What is fascism?

[lucklucky]

Incorrect. Communists/Marxists and Nazis are much more extreme than Fascists. Who murdered millions of own people? 

Edited March 2, 2021 by lucklucky

[rmgill]

49 minutes ago, BansheeOne said:

Frankly that's a description of populist ideologies so general as to be pointless. The only way for any party to not possibly meet it is not attaining unchecked power, because you cannot say how they would use it.

Depends on what they're selling AND how they plan to deliver it. 

If it involves the government getting out of the way and not controlling everything for you, it's kind of hard to be corrupted by power that's not there. 

Trump was pushing this. Dial back on government regulations (it's not a switch with two positions of Off and 11 Nigel). This was seen as SUPER BAD! ELEVENTY!!!

More so, Libertarians are described by many on the left as evil and dangerous....ooooh....The Libertarians are gonna get into power and NOT do anything to anyone.....ooohhh scary!

So, yeah...sorry. Just because it's "populist" doesn't mean squat. What are they selling, who are they selling it to, what's it cost and what's in the fine print? 

I've had PLENTY of conversations with folks who'm I've known for years who are ALL enamored of the socialist mumblings of Bernie and AOC, and they're quite surely thinking with their hearts and not their heads. They WANT to take care of folks, they just have ZERO clue as to how socialism's promises tend to not deliver and come with a VERY high cost. 
 

[rmgill]

21 minutes ago, lucklucky said:

If it is circuital it is 2-D not 3-D  

Where do you put the the Extremism from the so called Centrists?  For simplification sake lets say these Centrists advocate World Government.

< Mr Picky...>

A linear left-right scale is 1 dimension.  (X Axis)

A circular scale tracking authoritarian along the vertical (Y) axis is a two dimensional 

</ Mr Picky...>

[lucklucky]

Isn't what i said? circuital is 2-D.

 

 

[rmgill]

Just being Mr Picky and expansive...not so much at you though. 😉

[lucklucky]

Okay 

[Steven P Allen]

Well, my cut-and paste botched THAT job really good!

The revised version has 1-D and 2-D and circular.  Obviously, my save came at the wrong time.

[lucklucky]

Just now, seahawk said:

In the end it is a circle, and facism and socialism/communism are actually not polar opposites but very close the each other.

 

Like i said above this is wrong, instead of Fascism it should be Totalitarianism.  And making centrism the place of "science, intelligence and logic" tells me the centrist that made that is only praising himself.

[rmgill]

yeah.. I confess I didn’t look at that other compass when we were quibbling over dimension count. I also think that its authoritarian vs libertarian. as to centrism..,what the hell is that? Its the middle ok.. of what? 

 

and yes.. science is/was claimed as precisely why some sterilize folks over others, be it for mental retardation or other defects that they decide. Entirely wrongheaded as that asserts authority over other people that should not be granted. 

 

How fundamentalism is next to fascism is also quite daft. 

[Rick]

In truth it all comes down to power. If you are being drained of your money via taxation call it "A." If your money is being drained due to governmental coercion call it "B." If it is both argue ad infinitum what it is and where it originated. 

When your speech is being curtailed by ... When your Christian morality is being abolished by ... You get the picture.

Just my opinion, but the U.S. has never had -- for the purposes of discussion here -- a right wing government.  The definition is the amount of federal government power, increased governmental power is always a left wing abomination. We have been seeing this from at least President F.D.R.'s time. 

The definition of a U.S. right wing government would be a Libertarian government -- the best type of government possible.

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

12 hours ago, lucklucky said:

Incorrect. Communists/Marxists and Nazis are much more extreme than Fascists. Who murdered millions of own people? 

They had 63 more years, so its not that much of an achievement.

And if we are going to throw the bodies of the various Communist affiliates on the pile, in Vietnam, Cambodia and Africa, then why not the South American states, Spain, South Korea, Phillipines and Italy. Ill warrant there isnt much in it.

We pretend now that Communism was a greater threat than Fascism. Much as I loathe Communism and all it stands for, none of them ever bombed my country.

[RETAC21]

2 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

They had 63 more years, so its not that much of an achievement.

And if we are going to throw the bodies of the various Communist affiliates on the pile, in Vietnam, Cambodia and Africa, then why not the South American states, Spain, South Korea, Phillipines and Italy. Ill warrant there isnt much in it.

We pretend now that Communism was a greater threat than Fascism. Much as I loathe Communism and all it stands for, none of them ever bombed my country.

