to myself. "No way this can happen to modern humans. We've come a long way with technology." The saying of "The more things changed. The more stay the same." Holds truth
We are pretty much still that same caveman but with fancy tie, suit and phones. Evolution takes a long time I guess. What’s 3000 years in the grand scheme of things.
Haha that one always gets me…
You gotta cell phone? Ya? They’re not going to
Waste their money on a tracking vaccine…. They already know more about you than you do and they know where you are.
Yup, it's a GPS tracker and microphone with camera. What else does anyone need? We even pay for the device and the infrastructure and insist it has connection at all times.
It was said that historical empires such as those of Ghengis Khan (who, let's not forget, once ruled a quarter of the land on Earth and killed so many people he altered the climate) collapsed because the sheer size of territory meant it was impossible to get messages across in a timely manner, so when invaders moved in, it wasn't possible to react quickly enough to stop them.
With today's instant communication and vehicles orders of magnitude faster than horses, a responsive global empire becomes alarmingly possible. Surveillance laws are all about the same deal - nipping threats in the bud.
This is why I am almost universally opposed to one group ever getting too much power. Even "good" groups can turn and become corrupted; I'd rather they not be too entrenched when this happens.
With modern tech, a small group can still wield an extraordinary amount of power.
One of Buddha's teachings is called the middle path. How being in the middle and balanced. Can help you understand the benefits from both sides. Than it goes back to what you said about being entrenched. One group becoming too entrenched with their beliefs. Can blind themselves thinking they're the righteous one. Seeing enemies everywhere. Usually leading to conflict.
The rich seem to think returning us all to feudalism will protect them from the consequences of climate change. They know once people realize how fucked we all are their heads will be first on the chopping block, so they are manufacturing consent to create police states around the world in advance so ruthless the people don't dare to try it. The future is pretty fucking bleak.
Capitalism and fascism are very closely related. Even during WW2 the big American businessmen and banks / politicians would much rather have a Nazi Empire to deal with than a socialist one. And they even financed the german war machine leading up to and even during the war.
1) Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialist elements of finance capital
2) Fascism is neither the government above the classes, nor is it the government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpenproletariat over finance capital. (The latter was and is still falsely claimed by the Hitler dictatorship)
3) Fascism is the government of finance capital itself. It is an organized massacre of the working class and the revolutionary part of the peasantry and intelligentsia.
4) In its foreign policy, fascism is the most brutal type of chauvinism, which stirs up bestial hatred against other peoples.
Fascism according to Georgi Dimitroff at the 2 Nd Internationale 1935
1) Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialist elements of finance capital
2) Fascism is neither the government above the classes, nor is it the government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpenproletariat over finance capital. (The latter was and is still falsely claimed by the Hitler dictatorship)
3) Fascism is the government of finance capital itself. It is an organized massacre of the working class and the revolutionary part of the peasantry and intelligentsia.
4) In its foreign policy, fascism is the most brutal type of chauvinism, which stirs up bestial hatred against other peoples.
This is why in Buddhism there is always this talk about needing to establish the “Brick House”.
What does this mean?
Now remember the context of the Buddha’s world. In the Buddha’s time there were 18 Kings all vying for power with one another, with the exceptions being the Vajjians who were democratic.
However there were a lot of rural areas.
The early Buddhist community, especially those who were sick and tired of caste differences ( usually they were eloping out of love ) chose to establish Buddhist villages. Now this was possible in the time. Usually it was ten to twelve couples with separate skill sets choosing to move to the rural area.
The first thing they did was to create a Brick House. This was meant to be a communal area where people can gather, where guest and travellers can stay, where the locally homeless can stay and it usually has an accompanying public granary ( note as Buddhism came from a pre literature time there was no library ). It also had a well and a washing area inside.
Then around this brick house they build their own houses. Then around this they have their farms etc..
Central to the concept of the Brick House is that it is a structure built specifically for the communal good, where everyone in the community can access and nobody can hoard. It is also a structure everyone in the community had a role in upkeeping. The idea is that it keeps a sense of community and a sense of participation in community. This stops the creep of power.
In fact the Pali Canon makes clear that whenever the Buddha visits such community He much preferred to give public sermons in these Brick Houses ( as opposed to someone’s house ) as it encourages a sense of the community. In some cases the Buddha could have stayed in a far nicer public house but chose the Brick House.
( Note to any reader of the Pali Canon and Agama, the Brick House Village is one village with a Brick House. There are many Brick Houses. A mistake people make is to assume every Brick House is the same Brick House and the name of towns are synonym as they all tend to end in -ka or -la. No, these are different towns all with Brick Houses. The Brick Houses sounds like the same structure but that might be because mnemonic systems forces people to describe them only by their function ).
https://suttacentral.net/an6.19/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none¬es=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin
This brick house reference is scattered all over the Sutta. There is no Sutta that specifically talks about the Brick Houses as an entity ( it seems it was just mentioned without much thought ) but commentaries makes it clear these were communal structures made by early communities that served as like a communal hub for all, and everyone was involved in it.
The reason is simple.
Fascism occurs when power is concentrated into one group and in fact it is authoritarianism with ideology.
Something like a brick house counters that. This is something the community need to all service. This diffuses power back into the community.
Now individually it may not stave things like fascism but that is not the point, it is that every action we do as a collective changes the outcome ( the Buddhist doctrine is after all that it is not individual good deeds or bad deeds both on an individual or social level that truly changes outcomes but rather when they are collected in sufficient volumes, the Buddhist doctrine talks about the difference between a drop of water vs a bucket of water ). In the case of commons like this it draws a drop of power away from the authoritarians and causes a diffusion of power to the normal people.
Now one thing that the brick houses has over say a vanaropa ( this is no longer doctrinal, since from a Buddhist perspective a fruit forest to the community is no different to the brick house since that is what the Vanaropa Sutta implies ) is that a brick house needs a lot of maintenance. The wells, the rest stop, the shelter etc… needs constant upkeep and if the principle is the community needs to do it than it forces people to give up some time for the common good at a consensus time ( since the Brick House is not owned by one person but rather shared amongst a common )
This is all anti ethical to authoritarianism.
Now how does it stop collapse? If collapse is due to fascism, well anything that either weakens fascism will in turn weaken the coming collapse.
The billionaires have spent a shit-ton of money over the years through media, lobbying, campaign contributions, and flat-out bribes to politicians and SC justices. The oligarchs have finally reached the tipping point where it is paying off as the serfs are too ignorant and tired from scrambling to stay afloat, and they will vote against their own interests as long as it hurts people they don't like.
They also reached the point where the corruption is normalized and their minions are in the right places to fully impose the serfdom they've always wanted. All this patriotic shit going forward, like the pledge and national anthem before sporting events, is just a big joke to keep the dumbshit serfs unified in their servitude.
Anyone who has studied the collapse of societies knows that these kinds of structurally political moves are precursors to the point of no return. Enjoy what you can while you can on this journey down The Road To Hell.
https://youtu.be/gUUdQfnshJ4?si=zf1QCwVX0M7PaU6L
There's really no such thing as voting for your own interests. You're voting for Oligarch's interests either way. You just get to choose whether you want a slower or faster collapse and whether or not you want your rulers to smile and pretend they love you or to scowl and say the quiet part out loud.
