I leafed through it a while ago and my main beef was that (I may be wrong on interpretation but this I what I remembered) having one or two aspects may make it entirely fascist, yet having every aspect or nearly all doesn’t necessarily dictate that it is fascist. I was wondering generally what y’all think.
Tali Faulkner talks about this on NonCompete: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KOCp4FhIeU
One big thing to take away from that discussion is that Liberals misuse UR Fascism because they only look at aesthetics, instead of the actual struggle and the actual solutions to that struggle. Fascist adopt the aesthetic of Socialists movements and movements of national liberation, which makes them look like Socialists and oppressed peoples. Then Liberals will see genuine liberation movements as appearing Fascist, i.e. “Black Fascist”, “Tankies”, etc. because the Fascists have co-opted their rhetoric.
When you look through the list, a lot of his rules are redundant, contradictory, and almost all of them ignore class and imperialism.
IMO the term fascism is so heterodox / means so many things, so as to make it useless as a term. The US and Britain did far more harm to the world, and its mode of capitalist-imperialism / settler-colonialism, did far more damage, and has proved far more stable than the fascism of the 1930s. We should use fascism to refer to that specific form of capitalist imperialism of the 1930s, and not to anything before, or after.
The term is mainly used because germany was expansionist against white europeans, and was defeated, and is therefore okay to demonize in the public sphere, unlike british colonialism for instance. This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was completely acceptable.
This is just a personal peeve of mine, because it allows westerners to shift blame yet again from their own country’s imperialist history. I challenge anyone trying to find any specific trait of fascism unique from what the US or Britain did for hundreds of years, other than doing germany doing a colonialism against white euros.