Sure, you can do that, stll comes out as Communism being 10 times worse than Fascism. Let's take Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge take power in April 1975 and are outsted in January 1979: 1.5 to 2 million dead

Same time frame: Argentina: 1976-1983: 13.000 to 30.000

[BansheeOne]

15 hours ago, rmgill said:

Depends on what they're selling AND how they plan to deliver it. 

If it involves the government getting out of the way and not controlling everything for you, it's kind of hard to be corrupted by power that's not there. 

Trump was pushing this. Dial back on government regulations (it's not a switch with two positions of Off and 11 Nigel). This was seen as SUPER BAD! ELEVENTY!!!

But by your reasoning, that is what parties sell to get into power, and you don't know how they will use it until they are sufficiently free of checks. Trump certainly didn't achieve that, despite him leading chants of "twelve more years", his expressed hope for his Supreme Court nominations to decide contested elections in his favor, and the helpful suggestions to declare martial law when they failed him.

Looking across the Western New Right as defined by their aim to go back to some putative good old days, they actually share some good old 70/80s Western socialist positions, too: anti-international capital, anti-free trade, anti-interventionist, anti-NATO, anti-EEC/EU (because it's a capitalist tool to remove national economic regulation), pro-USSR/Russia or at least a stance of US-Russia equivalency, make the judiciary subservient to the "will of the people" (i. e. the government they elected, though that's actually more a proper communist thing), expanding or at least not cutting back on popular welfare state implements.

The UK Brexit camp: reroute our payments to the EU into the NHS. The French Front National (or whatever they call themselves this week): defend the 35-hour work week etc. against Macron's policy of deregulation. The German AfD: roll back the Hartz IV welfare cuts, and social security in the DDR actually wasn't bad. The Polish PiS: expand welfare measures for families. Hungary's Viktor Orban in his infamous 2014 speech on illiberal democracy: the 2007/2008 world financial crisis shows the Western liberal capitalist system is breaking down, guided political and economic systems like Russia, China and Turkey are the future. Even the Trump Republicans didn't really touch Obamacare in the end because they feared repercussions from a significant part of their voter base. 

There are few data points to indicate what these parties would actually do with unchecked power. The Polish and Hungarian governments have achieved some Gleichschaltung of societal institutions, namely the suppression of independent judges and media. Hungary's Fidesz actually rewrote and repeatedly amended the country's constitution with their two-thirds majority in parliament for their benefit, and look entrenched in power for the forseeable future.

But in the modern globalized world, governments of smaller countries remain particularly checked by international constraints and multinational organizations like the EU, despite Orban's attempts to reduce his dependence upon EU subsidies to pay for his economic promises and run his crony system by bringing in Chinese and Russian money. Which is of course one reason for the anti-globalism of these parties; if they were free from the influence of global markets and international rules, they think, they could implement their aims that much more easily. Though those outside constraints naturally make convenient scapegoats for failing to achieve their promises, too, always steered by sinister international enemies of the national revoution. 

 

Edited March 3, 2021 by BansheeOne

[Stuart Galbraith]

3 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

Sure, you can do that, stll comes out as Communism being 10 times worse than Fascism. Let's take Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge take power in April 1975 and are outsted in January 1979: 1.5 to 2 million dead

Same time frame: Argentina: 1976-1983: 13.000 to 30.000

Against 25 million Soviets, 6 million Jews and other political undesirables of the Nazi Regime, 52000 British civilians killed by enemy bombing, possibly as many as 600000 by allied bombing in Germany because the regime wouldnt give up even though they  knewy they had already lost. And thats not getting into the ground forces killed in North Africa, Italy, France, Germany among the Western Allies, all those lost at sea in the battle of the atlantic, etc etc etc.

You know we could tot that all up and play a Top Trumps game of 'My totalitarian Government is worse than your totalitarian government'. I dont think it would tell us worse other than both regime were perfectly capable of murdering wholesale when they saw the need. That both sides seemed perfectly capable of committing the atrocity at Katyn is the best evidence of that fact.

The Soviet Regime existed for 63 more years than the Nazi one, and were able to export the regime to considerably more places than the Nazi's did. If they killed more, that says more about longevity than their being even worse than the Nazi's and their allies.

