Hierarchy isnt something you control. Let’s say group A has all the ugly messed up people and Group B has normal people. You can’t change this hierarchy because it already exists. The only change you can make is put group A over group B, which is a Betamale hierarchy.
Stalin rebranded Soviet antisemitism to pretend it wasn’t a common trait with the Nazis. No-one has ever said that antisemitism and persecution of jews was an exclusive trait of fascism. Your premises could really use some work here.
:smack:
Like, you can oppose specific instances or problems with inequality. But inequality as a concept is a zero sum game.
Thank you for giving another example of you mis-stating what was said to you, and then arguing against it on that basis. This is intellectually dishonest, and now everyone here has seen you do it more than once.
Seriously, do you believe that anyone here believes that Adolf Hitler was “Comic book evil?” Get real.
I think hitler was just a normal politician who happened to be on the wrong side. Like if Germany voted for FDR would things be any different? Germany had no food, it attacked people because they were starving. Sending specific ethnic groups to concentration camps is just a more organzied way of giving minorities less resources or whatever.
I disagree most vigorously with this. But at least you were honest, and said what you think, instead of presenting a fun-house mirror to what I think.
(In my opinion, FDR, with German parliamentary support akin to the support he received in the US, would have turned the German economy around, gradually, making a success of it roughly the way he did here, without needing to resort to a major war or the murder of millions. Look at the post-war economic recovery of West Germany as an example of how, from utter devastation, wealth can be restored. Fascism is a very bad tool, a whip to be used against slaves, not an honest wage to reward labor.)
Isnt fascism alleged to be futile. Wasn’t fascism basically the leader in Keynesian economics to the point where some said the terms were synonymous.
Even among fascists, Hitler was extremely evil. Mussolini didn’t engage in the level of cruelty that Hitler did
Not sure how you can compare FDR to Hitler though. While FDR had as part of his voting coalition southern whites who were actively hostile to minority rights (especially black rights), FDR wasn’t in the same league as Hitler.
Hitler made military expansionism part of his core philosophy. He set a goal early on to conquer areas he felt should be part of the German empire. FDR didn’t do anything like that to my knowledge.
Also there is a huge difference between starvation and waging an expensive war to conquer territory for ideological purposes.
FDR deported legal Mexicans who had been there before the US. If FDR was alive today and held the same opinions he would be considered an extreme neo nazi, even more extreme than most. The neo nazis are just 1940s allied.
Simply but very straightly put. “Fascist” has become a sort of catch-all shorthand snarlword for any undesirably illiberal (in the speaker’s judgment) regime that just happens to be not ostensibly marxist/socialist.
Sometimes a despotic regime is just a despotic regime, and not really informed by a specific coherent ideology.
Oh, and BTW…
Seriously…?
Except for that thing where he tried to murder every Jew he could. And that other thing where he killed every German who had even a hint of a handicap.
Honestly fdr never said the holocaust was bad.
Who cares if it’s “fascism” or some other ism?
Coercion. Coercion is bad, period. Coercive power structures should be recognized as such and disparaged as such.
Actually, Hoover invented it. :o
FDR later didn’t officially sanction “repatriation drives,” but neither did he suppress them, but they stopped during his presidency around 1939.
Askreddit, this looks like intentional trolling. I am suspending you for two days while we discuss your ability to post on the SDMB.
Well, that’s patently false. You can’t have a functioning society without some degree of coercion. Contracts? Nope, you can’t coerce someone into upholding their end. Law? Nope, you can’t coerce someone into not murdering people.
That’s a clownish proposal that fails even rudimentary examination.
a) You’re wrong; but
so what?
b) So deal with it as a matter of degree. Excessive coercion is what makes a bad government oppressive. Not something else.
I suppose excessive coercion isn’t the only thing that can make a government bad. There could be incompetence. There could be depraved indifference to things that should be commanding the government’s attention. There could be embezzlement, or cronyism. But oppression is the outcome of using force to overwhelm people’s will instead of convincing, using leadership skills, making compromise deals with others.
Easy to throw around. You offer no refutation to my points, however, so your assertion rings hollow.
So what if a society cannot have any form of law or contracts? Do you have any remote understanding of what a society is?
You transact with strangers in almost every single thing you do. If you have no legal recourse - because any recourse would be coercion - then the next time you hand a cashier a $10 bill, they can just say “Thanks!”, put it in their pocket and refuse to give you the goods and services you were supposedly purchasing. Alternatively, the next time a plumber shows up to a stranger’s house and performs a service, the client could just say “Thanks, now get out” without pay and there would again be no recourse.
There would never be a store in such a society, never be plumbers or any other services, and almost no transactions at all.
Our entire society is premised on the concept of trust. Trust only exists between random strangers because both parties can be held to account. No coercion? Then no accounting. No accounting? No trust.
Congratulations on shifting your goal post. You said “coercion is bad. period.” Not excessive coercion, you specifically emphasized that any coercion is bad. That’s not a question of degrees, it’s a question of sanity and an apparent lack thereof.
Once again someone tries to equivocate definitions like nobody will notice.
If you redefine oppression into such a meaningless thing, then oppression isn’t wrong. Look: legos are not evil things. They’re quite fun for kids. This isn’t a controversial statement. But when I redefine “lego” as “nuclear warhead” and try to keep using my new definition with all the connotations of the little plastic bricks, you can see where it gets absurd. With your new definition, I would not say legos are not evil or appropriate for kids. Likewise, with your equivocation of oppression, there is nothing wrong with it. Societies use many different forms of coercion to prevent bad behavior. Period. You murder someone, you go to prison. You steal from someone or break a contract, you indemnify them. And not out of the goodness of your heart, but because society forces you to.
Coercion is bad period. But more of it is definitely more bad than less of it.
I think some coercion is unavoidable, just as there will always be power differentials when people interact. But there’s a difference between its presence in human interaction and its presence in the design of institutions and how they’re designed to function. There, in particular, incremental increases in equality and democratic participation have made huge differences.
I am an anarchist. You do not, however, need to be an anarchist to agree with the above. You can believe that some modicum of coercive enforcement is necessary for social order, that without it someone would come over the proverbial hill and do non-systemic non-structural coercive things. I don’t happen to agree with you there but I am not going to engage — believe what you will on that one.
But a classic monarchy in which the King’s voice is absolute is inherently oppressive. The English found it to be so and drew up Magna Carta to put some checks & balances in place against King John, as you’ll recall. The American revolutionary leaders implemented a new form of government a half-millennium later that was founded on the notion that even the far more limited powers exercised by King George and his non-representational Parliament were oppressive, and they put in place structures that were designed to make the governmental apparatus a lot more egalitarian, hence less able to coerce, hence less oppressive. And in the couple-centuries-plus, we have modified those structures significantly, making them yet less coercive, giving more rights and greater democratic participatory role to all the citizens, which means a bit more of their consent is necessary in order for the government to do things that affect them, hence less coercive, more democratic, less oppressive, and better.
You got a dissent with that?