No I’m not catastrophising.
The world is slowly lurching towards a fully fascist led America, India, Hungary, Russia, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Argentina.
Instead people are either ignorant or blaming “wokeism”* for their problems.
I have no clue what to do and this is literally a car crash in slow motion.
I’m despondent because I’m going to be crushed under the boot when the time comes and my morals get in the way of my survival instinct.
Humans are repeating the mistakes of the past. It’s just so anxiety inducing.
*Woke is a useless term promulgated by fascists to dog whistle the things they really want to hate - feminism, socialism, LGBTQIA+, immigration, brown/black people, equality and diversity.
From the perspective of age, we’re always careening one direction to another one potential catastrophe to another. It’s never pretty in the short term, in the small details. However from the larger perspective, the direction of society approximates a middle of the road direction.
For your own sanity, step back from the immediate details and see where we’re heading from a more safe distance
How old do you think I am?
I’m ancient by Lemmy standards.
Age has made me more aware that most adults have no idea what they are doing but think they actually do by virtue that they’ve survived to their 40’s and beyond. This makes them incredibly dangerous.
It’s not actually fascism, it’s modern feudalism. The push for a more totalitarian government in all of the countries you mention is being funded by the super rich who want the working class to stay firmly under their thumb. And the plebes who are voting for the oligarchic candidates are really just voting to become serfs to their new lords and masters.
Fascism is a violent protection of the Capitalist status-quo in which the bourgeoisie cements itself as the totalitarian rulers.
Fascism is “a political system based on a very powerful leader, state control, and being extremely proud of country and race, and in which political opposition is not allowed”
Fascism is quite a bit more complicated than that. What I described is the function of fascism, as well as the material conditions that result in it. You’re describing the form.
Fascism is capitalism in decay. It’s governments run by the rich for the rich. It’s the crushing of labor unions and it’s choosing a scapegoat to blame the ills of your economy on. Fascism is exactly what we are seeing
I have hope for Germany. The past few weeks we had enormous protests(over 3m people protested in total) and multiple petitions against fascists and the AfD(the party that literally want to deportate everyone who isn’t “German”(this means even if you have a German passport, but came from another country youre going to get deportated)) had blown up. Their youth organisation is now officially a right wing extremists organisation. I still have hope, that we may save our country before it’s to late.
Don’t underestimate the backlash. The big, mellower, center segment of the population that is generally more chill isn’t in favor of fascist idiots.
Just, do what you can to help maintain motivation in the face of the fascist fear-train. Fear is their #1 tool, it’s the emotion that underpins their whole worldview. Control is simply a response to that fear. Without that underlying current of fear, though, how do they get people to grant them control?
Don’t underestimate the backlash.
Don’t overestimate it, either. Only about 1/3 of Germans were NAZIs even at the height of its popularity, but that didn’t stop Hitler from being a dictator.
Resistance takes work, not just hope that reasonable people will somehow prevail just because they’re the majority.
There is also a lot of people who are clueless or don’t care about the world around them or even treat their ignorance as a sort of virtue. 1/3 of Germans being Nazis don’t make the other 2/3 the resistance.
This isn’t even a car crash brother it’s like watching 8 separate trains collide
I think it sucks when you are forced to save the environment but the rich don’t have to change their lifestyle at all. They should be the first to have to change since they affect the environment a lot more.
They also have the means to install eco technology.
May i present to you:
the antifacist handbook, free to download/read (in different formats like pdf/epub/html/plaintext):
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/mark-bray-antifa-the-antifascist-handbook
Thanks for this, reading now.
I’ve also been busy reading the history of the rise of the Nazi party particularly the SA.
It’s scary (scary is not a strong enough word for the combined emotions of frustration, anger, fear, anxiety) how close current USA events are replicating the original rise of Nazi Germany.
Even current German events are replicating the rise of Nazi Germany. But many people are too blind to see…
Yeah, it’s so sad. Before inflation and all the other shit, nobody cared about fascist, but now they’re like
“Oh hey, that are so easy solutions to my severe Problems, I don’t care if they discriminate a minority or a group of people. Let’s vote them!”
Just to realize that they would change nothing - they will make it worser - and install slowly but surely their fucking pervert dictatorship.
to my severe problems
You mean the problems the fascist just made up and actually aren’t a really problem
It’s happening in France too. Are the fascists roaming the streets to beat leftists and Arabs in your country too?
Are the fascists roaming the streets to beat leftists and Arabs in your country too?
Only in the east and rural areas. So far.