[RETAC21]

51 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Against 25 million Soviets, 6 million Jews and other political undesirables of the Nazi Regime, 52000 British civilians killed by enemy bombing, possibly as many as 600000 by allied bombing in Germany because the regime wouldnt give up even though they  knewy they had already lost. And thats not getting into the ground forces killed in North Africa, Italy, France, Germany among the Western Allies, all those lost at sea in the battle of the atlantic, etc etc etc.

You know we could tot that all up and play a Top Trumps game of 'My totalitarian Government is worse than your totalitarian government'. I dont think it would tell us worse other than both regime were perfectly capable of murdering wholesale when they saw the need. That both sides seemed perfectly capable of committing the atrocity at Katyn is the best evidence of that fact.

The Soviet Regime existed for 63 more years than the Nazi one, and were able to export the regime to considerably more places than the Nazi's did. If they killed more, that says more about longevity than their being even worse than the Nazi's and their allies.

Ah, so we move the goal post, ok, then, the whole XX century in its glory:

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM

VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS
61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill
20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime

5,964,000 Murdered: Japan's Savage Military
2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey's Genocidal Purges
1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
1,585,000 Murdered: Poland's Ethnic Cleansing
1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
1,072,000 Murdered: Tito's Slaughterhouse

Commies: 103 million, everyone else: 40

You were saying?

One big difference is that all those genocides of non-communist persuasion are not justified/forgotten by current existing politicians that seek to re-implement the same failed policies.

[bojan]

1 mil for Yugoslavia is very, very creative number, as it includes those killed in service of the Germans during war, people killed in conflict of non-communist groups etc. There was a scandal locally when "truth commission" tried to find out numbers of killed post war in Serbia, based on one of those lists, turns out... less then 20% of the list was true. It included people killed during war in inter-royalist conflict. One example is that out of 207 priests killed in Branicevo county in Serbia attributed to a "communist killing of priests", 87 were supporters of Mihajlovic chetniks or communist partisans (support for communists was very widespred among low level clergy) killed by Ljotic colaborators, 64 were colaborators and communists killed by Mihajlovic Chetniks, 49 were killed by communists (some colaborators, some chetnik supporters), and 7 were unclear cases (at least one was possibly joint chetnik/partisan action that failed and then he died later in unclear circumstances, so he was on both groups bad side). Out of those killed by communists, at least 13 were on "death list" by Mihajlovic chetnics for being supporters of Ljotic.

It is same thing as claim of 800.000 killed in Jasenovac concentration camp, creative claims combined with political misuse of victims.

Edited March 3, 2021 by bojan

[Stuart Galbraith]

1 hour ago, RETAC21 said:

Ah, so we move the goal post, ok, then, the whole XX century in its glory:

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/NOTE1.HTM

VICTIMS: THE DEKA-MEGAMURDERERS
61,911,000 Murdered: The Soviet Gulag State
35,236,000 Murdered: The Communist Chinese Ant Hill
20,946,000 Murdered: The Nazi Genocide State
10,214,000 Murdered: The Depraved Nationalist Regime

5,964,000 Murdered: Japan's Savage Military
2,035,000 Murdered: The Khmer Rouge Hell State
1,883,000 Murdered: Turkey's Genocidal Purges
1,670,000 Murdered: The Vietnamese War State
1,585,000 Murdered: Poland's Ethnic Cleansing
1,503,000 Murdered: The Pakistani Cutthroat State
1,072,000 Murdered: Tito's Slaughterhouse

Commies: 103 million, everyone else: 40

You were saying?

One big difference is that all those genocides of non-communist persuasion are not justified/forgotten by current existing politicians that seek to re-implement the same failed policies.

Im not moving any goal posts, ive asserted the Communists had over 60 years more to commit attrocities than Communism, ergo its inevitable Communism killed more. Its also pretty clear that between 1933 and 1945, Fascism created a wholly unimaginable butchers bill, and it takes an effort willful credulity to believe that they would have won the war and stopped killing. The only time they would have stopped killing is when everyone left was an Aryan.

If you want to assert that Communism as it was killed more people, you may well be right. OTOH, no Communist ever bombed my country, or welcomed any of my relatives to camps with a rifle butt.  Ive never accepted the cheery view that Fascism was a responsible reaction to communsim, because that is the kind of bull Oswald Mosely was selling. It didnt sell very well then, it positively reeks now.

Yes, I know spain has a complicated history and looks on fascism differently from my country. Thats absolutely fine, but you are not going to convince me that Fascism was any better, because it showed the same indifference for individuals, the same capacity for industrialized mass murder.

