In reality, far from stopping the far right, Germany is implementing a far right agenda. Increase police authority? Check. Scapegoat immigrants and other marginalized groups? Check. Build up the military? Check. Suppress protests and dissenters? Check. Impose austerity, providing the fertile ground for fascists? Check.
By the time the AfD comes to power, they won't have to do anything. The liberals (including socdems and greens) will already have created a fascist society.
The same is happening to France. As you said, they'll have a field day when (at this point it's not if, it's when) they get to power.
Gotta love neoliberalism...The Netherlands will very likely have a right wing government and will be heading down the same path. Same with Italy, Sweden, Denmark.
With the next European election this year the right wing parties in the European Parliament will gain a lot of traction.
We could be heading down the American path and lose a lot or the progress we made over the last 2 decades.
I will be a father in a couple or hours. Between the right taking to power and accelerating climate change i am just so fucking worried in what kind of world my kids will grow up.
Fascists won the Cold War; it just wasn't the nazis. This was unfortunately always an inevitable consequence of that.
Fahsism is not a very well defined term. Can you expand why you see America (whom I assume you are reversing to?) as a fashist regime?
Would be more accurate to say capitalists I suppose, who inevitably give way to fascism.
The US is a bourgeois/capitalist dictatorship built on the genocide of millions of native Americans. I think most socialists would say it's not quite a fascist regime just yet, but it has a history of supporting such regimes and is currently supporting a fascist colony committing a genocide in Palestine.
Fascism is well defined, it is capitalism in decay, it is a desperate lashing out of the parasite class when they become incapable of forestalling the TRPF. Fascism is simply capitalism with the mask off. It is only "not a very well defined term" within the capitalist superstructure because they don't want people oppose capitalism, so the definition deliberately muddied. There are many things that are not poorly understood, but must be made to be poorly understood.
Build up the military?
Any source on that? We do not have a military right now. Wouldn't be bad if we wanted to defend ourselves against Putin.
defend ourselves against Putin
Putin is going to come and finish the job for Stalin any day now. Just wait and see, tomorrow the Bolchevik hordes might be flooding into Germany, to eat your Dachshunds and turning the Oktoberfest into a vodka and balalaika festival.
Why would Putin do that? Simply because he is evil.
The only sensible response is to cut every social program to fund the construction of a German death star.
My guy, have you heard phrases like “100 Mrd. € Sondervermögen für die Bundeswehr”, “Wiedereinführung der Wehrpflicht” , shit like this? Or have you heard anything people like Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann have said in the past two years? Also, hasn’t the Russian army been struggling to overpower Ukraine for the past two years now? The poorest country in Europe with basically no functioning infrastructure to begin with that also is decidedly not a member of NATO? Wouldn’t the Russian Army have to cross the Baltic states and Poland to even reach Germany, triggering a response from all of NATO? Could it be they all the rhetoric about the Russkys expanding westwards is full of shit and nothing more but a fig leaf to sell austerity and a military buildup to the German populace?
Those are not sources, those are only talks and rumors. I've not seen any result of the 100Mrd. yet. And yes, the NATO would be triggered if they invaded Poland, but shouldn't Germany as a member of NATO be able to help then?
This is the same fearful and paranoid mentality which caused Putin to invade Ukraine. If everyone continues with this catastrophic thinking, we will have world war in no time.
Living in fear of a Russian invasion of Europe is completely delusional.
Alright then, let Putin do his thing.
I know there are many communists on Lemmy, but I didn't know they are pro Putin.
Yeah yeah, I remember all that shit from back in the day. Die Russen kommen! Die Russen kommen! Oldest trick in the book.
Natürlich, das einfache Volk will keinen Krieg […] Aber schließlich sind es die Führer eines Landes, die die Politik bestimmen, und es ist immer leicht, das Volk zum Mitmachen zu bringen, ob es sich nun um eine Demokratie, eine faschistische Diktatur, um ein Parlament oder eine kommunistische Diktatur handelt. […] Das ist ganz einfach. Man braucht nichts zu tun, als dem Volk zu sagen, es würde angegriffen, und den Pazifisten ihren Mangel an Patriotismus vorzuwerfen und zu behaupten, sie brächten das Land in Gefahr. Diese Methode funktioniert in jedem Land. -- Hermann Göring
Also, I love that you want a source for something that was a top news story for months. You somehow heard, dass die Russen kommen!!! but not the Sondervermögen? You're just fucking with me, aren't you?