I’m only 18 and I’m already so fucking tired of existing in this world, seems like everything is going downhill and I’m just gonna be forced to live in an authoritarian dictatorship world where all the air is full of toxins and the water is full of plastic
I hate thinking so negatively about the future but the more the world seems to crumble around me the more I feel like we might be one of the last generations of humans that got to experience civilisation for a long time.
The planet is dying, fascism is spreading, the tensions are rising, and everyone has nukes! woo! future!
You forgot to mention end stage capitalism to further enrich the 1% and corporations.
that’s part of the “planet is dying” bit, since nobody who can do something about it is doing anything
On the positive side a world ravaged by nuclear war could solve both problems!
Yay.
*cough* Posadism *cough*
TIL. The Federation already exists. We just aren’t communist enough to get the immortality beam and reality bomb engine.
TIL. The Federation already exists.
Weelll except for the nuclear first-use policy.
Although all in all that’d sort of track, too
Just do what you can. Don’t join the army and minimize your contribution to fascist government. Put your efforts locally where you can :)
Look on the bright side: it’s not as if this will continue forever. If our infrastructure is failing as deeply as it seems, society will reach a breaking point. The real question is where that point is and making sure you reach it. If it truly gets bad enough we’ll see the return of the guillotine, maybe even literally if we’re feeling spicy
If our infrastructure is failing as deeply as it seems, society will reach a breaking point.
My sector. It is worse than you think and I am scared of quitting.
Guillotines, gas chambers, executions, concentration camps is no good… Nor are genocides … and it’s all going on RN somewhere.
I don’t think that’s what he meant. As far as I understood his comment he meant using the guillotine in the French way.
However you’re right. It will get very bad before it gets good again.
I understand how you might feel this way. But a key difference to the early 1930s is that there are many large-scale protests against far right extremism in Germany. The elections in the Netherlands did produce a right wing tendency, but there is no government as of yet and the PVV is still pretty far away from fascism. The other three large winners of the election are not even that right wing. At least no more than the party that ruled for the last 15 years.
That said, I do kinda hope that this phase passes quickly and that people will start to finally get along and care about our fellow humans. Even though we never have.
The protests in germany give me hope that the german public finally resists against fascism instead of just letting it happen and then saying “there’s nothing that could have been done” afterwards
I expect the US will hold out for at least the next 4.5 years. After that, no promises.
I expect that the US will last five years, what’s the bet?
4.5 years is optimistic with an election pending
Hungary is seriously fucked up at the moment but calling it fascism is a huge stretch. It’s not like these fuckers actually believe in anything, they’ll just do whatever gets them the votes and the cash. Not that the tendencies aren’t worrying (in fact I’ve left the country because of them), but it’s not a full blown dictatorship yet. Source: am Hungarian.
I hate to say this but I’ve honestly just gotten used to the idea at this point. I’ve been watching the people around me howling in support of fascism since about 2015 now and the more egregious these politicians crimes become the louder these idiots seem to howl for them. It’s been going so long that it’s just part of the background noise of day to day life now, and I’m tired of caring anymore. It’s fucking depressing.
How can we convince people now is the time to act? What more information do we need? I think most people are clinging to the idea everything is a business as usual. As long as they can keep the lights on they wouldn’t want to upset the stability they’ve managed to make for themselves.
As a Russian who’s been thinking about what could’ve been done about Putin’s many moves towards authoritarianism, I say this: I don’t know. I dint think anyone knows either.
indsight is 20/20, so good luck trying to convince people to act now, before the far and distant future is here; it’s probably part of our nature to not be that much concerned with the long-term, as it’s the short- to mid-term that keeps us alive, i.e. fed, sheltered, hopefully healthy etc.
At this point, it feels like history is indeed very cyclical, at least society is, and now anyone left of outright fascism seems to be in minority, with many others either failing or refusing to recognise what’s likely coming. I don’t think it’s new, either - I’m sure people of our ages had things to compare their situation to during the Nazis’ rise to power and subsequent events, just like we look back to their times and wonder how in the world could we possibly let that happen.
It’s probably best to vote and to protest and to be politically active and all that, before the right-wing or some other authoritarian group manages to manipulate its way into your government, local or higher, and start doing all it can to make you not even think of voting or protesting or being politically active. The caveat is you just don’t have any guarantees that any of that is going to work.
What’s even more important to remember is the fact that we cannot come up with some universal solution that’s going to always work the best way possible in every political and economical and social circumstance. This is what makes recording history and experience so important - it will allow us and those that will be after us to analyse the multitudes of factors and tendencies that lead to things and hopefully figure out reliable and effective and predictable mechanisms for society to function and prosper in mutual respect, egalitarianism, support, etc.