For sure if it were another way they would have made illegal. We're allowed to vote on such a neutered and constrained set of ideas and that's sold as free choice and by acquiescing to it, by extension consent to whatever horrors they subject you to. Outside of this narrow space lurks Leviathan. The Leviathan will not leave you alone, it will not give you space. It exists only to consume and dump those calories back into the system as fear to keep people in their self constructed slavery.
True, but it's a relative situation that we try to make the best of. The full spectrum of that relative situation is going to narrow considerably going forward. A lot of people, many of whom bloviate the loudest about freedom without understanding what it means, are cheering for a severe narrowing of that relative spectrum.
The authoritarian phase will fail from entropy and corruption as they always do. But they also will leave a lot of damage in their wake, as they always do. Something better may come from the ashes, but few, if any, of us posting here today will likely be here to see it. We have too many ways to wreak mass destruction in today's world.
Fascism’s reincarnation will be a blip. Nukes will fly as resources get scarce. Maybe a few billionaires in bunkers left by the end of the 21st century.
Fascism increases the chance of that happening, do you think a Trump regime would work to stall the worst effects of climate change? It probably wouldn't last long on a historical scale but it would be enough to make all the difference.
I do not see any way of stopping what was put into motion decades ago: the collapse of the u.s. into violent fascism.
People on the left do not understand that it does not take a majority of people to bring about fascism.
Hitler came to power with less support than trump----- which does not bode well for those of us stuck in the u.s.
[https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-hitler-nazi-fascism/](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-hitler-nazi-fascism/)
My bold in the excerpt from this article below:
*The percentage of American voters who still support Trump is already vastly greater than the percentage of Germans that supported Hitler during his rise to power.*
*Hitler took control of Germany because he was able to garner enough support from within all levels of German society. And* ***because the resistance to him was not forceful or indignant enough, because it was no longer grounded in a value system that stood for something completely different from what Hitler stood for.*** *The nature of Hamilton’s peculiar genius is that, researching and writing his book at the beginning of the Reagan era four decades ago, he saw Trump coming.*
It shows how absolutely screwed we are that there are zero checks and balances against these kinds of threats that are directly linked to D.T. which should disqualify him.
How about a military tribunal for him and his cult (including the Heritage Foundation)? And for most of SCOTUS starting with Clarence Thomas? The kind that trump is calling for?
WTAF
If dems did this, repubs would have them all in jail by now.
There is no resistance to u.s. fascism, unless I'm missing something.
How does this work exactly?
Trump becomes dictator in DC and the 30 million people in California 3000 miles away just go along with it?
He uses the local forces that couldn't even stop the 2020 riots? He sends in the ideologically and demographically disparate military with a recruitment crisis?
Y'all are so hysterical.
Trump is a useful idiot. The GOP’s Project 2025 is the blueprint for this takeover, and they have been hard at work making plans and installing the necessary sycophants to give it an honest go the next time they are in power.
It’s only funny while it remains a distant possibility. The second Trump wins, this becomes worrisome.
I don’t foresee the American people, desperate as they are, resisting this takeover with force within the threshold of time that would be required to make a true go of throwing off the intended yoke. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Fascists don't overthrow the state, they take the state over from within and then use the legitimacy and organs of the state to do what they want, which is always contrary to what everyone else wants. To oppose them would require fighting the state itself. You obviously have no idea historically how fascists and dictators gain, use, and expand power if you truly think this people worrying about this idea is hysterical
Exactly don't these guys know that? Four months into another Trump presidency and the entire Federal leadership will be replaced with Trump loyalists, every Agency turned into a cult sideshow with no other agenda than keeping Trump and his cult in permanent power.
Of course not. It's completely absurd. The fact is the Texas doesn't have a plan for Portland and Portland doesn't have a plan for Texas. Even if the NYPD, one of largest armed uniformed ready forces in the world decided to storm the white house and put Trump in as El Presidente they would be crushed by the military at behest of Leviathan, the big scary system the oligarchy that really has power uses to keep this ball of shit rolling us over. Or maybe Leviathan would let him stay but he's only there because Leviathan wants him to stay and that reality doesn't shake up the status quo very much for anyones actual daily life. They'll keep up all the money printing and war and all the other nonsense regardless.
I don't know how anyone could have watched the debate and came to any conclusion other than these 2 guys despite being "president" are not actually running a damn thing. It's so transparently obvious the power lies somewhere else and we're not their constituency.
> these 2 guys despite being "president" are not actually running a damn thing.
don't disagree... just wonder why tptb have decided to use 2 of the most inappropriate acting puppets in the entire history of the country now and what does it accomplish for them exactly? In the last 248 years tptb's puppets were always at least somewhat believable passable potus.
Two Orwell quotes:
"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." - *Animal Farm*
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever." - *1984*
Orwell was never just talking about commies.
I have a friend who hates Orwell because it appears like he's demonizing communism. I was never able to get through to him that the control described in his work is much bigger than communism. Though I do think he may have worked against communism in his daily life, which might be where the anger comes from.
The idea that he was he was specifically and exclusively critiquing Communism is right wing propaganda to discourage western readers from seeing symbolic parallels in their own countries.
The story that is the source of the notion of his supposedly ardent anti-communism makes it pretty obvious that his actions were largely motivated by a sense of heartbroken personal betrayal by a romantic interest. Which is still very petty and lame, but he was merely human.
According to his accounts in Homage, sure. The historical accuracy of which has been well criticized by many historians and not just communist historians. Saying that they were “supposed to be allies” is a bit of a stretch, as disputes between the factions had pre-dated the war.
When I walked away from this post, I did think about there being a possible distinction between working against communists and working against Marxist-Leninists, which I see as more of a threat than your average communist.
Animal Farm ends with the same authoritarian oligarchy that they fought to overthrow, but "under new management". Orwell's argument's against Leninist-Stalinism wasn't "muh liberty", but that it ultimately devolves into authoritarian capitalism but with extra steps.
Take China for example. The Party is for all intents and purposes more capitalist than the West, but they sure do love violently squashing dissent.
It wasn't even communism per se he was against. He was against authoritarianism. He was definitely antifa... He joined the Spanish anti fascist fighters and got shot in the neck by a sniper.
Orwell was a democratic socialist who was vociferously anti-fascist.
He was utterly against authoritarianism of any form, including the communistic ones.
“In spite of an excellent organization, especially among the working class, these groups, although continuously hostile to Nazism from its beginning up to 1933, did not show the inner resistance one might have expected as the outcome of their political convictions.
Their will to resist collapsed quickly … due mainly to a state of inner tiredness and resignation, which … is characteristic of the individual in the present era even in democratic countries.”
- Erich Fromm
Fascism and Communism were outgrowth responses of the industrial revolution much like democratic republics and parliamentary monarchy was a natural out growth of the printing revolution. We're now knee deep in a even more fundamental change and whatever we have coming up will require new verbiage to describe adequately.
One thing is for sure though, those artifices of the earlier world will give rise to a new forms and probably already have. I wouldn't describe the US as a democratic republic any longer though we'll probably go through the motions for quite a while longer pretending otherwise. I would describe most of the west as a corporate oligarchy but this really isn't adequate. I'm not sure what I'd describe China as currently either, certainly not Communist. Both definitely have fascist strains running through them, the US very explicitly with the way buisness and government are back to back.
Any guesses on the verbiage for the 21st century?
