• kameecoding@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      I am pretty sure England allowed the Anschluss and for Germany to take parts of Czechoslovakia before WW2, because they thought that would be enough for Hitler, so does that mean England was fascist?

      • daltotron@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        so does that mean England was fascist?

        The biggest imperial and colonial power of perhaps all of history? yeah probably

        • TheFonz@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Why do you conflate two different things --both bad-- but cant distinguish the definitions for each? There’s a reason we have separate words for Imperialism and fascism? There’s a weird fetish for this word here and you are very intent on applying it for some reason.

          • daltotron@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            I can distinguish the definition for each, which is why I’m applying the label. I’m just using a different definition than you.

            To perpetuate supremacy and keep an in group and out group amongst all it’s colonies and populations, something that they found necessary in order to be able to extract colonial goods and maintain property, they had to build a hierarchy. That hierarchy was partially based on race. The US was a colonial state and actively engaged in the genocide of the native americans, both before and after, so much so that hitler took notice and said, gimme a slice of that. This happened with basically every colony that England took, even their first ones, like ireland, where now a very slim population actually speaks irish. I don’t really feel bad in calling that kind of behavior to be like, prototypically fascist.

            Maybe if you were to define fascism as integrally privatizing other public goods, like mussolini and hitler did, then that might swing things a little bit, but america and england both went and did that later on and historically have had no problem with doing that. There’s really not a good definition of fascism that I’ve ever heard that doesn’t apply to america or england, other than “oh, well, those countries were super authoritarian”, and then somehow they don’t recognize, say, that america has 1% of the world’s prison population and a massive police state, and the level at which we propagate authoritarian governments globally in order to further our own interests. The semantic argument that people try to hash out over definitions of fascism, it’s not the real crux of the issue there, it’s just a kind of obfuscation of the real talking point, which is that people aren’t realizing the massive amount of bullshit the imperial core has been engaging in on a near constant basis for like the past couple hundred years, and precisely how bad it really is.