cross-posted from: https://linux.community/post/3587385
I don’t mean only the US but in much of the world: in many European countries the populist far right is unseating Christian-Democratic parties (conservative parties), like in Hungary, Slovakia or Czechia. In others like Germany or France the far right is at the gates of power, in the UK, Reform UK is running high in the polls. In Turkey autocratic Erdogan is copying the Putin playbook to systematically dismantle the social-democratic opposition. In Japan, a neo Thatcherite that doesn’t hide she honors Japanese war criminals is about to become the new PM.
Something common I see in all these parties is strong disaffection with the current state of their countries and a longing to an idealized past they promise to bring back, to make countries great again…
Except that societies have changed beyond recognition in the last 40 years, emerging China, India, Mexico and a myriad of south east Asian countries can produce cheaper than us in the developed countries, so called first world democracies are now much older and indebted than 40 years ago (no wonder societies have shifted so hard to the right), buying a house is now waaaay more expensive than 40 years ago, you cannot earn a livable wage just assembling toasters like 40 years ago, you just cannot roll automation and digitization back, no matter how much you complain…
The past cannot come back, neither will it come back just because some people want it to. It’s completely futile, but people are not rational about this, they’re completely emotional and tribal.
It’s like a huge, collective effort in denial: denying that we in the developed world are older, not the first ones in the world anymore, that other countries we always considered inferior to us are even surpassing us technologically while we complain and hope for a savior that brings us 40 years back when we, the white guys, ruled all over.
I don’t see it happening: being angry and voting the far right may make some people feel good, it may make them feel they’re somehow taking their country back, but it’s not going to stop China, India and other countries from developing, investing in new technologies and even creating trade alliances that bypass the US or the EU.
My question: was there a moment in history where societies were so shifted to the right like today? How long did it last?
i’m not an expert, but here’s my take.
personally i question when such movements take power that we should interpret it as consent by the public majority.
part of the reason the public apparently bestow power to the machinery of government is because the machinery is supposed to protect them from this very thing happening.
the fact that it is happening, means such a rise in fact did not occur within the correct functioning of that machine.
therefore we should probably question whether we should interpret it as consent by the majority.
and if its not consent by the majority, then in some ways the picture is both bleaker and brighter.
brighter, because you’re not surrounded by quite so many evil fucks as they wanted you to believe
bleaker, well, probably don’t need to explain that bit
Just look at Europe at the start of the 20th century and the rise of fascism. We’re seeing a very similar dynamic unfolding in the west today. It lasted until USSR broke the back of the fascists in WW2. It’s also important to note that right wing extremism gets a lot of support from the rich normalizing their views.
It’s also dangerous to think that such right wing movement can be stopped simply by voting. German nazis never won more than 37% of the vote while there were still democratic elections in place. Once these people get in power the mask comes off.
First chapter in Blackshirts and Reds discusses the rise of fascists in Italy and nazis in Germany, and it’s hard not to draw parallels with what we’re seeing happening across the Western sphere right now:
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamentary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut - measures that might sound familiar to us today. But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921 , many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate.
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusiness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the “March on Rome,” contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy’s top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist “revolution”- really a coup d’etat - took place.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had concluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July 1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37.3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bourgeoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as “Moscow inspired.” Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13.7 million.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. Meanwhile a number of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January 1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
But all the politicians told me that political violence is wrong!
o7
Before fascism, religions were the fascists. As far to the right as possible, they dictated terms based on the whim of fictional gods. No logic, or reason, they just believed that they had a ‘divine right’ to rule over everyone else. If you didn’t acknowledge that right, they killed you, tortured you, enslaved you, etc… Oh, and you had to be their religion, or you’re a heretic. And if they change religion, you’re expected to as well.
Oh, they knew about democracy, republics, and representitive politics. They actively fought against that. After all, gods don’t vote, and there’s only one fictional god, and he rules with supreme fictional power.
It was generally called “The Dark Ages” (of humanity). It’s dark because of religion, and the feudal system it demanded. It lasted for hundreds of years.
Stay away from religion. Get away from religions. They harm individuals and society constantly, everywhere they are.
If you don’t believe me, that’s the reason that nazis are called ‘christofacists’. It’s the religion part. It’s the christianity part of nazi fascism.
Early 20th century, as a reaction to large-scale social change stemming from industrialization. The bulk of it ended in the mid 1940s, though Spain and Portugal remained under far-right dictatorships until the 1970s.
The US has had three different distinct Red Scares, and before those it had a wave of white terror that defeated Reconstruction.
So, yes, this keeps happening. We’re just living during one acute part of a longer cycle.
Seti I’s lackeys killed every Jewish firstborn son, Anglo-Saxons murdered their way through North America without any pity, Belgium had “human zoos” not even a hundred years ago… Idk, I’m not shocked by the banal brutality of stupid and amoral societies/so-called “cultures”, nor do I think it’s something new.
Honestly, speaking strictly about the West now (but it probably applies to other groups, perhaps some that are by now extinct), I think that there have been maybe some “gaps” from their inherent amoral, truth-denying, self-serving and proudly unaccountable mentality scattered here and there throughout its history, and these things never took hold. Their collective psyche was never fundamentally altered, and so their ethos remains the same as it ever was. 🤷
