First of all, I made references to China and Russia because I wrongly assumed that you are a tankie (I perceive the Lefty Memes community as the nest of them). My apologies.

And while it doesn’t necessarily make you a fascists, it does check the extreme tribalism flag. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_are_either_with_us,_or_against_us

While choosing East vs West is by no means comfortable, it is actually true. You made examples of countries like Finland, Estonia or the Netherlands. The last one recently has turned far right, but overall countries like that, including Sweden and Norway are cool and as for me, the rest of the world could be like this, I do not expect more from the world and I saw too much to dream about some communist utopia. Anyway, such cute countries alone cannot compete military and thus geopolitically with behemots like Russia or China (though Sweden and Finland seems to have decent means to defend themselves). And history taught us that since the dawn of humanity the winner is the guy with the bigger stick. Even within NATO, the European countries are rather supporters to US. Therefore, at the global stage, this all boils down to the dichotomy East VS West or NATO (mainly US) VS Russia+Iran+North_Korea+China. In the end of the day, there are only us VS them.

But boy, it’s funny you’d mention the Russian shithole, considering the US seems rather proactively aiming towards it. The republicans especially seem to have em as their role model.

This actually scares shit out of me. WTF. I wish they had to live in Russian province for couple of months, that would be a good part of punishment. The US cannot be defended from outside, but only by itself (by republicans, to be precise).

To the rest of the points I generally agree, but… If you pick only the shittiest parts of this country, you end up with such a picture. Again, I feel it is not right to equate the main trait of Nazi Germany (fascism) to US, who helped to liberate half of the Europe from this brown shit. Even in the case of genocidal China, “authoritarian” seems a more proper word. There is no consensus on definition of fascism, so neither you or I can provide more than such judgments. Back to US, even if it fails to realize the “American Dream” to many, it is RELATIVELY bearable hegemon in the history. And in the jungle, there is always one.

Both democrats and republicans say the fucking “you’re with me or against me” shit, like really???

Is this really what makes a fascist? Almost every party in democratic world uses similar rhetorics.

The US generally has a rich history of violently shutting down competing powers

This is pretty much 99% of human history

a 2 party system IS NOT natural for a democracy!

and what to tell about single party systems, like China? Do you call them fascist too?

American imperialist wars are pretty much build on forcefully spreading American culture at any cost

I do not feel forced to watch “Top gun” or eat McDonalds

(especially if it involves killing anybody claiming to be socialist or not christian)

thanks god they did not kill Bernie Sanders

From a young age US citizens are indoctrinated

like any other fucking country, just look at Chinese schools

the shit where they swear loyalty to the flag every morning is creepy as fuck

still, rather weird tradition or aesthetics, not a fascism, for fuck’s sake

Like christ, just look at how Americans treat foreigners

they behave like assholes at worst, still millions of foreign people dream about living in USA

Didn’t even mention the police yet…

This sucks indeed, but this is not inherent to USA, rather to police in general.

Summing things up, these accusations about fascism seems completely baseless and using the word “fascism” in the context of US is just making it meaningless and makes impression that US are similar to nazi Germany. US are imperialist at best, but boy, I prefer to live under US empire that fucking russian shithole.

In his book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (2018), Jason Stanley defined fascism as “a cult of the leader who promises national restoration in the face of humiliation brought on by supposed communists, Marxists and minorities and immigrants who are supposedly posing a threat to the character and the history of a nation” and that “The leader proposes that only he can solve it and all of his political opponents are enemies or traitors.”

While this resonates with trump, could you tell me how this fits to other American presidents? What traits US poses to call it “fascist”?

This reminds me far right conspiracy theories

we’re seeing it again with the Russian-NATO conflict which led to the Ukraine invasion

So it’s the NATO’s fault in your opinion?

And this is why 405000 Americans lost lives fighting against nazism and Japan imperialism? I do not belive how this is both offensive and stupid.

I suppose that you prefer russian, north korean or iranian presidential debate more.

I had one. Besides, I love 80s/90s aesthetics.

It’s like my breakfast and i’m an european. Some american vibe in an eastern europe shithole. But I would add a spicy sauce to the pizza.

For example, explain China increasing in manufacturing output as a percent of their economy as they enter and push into the middle income bracket?

Exploiting cheap workers in inhumane conditions, resembling 19th century capitalism. Exactly what communism was supposed to end. China is getting robotized somewhat, since its society ages dramatically, but they want to keep polluting the world with cheap throwaways.

Also, how the hell is the DPRK imperialist?

DPRK constantly threaten South Korea and Japan. Apart the famous missile launches, it performs abductions, drug smuggling, marine poaching, and spying. And we have cyber attacks as well. The country is too shitty to invade another country full scale, but it does what it can do to be a bully, officially uses imperialist rhetorics and throw threats.