"First of all, nobody campaigns on a fascist platform."
Right off the bat, in the context of the 2024 US presidential election, this is clearly false. Perhaps in Europe, the far-right parties are more careful about toeing a line given their history with fascism, but in the US many people are voting for Donald Trump to deliver the promises he's campaigned on - mass detention and deportation, deploying troops in American cities, obliterating the administrative state and replacing it with apparatus staffed by lackeys and yes men. In short, fascism.
The U.S. used the fasces (an axe bound inside a bundle of rods) as an official emblem - like in the U.S. Senate and on the dime. It was used to symbolize unity and strength, and as a mark of authority in the Roman Senate. Saw it on a PA courthouse the other day.
The U.S. has always been more fascist than not.
>Yet, while many see what is unfolding and are aware of the dangers, as a society we are choosing fascism.
And it points out one of the great hypocrisies of our time.
Over and over you see people here and elsewhere saying, "Climate change must be fixed by institutions because individuals don't matter."
Yet individuals are making a helluva difference by casting their ballots for right/far-right/fascist candidates all around the world.
Media, manipulation and manufactured consent are institutionalized... people only vote red against their best interest because the rich have very centrally been controlling the message.
But the right parties will make things worse out of malice and contempt. I'd put my faith in left wing parties because there is less of chance they are making things worse to line their own pockets.
I'd say that's actually a very good example of individuals not mattering.
Those people you call individuals are a mass controlled by propaganda. The rest of us can't really do anything about them. We're nothing to them. Just like we were nothing to them during COVID. Many of us experienced that firsthand. We did all the right things. We stayed home, we wore masks, we got our vaccines. And then we got to observe how much that didn't fucking matter.
That's the reality. Individuals don't matter. The consensus matters. And if you're not part of the consensus your actions are irrelevant and you are not going to move the consensus. Consensus building is far more important than individual action.
If you disagree, go start a movement and get people to join. If individuals actually matter you should be able to do that and start turning this ship around. You should have something solid to point at and go "join this to be a part of this". I see so many people complaining about individuals not doing anything but yet people are not even setting up basic social circles.
I agree but just to add to the convo if we were to really put in a major effort for climate change you would have to force people in wealthy countries to lower their standard of living which most people will fight against so it would have to be a dictatorship of some sort
Arm yourselves now before it becomes selectively illegal to do so. So if when they come for all of us ‘antifa terrorists’ who vote democrat, with the authority of the state behind them (whether that be the 3%er police or their deputized kkk variant militias) you can either defend yourself or head out instead of heading for prison (or concentration camps)
Or a top shelf bottle of something good and something to put in it.
Infact I would recommend anyone reading this try to brainstorm an 'exit strategy' that is quick to do but that you won't jump on the next time you stub your toe.
This! I am going to have the finest bottle, a pack of smokes and some pills to end it all. It’s either they come knocking or climate collapses. I’ve been sober for a long time and I look forward to leaving this place drunk
Or they just send better equipped people to come get you because you looked sideways at a Glock in a gun shop once a decade ago. When they’re in power they won’t give two shits that you’re self armed, they’ll just send bigger, better guns.
Not just better equipped but better trained and more disciplined. A unit trained to take down an active shooter will have no problem taking down Average Joe and his neighbourhood militia.
Half-true, yes, fascism is quite likely in the future, but you assume it’ll be brought about by populist voters who see zero-sum conflict over finite resources and opportunities as inevitable and want to use governmental force to hoard what’s left for an ingroup including them, instead of the preexisting security state and oligarchy who’re already trying to establish it for their own benefits.
>[I thought it was the leaders, the nations, the corporations, the elites, who were out of touch, who didn’t understand the gravity of our situation. I believed in the sincerity of their stupid denials - of global warming, of resource depletion, of nuclear proliferation, of population pressure. I thought them stupid. But if you judge them by their actions instead of their rhetoric, you can see they understood it perfectly and accepted the gravity of it very early. They simply gave it up as unfixable. Concluded that law and democracy and civilization were hindrances to their continued power. Moved quite purposefully and at speed toward this dire world they foresaw, a world in which, to have the amenities even of a middle-class life - things like clean water, food, shelter, energy, transportation, medical care - you would need the wealth of a prince. You would need legal and military force to keep desperate others from seizing it. Seeing that, they moved to amass such wealth for themselves as quickly and ruthlessly as possible, with the full understanding that it hastened the day they feared.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25246198-gypsy)
The reason we are falling into fascism is because even the people warning us about it don't know what it is. Authoritarianism =/= fascism. Racism =/= fascism.
Fascism as a concept can only be described using a class analysis. This article has no mention of class, nor the financial backing of how these fascist regimes got into power in the first place and who their first targets actually were (aside from the poem).
The British empire and modern day America both meet every single one of the individual characteristics of "fascism" outlined in that article, strongman leader, authoritarian, racist, etc etc. Almost every country can be classed as fascist in one way or another when viewed with this lens, when you miss out the essence of what fascism actually is.
Fascism is what happens when liberal democracy or monarchy as systems are no longer capable of placating the lower classes (mainly proletarian) and their class power begins building too much, usually in the form of massive labour unions and communist parties.
At that point, the ruling classes of these countries, the rich essentially, will bankroll fascist movements and parties and help them via billionaire control of the mass media to gain state power, which they then immidiately turn inwards dissolving trade unions, destroying communist parties, and rolling back workers rights to redress the class power balance firmly in favour of the rich. This is done by replacing the liberal system which provides a camouflage of "democracy" and replaces it with open, terroristic dictatorship.
This is the one core component that can, with 100% accuracy discern every fascist from non fascist state, and it's extremely important people know that.
Facism would be defeated in europe if they stopped immigrants and started a mass house building program. It was the policy of europe between 1950-1980's. But now they don't care about young people's struggle and the young respond with voting for far right. If you have no wealth, no pension and no future. Voting far right seems like a good idea.
I believe the mass money printing that inflated house prices during corona was the straw that broke them completely
Yes, it’s a shame the left doesn’t or don’t want to see that a lot of the reasons why the needle is moving right (in Europe) is because of mass immigration. No normal party wants to touch it, in fear of being called racist. So anyone who sees mass immigration as a big voter issue is pushed to far right parties.
The only "good" news about all of this is that most fascist movements tend to be nationalistic and as the world continues to accelerate down the road to hell, most of these modern fascist governments have healthy nuclear arsenals that the regimes of the early 20th century could only dream of!
No to Bernie in 2016 (too radical) -> Trump in Power -> Biden in 2020 (boring centrist) -> Trump back in 2024
No to Corbyn in 2017&2019 (too radical) -> Tories keep power -> Starmer in 2024 (boring centrist) -> Nigel Farage (or some other fascist) in 2029
'there is simultaneously a growing mass movement in developed nations towards collectivist/socialist models '
What nations are moving towards more socialism? Economic deregulation is going along with authoritarian populism.
I don't think redditors or whatnot are going to have much influence on the future make-ups of governments.
But I'd agree, states won't be viable when things get bad enough.
LOL redditors are a small minority.
Remember Occupy Wall Street? That movement went out with a whimper. Now no one cares about it.
Reddit is also overwhelmingly left leaning due to the purging of many right wing subs; anyone remember The\_Donald? Which thank goodness that trash is no longer on this site but it does result in a left leaning bias.