Do liberals have a theory for why fascism is sprouting up around the world?
Because Marxists are like
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/FascismLiberals believe all ideologies other than basic western liberalism are based on confusion or ignorance at a personal level. And that's the entirety of where ideology comes from. They don't believe it's rooted in history, conditions, wealth, anything. They see fascism as a complicated misunderstanding that could potentially be cured through a big speech or exposing fascists to the musical Hamilton. They think ideology is pathogen that spreads more easily through who they regard as ignorant and malleable. They believe racism is simply a matter of confusion over human biology that can be instructed away.
They're very similar to conservatives like that. They both think societies are built by IQ scores and being "civilized." Liberals may dress up their goofy theories in fancy academic language, but ultimately they believe the following: "Stupid people are more prone to fascism simply because they're stupid and didn't read enough Margaret Atwood books like me. People are more stupid now because of Tiktok." And that's how liberals would explain why fascism is on the rise again
And to elaborate on what you said, liberals believe that the "stupid" people are the proles. The uncultured, unwashed and financially unsuccessful masses who deserve every punch the invisible hand of the market throws at them. Liberals simply can't conceive of someone with a fancy education, an expensive suit and good table manners being a fascist.
It's tough to be critical of "liberalism" when everyone has a different idea of what it means. It might help to specify "economic liberalism".
Along with it's deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights, etc. Conservatives also muddy the waters by blaming these things for economic hardship.
Liberalism has a definition, which Marxists have never forgotten, though thanks to two red scares and a cold war, others have forgotten. Now in Orwellian fashion, “liberalism” and “socialism” are floating signifiers, so we have liberals like Sanders calling themselves socialists despite never calling for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production.
Slavery did end under liberalism, but then again liberalism started it.
Yes, but have you considered that Anglosphere liberals are stupid assholes? Who don't know how the rest of the world uses words?
I thought not. Checkmate, tankie.
i wanted to find the higher res version, but instead i found a prophet and the people who rejected his message
So that's the change you want to see in the world. Technical linguistic grammar takes precedence over political outreach.
I fully support your desire to spread vocabular competence. My impression from your first post was that you had other priorities.
Despite the erasure of the words’ meanings in the public consciousness, the concepts still exist.
If you have new, sexier names for the concepts which will accelerate their reintroduction into the public consciousness, I’m all ears.
It doesn't have to be sexier terminology, or even different terminology. Just don't drop the word "liberalism" into a conversation and expect the average person to understand what your talking about.
You could use "corporatism" which has kind of taken over that definition in common language. I know it's technically incorrect, but language also isn't static outside of academic disciplines. But ultimately you can use whatever language you want, just don't assume a particular definition will be understood without explanation.
The only people I know of who don't know what the word "liberal" means, especially in the context the person above was using it, are very ignorant Americans. To be clear, even though I don't like most Americans, I'm not blaming them for being ignorant in this particular case because they have been subjected to decades of mostly uncontested propaganda deliberately obfuscating the term. But most of the rest of the world knows what everyone is talking about when saying "liberal" and knows it's a right wing ideology. And everyone shouldn't have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don't already know. People are generally expected to pick up the gist of a sentence or point via the context of what's being said. The context was perfectly clear and it just sounds like concern trolling to go on about needing to hand-hold and dumb down the terminology being used for "the average person."
And everyone shouldn't have to hold up the conversation to preemptively explain what the word means to those who don't already know
Well, if you know that the person doesn't know, giving definitions can be a helpful way of setting up your argument, but obviously these lemmitor assholes are just wasting your time.
You could use "corporatism" which has kind of taken over that definition in common language
No one says "corporatism" in the real world. The better suggestion for an "alternative" is to just say "capitalism", because that's accurate enough.
nOOooOOOoooooo you can't blame capitalism! We have to make up a word that means "capitalism" but isn't capitalism and fix that (through reform! because we shouldn't try to abolish capitalism).
You could use “corporatism” which has kind of taken over that definition
"Neoliberalism" rather. Though that's more like mask-off imperialism. And "corporatism" is just capitalism but when you don't want to admit that the problem is capitalism.
Either way liberalism is the same idealist, individualist culture/ideology that emerges under capitalism to maintain that capitalist mode of production, and must be destroyed along with the mode of production it sustains.
