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.
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 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.
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
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
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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.
The French Revolution wasn’t what pop-history suggests. It was a genocidal civil war that killed far more commoners than nobles. There was a point where they were killing so many people, the only way they could keep up was to drown them en masse by chaining them to a barge and sinking it.
Just do what you can. Don’t join the army and minimize your contribution to fascist government. Put your efforts locally where you can :)
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.
4.5 years is optimistic with an election pending
I expect that the US will last five years, what’s the bet?
Anything I have learned from history classes is that this cycle of fascism/dictatorship and democracy has always been going on, people are dumb -> they choose fascists -> fascist gonna fasc -> ppl get fed up -> uprising/protests -> government overthrown after tons of bloodshed -> some sort of constitutional bind on rulers/elections -> some peace -> dumb ppl forget everything and chose fascists again -> repeat
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You need history classes that cover more than the little fart of time known as the 20th century.
Well I only studied the history part which was mandatory in my school, so it was naturally not very in-depth or far back, only standard topics like the World wars, french and russian revolutions etc
I think you forgot the part where capitalism makes peoples life worse and worse, while at the same time conservative media blames the left for it, even if they are the cause.
Because in the End people dont vote for fascists because its funny, but because they believe they can get them out of a shitty situation (Fascism doesnt do that obviously, but people get blinded by propaganda).
We wouldnt have this issue today if politicians werent all neoliberal and actually cared about poor people.
It worries me too and I’ve been thinking a lot about margaritas, I’ve been sober for four years so its troubling thoughts of alcohol are creeping back in. I don’t know what else to say. Need a hug?
Need a hug?
Wish I could give one
This isn’t even a car crash brother it’s like watching 8 separate trains collide
nice username
The UK won’t be far behind. Our left leaning party is likely to get in at the next election, but the overton window has shifted faaaar in the past 10-15 years and today’s labour may just be yesterday’s Tories. Who’s to say what tomorrow’s Tories will be…
2024 is just 2020 part 5.
There’s nothing you can do, at least outside of your local community. It’s still possible to be a decent human being and help people with your own two hands.
At this point the only thing that would have stopped this would have been Joe Biden radically shifting to the left and laser-focusing on lifting the poor and middle class, to the extent that their new quality of life would make it unthinkable to vote Trump.
Instead, the opposite is true. Biden’s spent the bulk of his time making arms deals and funding other countries’ wars, and homelessness jumped 12% in 2023. Hell, in a year half of the US will have literally criminalized abortion in all cases, because Idaho got away with it already.
Fascism isn’t some looming specter. It’s here.
I am trying to transform my community into a stronghold of democracy, that is ready to defend itself. Works relatively fine so far.
If only this was that simple. A “Democratic country” doesn’t just wake up one day vote for a bad guy and become fascist. This has been happening all over the world for last few decades. All the past politician created few policies out of fear, out of ignorance, out of greed, and out of malice that edged us towards this. And now most of the people have accepted this blatant abuse of our freedom, our privacy, our democracy as just part of life. There is nothing that anyone can do to stop this. Because we don’t bother reading EULA because we don’t demand the companies the governments to do better we just sign away our rights our freedom because we have better things to do.
Why do you think this is? What are the root causes?
Fear. It’s that simple. An authoritarian mindset is one predicated on fear. After 9/11, Dick Cheney and George H. W. Bush used fear to drive their policies of restrictive freedoms. They pushed these through so they could amass additional powers and push government money towards their friends. Once these freedoms are gone, they almost never come back. The Republican party has been running on a campaign of fear ever since. Quite honestly, they’ve used fear as their driving force since the '80s. Back then it was fear of the Communists, and then it was fear of 'big government" and then it was fear of immigrants, or “the gays”, or restrictions of the second amendment, or caravans of people coming up from South America. Fear is the only thing that they can run on since they have no actual plans to move our country forward.
But why? What’s the actual, underlying, root cause? Fear doesn’t appear out of nowhere.
Human stupidity and malice – they’re an infinite resource that just keeps on taking. We’ve gotten this far despite ourselves, not because
The word “fascist” has truly lost its meaning. Please stop using this word if you don’t understand the historical context behind it.
My guy, Italian politicians literally publicly idolize the good ol’ days of Mussolini, and talk about Mussolini in a positive light, I think that’s worthy of the title fascist since they’re praising the guy who CREATED FASCISM. The current PM is just a fascist.
And Putin, Orbán, Modi, the AfD are incredibly undeniably fascist. Or at the very least Modi and Orbán are fascist-adjacent (Modi is a sort of Nazi but for Hindus instead of Germans).
I don’t know enough about Dutch politics/politicians to speak of it. But afaik they’re going down a similar path as Germany, Sweden, etc. but even more pronounced. Argentina I don’t know if the word “fascist” is accurate at all but the new president is certainly very far-right.
And in the US Republicans are descending towards fascism, they’ve already taken many of our rights and are in the process of taking more fundamental rights, the things the most popular Republicans publicly preach about and have like half the country’s support over is sickening. The only reason we’re not balls deep into stripping away the rights of anyone who doesn’t fit into the majority categories (christian, white, straight/cis, male) is because Democrats exist (even though elected Democrats just play the “moderate Republican” and are complicit in the current state of the country).
Fascism is on the rise. Ignoring it doesn’t make you look smarter.
They are using not just the same rhetorical frames as the Nazis, they are often using the same exact phrases and propaganda techniques, just in social media. They are seeking/achieving autocratic rule. I don’t think they are winning the world on the whole, but they are growing stronger… They are fascist movements.
Which word would you employ to address those seeking power through the scapegoating and targeted discrimination of minorities and vulnerable populations?
If I got through the end of the world in 2012 I can get through this
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.
i believe in anarchy
organize
It’s really time to get organized before the cycle starts: I wasn’t a Jew so I minded my own business, I wasn’t a…
Woke is a hijacked term by the facists it literally means to be socially aware of the problems faced by different people in a society
Its like ya, I’d rather be AWOKE than ASSleep
