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About as fascist as any other capitalist nation. Which is to say if there was any threat to the Russian bourgeois by their working class it would be. Probably the only reason the US isn't full fascist yet is because leftism is so dead in this country that the capitalist class doesn't need to worry about such things.
The USA is fascist. Do not kid yourself. Remember that the Third Reich emulated the USA and the USA absorbed the Third Reich. The USA is the torchbearer for fascism. The idea that it's not is almost entirely from a white perspective. The USA has continuously had racial ghettos, massive prison labor, criminalization of poverty and racial deviance, mass murder, fanatical Christianity, secret police, domestic surveillance, control of media, lack of democratic accountability, concentration camps, callous murder of racialized groups, constant war footing against engineered enemies, domestic and global terror projects, political prisoners, and protection of the minority bourgeoisie.
The only things the USA doesn't have right at this moment that the Third Reich had are the following: industrial mass murder, industrial mass displacement, violent purges.
It is unlikely to develop these things because they understand that the reaction to these things will be counter to their continuous hold on power.
The USA has, in essence, been fascist since beforeb it's founding, because the European colonists essentially had all the components of European fascism during the colonial era. Mass murder was made easier by stuffing hundreds of black rebels into ships and gassing them. Haiti worked their slaves to death so fast they needed to import 50k a year to keep up. The USA's relationship to the native peoples is nearly identical to what fascism showed us. We still have race science built into our culture through our media narratives and our particular use of statistics in social sciences.
Don't wait around for the USA to become fascist.
All great points. And remember the US all but put gay people in camps in the 80’s as AIDS ravaged them and Regan (may Satan torture his soul forever) just sat there and smiled as it happened.
Still, how should we describe a potential turn into those few things Nazi Germany had that the US has lacked? Like, I say I fear a fascist takeover of the US but really, that’s what I mean by saying that.
You gotta get specific about what could happen:
Why would the US create death camps? Because of risk of revolt. So that means if the lumpen start getting organized, the risk of death camps becomes real.
Invasion of neighbors is unlikely because strategically it creates way larger borders and the conditions for international intervention.
Invasion of further countries is possible, for a number of reasons, but that will just create proxy wars, which... we're already there.
So what other than industrializing death are you concerned about? If that's the only thing, then you should see that we're already fascist, we're already taken over, we're already in that place, we just don't have the rebellion that requires that tactic to be implemented.
Even without death camps we have a wide variety of concentration camps here in the US, many which have or had conditions bad enough to cause death at a higher rate. Whether it's the indigenous genocide and reservation system, the prison system which is the biggest forced labor camp system in the world, mostly for Black and poor people, the immigrant detention centers that separated children of legal asylum seekers from their parents, or the Japanese internment camps in WWII, the US really is a world leader in fascism.
Yup
Don’t forget about black sites both inside and outside the US that we kidnap people to and torture them to death
The republicans very much are beating the war drum against mexico rn, remains to be seen if the MIC wants that or war against China imo.
I just answered my own question trying to type this comment out to explain what I’m afraid of for the US lol. I’m afraid of fanatics, whether it be like the neo-Nazis with white supremacy or Evangelicals with Christianity (I’m aware there’s a ton of overlap, and it’s likely it would just be both in America), they would open death camps not for “fear of revolt” (That’s what violent purges are for, which the US already does to communists already tbh) but because they are fanatics for their ideology.
Edit: I should add, I fear them
takingreceiving the reins of power as our living conditions decline here as dedollarization accelerates in the future.I think my point is that they have the power. Do you think well-adjusted, compassionate, peaceful people are occupying Hawaii, Guam, the Caribbean, the Pacific, and South Korea. Do you think Victorian Nuland was handing out cookies during Euromaidan because she believed it was all for peace? Do you think it's healthy libs overseeing the largest prison population per capitalist with $11Bn in slave labor profits?
The violence domestically is already here. The mass shootings are insane and the politicians are all in support of them. White people get called "mentally unstable" and everyone else is a terrorist participating in a conspiracy against the perfectly normal USA.
All the people you're worried about are already in the power structure. The crazies will only be elevated when the domestic threat requires it. But it's all prepared. The Florida militia is a great example. We're there, comrade. We're already there. We can trigger the death camps just by organizing the lumpen left effectively. As soon as we do that, we'll see the reaction from the power structure. It's already what you fear it is.