Overthrowing liberalism/capitalism and stopping fascism requires mass organization and class consciousness, part of which is often understanding these basic concepts. And people did. They have to again.
These weren’t egghead concepts back when we had a labor movement large enough to support a labor press.
All I'm saying is that if you don't take your audience into consideration, your message will be misunderstood. If you want to use the "correct" (more debatable than you think) terminology when that terminology isn't well understood in the culture, then take the time to explain the language. Or keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody.
keep scratching your head about why your getting downvotes and convincing nobody
Yeah you do that.
I'm getting downvotes because I'm telling a bunch of bubble communists that actual communication is more important than in-group signalling. No head scratches required. It's why the left has been hopelessly ineffective for at least half a century.
I know exactly why I'm getting downvotes. No head scratches required.
Lol I'm sure Prolewiki is an unbiased source that the majority of people would agree with on the definitions of words. /s
It's basically just "classical liberalism and neoliberalism", and whether politically illiterate Americans use that word that way doesn't matter very much from an analytical standpoint, because in political science, history, philosophy, and even just popular discourse in most other countries, the term "liberal" mainly has that meaning.
Oxford Dictionary:
lib·er·al
/ˈlib(ə)rəl/
adjective
willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one's own; open to new ideas.
relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise. Similar: tolerant, unprejudiced, unbigoted, broad-minded, open-minded, enlightened, forbearing, permissive, free, free and easy, easygoing, laissez-faire, libertarian, latitudinarian, unbiased, impartial, nonpartisan, indulgent, lenient, lax, soft
noun
a supporter of policies that are socially progressive and promote social welfare. "she dissented from the decision, joined by the court's liberals"
a supporter of a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Opposite: narrow-minded, bigoted,
You are free to argue with dictionaries, but if your enemy is liberalism as defined by civil rights, democracy, and welfare then you are the enemy of all people, in my eyes.
If one is trying to define liberalism against feudalism, that definition is fine, but it's just redditor sophomorism to act like a dictionary is a replacement for an actual historical or academic definition of a political tendency.
Take it up with oxford, Words mean what the majority believes they currently mean. Anything else is just some shit somebody made up. This discussion is about the current meaning of Liberalism in today's political context.
Where did he say that the majority of people agree with this definition?
Well, the majority of workers in the US probably did, until the labor movements were crushed in the 60s and 70s
If the majority of people don't agree on the proposed meaning of a word then that isn't what the words mean. In other words, it is wrong.
It's a materialist/Marxist definition, hence the
Because Marxists are like
https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Fascism
All successful labor movements and mass organizations in the past have included teaching others how things work, handing out pamphlets, etc.
And so we can choose to act towards restoring definitions to words with important meanings, so that we become capable of discussing the things they signify again.
If we don't use words as they mean, but instead use unorthodox terminology, then we allow the significance of such words to be lost, with no standardized alternatives in common use - i.e., no alternatives that are any more clear than the original word.
There is a war on language. It's primarily a subset of the class war. We can surrender, or fight what is probably the simplest fight of our life: We can use words as they were meant to be used.
Yeah, I'm glad you're slowly starting to comprehend the conversation. I'm informing you that making up definitions for words is wrong and is the source of confusion when you try and fail to converse with others.
Along with it's deep flaws, Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery . . .
Liberalism is also associated with the invention and virtually entire existence of chattel slavery along with the exporting of the criminalization of queer people to cultures that did not feature such things.
Is it though? In the common consciousness? I really don't think it is. Whether or should be is a different discussion, but the bubble in which those concepts are innately connected is pretty small. You can't just say "liberal" today and expect it to be understood in that way.
Is it though?
Yes, it is responsible for those things, like when we say smoking is associated with higher risk of lung cancer.
In the common consciousness?
Moving the goalposts. Good job observing that liberal propaganda takes credit for good things and not for bad things.
Though outside of America, you get a much more accurate view of the term because liberal means "sniveling, centrist, market-fetishist" in most other countries.
Yes, it is responsible for those things
I never said it wasn't. It's about language and perception.
Moving the goalposts.
Nope. This was my exact goalpost from the beginning.
Good job observing that liberal propaganda takes credit for good things and not for bad things.
