https://redsails.org/white-supremacy-and-magic-paper/

There is no fascism without liberalism; demsoc and anarchists without a scientific understanding of capital or socialism default to liberalism, the dominant power.

Yes, obviously, in the same way they were the first time, though liberals and social democrats bear greater responsibility.

Large sections of the Western left (especially demsocs and anarchists), alongside liberals, treat “neutrality,” “free speech absolutism,” and abstract anti-authoritarianism as virtues detached from material conditions and class power. In practice, this is not neutral at all. When one side is the hegemonic ideology (capitalism, backed by the state, capital, and media) being “against both sides” objectively favors that hegemony.

Liberals and social democrats are more directly responsible because, historically and consistently, they side with reaction against communism when forced to choose. This is not hypothetical: the Freikorps were unleashed by social democrats to crush the German communists; liberal states normalized anti-communism through the Red Scare; and today we see the same logic in the criminalization of communists, the rehabilitation of fascists as “free speech dissidents,” and the alignment of liberals with the far right against AES states and revolutionary movements.

This pattern is structural, not moral. Liberalism and reformist social democracy refuse to confront capital as a system. They manage capitalism, they do not abolish it. When imperialism faces crisis (falling rates of profit, declining global dominance, internal decay) capital does not become more democratic. It turns to repression. Fascism is not an aberration; it is capitalism’s fangs turning inward.

By equating communists with fascists (“extremism on both sides”), by platforming reactionaries in the name of free speech, and by rejecting revolutionary authority while preserving bourgeois authority, liberals and much of the Western left ideologically disarm the working class. Anti-authoritarianism in the abstract becomes a cover for submission to the most entrenched authority of all: capital.

The real question is not “authoritarian vs anti-authoritarian,” but authority of which class, in service of which system. Without answering that, you don’t oppose fascism, you enable it.

History has already settled this. Fascism is defeated not by neutrality, liberal norms, or reformism, but by organized, class-conscious opposition to capitalism and imperialism. Fascists only understand the stick not the carrot and we must never forget that.

Liberals aren’t left. Anarchists mostly are fringe movements in the west and as much as I am critical about them they are the ones present at almost all anti racism and anti nazism protests I have seen, often wanting to punch the Nazis in the face directly. So they can’t be blamed I guess.

The socdems, or what’s left of them, have spent the last decades moving to the right and losing their ideals (however thin they were). If we look at The Netherlands, for example, back in the 60s the parties against the first migration waves from Northern Africa were actually left wing parties as they saw it as importing cheap labor and hurting their own working class.

Neoliberalism and austerity has been the main ideology of the West for decades now and their predisposition to make everything shit for the people has divided the working class to the point where ‘anti ruling class’ far right parties were able to swoop up large voter bases. If anything I would blame the lack of a Western left for all this as the established socdem and even progressive liberal parties could not be arsed to make an effort to appeal to the people.

Yes I think the western left is co-responsible, but not primarily because of their defense of “free speech.” Rather it’s their absolute unwillingless and inability to respond to the people’s concerns and frustrations about their material conditions, opening pathways for fascists to talk about those concerns.

The western left barely exists, they’re not responsible for anything.

Is there any reason to believe that if free speech wasn’t upheld for nazis something about the material history of fascism and its rise in the Western world would’ve been reversed? The hard left in the West has always been pretty marginal and every means, legal and otherwise, has been used to suppress them; this could lead you to the conclusion that discarding free speech would have no effect on your ability to organize but it would hurt the fascists, but it’s currently an uphill battle for the state to dismantle left wing media organizations.

No free speech protections would make the process of suppressing left wing dissent a lot faster. The government could directly take down anti-imperialist media for promoting terrorism, when currently such media can exist but at a disadvantage in the social media algorithms.

Your observation would hold if the states in the capitalist world had a stronger interest in suppressing fascism than communism. Maybe in that world, some communists would get arrested for praising China on the internet, but far more racists would be getting arrested and re-educated and somehow that would be a positive trade-off. The opposite is true, they’ll use any additional power to hurt communists before fascists, so it’s generally better for the state’s mechanisms of repression to be weaker and anyone who can agitate to that end is probably doing you a favor.

As for anti-authoritarianism in general it’s been a very successful psyop to make western leftists forget that serious leftist criticism of the state has always held that all states are authoritarian.

Yes

I’m going to say no but mainly because of how the question has been presented. I don’t like this framing of “largely responsible” because 1) it makes it sound like nazis don’t bear any significant responsibility for being nazis (it reads like it could be used to validate the rightist thing of “guess I have to go further to the right because the left is so annoying”), 2) it leaves out the material conditions that contribute to the development of fascism, nazism, etc., and 3) it lumps together liberals with “demsoc/anarchist” which can have meaningful distinctions to what they are in practice.

To say liberalism contributes now and historically, yes, but “largely responsible” is a mangled way to put it. I’m not sure in what regard anarchists would be contributing meaningfully, especially when considering how little power or influence they tend to have over anything. Liberalism has significant institutional power though.

Also, and this is something I have brought up before with other “questions” and will probably bring up again in the future because it continues to matter: This is worded like an unsupported claim rephrased as a question. A question way of putting it would be more like: “How much responsibility does X group bear for Y?”

The thing about NAZI-ism/fascism is that it seeks out enemies and lacking any will start creating them.

That predatory behavior is the fault of those that act upon it not those suffering from it.