> There's no better definition of being punished for a political opinion than being punished to donating to a legitimate party.

Maybe being punished for some political opinions isn't a bad thing, if your political opinion is "some people don't deserve human rights" :-)

Is it a human right to live in Sweden?

If it was your home for [almost] all of your first 18 years of life, I would say yes.

How is he being "punished"?

They are not fascists, they are somewhere between “right-socialists” and left-populists, seemingly very close to Titoism. There is a substantial difference. Fascism calls for fusion of corporations and state and I haven’t seen that from them. They have called for socialization of energy, but that’s common among many left parties.

I am sick to death of the overapplication of the word “fascism”. It doesn’t mean “bad thing”. Distinct words are needed for distinct concepts, otherwise all political discourse ends up like here in America where you have “liberals” who are not actually liberal and “conservatives” who don’t want to conserve anything.

Edit: edited to reflect that they are probably a lot closer to Tito than Hoxha or Juche, after thinking about it.

My man made up his own definition of what defines fascism with a single feature and rolled with it.

It’s literally one of the key defining features that separate it from other forms of totalitarianism. That you don’t seem to know this speaks poorly to your understanding of the concept.

It certainly isn’t the only feature and nobody claimed that.

It's one of the multiple still debated feature of fascism. And you said : "They are not fascists [...] Fascism calls for fusion of corporations and state and I haven’t seen that from them."

Both Italian Fascism and National Socialist Germany, the two prima facie examples, exhibited this. Nobody’s debating it except those who want to inappropriately extend the concept to cover other ideologies they don’t like, as a way of associating them with the worst regimes in history for propaganda purposes.

It's not the "calls for fusion of corporations and state" you mentioned above that these people are the most famous for, and what you seem worried about others being associated with; but their ideology and the associated actions. It's no wonder modern forms of a similar ideology draw comparisons to its most famous proponents in recent history.

The association happens by way of that similarity. That's what they're getting called out for.

Opening up a discussion about technical differences in economic policy is completely beside the point, unless you want to distract from the rest of the rotten elephant in the room.

It's not about names, it's about using names as a shorthand for what these people said to motivate and justify their horrific deeds.

They were not the first, or last, but, as you say, among the worst. They serve as an excellent model of what can happen when you put people like that in control of a modern, organized and industrialized state.

And as such, I find it entirely appropriate to invoke their handle as a shorthand for modern ducks quacking a similar tune.

I assume you’re referencing the Holocaust. Unfortunately, genocide and mass killings are not all that uncommon, and there’s been a number of examples coming from wildly different ideologies over the years. (And besides, there’s only one region of the world where civilian mass killings are regularly taking place at the moment, and it’s not the US.)

If you believe historical accounts of the Holodomor, the Soviets perpetuated an even worse genocide. Yet we don’t call the baddies “Stalinists,” because it would be obviously absurd. I’m saying that it’s just as absurd to call them fascists, and the only reason that most people don’t understand this is widespread historical and political illiteracy.

“there’s only one region of the world where civilian mass killings are regularly taking place at the moment, and it’s not the US”

It’s literally being done using US weaponry with the full backing of the US…

Yes, but this is puts the US in a very different position than Nazi Germany during the Holocaust, which was conducting mass purges of its own citizens, and bringing in citizens of surrounding nations to do the same. The current scale is also much smaller, and the method of murder is more military than industrial.

A closer comparison would be WW1 imperial Germany, allied with the Ottomans, who conducted the Armenian genocide. This fits better in many ways; the WW1 German Empire was also a militaristic, culturally conservative empire that decided to abandon its previous alliances in favor of imperial ambitions. Furthermore, the Armenian genocide was also over control of land, and it was roughly on the same scale.

It’s much more accurate to depict Trump as a Kaiser rather than a Führer, but it loses the emotional resonance. Of course, most people care more about propaganda than understanding reality.

My point is that the term "fascist" here gets used to draw attention to parallels in core ideology, and that this is unsurprising and indeed appropriate.

There will always be differences, and a narrower definition can be useful in a different discussion, but in general, I'd say recognizing the same patterns from the past is the opposite of historical illiteracy and something that we could use more of. Insisting on the finer points _in this context_ comes across as historical pedantry at best, or an inability or unwillingness to recognize the fundamental similarities otherwise.

They just aren’t that similar. One of the reasons that accusations of “fascism” fall flat with so many is that it’s an obvious exaggeration.

It might be pedantry, but in this case it’s appropriate. We’re losing the ability to actually discuss politics above the level of raw tribalism, because every position is always cast as a worst-case extreme. Believe it or not, things could get a lot worse! And they just might!

