QuietCupcake [any, they/them]

As far as relating fascism specifically to the Neoliberalism of the US, here is an insightful comment by @Droplet@hexbear.net:

Fascism is fundamentally characterized by 1) mass privatization and 2) vicious anti-communism.

The fascist counter-revolution first saw its success in 1920 Italy when the post-WWI nationalized economy gave rise to a strong socialist movement that nearly overthrew the bourgeois government.

WWI ended laissez faire capitalism when it found itself unable to ramp up war production and suffered from inefficient output, and this was a disadvantaged position during inter-imperialist warfare. Instead, state run capitalism became the norm as the imperialist powers were dragged into a protracted Great War during which vast resources and war production could only possibly be organized efficiently with state intervention. Such dramatic changes shifted the leverage to the working class, whom the ruling class became dependent on to win the war. The consequence of this was the explosion of labor and socialist movements throughout Europe, and culminated in the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia that subsequently ended WWI.

As they found themselves unable to resist against the tidal wave of workers movement, inspired by the success of the Bolshevik Revolution in Europe, the liberal capitalist class turned to fascism with the hopes that such extreme brutality could crush the seemingly unstoppable socialist movements. They succeeded, first in Italy in 1922, and then subsequently in Germany in the early 1930s.

One of the first signs of a fascist regime was the mass privatization of the previously nationalized industries:

Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister in October 1922. Nazis rose to power in 1933 in Germany. Mussolini convened a meeting of his cabinet and immediately decided to privatize all the public enterprises. On December 3, 1922, they passed a law where they promised to reduce the size and function of the government, reform tax laws and also reduce spending. This was followed by mass privatization. He privatized the post office, railroads, telephone companies, and even the state life insurance companies. Afterward, the two firms that had lobbied the hardest: Assicurazioni Generali (AG) and Adriatica di Sicurtà (AS), became a de-facto oligopoly. They became for-profit enterprises. The premiums increased, and poor people had their coverage removed.

After the trains were privatized, the services became slower and more irregular, contrary to the popular myth.

In January 1923, Mussolini eliminated rent-control laws. His reasoning ought to be familiar since that is the same reasoning used in many contemporary editorials against rent control laws. He claimed rent control laws prevent landlords from building new housing. When tenants protested, he eliminated tenants’ unions. As a result, rent prices increased wildly in Rome, and many families became homeless. Some went to live in caves.

Once more, these policies allowed landlords to increase their profit and holdings while they severely hurt the poor.

To remove “government waste,” Mussolini removed the federal government from remote areas in Italy. This meant that rural farmers, peasants, and workers no longer had the protection of the federal government against abuse from agribusiness. Instead, they were entirely under the mercy of big businesses.

The austere economic policies in fascist Italy were studied closely by the British marginalists, who were the precursors to the neoclassical economists that eventually found the Chicago school and brought neoliberalism to the forefront of economics.

As such, there is a direct connection where fascism and their austerity economics directly contributed to the development of neoliberalism. Combined with a vicious anti-labor and anti-communist thrust, the models of fascism being replicated in Indonesia in the 1960s, Chile in the 1970s and Russia in the 1990s (Russia being a special case because they didn’t go all the way, as Putin re-nationalized a lot of the key industries since in the early 2000s) under the guise of neoliberalism, during which hundreds of thousands if not millions of communists and left wing activists were brutally murdered.

Within Europe itself, mass privatization began in the UK as early as the 1960s, and began to become part of the European center left/social democratic platforms in the 1970s. Interestingly, most historical account of privatization in Europe conveniently left out the earliest forms of mass privatization that took place under the fascist regimes in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

In other words, neoliberalism is simply fascism rebranded. By all accounts, the neoliberal model of the United States is as close as you can get to fascism - what is missing here is that violence against communists, labor activists, minorities aren’t becoming prevalent yet due to the relatively high living standards of the US being sustained by its foreign imperialist policies.

But don’t let that fool you, just like in the 1920s, they really can turn to fascism in an instant when the situation becomes dire enough to call for it. It took no effort at all in convincing an entire class of liberals in Italy and Germany to support Mussolini and Hitler.

Variations on this question get brought up every once in a while, which is good, I think it’s important to rehash these kinds of discussions even for people who have seen them come up before. But if anyone is interested in skimming over some past hexbear conversation on exactly this topic, here are a couple threads that I think had some good responses too:

I want materialist definitions of fascism please - 1 year ago

What is your definition of fascism? - 2 years ago

edit: Just came across another post from 2 years ago asking specifically what Stalin’s definition was, and @Alaskaball@hexbear.net turned up an answer, found in a 1941 Speech Stalin gave.

I know. But what I said above is true regardless, ftr.

