Fascism perpetuates under suspiciously similar conditions? Capitalism can’t be anything less than nature itself, therefore fascism must be the devil, always there, always waiting.
Partial though it might be, sanity is offered and rejected:
If I, the smartest liberal, can’t put it in a small box, it can’t be that I’m approaching this with faulty axioms, it’s the box that’s to small.
Can’t forget the least meaningful concept in all of political science! That and human nature! Because if this weren’t natural, neither would capitalism, and we can’t have that.
everyone has a little fascist deep down inside of them right? I can’t be the only one who struggles to contain my hatred for minorities and my lust for genocide…
People misunderstand fascism. It’s not a political ideology. It’s a dark side of human nature that must always be repressed.
I almost laughed out loud as I read this. Correctly stating that people misunderstand fascism only to immediately prove your own point is embarrassing, and boiling it down to human misbehaviour is simply not useful.
I can agree that fascism demonstrated how complex human behavior is: not many of us want to admit that plenty of ordinary people willingly supported fascism and that even the most atrocious fascists were still humans, but somehow I doubt that this is what the author had in mind. Calling fascism ‘a dark side of human nature’ is much too vague to be meaningful.
Note how fascism doesn’t really have a consistent definition though. It is much more of a constellation of political traits that serve towards an end.
This is a classic oversimplification. Initially, yes, the Fascists did try to appeal to the lower classes, but we can see that that was a cynical ploy since the Fascists firmly sided with the bourgeoisie once it promoted them to institutional power, for the simple reason that the haute-bourgeoisie is the ruling class. The self-contradictory appeals to various classes was a natural consequence of fascism’s predominantly petty bourgeois base.
It’s a shame that these types seem more interested in masturbatory philosophizing rather than examining episodes from the Fascist era. When I emphasised that militarism is crucial to fascism, I was worried that I was only kicking at an open door because it just seemed so obvious. Now that I’ve seen Fedditors saying nothing about fascism’s militarism, I can rest easy knowing that my thread was necessary after all.
Even the oversimplification could be if some use, had the fool followed their own argument to a conclusion. To what end? In the same vein, what’s the point in talking about the sociological mechanism behind it if we’re not investigating its driving forces or where it actually comes from?
It’s “fatherless biped” thinking at its finest.
HuMaN nAtUrE is and always will be the cop-out for any sort of investigation into systems. “EVIL” is out there, biding its time, and we have to just kinda be on the look out for it invading our totally good capitalism, which is also human nature and not a product we created.
Question: How come we all keep getting sick since we started spending all day wading in faeces?
Libs: It’s just one of those unchangeable facts of life
Now get back in the cesspitThis reminds me of the quote I dug up while writing this piece: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/9974756
“The savage in man is never quite eradicated.” - Henry David Thoreau
And also the opening from it:
This is the primary fear that lurks in the mind of the colonizer, whose identity is constructed on a polarizing narrative of a world divided up into civil and savage, with themself on one side and the barbaric savage on the other.
It’s funny that the liberals here are claiming conservatives are more ruled by fear, while they wax on about the bogeyman that is “human nature.” This is their baggage from being immersed in an ideology based around justifying colonization and dividing the world into civil and savage. In order to justify colonization, they have to view a significant amount of people as inherently fucked up. This comes back to bite them when they start wondering if they could be fucked up too and they have to ritualistically beat it out of themselves somehow.
The explanation that no one is born bad and unchangeable, that people develop out of a combination of inner and outer world, individual and collective conditions and interests: this is out of the question for them because it would imply that the savages were never savages in need of civilizing, that they were always complex peoples with storied histories and cultures and behaviors, and that the colonizer was always doing mass murder simply because they wanted the land/resources/etc. There was no moral high ground justifying it.
People see the same thing play out in the US today, on a smaller scale, when cops gun someone down and then slander them.
We must be eternally vigilant against the perfidious forces of evil, who are eternally striving to infect our precious
Volkcivil society, which is pure and good.Our most perceptive and principled anti-fascist liberals
It’s true though, I’m playing Diablo right now and the secret Fourth Prime Evil is Al’Trumpler, Lord of Authoritarianism.
“It’s human nature” is misanthrope for “I hate humanity”.
