double plus
With the far left as represented by Stalin and Mao, there’s not a whole lot of difference.
And confused “liberals” with the far left. Anywhere else in the world, they see each other as opposites.
Agreed. If I ended up as one of the damned handmaids, first chance I got the family would be dead and I would either have committed suicide or be on the lam. I can think of at least a dozen plants that are common in the east coast atlantic states that are toxic as hell and know how to extract them into poison, also dozens of common around the house/garage/barn toxins and know offhand how to turn mercury, silver, ammonia, iodine and several other ‘kitchen chemicals’ into explosives, how to treat pink fluffy fibreglass into ‘razor wire’ barrier material, all sorts of handy guerilla warfare stuff. The benefits of working hazmat and having an interest in medieval herbalism. All commonly available information [don’t ask what I can make with silver dimes … ]
Indeed, I’ve noticed that what used to be called “totalitarianism” is now referred to as “fascism”. Implying what, that Stalin and Mao were simply misguided idealists?
Both words have become pretty mixed up in the past decade or so.
I was listening to a History professor on a leftist podcast who referred to Stalin’s Soviet Union as a “Fascist State” and nobody else on the podcast seemed to have a problem with it.
Google “Christian Domestic Discipline” sometime. Not saying it represents a majority view, but it’s out there.
From reading it, it sounds more akin to consensual BDSM than actual Handmaid Tale type stuff, furthermore, meant to be between a married couple than a government flogging a citizen.
Sure if you sin heavily it gives so many more opportunities to repent and appear devout.
Fascism is fascism. What you’re bring confused by is a limitation of language, and its manipulation in propaganda. Doublespeak is confusing. It’s meant to be. Unless you believe Nazism is a leftist ideology because they included the word “Socialist” in their name for themselves?
Lol I once wrote a story about a man who was so devout and so eager to prove God’s redemption that he turned his life to the most vile sins sins he could imagine. He destroyed lives and died peacefully assured he was going to heaven.
No, @Lumpy is right. People use ‘fascism’ so often when they mean ‘totalitarianism’ that no one knows what the words mean any more. 1984 has a totalitarian government, but not a specifically fascist one. It’s nominally socialist, but doesn’t appear to have any particular ideology or aims other than retaining its grip on power.
Nazism has the disadvantage of having lost, while the Soviet Union crawled on until it died of senility; while China reverently buried Mao and then promptly forgot about his fantasies of an agrarian utopia while keeping a one-party state. If the shoe could have been on the other foot- if a victorious Nazi Germany had annihilated the Soviet Union- then after the eventual deaths of Hitler and the old guard had reformed somewhat into a technocratic state primarily concerned with internal eugenics, we would probably use “communism” as a synonym for totalitarianism.
AFAICT, Gilead is an exercise in “it could happen here” , on how different components of fundamentalist attitudes and teachings could converge in a crisis, basically along the line of what-if the Evangelical Fundamentalists in the US became like and took the role of the Islamic Fundamentalists in Iran.
It is not the depiction of an Evangelical Utopia: it’s the depiction of what someone else fears utopian Fundamentalism could lead to.
Which Orwell pretty much declares right in the text: “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
(and really, in the early 20th century everyone who was anyone would stick “social(ist)” to their movement, like early in this century corporations were sticking eco-, cyber-, i-, and e- in front of everything…)
Hitler and his ilk were “socialist” to the extent that they loathed “Jewish” capitalist high-finance and monetary policy almost as much as they hated the Communists. Ironically, both Nazis and Communists insisted that capitalist economics was false consciousness; figures written in an accounting ledger were an abstraction, which would have no reality if people refused to believe them. In Germany this led to a rearmament program financed by the equivalent of a shell game, which would have collapsed if Germany had not gone to war first.
I thought the reason they were called the National Socialists were because they were a merging of the far left non-Communists and far right anti-bosheviks that had been kicked out of post-war politics. It was only with the Knight of the Long Knives and the disbanding of the SA that you truly saw the full far-right fascist take over.
True. Nobody made a Big Deal about “soft theocracy” Back In The Day, because the influence of established/predominant religion in the culture and mores of the society was such that it was taken for granted that those had to be the basic moral principles on which to base the laws.