Definitely not. If there is actual talk of instance wide defederation over this then something has gone horribly, hilariously wrong. No, I’m just saying how funny the language and framing of this has been, and that they already defederated from the dunk tank.

And you can’t view deleted posts from lemmy.ml by clicking on them in their modlog the way you can with hexbear. This is just the standard there.

In other words, people logged in to an account on lemmy.ml who see in the modlog that a post was deleted will only see “error_couldnt_find_post” if they click on it hoping to see what it was. For a lemmy.ml account, none of that post content or the comment thread it generated is visible, just gone.

To see what used to be there, you have to get to it from a hexbear account.

Hmm now that it’s been made obvious that c/the_dunk_tank aren’t oathbreakers and didn’t in fact go rogue after all but still bend the knee to Hexbear, will there be talk of full scale defederation?

(I don’t think they will, it’s just so funny how this has been framed as “going rogue” and now that they’re essentially pulling out of an alliance with a hexbear comm! It’s Just

a complete 180 of my previous impression of him.

Honestly I don’t get it. Davel has been on of my favorite members of the broader lemmy-lemmygrad-hexbear commentariat when it comes to knowledgable anti-imperialist takes in the posting trenches. He has consistently been among the best at having pertinent (even lib-denialism-proof) sources on hand and ready to go for when the libs, much in need of being owned as always, start clamoring for them, and then correctly pointing out their own debate bro perversion. I have unjokingly thanked him for his service before.

It is so odd and discouraging to see him on the other side of that gulf.

Truly, no one is immune to the occasional need of touching grass.

Can you point out where you’re seeing those things specifically?

The “no civilians were injured” is coming from Awoo pulling quotes out of the links

You linked to Awoo’s comment to say that she said (or quoted someone who said?) that there were no civilian injuries. But a ctrl-f of ‘civilian’ shows the word mentioned nowhere in her comment. In your replies to that comment, where you quote from some of the linked sources only shows cases of people talking about civilian injuries! Please point directly to someone saying, or even implying, that “no civilians were injured.” It may be there, and I’ll wait for you to actually point it out if it is, but until then, it sure as hell looks to me like you’re making shit up and expecting us not to double check.

“it was a violent mob that needed to be stopped by any means” is from Nakoichi.

What Nakoichi said in the comment you linked was:

“Yes but the people killed outside the square were actually armed and had killed police officers already. There were people demonstrating inside the square that did not, for example, lynch and burn police officers alive.”

None of that has anything to do with “needing to be stopped by any means.” It is simply stating what happened and showing beyond any shadow of doubt that the claim of CPC/PLA/Any Chinese authority conducting a “massacre” but rather instead responding in an entirely understandable and justified way to extreme violence and murder of their comrades.

Both of them are my interpretations of what they said, only slightly exaggerated.

Oooooooh, ok. There it is. You are just making shit up and telling us people are saying things that they aren’t actually saying.

First off, that bit isn’t from the link unless you’re summarizing it for me, in which case thank you.

Yeah, it looks like I pasted a different link than the one with the text I quoted. My bad on what is essentially a typo. This is the link I meant to paste that does correspond to the text I quoted and that was one of the sources already linked above: https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/06/06/tiananmen-the-empires-big-lie/

But second, that article picks and chooses what information it wants from its sources even if the sources overall contradict each other. It uses a wikileaks source from earlier to say there were no deaths at the monument, but later uses a declassified document to confirm the death toll that says “TROOPS BACKED BY TANKS AND ARMORED PERSONNEL CARRIERS BATTLED CROWDS 0F CIVILIANS FOR SEVEN HOURS BEFORE REACHING THE SQUARE SHORTLY BEFORE DAWN TODAY BEIJING TlME . STUDENT DEMONSTRATORS BEGAN TO LEAVE TIANANMAN BEFORE THE TROOPS MOVED IN; TROOPS OPENED FlRE ON THOSE WHO REMAINED”.

There is no contradiction there. Opening fire on the remaining students does not mean that students were killed at the monument. But all of that is immaterial anyway. It’s a fucking nitpick. Like you liberals will accuse us of nitpicking about “no actual deaths in the Square” because they happened exclusively (or almost exclusively) in other areas. And as I said, the reason that is singled out is because of the way the false narrative is built around the square itself. It would be an irrelevant detail whether people were killed there or not, were it not for the fact that the picture that anti-Sino western narrative deliberately paints of a massacre that didn’t happen, is centered around and built upon those details. But in this case, you really are just saying “nu uh! I caught you in a contradiction because one source said people died in this spot and another says they didn’t!” which first of all, doesn’t even matter to the context we’re providing here that… again… there was no “massacre,” and secondly was something I already addressed in my previous comment where I specifically mentioned that contradictions in the details of first hand accounts does mean there is some ambiguity around those specific details. Provide us with something that isn’t just a detail that is ultimately inconsequential and that has nothing to do with the invalidity of the “massacre narrative.”

