Early Signs Of Fascism
"We must protect our borders from the ravages of other countries, making our products, stealing our companies and destroying our jobs!"
image by Byzantine_K - source: flickr
Does your president or king or dictator sound like this? Does he make it look like it's "us against the rest of the world", and does he make you feel special because you happen to be born in the best country of them all? If yes, then watch out. Nationalism can on one level be a good thing. It unifies people to work toward a common goal: the improvement of (the lives of the people living in) that one country. And it does it in a way that makes distance unimportant: I don't know the billions of other people that live in my country, but the mere fact we share the same geographic borderline binds us together, let alone the laws and government.
But when nationalism becomes fear and hatred against other countries because yours is superior, then you see one of the first signs of fascism awakening. Another sign is the idolization of the military, which is directly related to the fear of the foreign threat:
"I'm gonna make our military so big, so powerful, so strong, that nobody, absolutely nobody is gonna mess with us."
Does your president sound like that? Well, I hate to say it, but then you're probably one step closer to living in a fledgling fascist country. Benito Mussolini described fascism as follows:
"The Fascist state is a will to power and empire. The Roman tradition is here a powerful force. According to the Doctrine of Fascism, an empire is not only a territorial or military or mercantile concept, but a spiritual and moral one. One can think of an empire, that is, a nation, which directly or indirectly guides other nations, without the need to conquer a single square kilometre of territory."
Can you think of your nation as one that "directly or indirectly guides other nations" and aggressively exports it's "spiritual and moral" concepts, like, let's say "democracy and freedom"? Maybe you should be aware of the fact that this to is an early sign of fascism. Mussolini also said once that fascism is the state of a country, where political goals are no longer distinguishable from corporate goals. Does that sound like a plutocracy you're familiar with?
The other quotes were from Trump of course, but could have come from any of his predecessors. He is the most extreme we've ever seen though. Trump even goes as far as to publicly make a case for the use of torture in the "war on terrorism", when all studies show that torture doesn't yield reliable information as victims will admit to anything or say anything for the torture to stop. And here's the president of the world defending that shit:
Trump on waterboarding
I'll leave it at this small grain of thought and hope it sparks some bigger thoughts of your own, dear reader. I have to keep it brief because time's too short for me now and I wish there were 48 hours in a day... Also I'm not too good at responding lately because of the same reason: I hope I can count on your forgiveness. Thanks again for your attention and continued support; you're a big part of the reason I keep having fun doing this :-)
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It's a fascism that's evolved from mid-century and gotten more cunning in that one can pretty well do whatever one wants under this new system as long as you're paying the vig...