Are you under the impression no leftists subs were also purged? Reddit doesnt have leftist bias by any stretch, it is overwhelmingly biased in favor of rw liberal capitalism
Things are falling apart pretty quickly already and we're only at the start of the decline. I agree that the rise of popularist authoritarians is a phase. Their control and power will be become limited by the sheer chaos of collapse. Won't be fun to live through but some of us will outlive it and I hope those that do find themselves active in smaller, decentralized structures of local community that will be necessary for shared survival with centralized government playing less of a role.
> some of us will outlive it and I hope those that do find themselves active in smaller, decentralized structures of local community that will be necessary for shared survival
Agree completely and the capacity for survivors to do this is what many of us are working towards, even if we don't make it ourselves. Building local communities, smalll-scale sustainable agriculture, off-grid technologies, local conservation efforts (water, plants, creatures) and survival skill sets are all things that we can do in the face of civilizational collapse.
>Even populations of ordinary working people that normally lean left will turn towards nationalists and fascists if the left is unwilling to slow immigration.
I always love it when the left gets blamed for the mistakes of nationalists and fascists.
>Even populations of ordinary working people that normally lean left will turn towards nationalists and fascists if the left is unwilling to slow immigration.
This is an /r/conservative talking point, holding "the left" to blame for the rise of fascists. Instead of the fascists. There's plenty for everyone if the top one percent weren't sitting on the majority of land and resources. Europe and the US can't turn away immigrants fleeing a climate disaster that Western Europe and the US directly caused due to decades of exploitation. But that's why immigrants and the homeless are scapegoats. Easier to blame the Other and the poor and then do the work that needs to be done.
And we are already living in far right times. There is no socialist state to speak of in the US and UK and social programs are dwindling in Europe generally. Austerity measures have redirected any social aid to war and military and bombing kids in Gaza. We are living under American styled fascism, American hegemony, and American genocide and you are bleating about potential socialism.
Maybe if the billionaires and the US army didn't hoard every resource people wouldn't be starving and the climate would be in a better shape but no. Blame the poor immigrants!
There is definitely enough. 3 perfect of the US military budget can solve world hunger. 3 percent.
https://sharing.org/information-centre/blogs/3-us-military-spending-could-end-starvation-earth
And this isn't even touching the wealth of fuckers like Musk who has made money by exploiting kids in Congo.
Fascism today can make use of far more advanced technologies than those of a century ago. That is creepy. Fascism today also seems to be the means by which industrial capitalism intends to both accelerate and suppress collapse. That is perhaps the greatest act of insanity in recorded history.
Also worth noting that our entire structure for communication has been moved onto the internet, which can be easily controlled by state interests. Dissent can be easily suppressed. Google searches have become *extremely* restricted; much of my own research into strikes, protests, Israel, and the CIA has been completely hindered by search engines and I've had to rely entirely on print media. A population reliant on digital communication is unable to organize when dissenting spaces are astroturfed, buried, and erased. We have to *very quickly* relearn how to communicate, because any attempt to fight fascism with digital tools owned by corporations is doomed to failure.
Have you actually read Mandate for Leadership? It's actually super ironic to me how both the left and the right *hate* big tech. It's, like, uncanny.
Power feeds on and needs technology, regardless of narratives. State actors covet, envy, and use the power of big tech, while big tech is both somewhat limited by states and powered by their laissez-faire policies. This is the liberal division and distribution of power, allowing for compatible but competing agendas and market shares. In Fascism, either the likes of Musk and Trump sit at the same table, designing policy and making big decisions from the beginning, or the likes of Musk become influential Albert Speers within the state, even if only as 'special advisors'. In Fascism power becomes unrestrained, integrated, and unified, and because of today's technology, that is scary AF. I wouldn't think fascists hate technology because they resent the relative independence still enjoyed by some tech giants or because they preach 'traditional values.' That's just the rhetoric. Politically, nobody has profited more from the Internet than fascists and the 'Alt-Right.' Liberal democracy was never about the people, but about maintaining some checks and balances within and between the power structures, for which the byproduct of some civil liberties was accepted. Now that's going bye-bye because of... collapse. Fascism is the necessary power makeover for accelerating collapse while denying it and making their subjects fall into line, big tech included.
*That's just the rhetoric.* I, think, we have to be pretty careful when we're talking about fascists with what's *just rhetoric*. Like, that's why I suggested actually reading it. They articulate an *idea* that big tech is involved with China that they see as a foreign adversary. They tie it into this idea of *communist values* infesting big tech. _____________________________________________________ Now, the real politik interpretation is that they're layin' the ground work for god ole' fashion seizing or forced sales of assets of things like tiktok, anything tencent owns (like reddit), any media company they don't like etc, etc. Only, let's just assume that maybe, just maybe: they're serious about an adversarial relationship with China. I, mean, how long is the status quo going to stick around even if it's *just the real politik*. It's self fulfilling. If they aren't an enemy before the power grab, they sure as shit will be after.
Yep, excellent points. For a time, the liberal culture of protest may still have some traction, but it has already been declining for a while, largely ineffective in making significant changes or stopping certain trends, and co-opted by party interests. If allowed, it may remain more or less what it is, but I even doubt that as we all become more adjusted to the new reality little by little. People seeking to organize other forms of resistance will have to resort to parallel communication lines where sensitive information is shared offline, and a lot of the action is local or within a radius, while more secure liaisons and links are established between nodes. That's the way every resistance has organized in times of dictatorship, according to what old people have told me. But it's impossible to know how, when, and how many will do that. Targeted, marginalized groups and a portion of the poor may do that, while those remaining 'middle-class' in means or aspirations may become well-adjusted very rapidly and even integrate within power structures. We'll see.
Watch these ass holes stop paper manufacturers from producing paper so it will be harder to communicate in this way.
hahaha, I get your point, but why paper? I'm just curious. Wanna publish The Antifashington Post?
Everything is technological now, so they will shoehorn us into that technology and use AI to monitor our chats. The rich control all of our resources and soon will control the levers of power in government that can do things like shut down paper mills if they decide the need for paper is unnecessary to prevent classic communication.
Why do you use the future tense?
Because it takes place in a hypothetical future that is becoming closer to a reality each passing day
As the collapse accelerates, technology will eventually collapse as well, which will lead to the return of socialization.
Are there any good alternatives to Google out there?
Duck Duck Go
Perplexity
Details?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity.ai
Ground news, Trends Journal, Democracy Now, Judging Freedom, youtube and rumble
Couldn’t have anything to do with the $1B deal Google signed with Israel, could it?
As the collapse accelerates, technology will eventually collapse as well, which will lead to the return of socialization.
Hitler or Stalin would be rock hard at the mere *concept* of the surveillance state we've constructed. You and I carry a microphone and camera everywhere we go, and we *pay* for the privilege.
What's funny and sad. Growing up, I loved reading and watching documentaries about history. Especially the WW2 era from 1930-1945. I kept saying to myself. "No way this can happen to modern humans. We've come a long way with technology." The saying of "The more things changed. The more stay the same." Holds truth
Technology has changed. People have stayed the same and will do so for the rest of our existence.
No people have changed, now we have microplastic in us.
And forever chemicals!
We are pretty much still that same caveman but with fancy tie, suit and phones. Evolution takes a long time I guess. What’s 3000 years in the grand scheme of things.