My last take is probably a little controversial: I think we shouldn’t ostracise people we see as fascist or right-wing or authoritarian, etc., but rather be welcoming and supporting, giving them respect, community and opportunity to speak and be listened to with kindness and understanding; many turn to violent and inhumane ideologies because, well, they don’t value themselves, feel threatened, humiliated, afraid, or something along these lines. It doesn’t have to be true, because it’s about how people feel, and we must work with how people feel and influence that on emotional level so they feel like they being in a group that’s based on being “anti-woke” or just “anti-” something - that’s a dead end; they should feel like they belong to groups that envision future and prosperity, where people know they can be trusted and can trust, where they can respect and be respected. You may not like it, but you have to understand that the human psyche can be very flexible and eventually turn a person you could easily turn into a human-loving ally into a bloodthirsty fascist just because they couldn’t find their place anywhere else, so instead they’re easily picked up by a group that manipulates confused and lost people into a sense of community and belonging.
Fascism has to be the unappealing option for them, and that requires a mind healthy from trauma and loneliness, the lack of that feeling like you’ve been played and robbed of something you own - like some great historical period the mouthpieces promise to get you back into if you yell at teenage girls for wearing bright-colored hair and rainbow pins.
I agree with your controversial take, however it’s important to note that a lot of this fascist rhetoric relies on misinformation which is spread far quicker and further than the truth. And the neofascism that has taken hold is very in-group oriented (i.e. the concepts that the in group is by definition morally virtuous and thus can do no real harm, whereas the out-group is the opposite) which is difficult to break down with logic and rhetoric. That’s not to say it can’t be done, but in terms of conversion (purely as a metric, i don’t mean to be oberly reductionist) it will always be one step forward three back. And if they people don’t approach a conversation in good faith it can be downright impossible to get them to even fathom a differing perspective. What I’m saying is that the new breed of fascists rely solely on dogma and groupthink, and have been trained to reject any rebuttal or outside perspective. They took what the old fascists did well and optimized it and trained people in it for the past 70+ years.
Yes, fully agree, we’re living in post apocalypse times :( Climate crisis will cause more casualties, and the rising fascism will do so as well. There’s usual housing crisis, and the hyped A.I. as well among others.
In your list of countries you can add Belgium as well. In fact today it is hard to think of a country in Europe which has shown zero far right or fascism sentiments nowadays. It is difficult to focus on positive things but things like solidarity, keeping in touch with like minded people, de-growth, D.I.Y. and de-googling can help.
I suggest target practice, that way you won’t get crushed by boots…and you can resist any fascist in your area, and encourage others in your immediate area to do the same.
Start a club, and then you can hold parties, where you show each other new knowledge, and help others to protect themselves…and fight against all the fascist hordes!
alright now im really confused. how does the world devolving into fascism bring complete anarchy? aren’t those completely different things?
This isn’t Red Dawn. People will quickly find out how inadequate they are against a military.
When real conflict begins domestically it will be drones being used by those in power. Guns won’t do much good.
Better learn spark gap jammers then
But odds are it won’t be the military. At least, not at first. It will most likely start with all those right-wing punisher-worshipping nutters who want an excuse to shoot ‘the liburlz’, with local cops either helping out or staying out of the way, and the government conveniently ignoring everything. Or at least, that’s how it’s tended to go in the past.
(See kristallnacht, Tulsa race massacre, Wilmington massacre, Rosewood massacre, Ocoee massacre…)
And those local assholes can be repelled with guns.
John Brown gun club or Socialist Rifle Association are out there… also there are plenty of paramilitary and social fascist groups to protect yourself against. Proud boys, border nutjobs, don’t listen to naysayers about learning to defend yourself. It’s not just military with tanks and planes. It’s your back the blue neighbor you have to worry about…
Well, at least that will take your mind off global warming. Which is good since we have already hit 1.5°C of warming.
1.5 and we’re just getting started! Let’s goooooo! It’s incredible what humans can do when we work together 🔥👏🏻🔥👏🏻🔥
You are a horrible person to make me laugh so hard at our folly
I don’t even have the energy to keep resisting the endless flow of bullshit anymore. It gets worse from day to day. What bothers me the most is that it’s gotten so bad that i turned apathetic to it. If someone starts spewing right wing bullshit i just zone out until they finished. In the end I won’t be directly affected by a right wing leadership in my country but i still can’t stand the idea. All the progress we have made in the last few years in terms of equality would just go to waste
I won’t be directly affected by a right wing leadership
Well, you know that famous quote where in the end there’s no one to fight for you when they come for you?
That’s why i said directly. I will definitely be affected in some form at dome point
