Doubledee [comrade/them]

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2022

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  • My favorite Israeli history tidbit is how their terror cells assassinated one of the guys trying to negotiate a peaceful way out of the violence creating the state of Israel caused because they were (wrongly, it turns out) afraid that the official government would try to take a peaceful solution to the conflict which might have jeopardized the creation of the ethnostate.

    Bernadotte had previously gained international renown for negotiating the release of thousands of Nazi concentration camp prisoners including hundreds of interred Jewish people.


  • Even the people pushing this law acknowledge that the threat is purely theoretical, no one is advancing any serious argument that data has been or will be shared or leaked or anything of the sort. It’s just xenophobia, if they wanted to protect American citizens’ data they would do something about the way they allow tech companies to just take your data and turn around and sell it to whoever wants it.

    Bonus points because US government officials can punt a great bargain basement blowout sale to former US officials by forcing the sale of a company using said xenophobia.







  • I think that's a slight exaggeration, although I get what you're saying. But I think it's important to demonstrate to libs that I'm being consistent so I'll explain what I mean.

    I don't think the communal decision making bodies that spun up in the wake of the Japanese evacuation were necessarily completely aligned with Kim or the communists in exile, it was virtually impossible to maintain a functioning domestic apparatus and what I've read makes it seem like these were mostly improvisational.

    That said, I think in the long run you're right, I see it as similar to Vietnam later: because US foreign policy was aligned with elements that were naturally unpopular to the population of the country (in Korea's case, the Japanese and domestic collaborators) a democratic resolution of the question of what sort of government a united Korea would chose for itself was not going to be an acceptable outcome to the US.

    But we don't know what they would organically choose for themselves because that decision was foreclosed by US occupation. I suspect a popular referendum was the best possible outcome but I think it would probably look very different from the current DPRK, for understandable reasons.





  • Doubledee [comrade/them]@hexbear.nettoMemes@lemmy.mlright where it belongs
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    1 year ago

    I mean if you’re not positive that workers will reap the benefits of it it makes sense to resist. The poster is more specific: it says to fight the fallout of automation, less pay and more work for a smaller group of people. The Luddites are a joke to a lot of people these days but they correctly identified that automation was making their jobs worse and making everyone who did them more miserable.

    Given how automation has impacted other communities in this country (take a trip through coal country some time) I think it’s wise to be skeptical. I’d love to live in a world where we don’t have to work because it’s all automated and I can go paint landscapes or whatever, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen.




  • I don’t want to dogpile and axont already pointed out a pretty good scholar who talks about the subject, but I did want to add for clarity the reason that it’s important to have a precise definition: We could look at, say, Victorian Britain, Ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire and Suleiman the Magnificent and argue that they were all unquestionably ruled by either a single or a small handful of rulers with no real checks on their power, that they oriented the economy and society around themselves, that they suppressed dissent etc. and conclude, from Webster there, that basically every government except modern American government is fascism. Simply in historical terms that would be an enormous problem, because it collapses all the nuance and distinctions that exist, obviously, between these extremely diverse forms of government.

    When people talk about fascism, there’s a reason they think of Hitler and Mussolini (who self-described, which makes that a bit easier I guess) even if it’s hard to put a finger on exactly what the unifying factors are. Very clearly, Mussolini and Hitler thought their projects were incompatible with communism/socialism, it’s why their first steps upon achieving power in their countries were to purge the left and ensure that left resistance couldn’t be organized against them. Even if you have critiques of Stalin (I certainly do) I think there are pretty obvious differences between the USSR and the fascist axis that it ended up fighting against, reasons that were ultimately persuasive to Roosevelt and Churchill despite their own misgivings about communism. Everyone at the time understood there was a difference, and we need to be able to distinguish if we’re going to talk intelligently about forms of government that western countries don’t themselves use.

    So in short, I’d say that definition from Webster is too vague to be useful, I’d say there are factors like palingenetic ultranationalism and hostility to the left that seem to be constant in any real fascist regime that should really be a part of a definition of the term. Otherwise ‘fascist’ just means ‘mean’ or ‘bad’ because all of its distinctives are gone.