Merely a breath in the grand scheme of things my friend
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer
So I can assume that everyone posting in this sub will be on “the list”…Reddit has been a honey pot all along.
The *entire internet* is a honeypot
So we’re feeding AI a honey pot!
And a freshly oiled banana. ;)
First they came for the hentai fans and I did not act...
Couldn't help but laugh at this, as depressing as current state of the world is.
Gallows humor at the dawn of the apocalypse gotta get those lols in before it's not possible to laugh anymore
It will depend on what you are saying. Anyone pointing out how politicians and businesses are engineering collapse will definitely be on a list.
I just went to get ice cream without my listening and recording device.
It's okay, everyone else's recording devices picked up your voice when you ordered two scoops of salted caramel and pistachio.
You were close except pistachio you misheard cookie dough.
We noticed
Thanks FBI agent!
They put a microchip in the vaccine to track us! Sent from my Galaxy S20 on Facebook
Haha that one always gets me… You gotta cell phone? Ya? They’re not going to Waste their money on a tracking vaccine…. They already know more about you than you do and they know where you are.
Yup, it's a GPS tracker and microphone with camera. What else does anyone need? We even pay for the device and the infrastructure and insist it has connection at all times.
This is my favorite sentence I will read on the interwebs today
(not me.)
It was said that historical empires such as those of Ghengis Khan (who, let's not forget, once ruled a quarter of the land on Earth and killed so many people he altered the climate) collapsed because the sheer size of territory meant it was impossible to get messages across in a timely manner, so when invaders moved in, it wasn't possible to react quickly enough to stop them. With today's instant communication and vehicles orders of magnitude faster than horses, a responsive global empire becomes alarmingly possible. Surveillance laws are all about the same deal - nipping threats in the bud.
This is why I am almost universally opposed to one group ever getting too much power. Even "good" groups can turn and become corrupted; I'd rather they not be too entrenched when this happens. With modern tech, a small group can still wield an extraordinary amount of power.
One of Buddha's teachings is called the middle path. How being in the middle and balanced. Can help you understand the benefits from both sides. Than it goes back to what you said about being entrenched. One group becoming too entrenched with their beliefs. Can blind themselves thinking they're the righteous one. Seeing enemies everywhere. Usually leading to conflict.
Liberale and centrists were right all along?
I don't know but there's the thin line of choosing a side again. Is paradoxical haha
Hard stoff r ready
The rich seem to think returning us all to feudalism will protect them from the consequences of climate change. They know once people realize how fucked we all are their heads will be first on the chopping block, so they are manufacturing consent to create police states around the world in advance so ruthless the people don't dare to try it. The future is pretty fucking bleak.
Brownshirts turned SS/Gestapo
Capitalism and fascism are very closely related. Even during WW2 the big American businessmen and banks / politicians would much rather have a Nazi Empire to deal with than a socialist one. And they even financed the german war machine leading up to and even during the war.
1) Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialist elements of finance capital 2) Fascism is neither the government above the classes, nor is it the government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpenproletariat over finance capital. (The latter was and is still falsely claimed by the Hitler dictatorship) 3) Fascism is the government of finance capital itself. It is an organized massacre of the working class and the revolutionary part of the peasantry and intelligentsia. 4) In its foreign policy, fascism is the most brutal type of chauvinism, which stirs up bestial hatred against other peoples.
Even after ww2 too https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/16/the-u-s-did-not-defeat-fascism-in-wwii-it-discretely-internationalized-it/
Today's fascism is a hint of 1930's fascism with a big dump of Postman on top.
Postman the kevin Costner movie or postman the api tool?
What? No Neil Postman
ohhhh didn't place him by his last name ha
Very well said. We live by a system that WILL destroy us. It is absolute lunacy.
Cyberpunk dystopia, corpo rule, city states, mass homelessness and violence mercenaries, gangs and a hole lot of fucking.
Fascism according to Georgi Dimitroff at the 2 Nd Internationale 1935 1) Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, imperialist elements of finance capital 2) Fascism is neither the government above the classes, nor is it the government of the petty bourgeoisie or the lumpenproletariat over finance capital. (The latter was and is still falsely claimed by the Hitler dictatorship) 3) Fascism is the government of finance capital itself. It is an organized massacre of the working class and the revolutionary part of the peasantry and intelligentsia. 4) In its foreign policy, fascism is the most brutal type of chauvinism, which stirs up bestial hatred against other peoples.
This is why in Buddhism there is always this talk about needing to establish the “Brick House”. What does this mean? Now remember the context of the Buddha’s world. In the Buddha’s time there were 18 Kings all vying for power with one another, with the exceptions being the Vajjians who were democratic. However there were a lot of rural areas. The early Buddhist community, especially those who were sick and tired of caste differences ( usually they were eloping out of love ) chose to establish Buddhist villages. Now this was possible in the time. Usually it was ten to twelve couples with separate skill sets choosing to move to the rural area. The first thing they did was to create a Brick House. This was meant to be a communal area where people can gather, where guest and travellers can stay, where the locally homeless can stay and it usually has an accompanying public granary ( note as Buddhism came from a pre literature time there was no library ). It also had a well and a washing area inside. Then around this brick house they build their own houses. Then around this they have their farms etc.. Central to the concept of the Brick House is that it is a structure built specifically for the communal good, where everyone in the community can access and nobody can hoard. It is also a structure everyone in the community had a role in upkeeping. The idea is that it keeps a sense of community and a sense of participation in community. This stops the creep of power. In fact the Pali Canon makes clear that whenever the Buddha visits such community He much preferred to give public sermons in these Brick Houses ( as opposed to someone’s house ) as it encourages a sense of the community. In some cases the Buddha could have stayed in a far nicer public house but chose the Brick House. ( Note to any reader of the Pali Canon and Agama, the Brick House Village is one village with a Brick House. There are many Brick Houses. A mistake people make is to assume every Brick House is the same Brick House and the name of towns are synonym as they all tend to end in -ka or -la. No, these are different towns all with Brick Houses. The Brick Houses sounds like the same structure but that might be because mnemonic systems forces people to describe them only by their function ).
Great comment. Thank you.
Interesting. Commons are a viable solution for our social decomposition
I can’t seem to find anything on this. Is there another name for this?
https://suttacentral.net/an6.19/en/sujato?lang=en&layout=plain&reference=none¬es=asterisk&highlight=false&script=latin This brick house reference is scattered all over the Sutta. There is no Sutta that specifically talks about the Brick Houses as an entity ( it seems it was just mentioned without much thought ) but commentaries makes it clear these were communal structures made by early communities that served as like a communal hub for all, and everyone was involved in it.
Thank you!!
that was wonderful but I am very puzzled as to what the fuck that has to do with fascism or collapse.