As for your other “gotcha,” there are discrepancies in the exact number of deaths, which no one here has denied and again, I addressed in my last comment where I said: “In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity.” It’s funny how you seemed to have latched onto trying to find those ambiguities, but totally ignored the whole reason I said that. Once again, those ambiguities only show us that even where things are uncertain and discrepancies in first-hand accounts exist, they come nowhere near to the claims of the massacre narrative, in this case the blatantly spurious death toll of many thousands. It’s almost like no matter which details from first-hand accounts you choose to go with, all of them discount the bullshit that the US State Department would like us to believe about the evil See See Pee via their PLA soldier-goons gunned down gorillions of innocent students and ran over poor Tank Man. (The student thing is especially ironic, given the militarized police crackdown students in the US are right now having to face while they protest a literal genocide the US is funding and helping to perpetrate, but that is obviously for another thread).

It goes to great lengths to describe the student’s movement and how barely any students were killed, but doesn’t dwell too much on who was killed, and what their motivations might have been, why they were so willing to set fire to vehicles and put their lives on the line.

Well, then keep reading the sources that have been generously provided by @Awoo@hexbear.net and others and maybe even do some of your own research. You may even be shocked to learn how many of those student were protesting the liberalizing of the economy and were against the increasing influence of capital, wanting to remain ideologically and economically socialist. But I’m getting tired of answering your homework questions for you. I’ve got my own work to do, good night/day/whatever.

so far from this thread I’m seeing something between “no civilians were injured” and “it was a violent mob that needed to be stopped by any means.”

Can you point out where you’re seeing those things specifically?

I’m trying to get a baseline for what you think happened

We (at least many of us) have read the sources that have been linked. What is described there, particularly the accounts of people who were there, is what we assert is what happened. In the few instances where there may be contradictory first hand accounts (and mostly, the accounts are not contradictory but rather corroborate each other) there may be some ambiguity. But even taking that into account, it is ridiculous and downright ahistorical to say “Chinese authorities massacred people.”

For the most part, this hasn’t even been about making moral judgment calls, which sounds like what you’re fishing for and why you seem to think it’s difficult to parse our position. This is partially implied by your phrasing “suppressed a riot? dispersed a violent protest?” etc. This has been about us just saying: Look, here is how things actually went down <see links> and by no stretch can that be called “a massacre” unless you want to also say that protesters in the streets were “massacring” soldiers and cops. Also, all of this happened relatively far away from the square, which is relevant because that is where many students were protesting and where the imagery for the “Tiananmen Massacre” false narrative comes from. Unless I have missed a comment or two somewhere, no one here is saying that “no civilians were injured.” In fact I think your phrasing of it that way is dishonestly projecting a position onto us that none of us hold. People were killed on both sides of the conflict, and indeed it was PLA soldiers who were killed first which unsurprisingly, understandably culminated in a violent response. The narrative that the CPC ordered the PLA to massacre unarmed student protesters is just a load of propagandistic horse shit.

Here is a bit from one of the links already provided:

In essence, it [the false western narrative] says that Chinese authorities massacred unarmed student protesters demanding democracy, slaughtering thousands and even tens of thousands in and around Tiananmen Square. Extensive subsequent research and many eyewitness accounts have shown conclusively that none of this is true. The most reliable estimate, from many sources, was that the tragedy took 200-300 lives. Few were students, many were rebellious workers, plus thugs with lethal weapons and hapless bystanders. Some calculations have up to half the dead being PLA soldiers trapped in their armored personnel carriers, buses and tanks as the vehicles were torched. Others were killed and brutally mutilated by protesters with various implements. No one died in Tiananmen Square; most deaths occurred on nearby Chang’an Avenue, many up to a kilometer or more away from the square.

There’s your “baseline” for what we “think” happened.

It was not a “massacre.”

Then post articles that say that and not articles that refute your own point.

Even the title of the first article I posted is “There Was No ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre’” It’s in the url for chrissakes. This is beyond a failure of reading comprehension, it’s a failure to even look at words.

It was not. a. massacre. It is not at all pedantic to point this fact out. Especially when people, following a blatantly propagandist narrative line, incorrectly call it that.

My choosing those two sources specifically among the thousands of others that was to point out how ridiculous it is to ban someone for “denying a massacre” when even mainstream western news sources (in addition to the BBC as was mentioned in the comment that caught that user the ban lol), including one of the most famous mouthpieces for the U.S. government’s foreign policy, likewise “deny” that it was a massacre and likewise would have been banned according to the silly mod’s standards. Those articles did not at all refute my point, they clearly made it, as should be obvious to anyone able to follow this thread.

Well said.

