this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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I need to make a bot to post this any time fascism gets mentioned.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, UK, France, the Netherlands, Australia, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially "adopting parliamentary democracy”. They haven't changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Make no mistake about it: parliamentary / bourgeois democracy is not only a more stable form of government, it's also far more effective at carrying out colonialism, and killing millions of innocent people.
Thank you for this. The historical and current colonial exploitation of the global South and indigenous peoples around the globe is absolutely something that is overlooked far too much in these conversations. A large part of this, I suspect is due to controlling narratives allowed in education and subverting factual accounts and analyses. A good recent example being the portrayal of The Troubles in Northern Ireland as a sectarian conflict.
I agree that most people, ourselves included, have vulgarized the concept of fascism and use it as a crude synonym for capitalist tyranny. Strictly speaking, régimes such as Imperial America and the Zionist neocolony are not, nor are they turning, fascist… but even so I do not feel the need to speak up every time we characterize our oppressors as such. That we recognize our oppression and struggle against it matters more to me than our imprecise categorization of it. If we need to characterize the ongoing superexploitation of the Southern world as ‘fascism’, even if that is not the correct term for it, then so be it.
Rather than explicitly disapproving of leftists for vulgarizing fascism, we can—and maybe we should—instead take it as an opportunity to show them how the most effective way to prevent neofascism is by abolishing capitalism; we can take it as an opportunity to show them how European colonialism inspired fascism. Take, for example, this extract from German Rule in Russia, 1941–1945:
(Emphasis added.)
We are less aware of how the status quo—with or without (neo)fascism—already superexploits the South, and that is a problem. It is frustrating how many are more concerned with the possible rise of neofascism at home than with the superexploitation already going on right now, but the two concerns need not be antagonistic at all.
We can show others, through their crude antifascism, how the superexploitation of the South was not only similar to but also inspired fascism, and how we can prevent more neofascism by ending the South’s superexploitation once and for all. Let us invite them to learn more, and dare them to upgrade their antifascism.