Not at all. I have no objection to telling people what liberalism is all about. However, the reality is that decades of propaganda from liberals and conservatives has successfully shifted the definition to a point where it's foolish to just drop the word without further explanation.
The qualifier “progressive” is used to describe a liberal who supports progressive social issues.
Supporting gay rights or feminism etc, that’s being a “progressive” (loosely speaking, it can be defined better than that.)
You seem to want to insist all liberals are progressive liberals but they aren’t.
That’s why the qualifiers “classical liberal” or “liberal conservatism” exist.
In some countries the “Liberal” party are the socially conservative faction of society.
You’re wrong to conflate liberalism with progressivism. That’s why they’re different words.
You’re also wrong to imply that progressive stances are “owned” by “liberals”.
You want to say “progressive liberal” is a tautology…. But it isn’t.
Liberalism is also associated with things like the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, LGBT+ rights
Communists had to pry these concessions from liberalism with organized violence, don't pretend like liberalism did these things.
Adding to this: if you like weekends, overtime, safety standards, or simply not working 19 hours a day in the dirt factory, you have communist violence to thank.
You quoted me, then immediately misquoted me. I didn't say what you think I said.
Sorry should have phrased it as "people shouldn't pretend..."
Honest question: when did communists use organized violence to abolish slavery? To win LGBT+ rights?
A lot of radical abolitionists were communists
The lgbt liberation movement would wave the flag of the legitimate vietnamese government during the US invasion. Marsha Johnson, Leslie fienberg, communists.
Liberalism is associated with those things because it allowed them to happen to avoid a negative effect to property rights (revolution, riots) once more radical people pushed for them. Liberalism is reactionary and regressive, but some liberals are easier to convince of specific rights extensions than others. You've been lied to a lot if you think liberals did these things
Yeah you're the one being pedantic here. Liberalism has exactly two definitions that get used 99% of the time. Someone might say liberal to mean "socially liberal," which means open-mindedness in regards to progressive movements such as feminism, promotion of gay rights, acceptance of trans people, and all that stuff. This is usually the only definition used in the USA.
Or they mean liberalism as the broad ideological foundation of capitalism, with a belief in the promotion of free enterprise, distribution, public-private separation, and the primacy of individual rights. This definition is almost never used in the USA except by socialists, but outside of the USA this is understood as the primary definition of the term whereas "socially liberal" is regarded as a secondary definition.
And it's very easy to determine which one a person is talking about if you look at the context clues. The only other context I can think of where liberal is used is the academic term "liberal arts," but that refers to scholarly topics that would have been taught to people who weren't slaves.
And you will notice that every person who calls themselves a liberal in America still believe in the broad ideological foundation of capitalism.
Huh... we're seeing anglocentric capitalists trying to rebrand liberalism somehow compatible with right wing. Always some liberty-hindering agenda gets newspeak marketing campaigns, "economic liberalism", "neoliberalism", "classic liberalism"
"war is peace," "freedom is slavery," and "ignorance is strength"...
Liberalism has always been right wing, and Orwell is the lowest garbage anyone can reference in political analysis. You didn't even do it correctly, assuming that "newspeak" just means a new euphemistic way of referring to something, and this is the way it's commonly used by people who didn't actually read 1984 (not to say that they should), but really it's a language based around contractions, abbreviations, and simplifications meant to make communication more efficient, and also (somehow) make people lose the ability to think independently.
honestly there seems to be some confusion/distinction only in the US.
i think most people elsewhere mean mostly "neoliberal capitalism" when they say "liberal".
the correct answer (which germany will never land on) is to shoot the nazis. it has always been the only solution to a nazi infestation but germany has always found that difficult to swallow.
Shoot the nazis, establish a dictatorship of the proletariat, establish capital controls and develop the productive forces so the material conditions that lead to fascism don't come back.
At this dark hour, the SPD turns to President von Hindeburg as a trusted ally
Yes he should have...
but only after circumnavigating the globe and killing all the nazis in between.
it's like that scene from Interstellar. It's not a mountain. It's a quadrillion soviet vanguardists.
Stalin should have kept going and made the entirety of Europe socialist. The USSR should have rounded up and executed every former Nazi officer, like the ones recruited in operation paperclip. Did @wombat@hexbear.net stutter?