Yes takeover was a poor choice of words, I should say I fear the handover. Didnt mean to come across as trying to do the “this is the most important election of our life” type thing like we could prevent them from holding power with that.
Could you expand on what you mean by the lumpen left? Or just like an article about it? I know that was a thing the BPs pushed for (like organizing gang members right?) but I’ve hardly read anything about them aside from quick rundowns and a few of their speeches.
I'm reading bout BPs mostly, and contrasting it against contemporary analysis of the labor aristocracy. With the massive prison population, homeless population, those with addiction diseases, and the underemployed, the lumpen is getting larger and larger compared to the days of the BP when it was mostly blacks in ghettos (still here) and the American Indians (still here). So if we manage to get them organized, likely by building from the AIM and Black Power movements, it is simultaneously the most likely formation and the formation most likely to trigger the most violent reaction.
Do you know if any of our mainline parties have started thinking about how to do this?
How to organize the lumpen? Not that I am aware of. However, the PSL is pretty well based on theory and historical analysis and Lenin was pretty clear on the need for the legitimate party and the less legitimate guerilla movement working together towards the same goals. So I imagine that without coming out and saying it the PSL is aware of the need for a lumpen movement and is probably doing what they can to agitate, educate, and support.
They already do industrial murder and displacement too, they just perfected it so it's less overt and they can't easily be criticized for it. Poverty killing us all, then of course mental health/suicide, plastic food, brain rot water, the slow death of intense stress put on workers trying to chase the Dream, multiple avenues of drug abuse, catastrophic destruction of community in a foundational sense, ecocide, obliteration of the mind the create a perfect obedient slave class...
Americans are not just fascist, they perfected it.
they perfected it.
Arguably well before Hitler did, I might add.
Yeah but if I call the US fascist in my political science classes I’ll be laughed at… and get a bad grade.
Yes, because the US is fascist and indoctrinates its children almost immediately upon their birth but most thoroughly through their schooling.
have you considered your political science curriculum is determined by western ideology and incredible biased and chauvinistic?
Yes, actually. That’s why I chronicle my experiences in my classes on here.
Most of those are quite business as usual for capitalism though. Calling it fascist while good for drawing a parallel isn't entirely true. Its peak capitalist settler colonialism which is pretty close but not entirely fascist. Communist parties are still legal, people still have some civil protections (not many, but far more than you'd have in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy). The US is basically diet fascist. Not quite fully there, but doing as much as it can to get close to it.
Like I said, if the left actually got its shit together then the US would happily fully implement fascism but really that is the only reason it hasn't fully done so.
The US is absolutely fascist toward indigenous and black people. Communist parties aren't illegal (because pretending that they have freedom of speech and association is required to uphold their national myth), but if they're led by black people (e.g. the Black Panthers), they're brutally repressed. It may not be fascist from the perspective of the settlers, but having a relatively privileged ethnic majority and heavily persecuted ethnic minorities is a core part of fascism
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Most of those are quite business as usual for capitalism though. Calling it fascist while good for drawing a parallel isn’t entirely true.
This is going to come down to what words mean, which is dependent on your ideology. As it turns out, European fascism IS capitalism - it comes from capitalism, it protects capitalism, it is required to maintain capitalism, it uses techniques developed through capitalism, it does not destroy capitalism nor replace it. So what's the difference between ideological European racialized capitalism, as a historical phenomenon, and European fascism? From a materialist stand point, literally nothing. From a propaganda standpoint, it's that the violence of capitalism is turned towards Europeans.
Its peak capitalist settler colonialism which is pretty close but not entirely fascist.
Again, settler colonialism is fascism, just directed at non-whites.
Communist parties are still legal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Control_Act_of_1954
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
people still have some civil protections (not many, but far more than you’d have in Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy)
They had civil protections. The idea that this is a distinguishing feature is the perspective of white person living in a fascist empire that has been indoctrinated to believe that those other fascists are the real fascists. Just look at the civil liberties of blacks, indigenous, women, queer, and other oppressed groups in the USA.
The US is basically diet fascist
The USA birthed the Third Reich ideologically and scientifically. The Third Reich studied the apartheid of the USA and applied it. They studied our eugenics programs and applied them. They studied our enslavement, our prisons, our management of indigenous genocide and they replicated it.
