So the thing is classical liberals were (and are) capable of a lot of damage without Fascism. Fascism is a specific ideology. Not the suffering people are capable of creating. It's important to understand that your normal democracy is perfectly capable of creating mass suffering.
i got a lot of downvotes last time i said it, but the definition of fascism is just "stuff i don’t like" right?
/s
Most Americans know America isn't immune to fascism. That's why we are on guard.
None of that is fascism. It's just run of the mill liberalism.
Same difference, just one has a smile and bright colors.
While not exclusive to it, they are elements of fascism.
It's funny that we have all these lists and essays and books on how fascist ideology and policy is a confluence of many such elements, yet people still act as tough "is this person/party/state fascist?" is a simple yes or no question with no gray area.
USA 1941:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
The German Nazis loved the whole salute to the flag thingy.
Also Henry Ford - The International Jew
Also American Eugenics Society
Hot take: forcing children to pledge allegiance should be more concerning than the exact posture they are ordered to make while doing so.
Didn't they quickly stop this after it became the Nazis favorite thing?
They only changed it in 1942, which is 9 years after Hitler rose to power and 3 years before his reign ended.
The U.S. Did Not Defeat Fascism in WWII, It Discretely Internationalized It
When the United States entered WWII, the future head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, bemoaned that his country was fighting the wrong enemy. The Nazis, as he explained, were pro-capitalist Aryan Christians, whereas the true enemy was godless communism and its resolute anti-capitalism. After all, the U.S. had, only some 20 years prior, been part of a massive military intervention in the U.S.S.R., when fourteen capitalist countries sought—in the words of Winston Churchill—to “strangle the Bolshevik baby in its crib.” Dulles understood, like many of his colleagues in the U.S. government, that what would later become known as the Cold War was actually the old war, as Michael Parenti has convincingly argued: the one they had been fighting against communism since its inception.
when I think of fascism I first think of America, then Nazi Germany
Not that Nazi Germany wasn't far worse but America is a right now thing, not an 80 years ago thing.
For me it’s Germany Italy Spain USA Portugal
Germany and Italy are making good progress to make it back onto the list
Id say Italy had a Donald Trump 15 years ago.
Yes I know my enemies. They're the teachers that taught me to fight me. Compromise. Conformity. Assimilation. Submission. Ignorance. Hypocrisy. Brutality. The Elite... all of which are American dreams...
All of which are American dreams...
All of which
Woa, hey now. Too close. I think I'm going to have to back up a truckload of apologia. BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP - is it there? Is it up to the line? Good.
Unloads why republics should be ethnically pure, but spun in a way that vaguely unsharps the truths jagged edge, while pining for a time gone by and fear mongering to whatever would be mob that could dawn balaclavas and facemasks to terrorize local neighborhoods with bigoted chants and flags in hand.
I say no, fascist, back to hell with you - and stay there. That is your home, that is where you should stay, forever and ever and ever - and if for some reason they should be let back out, it's up to the entirety of the human species to slap them straight back down to the depths that they came from.
Give me liberty, or give me dead fascists - because the latter has a tendency to produce the former.
Never forget, the fruit of the tree of capitalism is fascism.
Capitalism unrestrained and left to do its thing, as it has, always leads to fascism. Fascism is the takeover of the state by the capitalists.
This is why fascism is blooming all over the western world. The global capitalist economy is simply in full bloom sitting on entirely captured nation states and fruiting.
The fruit being concentration camps, war, poverty, and scapegoating. Anything to blame literally anyone and everything else for all the inhuman malice the capitalists are doing to attempt to satiate their unquenchable greed.
If anyone still cares about maybe not ending the world for humanity, the capital markets must be destroyed, and speculative investment by passive robber barons not actively participating in laboring to produce products and services must be outlawed. But don't worry, we'll fade into the oblivion of greed made climate change out of cowardice. We'll probably be grateful to die to that after the Fascists have had their fun.
Fascism is the takeover of the state by the capitalists.
What. Capitalism is already the takeover of the state by capitalists. The state apparatus is just the means by which the dominant class exerts its power.
You left off Hitler being impressed by Henry Ford.
Being very impressed by US segregation laws too.
And US scientific racism too
The White House’s new exertion of control over the media finally gets us a perfect 14/14 score according to Britt’s Characteristics of Fascism. Granted, it’s not pass/fail. Things can still get far worse.
Huh......so we passed on all 14......which is a fail.......at least from my perspective. Maga perspective may differ.
Yes, perfectly modeling fascism is a failure. I didn’t want to suggest that we hit bottom just because we checked some boxes. There’s still plenty of room for things to get worse if we don’t do anything to stop it.
I feel like it's unamerican in regards to the values our country espouses, even though it completely and utterly fails to uphold them.
All men are created equal
IS SLAVE STATE
Always has been
Yeah dawg that's my point. We have the ideal of equality but also failed to actually follow through with it.
The purpose of a system is what it does
"American values" are just a smokescreen, they aren't failed, more they serve their purpose of obfuscation well.
Nah man, Americans have values. Freedom, perseverance, independence, self expression. It's just that we have utterly failed to uphold those values in our actions. Even in the beginning, talking about slavery being terrible but still allowing it for political reasons right at the founding.
Those values only really served as a way for the ruling class that founded America to justify itself. They weren't genuine.
"Espouses but fails to uphold" sounds more like negligence to me. Negligence would be allowing fascism through inaction (like democrat administration). But the US does far worse than that (funding genocide and propping up fascism elsewhere)
Nah, I liked how I phrased it. We've been failing to uphold our ideals since the beginning, even Thomas Jefferson was a hypocrite who hated slavery but sure as hell did a lot of it.
Feels like imperializem merits to be further down the line, if not the last panel.
But yes, good memetics in this meme, gg.