> things could get a lot worse! And they just might!

Looks like they will. Do you care to bet what sort of party will make them so? You can see them in action across the world and in our past.

> They just aren’t that similar.

That's where we disagree. I say they're similar where it counts the most, at the core. Where did the fascists come from?

There's a combination of xenophobia and populism, this tendency to offer simple solutions to complex problems that tend to involve blaming and getting rid of people that are "different". It usually goes hand in hand with a certain latent or overt brutality, doesn't it, the tendency to not care about the suffering inflicted, about the humanity of others. There's a generous streak of authoritarianism there, wanting to suppress differences, a hostility towards the mechanisms that allow these differences to be expressed and balanced and protected. A disdain for courts that don't rule the right way, for journalists that don't write the right thing, and a soft spot for what we call "alternative facts" these days and for "remigration" - I think the nazis entertained such an idea, too.

I agree that there's an inflationary use of calling out "fascism", but you don't need to look deeply into that Swedish party to see the similarities. From what I read, much more likely than not, somebody like their boss would have been an ardent nazi even before the 1930s, golden party badge and all - and if not, then only because he'd have a competing party for a while.

So yeah, sometimes it's right to call a spade a spade. Another one of the reasons that accusations of “fascism” fall flat is that people just don't want to be associated with _that_, and there are enough differences to talk about to avoid looking in the mirror of the past. You don't need to have arrived at the extremes for people to understand where your heart is, and what is at least the direction you want to go. It's the one that's consistently turned out to be worse.

I just don’t think that pointing to the direction of travel and jumping to the conclusion is politically astute. It’s not an immediate threat and it turns the average person away from political involvement, not towards it.

All the things you pointed out have also been part of other authoritarian movements.

Capital-F Fascism will only come in Western nations after they experience a massive humiliation, not before. This precipitates the broad nationalist anger that’s required. The present course is taking us towards a different kind of totalitarianism, one that doesn’t really have a historical parallel.

Edit: I also think it’s a mistake to equate fascism with some kind of mystical “ultimate evil”. With modern technology, it’s quite possible for us to dream up a future that looks very different than fascism but is somehow even worse. Positioning every political struggle in terms of “fascism” or “anti-fascism” just makes this more likely, because it creates blind spots for new horrors.

Well, I think that pointing to the direction of travel is necessary, because that's where these folks want to go - and if we don't end up there, it's not because they had a change of heart, but because not enough people jumped on their bandwagon.

As I said, I also think that "fascism" is overused as a label, but that it fits in this case and is one of the right labels. Calling the modern revenant by the name of one of its previous forms is not wrong, and should be goddamn possible, at the very least. That was my point. I won't pursue it here anymore, because I agree that it probably does not _work_. It doesn't work because it's wrong, but because it seems like there are simply no words at all that work. This name, that label, new, old, short, long - enough people just don't care, don't see, will not see what they are supporting and voting for. It sucks.

I do agree with you here except on one thing: I don’t think they do want to go towards fascism. The neofeudal “network state” idea that we’re iterating towards is the antithesis of any known state. In abstract it’s another silly ancap experiment that’s bound to fail, but in practice the goal is to splinter any organized resistance to capital into tiny economic zones.

If you want to look at it another way, fascism was domination by national capital using the organs of the state, and it relied on strengthening and centralizing the state. Neofeudalism is domination by transnational capital, with the state reduced to a powerless vestigial remnant.

I think that people do oppose this—see the growing opposition to Flock and data centers, which are small components of the overall picture—but they don’t understand it, and they don’t know what to call it. Personally, I think neofeudalism works well. It even has a Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-feudalism

Edit: I will add nuance here by saying that there is a subset of the right that wants something more akin to an American fascism, mostly a small but vocal group of internet posters, but they are subordinate to both the neofeudalists and the religious nuts and they only get fed scraps from the table. If the AI bubble collapses and drags the economy down with it, the dynamic may flip on its head, depending on how prepared both groups are. Either way, misunderstanding the neofeudalists as fascists allows them to carry out their work in the dark.

This is a petty gotcha, that's not what that sentence means.

The annoyance is that your personal judgement of "bad" is being wrapped up in emotional escalating language which equivocates, "I dont like this policy on immigration" with the history of genocide and total war in europe.

> Fascism calls for fusion of corporations and state

Ironically, most people screaming online and at demonstrations about "fascism" explicitly support this. Outside of socialized health care and university education, it's impossible to detect any traditional left-wing politics among them - deviate an inch from those two things and they instantly revert to a sort of common ignorant libertarianism.