If they're not executing nazis in the streets they're not stopping them from assuming power.
yeah, we're trying to find the guys who did this and give them a spankingLet's see if any Lemmy users are able to correctly identify why this is happening. Bonus points for American-Style ignorance
Love to climb up on my high chair with my sippy cup. Looking down on everyone while pretending at intellectual superiority and yet making no actual statement at all.
Today, German lawmakers are rewriting bylaws and pushing for constitutional amendments to ensure courts and state parliaments can provide checks against a future, more powerful AfD. Some have even launched a campaign to ban the AfD altogether.
You see, democracy is when...
Banning fascist organizations is not only democratic, it's one of the bare minimum tasks a democratic society should perform in order to protect itself. Personally I think their solution is a little weak. Fascists will always wiggle around courts and laws, then use those very same laws to their advantage. It's what they do. They fill in the gaps that liberal societies are always going to have, yet endlessly try to repair.
The best option is to shoot fascists in the head, without hesitation. That's not a metaphor for anything, I mean literally line them up against a brick wall and shoot them with guns. Then announce you'll do the same to any further fascists you discover. Drive all potential fascists into hiding, make them cower in fear and remain powerless. That's the only thing that has ever worked.
YMMV on the CDU vis a vis being fascists but I'd argue you can look back at Adenauers "Radikalenerlass" ("Radical Decree" or something) that purported to stop extremists from both sides from holding certain important jobs and somehow managed to find 1000 left wing extremists for every right winger in '70s germany.
Yes, because it's so easy to murder a few people. We just need to label people we don't like as Nazis and shoot them. What could possibly go wrong? And when we are at it, I think my neighbour is a nazi too, let me shoot him.
It's way easier to shoot a few nazis than to let them form political organizations, raise money, and present themselves as a threat. Yes, that's true.
You talk like it's difficult or debatable who qualifies as a nazi. It's not. They always expose themselves and announce their intentions clearly. This isn't a matter of people who we have a disagreement with. They're not simply people we don't like, they're people who threaten to kill us. This is a matter of fascists who publicly announce their intentions to pursue racist, bigoted murder against me and people like me. It is part of AfD's standard platform that LGBTQ people receive fewer rights than straight people, and that all foreigners should be rounded up and deported. Those are fascist threats, not some disagreement on who we like. They only historical method of dealing with these fascists is to destroy them before they destroy us.
sounds like you see more nazis than we do. We don't have this kind of problem of not understanding who is who. We know who the enemy is and what they deserve. if your understanding of fascists is this shallow it's no wonder you'd sympathize with them
If you wanna insult me please call me a queer Marxist Stalinist devil worshiper or something, because that would be more accurate. Call me a North Korea apologist because that's true. I'd also readily accept insults like baizuo or first world crakkker, because those are unfortunately also true.
i think fascist for you just means "scary person with bad ideas." if it's only a pejorative to you, rather than a specific identifiable movement, then you're not gonna get it. I recommend reading Robert O. Paxton, or Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci or (my personal favorite) the historian Perry Anderson. They've all written on the particular contours of fascist ideology and how to identify it, rather than treating it as simply a set of violent tendencies.
If you're fascist and antifascists come for you, you have a choice. You can give it up. You can go renounce what you said. You could just go on with the rest of your life and stop turning up at fascist rallies. Anti fascists probably aren't going to buy you a pint and be your best friend but they'll move on. But if you're a person of color, if you're trans, or a person with a disability or gay or Jewish, and fascists come for you, there is nothing you can do to make them happy except stop existing. If you're a political enemy of antifa, you can become a friend. If you're a political enemy of fascism, either they lose or you die.
Abigail Thorn, The Philosophy of Antifa
Pack it in everyone, the German scat fetishist can't tell the difference between fascists and anti-fascists. Wouldn't be the first, I suppose.
I don't understand your point of saying the AfD are comparable to standard American Republicans as if that's a defense of them. I also believe Republicans should all be lined up and shot.
not sure about your neighbor but anyone caping for nazis the way you do should probably be lined up and shot alongside them
You sound like you are realizing where your bread is buttered and arguing for that side accordingly.
Democracy is (in part) when you tell the fascists to eat shit, yes.
L take. AES countries which are actual democracies do the same thing.
Though of course, banning it isn't gonna go anywhere for Germany unless they tackle the root cause of capitalism.
I think they're saying that liberal "democracies", as soon as they need to, will use the exact same censorship that they claim "autocracies" use, and which not using is the entire source of their supposed moral superiority.