I said it before, look at Katyn. The British POW's who went to see it when it was unearthed could not decide whether Communists or Fascists were responsible. Of course not. Because extermism, left and right, taken to an extreme is completely identical.

Edited March 3, 2021 by Stuart Galbraith

[rmgill]

5 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

They had 63 more years, so its not that much of an achievement.

They had to warn people Not to eat their children after a giant bloody famine. Then they really got down to business. 

The fact then they did it and kept on doing it for decades should be evidence of how bad it was. Then they tried it in other countries and it got even worse. 

Frankly I expect more of an excoriation from you for the mass murder of ~60,000,000 people. 

 

Quote

And if we are going to throw the bodies of the various Communist affiliates on the pile, in Vietnam, Cambodia and Africa, then why not the South American states, Spain, South Korea, Phillipines and Italy. Ill warrant there isnt much in it.

Portugal is the one that gets closest to the body count. But I'm sorry, when you're someone like Pol Pot and you write about how you're going to do this in papers and then come to power and do it, it's pretty clear that he's a monster through and through. 

Quote

We pretend now that Communism was a greater threat than Fascism. Much as I loathe Communism and all it stands for, none of them ever bombed my country.

Fascism did it over one major region and then Communism came and did it over every region of the world. For far longer and didn't learn from it's mistakes. And it STILL has people defending it as not all that bad because their murder rate wasn't as high even though they kept doing it for FAR longer.

Communism IS a greater threat because it DOES have a higher body count and people keep writing apologias for it's behavior. Still, even in this thread. How many times do you have to run the same experiment, break a couple million or tens of millions of eggs before you realize that it's nota  good experiment to try? 

Yet somehow, noone is fronting themselves as Democratic Fascist or Democratic Colonialists and somehow Facism and Colonialism is still deemed the greater threat/evil? 

Edited March 3, 2021 by rmgill

[rmgill]

2 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

But by your reasoning, that is what parties sell to get into power, and you don't know how they will use it until they are sufficiently free of checks. Trump certainly didn't achieve that, despite him leading chants of "twelve more years", his expressed hope for his Supreme Court nominations to decide contested elections in his favor, and the helpful suggestions to declare martial law when they failed him.

Trump was campaigning on less government. And he delivered that action in reducing regulations AND reducing the number of federal laws. We didn't know what he was going to be like. Then we saw actual action of reducing federal burdens on everyone. 

Then he was also directly and coherently NOT on board with federal mandates for covid issues or production targets, preferring to come to voluntary agreements. Again, the left was upset that he wasn't seizing power to make things happen. 

Witness the same fact that New York Governor Cuomo was lauded as the BEST GOVERNOR EVER!!! (Most sexy too, nipple rings and all 🤢) while the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, who was NOT implementing vast controls and who had the more aging state. This was all bad when you look at US media coverage.  Yet when you look at effects New York has the high body count and Florida is middle of the pack for the US. 

 

2 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

Looking across the Western New Right as defined by their aim to go back to some putative good old days, they actually share some good old 70/80s Western socialist positions, too: anti-international capital, anti-free trade

Free Trade is fine with the playing fields being even. Trade with China isn't free trade. Uiger Slave laborers are evidence of that. 

 

2 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

, anti-interventionist,

What wars is Germany engaging in right now? Lets see your forces take over our place. Come on step up...Lets see your carriers deploy to the Indian Ocean. What? You have no carriers? How about a Marine Expeditionary Unit...you don't have MEUs? Who's anti-interventionist again? 

Anti-interventionism is expanded power though? How's that work out? 
 

2 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

 

anti-NATO, anti-EEC/EU

It's not anti-NATO, it's make NATO pay their bloody agreed upon share. We've hashed this out. You're behind on your bills. Stop freeloading. Getting allies to pay agreed upon shares is power seeking behavior? Again...how's that? 

2 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

(because it's a capitalist tool to remove national economic regulation), pro-USSR/Russia or at least a stance of US-Russia equivalency,

Removing national economic regulations isn't power seeking. It's the opposite. 

Same thing with regards to Russia...

2 hours ago, BansheeOne said:

make the judiciary subservient to the "will of the people" (i. e. the government they elected, though that's actually more a proper communist thing), expanding or at least not cutting back on popular welfare state implements.

The Judiciary is meant to serve the people in line with the text of the constitution. The left of the US wants the judiciary subservient  to the will of the lefty people. Witness how they protest to make cases swing the way they want. 