They don't understand that socialized health care and university educations (both of which I support) are easily incorporated into a fascist state, or that Mussolini became prominent and famous as the head of Italian socialism, and saw fascism as a more efficient and powerful way to provide the things that he wanted. They can't be central to your anti-fascism.

But, in fact, all of their anti-fascism is those two things, and additionally somehow unlimited immigration (a capitalist dream.) The only even vaguely left-wing related ways to support this are 1) that communists didn't believe in nation-states, they believed in world communism, and 2) that warmongering imperialists attacked immigrants' countries of origin, so their populations are simply "chickens coming home to roost," aka "blowback."

The first is them pretending to be communists when they're social safety net liberals which falls apart pretty quickly, and the second basically paints immigrants as a punishment as the West deserves. It's no wonder that they default to liberal elite capitalist defenses of immigration - "who will pick our fruit and clean our toilets?" "I love their food, their native dances, their beautiful clothes, and their magical mysterious spirituality," "they're so much more beautiful and interesting than boring white people." At least then immigrants aren't painted as some sort of venereal disease you get from fucking other countries over.

The real reason is that they're following the anti-Wall rhetoric that was cynically aimed at Trump in 2016 by the Democrats (and the Koch brothers) in a massive colossally expensive media campaign, and mistaking that for left-wing politics.

There's a hidden strength in this from the "birthright citizenship" in the US which combined with the extreme pro-immigration stance that the Democrats had to take to differentiate from Trump. A bunch of immigrant children and citizen children of illegal immigrant parents started pretending to be left-wing when they were really mostly single-issue (themselves), and it also worked because they were often low-middle income (safety net, again themselves.) The joy that upper-middle class whites who got worthless liberal arts degrees in word salad experienced when they could attend meetings (and have sex) with this population is mostly responsible for the rise of this dimwitted activism that gets blamed on the left. It was the logical continuation of the orgy of self-love they fell into after congratulating themselves for voting for a black (but absolutely nothing to do with anything that the US did to black people) president twice. A black president of immigrant descent who made "DREAMers" an issue.

There's a similar feature in Europe with refugees, and additionally in both places because there are simply a lot of foreign elites in European universities who love to be seen as the victim rather than the oppressors that they are seen as where they come from. Europe also doesn't have the history with local black people to feel guilty about, so their guilt is mostly around colonies - and these people are from former colonies. Europeans should feel guilty about the gypsies, Holocaust and all, but they don't; they still hate them. Hell, the US left-liberal transferred their guilt about black people and natives to immigrants, who are cast as strivers and saints with big happy families to differentiate them from the abandoned and ghettoized ex-slaves who get to hear about how immigrants built America.

When every power structure in the world started adopting this stupid language, the former left were doomed. Why wouldn't they be? The beliefs of the actual, traditional left had officially been deemed "fascist" and replaced with a cobbled-together set of lifestyle beliefs and xenophilia that bankers had no problem with.

Fully agree. Thanks for clarifying.

Who is that ? The personification of the Dunning-Kruger effect ?

Most people don’t describe themselves that way, but you do you

The person I'm refering to (which is not you) clearly has a biased view of what he considers leftism, purely based on skewed USA politics and propaganda without theory. In his wall of text, every single anti-fascist is "left-libtard who doesn't know class war". If you want to talk about the communism and it's link to autoritarism : fine. About the history of fascist leaders stealing socialists ideas to get in power and never implement them : fine. But this is just mashed potatoes of brain matter.

From reading his past posts, I’m pretty sure he and I would fall under the same general “post-left” umbrella. His (and my) problem is not with “the left” or left theory in general, only with the idiots who have appropriated the label and abandoned the key goal of economic justice that sits at the core of left theory. They are the running dogs of the “capitalism” they claim to oppose.

I’m not even a Marxist (my preference lies somewhere near Georgist left-libertarianism), but increasingly I find myself required to dig into Marxist theory to slap down the nonsense coming from what remains of the putative, fully captured-by-propaganda and brainrotted left. Of the heirs of the old left, only doctrinaire MLs seem to have any solid grounding in the actual requirements of governing, while the radical left have all absorbed the New Left (crypto-Trotskyite) approach of “permanent revolution,” although they don’t even realize what this theory is or what it leads to. (In case you weren’t aware, the theory merely reinforces imperialism, leading to domination by transnational capital.)

Lenin was completely right about left deviationism.

You're transforming "remigration" into "controlling borders" and "opposing immigration".

But I agree the F word frequently doesn't advance political discussion.