When the Third Reich was defeated, the USA protected its members, it's distributed them all over the Western hemisphere through Operation Paperclip and distributed them all over Europe through Operation Gladio. They incorporated the Nazis into NATO leadership.
The USA isn't diet fascism, it's the fascist reservoir from which other fascist movements have historically emerged and to which those movements recede.
The USA isn't diet fascism, it's the fascist reservoir from which other fascist movements have historically emerged and to which those movements recede.
Thank you. Instead of putting things into arbitrary idealist categories we should be looking at material ways that these things emerge and spread.
So what’s the difference between ideological European racialized capitalism, as a historical phenomenon, and European fascism?
Fascism was the predominantly petty bourgeois and militant movement that the haute bourgeoisie promoted to institutional power to secure capitalism. If there were no meaningful differences between European racialized capitalism and European fascism, that would logically imply that the Kingdom of Italy was already fascist in the 1910s and earlier, making the March of Rome redundant.
From a propaganda standpoint, it’s that the violence of capitalism is turned towards Europeans.
Umm… the Fascists were very violent against North and East Africans. I feel like you must already know this since you’ve clearly read some history, but to be honest it almost upsets me to see somebody overlook this.
I know that this is only part of your post, but I feel too uncomfortable to address anything else right now.
I don't think they were overlooking the violence against non-European peoples; "from a propaganda standpoint" is the key phrase, i.e. the Europeans who didn't care about violence against non-Europeans only started caring once other Europeans became targets as well, and this is used as propaganda to suggest that Hitler and his ilk were "worse" than European settlers who murdered non-European indigenous people
I don't disagree with what you have said (for obvious reasons), but out of curiosity - why did USA fight other fascists in that case? Imperial Japan was likely due to wanting control of Pacific region. What about the Nazis?
I'd imagine this kind of questions arise sooner or later in discussion with USians in regards to their country's behaviour and state
European fascism was directed at Europeans in the process of attempting to enslave the Slavs. It's ultimate goal was to destroy the USSR because the ideology that led to the world's first workers' state was a threat to the entirety of the European project. Everyone in Western Europe and America was onboard for this.
The first problem came when the Third Reich showed it would apply it's brutality to white people. This had never been done before and it was a major moral affront to the West. The second problem was when it became evident that, in order to win, the Third Reich would need to consolidate much of the European economies under its control. The US needed that economy in order to sell its goods.
The final problem, however, was that the Third Reich was losing to the USSR. Had the US not intervened when it did, the USSR would have marched all the way across Europe instead of stopping at Berlin. The USA had to intervene to stop the entire continent from becoming part of the workers' state movement.
Why did it intervene in Japan? Mostly because it gave the US access to the Pacific border of the USSR. Japan occupied Korea at the time, so defeating Japan gave the US legal and physical capability to occupy Korea in their wake, which they needed to do since the USSR had a long history with Korea and indeed arrived to secure it as a socialist society.
There's also the issue of China. China was beyond valuable to the Western Europeans. So much of White action in the Pacific is related to dominance over China for profit. Japan was fighting in China and the Chinese communists were fighting alongside the Chinese nationalists in a temporary alliance. The West wanted the nationalists to win the civil war in order to secure their dominance over the region. Pushing Japan into a full submissive surrender created room for the West to operate in the region, taking on roles and relationships and positions that used to be in the Japanese sphere of influence.
Just because two people are fascist doesn't mean they share goals. It just means they share ideologies. Fascists have no ideological framework for cooperating with other fascists. There may be some benefit to that cooperation. But that benefit cannot outweigh the problem of one fascist power eating another power's lunch.
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Japan attacked the US first, and they did that because Japan wanted an empire and the US empire was taking up a bunch of the space in the pacific already
Who attacked first is irrelevant.
I mean, it’s relevant to why the USA was on the correct side of the conflict - because they were forced to be by Japan who wanted their pacific territories. It was Japan and Germany that declared war on the USA, not the other way around. The USA was on the “good side” by pure happenstance and conflicting imperialist interests, they would have preferred to sit back and be isolationist while the Nazis and the Commies killed each other.