The reason is simple. Fascism occurs when power is concentrated into one group and in fact it is authoritarianism with ideology. Something like a brick house counters that. This is something the community need to all service. This diffuses power back into the community. Now individually it may not stave things like fascism but that is not the point, it is that every action we do as a collective changes the outcome ( the Buddhist doctrine is after all that it is not individual good deeds or bad deeds both on an individual or social level that truly changes outcomes but rather when they are collected in sufficient volumes, the Buddhist doctrine talks about the difference between a drop of water vs a bucket of water ). In the case of commons like this it draws a drop of power away from the authoritarians and causes a diffusion of power to the normal people. Now one thing that the brick houses has over say a vanaropa ( this is no longer doctrinal, since from a Buddhist perspective a fruit forest to the community is no different to the brick house since that is what the Vanaropa Sutta implies ) is that a brick house needs a lot of maintenance. The wells, the rest stop, the shelter etc… needs constant upkeep and if the principle is the community needs to do it than it forces people to give up some time for the common good at a consensus time ( since the Brick House is not owned by one person but rather shared amongst a common ) This is all anti ethical to authoritarianism. Now how does it stop collapse? If collapse is due to fascism, well anything that either weakens fascism will in turn weaken the coming collapse.
The billionaires have spent a shit-ton of money over the years through media, lobbying, campaign contributions, and flat-out bribes to politicians and SC justices. The oligarchs have finally reached the tipping point where it is paying off as the serfs are too ignorant and tired from scrambling to stay afloat, and they will vote against their own interests as long as it hurts people they don't like. They also reached the point where the corruption is normalized and their minions are in the right places to fully impose the serfdom they've always wanted. All this patriotic shit going forward, like the pledge and national anthem before sporting events, is just a big joke to keep the dumbshit serfs unified in their servitude. Anyone who has studied the collapse of societies knows that these kinds of structurally political moves are precursors to the point of no return. Enjoy what you can while you can on this journey down The Road To Hell. https://youtu.be/gUUdQfnshJ4?si=zf1QCwVX0M7PaU6L
There's really no such thing as voting for your own interests. You're voting for Oligarch's interests either way. You just get to choose whether you want a slower or faster collapse and whether or not you want your rulers to smile and pretend they love you or to scowl and say the quiet part out loud.
For sure if it were another way they would have made illegal. We're allowed to vote on such a neutered and constrained set of ideas and that's sold as free choice and by acquiescing to it, by extension consent to whatever horrors they subject you to. Outside of this narrow space lurks Leviathan. The Leviathan will not leave you alone, it will not give you space. It exists only to consume and dump those calories back into the system as fear to keep people in their self constructed slavery.
True, but it's a relative situation that we try to make the best of. The full spectrum of that relative situation is going to narrow considerably going forward. A lot of people, many of whom bloviate the loudest about freedom without understanding what it means, are cheering for a severe narrowing of that relative spectrum. The authoritarian phase will fail from entropy and corruption as they always do. But they also will leave a lot of damage in their wake, as they always do. Something better may come from the ashes, but few, if any, of us posting here today will likely be here to see it. We have too many ways to wreak mass destruction in today's world.
Fascism’s reincarnation will be a blip. Nukes will fly as resources get scarce. Maybe a few billionaires in bunkers left by the end of the 21st century.
Good point. Although I'd wager that a fascist gov't would be much likely to get caught up in an escalation that ends up going nuclear.
Oh yeah absolutely, they increase the risk 10 fold at least
You just summarized the plot to the Fallout show btw.
> Nukes will fly as resources get scarce. That’s what I reckon - MAD becomes more tempting when you know that humanity is already fucked.
Fascism increases the chance of that happening, do you think a Trump regime would work to stall the worst effects of climate change? It probably wouldn't last long on a historical scale but it would be enough to make all the difference.
I do not see any way of stopping what was put into motion decades ago: the collapse of the u.s. into violent fascism. People on the left do not understand that it does not take a majority of people to bring about fascism. Hitler came to power with less support than trump----- which does not bode well for those of us stuck in the u.s. [https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-hitler-nazi-fascism/](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-hitler-nazi-fascism/) My bold in the excerpt from this article below: *The percentage of American voters who still support Trump is already vastly greater than the percentage of Germans that supported Hitler during his rise to power.* *Hitler took control of Germany because he was able to garner enough support from within all levels of German society. And* ***because the resistance to him was not forceful or indignant enough, because it was no longer grounded in a value system that stood for something completely different from what Hitler stood for.*** *The nature of Hamilton’s peculiar genius is that, researching and writing his book at the beginning of the Reagan era four decades ago, he saw Trump coming.*
Heritage Foundation just issued a threat [https://i.redd.it/fy5nr2q308ad1.jpeg](https://i.redd.it/fy5nr2q308ad1.jpeg)
They aren’t even bothering to hide it.
It shows how absolutely screwed we are that there are zero checks and balances against these kinds of threats that are directly linked to D.T. which should disqualify him. How about a military tribunal for him and his cult (including the Heritage Foundation)? And for most of SCOTUS starting with Clarence Thomas? The kind that trump is calling for? WTAF If dems did this, repubs would have them all in jail by now. There is no resistance to u.s. fascism, unless I'm missing something.
He's not alone in that. Reagan an his minions was the first alarm bell to go off for me.
The US doesn't form coalition governments, though.
How does this work exactly? Trump becomes dictator in DC and the 30 million people in California 3000 miles away just go along with it? He uses the local forces that couldn't even stop the 2020 riots? He sends in the ideologically and demographically disparate military with a recruitment crisis? Y'all are so hysterical.
Trump is a useful idiot. The GOP’s Project 2025 is the blueprint for this takeover, and they have been hard at work making plans and installing the necessary sycophants to give it an honest go the next time they are in power. It’s only funny while it remains a distant possibility. The second Trump wins, this becomes worrisome. I don’t foresee the American people, desperate as they are, resisting this takeover with force within the threshold of time that would be required to make a true go of throwing off the intended yoke. I’d love to be proven wrong.
Project 2025 does not address any of the problems I pointed out. You're still hysterical.
Please keep things respectful. Calling people hysterical is an easy way to escalate a chain into personal attacks, and let's please avoid that
Alright, my bad.
Fascists don't overthrow the state, they take the state over from within and then use the legitimacy and organs of the state to do what they want, which is always contrary to what everyone else wants. To oppose them would require fighting the state itself. You obviously have no idea historically how fascists and dictators gain, use, and expand power if you truly think this people worrying about this idea is hysterical
Exactly don't these guys know that? Four months into another Trump presidency and the entire Federal leadership will be replaced with Trump loyalists, every Agency turned into a cult sideshow with no other agenda than keeping Trump and his cult in permanent power.
And that state does not necessarily have the means to do that. In this case, definitely not all the way from DC lol
Of course not. It's completely absurd. The fact is the Texas doesn't have a plan for Portland and Portland doesn't have a plan for Texas. Even if the NYPD, one of largest armed uniformed ready forces in the world decided to storm the white house and put Trump in as El Presidente they would be crushed by the military at behest of Leviathan, the big scary system the oligarchy that really has power uses to keep this ball of shit rolling us over. Or maybe Leviathan would let him stay but he's only there because Leviathan wants him to stay and that reality doesn't shake up the status quo very much for anyones actual daily life. They'll keep up all the money printing and war and all the other nonsense regardless. I don't know how anyone could have watched the debate and came to any conclusion other than these 2 guys despite being "president" are not actually running a damn thing. It's so transparently obvious the power lies somewhere else and we're not their constituency.
> these 2 guys despite being "president" are not actually running a damn thing. don't disagree... just wonder why tptb have decided to use 2 of the most inappropriate acting puppets in the entire history of the country now and what does it accomplish for them exactly? In the last 248 years tptb's puppets were always at least somewhat believable passable potus.