If you can’t explain how the soviet councils were layered and how elections were carried out then don’t pretend like you can argue about this in an informed way.

The elections were carried out in such a way, that an average worker had no chance to vote for a social demoratic party, anarchist party, or liberal democratic party. They even killed their communist opposition, Mensheviks. There is no democracy with a single party system, don’t be ridiculous.

China uses a similar system

And is a similar authoritarian regime.

This is holocaust trivialization. The gulags were not meant to kill people, and the mortality rate in them reflects this.

Setting aside manufactured famine in Ukraine and genocides like Katyn, very cautious estimates says that around 30 millions of people were victims of gulag, with lethal 2,7 million victims. This is probably massive underestimation, since many of gulag documents were destroyed in 2014. But hey, the mortality rate was smaller than in Nazi death camps, great job USSR! /s

Good.

I think that’s a fair take and perhaps indicates you’d lean anarchist-left.

I perceive myself as a social democrat, maybe with elements of anarchism, such as decentralization and down-to-up elements of organization.

I have mixed feelings myself, that kind of natural transformation won’t just be left alone to evolve, it’ll be actively resisted by powerful political and global forces, the United States and its allies would not allow it, for example.

This problem is actually a hard one – otherwise no one wouldn’t need to argue about it, and there is no simple choice. If someone thinks that there is an obvious simple solution, then he/her may be just very ignorant. Maybe I will sound controversial here, but in contrast to Marxist-Leninist, I do not blame United States for damping revolution. Revolution will not come simply because we are not in 19th century capitalism anymore. Capitalists adapted, provided more humane conditions to workers to not be swept by workers’ revolution, and Antonio Gramsci saw it something like 100 years ago, but Marxist-Leninists still live in 19th century and do not see that low-income class would rather choose far-right options like Trump or AfD. The United States indeed massively interfered with damping of “socialists” republics in South America, but I think we do not need another “red” imperialism country like USSR or Russia’s vassal. Humanity needs real communism, not “red” authoritarianism.

I think this pretty clearly demonstrated that the USSR wasn’t interested in anything but Empire.

I think so, and with time this was becoming more and more obvious. Western leftists were surprisingly long (like 1956) under the charm of USSR, maybe with an exception of people like Emma Goldman.

This sounds like western chauvinism. Hoe can you be sure?

And how can you be sure? Given nontransparent smokescreen of all red imperialist countries like USSR, China and North Korea?

The other was democratically elected

Oh yes, USSR, the famous standard of democracy /s

end the holocaust

*replace it with the gulag system

The term is wide and sometimes misinterpreted, but actually not meaningless, since tankies are mainly associated with marxism-leninism (maybe sometimes maoism) and whitewashing of regimes as China, USSR, or North Korea. Same as the term “woke”, which is even wider and horribly overused. Thus, I wouldn’t call a western postmarxist leftist a tankie, and a lib or neocon probably would call this person a woke one :)

Yes, Marxists have been on Lemmy.ml and this is a good thing. But there is difference between Marxists and supporters of authoritarian regimes like China, Russia or North Korea, who are denialists of genocides like Bucha, Katyn, Tiananmen, etc. and who are cheap wumao/govnoyed propagandists.

I just love her.

The “tankie bubble” is Lemmy.

Not so. The tankiest instances are lemmygrad and hexbear, while I think sh.itjust.works is neocon or lib at best, not to mention nazi “exploding heads” so we have a whole spectrum. I think Lemmy.ml had tolerable tankiness, but since lemmygrad and hexbear were rightly defederated from most instances, the tankies and wumaos are poisoning Lemmy.ml and much of fediverse with genocide denialism, authoritarian propaganda, etc.

Thank you for a quite objective response.

I also see how a state which transforms into socialism or communism must be “authoritarian” in that it has to take away factories and land from those that keep it as capital, so that it can be shared.

I think this will never work, or with a very small probability. Power simply corrupts and attracts a nasty kind of people. Personally, I believe that upwards, organic, evolutionary changes are more probable to bring us closer to the ideas of communism, as industrial evolution moved most of the world from feudalism into capitalism in a natural way.

Yeah, I’ve heard about the white terror. This does not justify people who supposedly wanted a better world. I am quite sure that now amount of torture in western countries is negligible when compared with China and North Korea, and mostly by intrinsic flaws of e.g. police than political causes. And yes, I’ve heard about exceptions as Guantanamo or Pinoshit. Actually Pinoshit and Franco should not be counted as nominal western mindset, since they are authoritarian fascist piece of shits. I despise all authoritarian despots equally, no matter fascist Franco or “communist” Stalin.

Well, maybe someone outside your tankie bubble may have an other interpretation.