Nah, I don't think that's accurate at all. FDR's entire strategy was to save capitalism. That was also the Nazi's goals. The problem was that the Soviets were winning, and that for Nazi Germany to win they would take over the European economy and America would have to take junior partner status. If Nazi Germany both didn't need all of Europe and also could actually beat the Soviets, the US wouldn't have been involved at all.
Japan had no capability to invade the USA and could not extend its empire to the USA. It attacked Pearl Harbor to get the USA out of the Pacific so it could have China, Korea, SE Asia all to itself. America could have responded to that without doing anything with Korea and without intervening in the Chinese civil war. Instead the US nuked Japan to demonstrate to the Soviets that they would destroy them if they tried to take the rest of Europe, then took Korea over from Japan to stop the Soviets from spreading into the peninsula, and then intervened in the Chinese civil war to protect the nationalist KMT and create the Taiwan situation.
The idea that the US had no horse in the race is contradicted directly by all the available evidence.
this is the kind of analysis you get when you start from a cold war perspective and work backwards to explain ww2.
Anti-communism was already a major component of what the US and Western Europe were doing before WW2. To ignore it and attempt to artificially divide motivations between WW2 motivations and cold war motivations is to be idealistically ahistorical
the problem is not ignoring anti-communist motivations from 1917, it's you not understanding that those interests got contradicted and disrupted by ww2.
the US arming, assisting, and requesting the Soviet entry against Japan makes no sense when you're trying to analyze this through the lense of future Korean war. why the fuck would they do that? why did the US give the Soviets any resources at any point if the goal of them fighting the nazis was entirely because they were losing to the Soviets? if these stated motivations exist, why would these events have taken place?
Because the US was not willing to lose hegemony over Europe nor was it ready to declare its in-theater ally as its enemy. The US would have been pushed out of Europe if they had. They needed to manage the end of the conflict in a way that resulted in containment of the USSR which is exactly what they did and what the result of their actions were.
I think calling every capitalist country fascist dilutes the meaning of the word; as far as I know, the state isn't completely controlled by the bourgeoisie in Russia (despite the West calling them oligarchs, they seem to have significantly less power than their imperial core counterparts), and while there are anti-LGBTQ+ laws which should obviously be condemned, I'm not aware of any mass imprisonment of minorities
I remember hearing about prisons for gay people in Russia. I’m not saying it true, by the way, just that it’s something that was making the rounds.
I'm sure a lot of liberals believe Russia has secret concentration camps and torture facilities for all kinds of people (like the US actually does)
I found it! It was Chechnya! Which is a part of Russia? It’s a republic of Russia but I don’t know what that means entirely. Anyway, they had anti-gay purges and I remember hearing about it in high school (not in class, just on the news). It’s a Wikipedia link so viewer discretion is advised, but it works for summary of what I was talking about.
it's possible that gay men were arrested (Kadyrov seems to be a bigoted scumbag), but you should be skeptical unless there's something more than a few self-proclaimed witnesses, especially when they're anonymous, e.g. in the source cited by Wikifedia for the first paragraph
I have a healthy dose of skepticism, I promise! I shared this to show what narratives were making the rounds. With how it’s talked about it reminded me of the “Uyghur concentration camps” in China, if that makes sense. I have a very hard time articulating myself.
Remember that the Chechens were portrayed by west as the good guys when they opposed Russia, and back then they were led by absolute scumbags compared to which Kadyrov is an angel, and even things like terrorist act in Beslan or Dubrovka theatre (imagine what would USA do if something like that happened there!) didn't shaken that.
In Poland mainstream media emanated visible schadenfreude and more open fash were saying the terrorist are cool guys, or would be if only they werent "ciapaci" (polish slur for brown people, usually used for muslims).
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Honestly, when this news broke out I had no idea that Chechnya was majority Muslim. All I knew (heard) was that this specific region in Russia is torturing gay people. I really hope me sharing this event didn’t come off as Islamophobic.
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From what I understand, Chechnya's a region that up until relatively recently had pretty hostile relations with the Russian Federation at large, including two wars. It seems like Yeltsin's failure to resolve the more recent war was a big part of how he fell out of popularity and Putin went back into office? I don't really know the details, but it seems he's managed to smooth things out with them seeing as Kadyrov and other local politicians have been pretty enthusiastic about the war in Ukraine.
Geographically it's situated in the far southwest of Russia, sharing a border with Georgia.