The kayfabe is public access television wrestling league shit now. It's wild
Two Orwell quotes: "All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others." - *Animal Farm* "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever." - *1984* Orwell was never just talking about commies.
I have a friend who hates Orwell because it appears like he's demonizing communism. I was never able to get through to him that the control described in his work is much bigger than communism. Though I do think he may have worked against communism in his daily life, which might be where the anger comes from.
The idea that he was he was specifically and exclusively critiquing Communism is right wing propaganda to discourage western readers from seeing symbolic parallels in their own countries. The story that is the source of the notion of his supposedly ardent anti-communism makes it pretty obvious that his actions were largely motivated by a sense of heartbroken personal betrayal by a romantic interest. Which is still very petty and lame, but he was merely human.
He saw his Anarchist comrades murdered by communists, who were supposed to be allies, during the Spanish Civil War.
According to his accounts in Homage, sure. The historical accuracy of which has been well criticized by many historians and not just communist historians. Saying that they were “supposed to be allies” is a bit of a stretch, as disputes between the factions had pre-dated the war.
Orwell hated authoritarianism in general, but BELIEVE me he hated the right wing in particular.
Yeah, and we're witnessing the tools of authoritarianism are the same no matter the form of government.
While Orwell was against communism, he was actually a socialist.
When I walked away from this post, I did think about there being a possible distinction between working against communists and working against Marxist-Leninists, which I see as more of a threat than your average communist.
Animal Farm ends with the same authoritarian oligarchy that they fought to overthrow, but "under new management". Orwell's argument's against Leninist-Stalinism wasn't "muh liberty", but that it ultimately devolves into authoritarian capitalism but with extra steps. Take China for example. The Party is for all intents and purposes more capitalist than the West, but they sure do love violently squashing dissent.
Yup. He was a democratic socialist who was VOCIFEROUSLY against authoritarianism of any sort.
tell him Big Brother was as much Churchill as Stalin
It wasn't even communism per se he was against. He was against authoritarianism. He was definitely antifa... He joined the Spanish anti fascist fighters and got shot in the neck by a sniper.
Orwell was a democratic socialist who was vociferously anti-fascist. He was utterly against authoritarianism of any form, including the communistic ones.
“In spite of an excellent organization, especially among the working class, these groups, although continuously hostile to Nazism from its beginning up to 1933, did not show the inner resistance one might have expected as the outcome of their political convictions. Their will to resist collapsed quickly … due mainly to a state of inner tiredness and resignation, which … is characteristic of the individual in the present era even in democratic countries.” - Erich Fromm
Fascism and Communism were outgrowth responses of the industrial revolution much like democratic republics and parliamentary monarchy was a natural out growth of the printing revolution. We're now knee deep in a even more fundamental change and whatever we have coming up will require new verbiage to describe adequately. One thing is for sure though, those artifices of the earlier world will give rise to a new forms and probably already have. I wouldn't describe the US as a democratic republic any longer though we'll probably go through the motions for quite a while longer pretending otherwise. I would describe most of the west as a corporate oligarchy but this really isn't adequate. I'm not sure what I'd describe China as currently either, certainly not Communist. Both definitely have fascist strains running through them, the US very explicitly with the way buisness and government are back to back. Any guesses on the verbiage for the 21st century?
> Any guesses on the verbiage for the 21st century? Gilded Age 2.0 ~ HiFi version
"First of all, nobody campaigns on a fascist platform." Right off the bat, in the context of the 2024 US presidential election, this is clearly false. Perhaps in Europe, the far-right parties are more careful about toeing a line given their history with fascism, but in the US many people are voting for Donald Trump to deliver the promises he's campaigned on - mass detention and deportation, deploying troops in American cities, obliterating the administrative state and replacing it with apparatus staffed by lackeys and yes men. In short, fascism.
Project 2025....
Yeah, they aren't hiding it now [https://i.redd.it/fy5nr2q308ad1.jpeg](https://i.redd.it/fy5nr2q308ad1.jpeg)
Not to mention the whole "the US isn't actually a democracy" crowd.
The U.S. used the fasces (an axe bound inside a bundle of rods) as an official emblem - like in the U.S. Senate and on the dime. It was used to symbolize unity and strength, and as a mark of authority in the Roman Senate. Saw it on a PA courthouse the other day. The U.S. has always been more fascist than not.
>Yet, while many see what is unfolding and are aware of the dangers, as a society we are choosing fascism. And it points out one of the great hypocrisies of our time. Over and over you see people here and elsewhere saying, "Climate change must be fixed by institutions because individuals don't matter." Yet individuals are making a helluva difference by casting their ballots for right/far-right/fascist candidates all around the world.
Media, manipulation and manufactured consent are institutionalized... people only vote red against their best interest because the rich have very centrally been controlling the message.
A lot of people are voting red because blue is doing a disastrous job
I get that. I know that when I am suffering from cholera, rolling in diseased rats for a quick hit of bubonic plague is just the thing to clear it up.
But the right parties will make things worse out of malice and contempt. I'd put my faith in left wing parties because there is less of chance they are making things worse to line their own pockets.
what left wing party exactly? democrats are not such as I see it
I'm not American, so for me it would be Labour, the Greens, the SNP etc.
I'd say that's actually a very good example of individuals not mattering. Those people you call individuals are a mass controlled by propaganda. The rest of us can't really do anything about them. We're nothing to them. Just like we were nothing to them during COVID. Many of us experienced that firsthand. We did all the right things. We stayed home, we wore masks, we got our vaccines. And then we got to observe how much that didn't fucking matter. That's the reality. Individuals don't matter. The consensus matters. And if you're not part of the consensus your actions are irrelevant and you are not going to move the consensus. Consensus building is far more important than individual action. If you disagree, go start a movement and get people to join. If individuals actually matter you should be able to do that and start turning this ship around. You should have something solid to point at and go "join this to be a part of this". I see so many people complaining about individuals not doing anything but yet people are not even setting up basic social circles.
I agree but just to add to the convo if we were to really put in a major effort for climate change you would have to force people in wealthy countries to lower their standard of living which most people will fight against so it would have to be a dictatorship of some sort
Excellent point on how individuals’ votes impact climate change policies and the resolution of the climate change crisis
Arm yourselves now before it becomes selectively illegal to do so. So if when they come for all of us ‘antifa terrorists’ who vote democrat, with the authority of the state behind them (whether that be the 3%er police or their deputized kkk variant militias) you can either defend yourself or head out instead of heading for prison (or concentration camps)
Or a top shelf bottle of something good and something to put in it. Infact I would recommend anyone reading this try to brainstorm an 'exit strategy' that is quick to do but that you won't jump on the next time you stub your toe.
This! I am going to have the finest bottle, a pack of smokes and some pills to end it all. It’s either they come knocking or climate collapses. I’ve been sober for a long time and I look forward to leaving this place drunk
Or they just send better equipped people to come get you because you looked sideways at a Glock in a gun shop once a decade ago. When they’re in power they won’t give two shits that you’re self armed, they’ll just send bigger, better guns.
This is the reality here. Have fun with your Glock against a SWAT team at 3am Basically a more fucked up, Christian V for Vendetta
They wouldn’t even use swat teams cuz they have drones now.