How is all of this power seeking behavior? 

 

[rmgill]

57 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Im not moving any goal posts, ive asserted the Communists had over 60 years more to commit attrocities than Communism, ergo its inevitable Communism killed more. Its also pretty clear that between 1933 and 1945, Fascism created a wholly unimaginable butchers bill, and it takes an effort willful credulity to believe that they would have won the war and stopped killing. The only time they would have stopped killing is when everyone left was an Aryan.

Communism won it's internal wars and kept finding new enemies to kill. Though, I suspect if you plot deaths over unit time, you'd find FAR more early on than later. But you know, the fact that the PRC STILL has concentration camps should be a warning that yeah, it's still a problem. 

57 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

If you want to assert that Communism as it was killed more people, you may well be right. OTOH, no Communist ever bombed my country, or welcomed any of my relatives to camps with a rifle butt.

Easy to say. However.. were the Citizens of Hong Kong people of your country or not? How are they going to fare under Communism? Is it a threat now? 

What of the Communist insurgency in Malaya? Did they attack British Citizens? 

 

57 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

  Ive never accepted the cheery view that Fascism was a responsible reaction to communsim, because that is the kind of bull Oswald Mosely was selling. It didnt sell very well then, it positively reeks now.

It was a competing world view to gain power. It wasn't a counter weight, it was a competition for resources of power. Thats' why you have Stalin, for example, edging out other people in the Soviet system who looked like potential enemies. 
 

57 minutes ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

I said it before, look at Katyn. The British POW's who went to see it when it was unearthed could not decide whether Communists or Fascists were responsible. Of course not. Because extermism, left and right, taken to an extreme is completely identical.

And what of the rest of the Soviet Captured Polish POWs? Where'd they go? Lost in the forest was it? Objectively, the Fascists and the Soviets were equally evil. The Soviets were just less obvious about it and had better PR. They still do. Despite the body count. 

 

[sunday]

Curious. TDS evolving into negationism?

[seahawk]

Any government that is not respecting the bible as the final authority is a failed government, that is what it comes down to. Move away from Jesus and you become the Devil.

[RETAC21]

1 hour ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

Im not moving any goal posts, ive asserted the Communists had over 60 years more to commit attrocities than Communism, ergo its inevitable Communism killed more. Its also pretty clear that between 1933 and 1945, Fascism created a wholly unimaginable butchers bill, and it takes an effort willful credulity to believe that they would have won the war and stopped killing. The only time they would have stopped killing is when everyone left was an Aryan.

If you want to assert that Communism as it was killed more people, you may well be right. OTOH, no Communist ever bombed my country, or welcomed any of my relatives to camps with a rifle butt.  Ive never accepted the cheery view that Fascism was a responsible reaction to communsim, because that is the kind of bull Oswald Mosely was selling. It didnt sell very well then, it positively reeks now.

Yes, I know spain has a complicated history and looks on fascism differently from my country. Thats absolutely fine, but you are not going to convince me that Fascism was any better, because it showed the same indifference for individuals, the same capacity for industrialized mass murder.

I said it before, look at Katyn. The British POW's who went to see it when it was unearthed could not decide whether Communists or Fascists were responsible. Of course not. Because extermism, left and right, taken to an extreme is completely identical.

No, you did move the goal post when you lumped together under Fascism: Franco, Hitler, the South American Juntas... and by your count, Mussolini got going in 1922 and the last "fascist" on your list would be Pinochet, who gave up power in 1988, so the periods are roughly comparable.

There are your 60 years of Fascism

You now try to move the goalpost again. So only people that bombs Britain is evil now? man, we are giving the pass to Stalin and Mao... and I guess to Mussolini too. And Pol Pot to boot, the guy that killed between 21 and 24% of the population of Cambodia. You sure have some morals that are... flexible.

[RETAC21]

4 minutes ago, seahawk said:

Any government that is not respecting the bible as the final authority is a failed government, that is what it comes down to. Move away from Jesus and you become the Devil.

Does that include Gun Jesus?

[rmgill]

1 hour ago, sunday said:

Curious. TDS evolving into negationism?

It's more congruent with erasing things they don't like from the cultural memory..

Wet Ass Pussy is song of the year. But Dr Seuss and To Kill a Mockingbird are offensive and shouldn't be read to children. 
 

Edited March 3, 2021 by rmgill