Another very illustrative example of this kind of deferral and obfuscation played by liberal democracies with their use of authoritarianism is the continued use of literal slave labor specifically in the US, which is even enshrined in the constitution. The sleight-of-hand (sleight-of-tongue?) comes from shifting the term slavery into euphemisms for prison labor. A slave population of “prisoners,” the vast majority of whom are People of Color, mostly black people, as is the slavery tradition, who are actually pipelined from their schools to prison, and criminalized for engaging in the only means they have of economic independence. The authoritarian slave drivers will tell the general populace they are “bad people, felons” and deserve to be sequestered away from society to live solitary lives doing hard labor for no pay (2 cents an hour doesn’t count as pay.)

There is nothing more “authoritarian” than having actual slaves, which is the major reason the prison-industrial complex exists in the US and has more prisoners (read: slaves) than any other country in the world both in absolute numbers and per capita by a ridiculously large margin. That is capitalist-style authoritarianism.

Yeah, I think that treatment should be the standard response to any instances with shitty anti-communist mods/admins but that still have at least some contingent of cool users. I think midwest.social fits that category. But yes, doing that is not only the funniest move, as we learned with db0, it’s like getting the best of both worlds. If the general users of an instance start getting regularly abusive, especially towards more vulnerable groups, that’s when it’s time to consider the full defed option imo. Fortunately, I don’t think we’ve had an issue with that on the scale of an entire instance since, what… blajah and shitjustworks?

There can be good users and bad users, even good mods and bad mods from any one instance, though it usually ends up trending in one or the other direction over time. This little incident isn’t very auspicious for their instance though. My experience has always been rather hit or miss with midwest.social.

Hey, since they came in here (which I honestly commend them for doing edit, nm, I take that back, they didn’t come in good faith but with a sarcastic “your feelings hurt, poor baby?” sneering insult.) someone explain to this brave antiauthoritarian lib that all governments, capitalist and communist and any other form will always use “authoritarianism,” (which Nakoichi never said otherwise from what I could see). But that unless you’re like a factory owner, landleech, CEO of a tech or oil conglomerate, or otherwise a member of the class that rules as part of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, then a state using its authority to prevent those leeches from exploiting you, a state using it’s authority to maintain a society where people are free to not worry about having to be homeless or starve to death in abject poverty is a good thing, actually.

To their credit, the ringwraithfish seems to understand the first part, but the rest of it, the most important parts, seems completely lost on them. Too wrapped up, I suspect, in their insistence on hating those “redfash tankies” to realize they’re just parroting and carrying water for the worst authoritarian imperialists on the planet.

(referring to this)

And there were many soldiers who were also killed as well, the first of which were not even armed but were lynched. There was absolutely fighting in the streets in the surrounding area, and no one denies that people did die. But it was a mutually armed struggle, not a massacre. Calling it a massacre distorts the reality and paints a distorted picture that is beneficial to the west and especially the current anti-China narrative.

The fighting I mentioned above was also heavily instigated and pushed to happen by westerners with a vested interest in harming China who were there to rile up protesters and encourage them to do violence, but then left in helicopters when fighting did start. Some of these instigators have openly admitted this and now live happily in the US. It was not a “massacre.”

Come on.

I should have cc’d @QuietCupcake@hexbear.net☝️

hey hey!

Seahorse is not going to see this because they banned you from the site for a year.

But if I tag @seahorse@midwest.social they will, yes?

No prob! I get a kick out of reading the modlog and was kind of in awe when I saw this massive line of bans filling a page-height with what amounted to “Nakoichi BANNED for being an EVIL TANKIE!” Naturally, I was curious what heinous, egregious thing you had said, but I couldn’t find any removed comments of yours in the log. I thought it must be some new mod with an old grudge or something. Then I happened on that post to see that your great unforgivable sin was to mention that the BBC didn’t consider Tiananmen Square to be a massacre.

How dare you?!

Then I laughed. Tbh, I thought about posting it to the dunk_tank, but 1) I figured it would probably get removed for being low-hanging fruit, and 2) I wasn’t sure if you wanted attention called to their dipshittery but regarding you. Glad to see that wider hexbear gets to point and laugh at them too now.

Calling the Soviets, the people who liberated the concentration camps and lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty one of the “most brutal regimes in history” is literally Nazi propaganda. Stop repeating Nazi propaganda.

lol, is this the comment that made some midwest.social mod go buck wild banning you from every comm they could? This is where you (checks modlog notes) were “denying a massacre”? Mod who did that: please make sure to ban not only other users who mention what the BBC says, but also that you remove any posts that link CBS News and the New York Times for their tankie propaganda massacre-denialism!

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/there-was-no-tiananmen-square-massacre/

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/06/13/world/turmoil-china-tiananmen-crackdown-student-s-account-questioned-major-points.html

There it is, @ringwraithfish^ !