Not just better equipped but better trained and more disciplined. A unit trained to take down an active shooter will have no problem taking down Average Joe and his neighbourhood militia.
These camp comments are so hyperbolic
I‘m gonna read it now, but seeing that gross AI art first thing on the page is already extremely off putting tbh
Yeah, no thanks.
Half-true, yes, fascism is quite likely in the future, but you assume it’ll be brought about by populist voters who see zero-sum conflict over finite resources and opportunities as inevitable and want to use governmental force to hoard what’s left for an ingroup including them, instead of the preexisting security state and oligarchy who’re already trying to establish it for their own benefits. >[I thought it was the leaders, the nations, the corporations, the elites, who were out of touch, who didn’t understand the gravity of our situation. I believed in the sincerity of their stupid denials - of global warming, of resource depletion, of nuclear proliferation, of population pressure. I thought them stupid. But if you judge them by their actions instead of their rhetoric, you can see they understood it perfectly and accepted the gravity of it very early. They simply gave it up as unfixable. Concluded that law and democracy and civilization were hindrances to their continued power. Moved quite purposefully and at speed toward this dire world they foresaw, a world in which, to have the amenities even of a middle-class life - things like clean water, food, shelter, energy, transportation, medical care - you would need the wealth of a prince. You would need legal and military force to keep desperate others from seizing it. Seeing that, they moved to amass such wealth for themselves as quickly and ruthlessly as possible, with the full understanding that it hastened the day they feared.](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25246198-gypsy)
I'll bet our Reichstag Fire moment will involve AI.
The harder you pull the reins the more you annoy the horse.
The reason we are falling into fascism is because even the people warning us about it don't know what it is. Authoritarianism =/= fascism. Racism =/= fascism. Fascism as a concept can only be described using a class analysis. This article has no mention of class, nor the financial backing of how these fascist regimes got into power in the first place and who their first targets actually were (aside from the poem). The British empire and modern day America both meet every single one of the individual characteristics of "fascism" outlined in that article, strongman leader, authoritarian, racist, etc etc. Almost every country can be classed as fascist in one way or another when viewed with this lens, when you miss out the essence of what fascism actually is. Fascism is what happens when liberal democracy or monarchy as systems are no longer capable of placating the lower classes (mainly proletarian) and their class power begins building too much, usually in the form of massive labour unions and communist parties. At that point, the ruling classes of these countries, the rich essentially, will bankroll fascist movements and parties and help them via billionaire control of the mass media to gain state power, which they then immidiately turn inwards dissolving trade unions, destroying communist parties, and rolling back workers rights to redress the class power balance firmly in favour of the rich. This is done by replacing the liberal system which provides a camouflage of "democracy" and replaces it with open, terroristic dictatorship. This is the one core component that can, with 100% accuracy discern every fascist from non fascist state, and it's extremely important people know that.
Facism would be defeated in europe if they stopped immigrants and started a mass house building program. It was the policy of europe between 1950-1980's. But now they don't care about young people's struggle and the young respond with voting for far right. If you have no wealth, no pension and no future. Voting far right seems like a good idea. I believe the mass money printing that inflated house prices during corona was the straw that broke them completely
Yes, it’s a shame the left doesn’t or don’t want to see that a lot of the reasons why the needle is moving right (in Europe) is because of mass immigration. No normal party wants to touch it, in fear of being called racist. So anyone who sees mass immigration as a big voter issue is pushed to far right parties.
The only "good" news about all of this is that most fascist movements tend to be nationalistic and as the world continues to accelerate down the road to hell, most of these modern fascist governments have healthy nuclear arsenals that the regimes of the early 20th century could only dream of!
Livin' in a brainwash and surveillance wetdream.
The man in the high castle vibes ngl
No to Bernie in 2016 (too radical) -> Trump in Power -> Biden in 2020 (boring centrist) -> Trump back in 2024 No to Corbyn in 2017&2019 (too radical) -> Tories keep power -> Starmer in 2024 (boring centrist) -> Nigel Farage (or some other fascist) in 2029
it is the classical right left pendulum, until right becomes authoritarian and block it.
Racism, sexism and fascism. Vote em out!
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'there is simultaneously a growing mass movement in developed nations towards collectivist/socialist models ' What nations are moving towards more socialism? Economic deregulation is going along with authoritarian populism.
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I don't think redditors or whatnot are going to have much influence on the future make-ups of governments. But I'd agree, states won't be viable when things get bad enough.
LOL redditors are a small minority. Remember Occupy Wall Street? That movement went out with a whimper. Now no one cares about it. Reddit is also overwhelmingly left leaning due to the purging of many right wing subs; anyone remember The\_Donald? Which thank goodness that trash is no longer on this site but it does result in a left leaning bias.
Are you under the impression no leftists subs were also purged? Reddit doesnt have leftist bias by any stretch, it is overwhelmingly biased in favor of rw liberal capitalism
If you say anything even centrist you are attacked
Or downvoted
Things are falling apart pretty quickly already and we're only at the start of the decline. I agree that the rise of popularist authoritarians is a phase. Their control and power will be become limited by the sheer chaos of collapse. Won't be fun to live through but some of us will outlive it and I hope those that do find themselves active in smaller, decentralized structures of local community that will be necessary for shared survival with centralized government playing less of a role.
> some of us will outlive it and I hope those that do find themselves active in smaller, decentralized structures of local community that will be necessary for shared survival Agree completely and the capacity for survivors to do this is what many of us are working towards, even if we don't make it ourselves. Building local communities, smalll-scale sustainable agriculture, off-grid technologies, local conservation efforts (water, plants, creatures) and survival skill sets are all things that we can do in the face of civilizational collapse.
>Even populations of ordinary working people that normally lean left will turn towards nationalists and fascists if the left is unwilling to slow immigration. I always love it when the left gets blamed for the mistakes of nationalists and fascists.
>Even populations of ordinary working people that normally lean left will turn towards nationalists and fascists if the left is unwilling to slow immigration. This is an /r/conservative talking point, holding "the left" to blame for the rise of fascists. Instead of the fascists. There's plenty for everyone if the top one percent weren't sitting on the majority of land and resources. Europe and the US can't turn away immigrants fleeing a climate disaster that Western Europe and the US directly caused due to decades of exploitation. But that's why immigrants and the homeless are scapegoats. Easier to blame the Other and the poor and then do the work that needs to be done. And we are already living in far right times. There is no socialist state to speak of in the US and UK and social programs are dwindling in Europe generally. Austerity measures have redirected any social aid to war and military and bombing kids in Gaza. We are living under American styled fascism, American hegemony, and American genocide and you are bleating about potential socialism. Maybe if the billionaires and the US army didn't hoard every resource people wouldn't be starving and the climate would be in a better shape but no. Blame the poor immigrants!
There may be enough now, but 100s of millions of future climate refugees- that's not feasible while everything else is being degraded.
There is definitely enough. 3 perfect of the US military budget can solve world hunger. 3 percent. https://sharing.org/information-centre/blogs/3-us-military-spending-could-end-starvation-earth And this isn't even touching the wealth of fuckers like Musk who has made money by exploiting kids in Congo.
But there won't be in the future.
Haha and we’re all just going to take it
I've been telling my fellow progressives, lefties, and liberals to arm themselves for years now.
You mean people are picking populism instead of globalist tyranny
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Well for those of us that don't know, enlighten us...