• freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    1·
    9 months ago

    I think that’s an incomplete analysis of fascism. Hitler wrote clearly that the USA model of eugenics, apartheid, slavery, indigenous concentration camps, cultural genocide, and propaganda was the model he wanted to build from. The first gas chambers were French ships during the Haitian revolution. When America went to WW2, they went to save the fascists from the communists. Through Operation Paperclip they worked with the Vatican to save fascists from all levels and integrated them into their global neo-empire. Through NATO they took the fascist officers and gave them new jobs leading an undemocratic transnational nuclear military that was specifically organized to counter Russia and internally create a culture of fascism. Through Operation Gladio the USA used NATO and the CIA to create fascist partisan militias that they funded, trained, protected, and armed all over Europe.

    If the only standard for fascism is that all the dominance that was applied to non-white people starts being applied to white people, I don’t find that to be a useful definition. Fascism did to Europeans what Europeans had been doing for centuries to the globe. I don’t think it’s useful, except for liberals, to distinguish between the historical period before the Third Reich and the period of the Third Reich solely by the racialized categories of the victims.

    • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
      21·
      9 months ago

      If the only standard for fascism is that all the dominance that was applied to non-white people starts being applied to white people, I don’t find that to be a useful definition.

      That’s literally what it is, though. It’s when the empire stops using superprofits generated by the empire to manage internal contradictions and switches to imperial management of the entire internal population, including the previously elevated segments of the population. Fascism did to Europeans what Europeans had been doing for centuries to the globe, that’s what makes it fascism.

      This is a useful framework if you understand that a segment of privileged workers within the imperial core are boureoisified by the distribution of superprofits, and that this is why revolution is impossible within the empire. It’s only when the empire can no longer generate enough superprofit to pacify that racial/caste/ethnic segment of the working class that they become a revolutionary subject.

      Revolution only becomes possible in the imperial core when the empire comes home.

      • freagle@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        0·
        9 months ago

        I think that definition potentially suffers from being non-universal. It’s not clear to me that the logic of society requires such conditions to exist as clearly as the definition states. That is to say, it sounds like a very accurate definition of a very specific time and place, namely Europe. It’s unclear to me that, given the colonial nature of America that such a clear delineation between America being not fascist and then becoming fascist is accurate in the least. It’s not like Germany or Italy was out there committing genocide against an entire continent and then eventually needed to bring it home. The conditions are completely different.

        If we expand the scope to try to include the historical underpinnings of Eurofascism, it appears not to be a distinct phase but rather a continuously ongoing process that simply has come to include some group of people it didn’t previously include. If we take a 1-into-2 analysis, that would point us to the recognition that such arbitrary groupings of people can’t possibly be the demarcation between fascism and non-fascism.

        As far as I can tell, fascism has been around since the Western European powers started going around genociding and dominating everyone they could. And when it finally came back via the Third Reich, it was the liberal imperial society that imagined this as a net new phenomenon that required a new name as it appeared to them to be a rupture from the past. But that’s an ideological myopia. The reality is that all of the elements of what liberals identify as fascism have been ongoing processes for several centuries.

        And when we consider how Eurofascism was inspired by, funded by, and lauded by the bourgeoisie in the USA, and then how that Eurofascism was protected from eradication, internationalized, cultivated, and extended into the present day, I have a hard time saying that fascism was born and then ended and that we are at risk of it reemerging. Instead I think the historical reality is that it has been an ongoing process for the last several centuries and the USA is its epidemiological reservoir.

        • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
          11·
          9 months ago

          Fascism is a stage of colonial development, when the rate of imperial superprofit began to fall and the empire came home. It “emerges” in the sense that it’s just the exact same thing the empire was always doing but turned inward. Fascism never went away, it just turned outwards again with the emergence of neocolonialism. Now that neocolonial development has again reached a stage when the rate of profit begins to fall and the empire turns inward, fascism (or some kind of neofascism) is the next stage of development.

          It’s only useful as a way to understand historical development, and it’s not as if fascism and colonialism are truly different things; they’re part of the same ongoing process, two sides of the imperial boomerang. When fascism “emerges” is when the revolutionary potential of the imperial core is at its highest, which is why the empire has to come home to manage the internal contradictions and stave off revolution. As a way to define political moments its only useful as a way to understand revolutionary potential within the imperial core.

          • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
            1·
            9 months ago

            Umm… Europeans have been colonizing other Europeans long before 1492. The most notable example of this was Ireland:

            Irishmen could not own land, sue in the king’s courts, hold office in central or local government, or be admitted to any ecclesiastical benefice in the territories under English control. In addition, the killing of an Irish man or woman was not a felony in English law; at most, the killer might owe compensation to the dead person’s lord.

            This last provision did not, as is sometimes assumed, imply murderous intent. The point was that Irishmen, as aliens rather than subjects, were outside the protection of the law. But the implications of that principle, where settler and native shared the same territory, were far reaching.

            (Source.)

            Capitalist colonialism within Europe was phenomenal years before the Fascist era. A byspel of this was World War I:

            In 1918 Germany annexed huge tracts of territory from the Russian Empire, taking direct control of almost all its coal mines, three‐quarters of its iron ore, half its industry, and a third of its rail system. An increasingly anti‐Slavic ideology added a racial dimension to this imperial expansion.

            Generals Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff wanted not only to control the resources of Eastern Europe, but also to subdue the region’s Slavic nationalities, settle Germans there, and create a “frontier wall of ‘physically and mentally healthy human beings.’” First in Poland then later further east, the German army commandeered forced labor, deported thousands of Slavic workers, and monitored the local population through registration and identity cards.46

            (Source and see Elusive Alliance: The German Occupation of Poland in World War I for more.)

            If by ‘empire coming home’ you mean ‘white capitalists superexploiting their fellow white citizens’, then that is likewise a prefascist phenomenon:

            Of the witnesses that Commissioner White examined (1863), 270 were under 18, 50 under 10, 10 only 8, and 5 only 6 years old. A range of the working‐day from 12 to 14 or 15 hours, night‐labour, irregular meal‐times, meals for the most part taken in the very workrooms that are pestilent with phosphorus. Dante would have found the worst horrors of his Inferno surpassed in this manufacture.

            (Source.)

            All that aside, what really disappoints me is seeing another person overlook the Fascist colonies in Afrasia. It bums me out. I try to regularly inform other users on that subject, so when I see a statement like ‘Fascism is the empire turning inward’, it makes me feel like my topics haven’t been of much help and haven’t really made a difference.