• dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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      4 months ago

      Sorry, that means you’re just as bad as the fash. You should be engaging them on the marketplace of ideas, just like people did in WW II when they stopped the fascists with kindness and debate

        • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          4 months ago

          All of mainstream media? Where have you been?

          Once, someone threw a milk shake. The NYT was wringing hands for weeks.

        • dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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          4 months ago

          I mean of course I was being hyperbolic but I’ve had several people tell me something equivalent to pretty much like this. “Using violence against fascists is stooping to their level” is another classic.

          edit: aaaaaand here we go, there is now at least one person in these comments saying exactly this

        • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          There’s been a push for decades that everyone should be respectful and peaceful and not bother anyone when they protest in any way. The entire country forgetting how we’ve accomplished almost every major societal change.

        • masquenox@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          Does anyone actually advocate for this?

          You mean… apart from about nine out of every ten liberals?

      • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        Fascism was never stopped. Can never be stopped. Fascism is not a political ideology, it is an expression of human psychology.

        If someone in your life is becoming a fascist, like is happening in many of our lives, do you get a gun and kill them? Does that solve fascism in your life? Perhaps you merely punch them until they stop being a fascist. Is this really actionable advice?

        Fascism is growing because people are afraid of an increasingly uncertain future that they have no power over. Threatening them with violence will only make them more afraid and draw even more on what fascism offers them. The people in our lives need love, not violence.

        • dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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          4 months ago

          Fascism is not a political ideology

          “Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement […]” (wiki, although I’m sure you’ll soon tell us that Wikipedia is not a valid source because you don’t understand the difference between using Wikipedia as a source on Lemmy vs. in a scientific article)

          The people in our lives need love, not violence.

          The people in my life aren’t Nazis

          • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            4 months ago

            The people in my life aren’t Nazis

            I know the right-wing infosphere has brainwashed multiple members of my family. I don’t have a way to check the percentage of people I’ve known in my life that are now brainwashed. I know that my life would have been lesser had I not met every single one of them. I don’t see the people in my life as a purity test, they’re still the same people. What happened to them is a reminder that we must first and foremost defeat fascism, the political ideology.

            • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              You seem to be absolving them of any responsibility here. Brainwashing isn’t magical, they have simply been convinced to be evil.

              • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                4 months ago

                Responsibility implies action. The majority of people in our country who have been brainwashed by the right-wing infosphere haven’t done anything. If people are physically attacked by someone, they should defend themselves. But thinking fascist thoughts isn’t a violation of the social contract of tolerance.

                • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  Thinking them may not be (although only because I believe in absolute freedom of thought). But voting for them certainly is!

                  • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                    4 months ago

                    Many of them don’t realize what they are voting for. Even if a person could identify the people who knowingly vote for fascism this information does us no good. Acting preemptively on that information subverts what’s left of our democracy, which is still our most effective tool against fascism. Engaging in that kind of political violence makes it harder to resit fascism. Acting retroactively on that information is an exercise in revenge which does nothing to resist fascism. Violence doesn’t inherently make a person a fascist, but it is our least effective tool.

            • dactylotheca@suppo.fiOP
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              4 months ago

              What the – and I simply can’t emphasize this enough – fuck does it have to do with PuRiTy TeStInG if I don’t want to associate or spend time with people whose political ideologies would fucking literally have me stripped of human rights if not outright murdered because of my gender and/or gender identity? What sort of an obligation do I have to keep those people in my life if they have publicly stated opinions that make it clear that I may not actually be physically safe in their presence?

              And no, I don’t have a way to “check the percentage of people I’ve known in my life that are now brainwashed” either you utter cabbage, I just don’t knowingly associate with extremists conservatives let alone literal Nazis. If somebody I know turns out to have fallen off the deep end, I just don’t keep associating with them. See, no magical PuRiTy TeStEr required?

              So yes, great, good on you for being so accepting of people, I unironically commend you for that, but even though I have no idea who you are or what your background is, this comment – like a lot of the hugbox let’s defeat the nazis with love bullshit I’ve seen earlier – definitely feels like it’s coming from someone who’s got no experience with being on the receiving end of bigotry or misogyny. Easy to be a bit more understanding and accepting of Nazis when you wouldn’t be one of the first people they’d shove in a camp.

              Edit: and I’m saying this as an avowed lover of hugboxes of various kinds. “Cute but will fight”

              • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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                4 months ago

                Not everyone has the luxury of knowing no one who has been brainwashed by the right-wing infosphere. A person not having anyone who has partially or fully adopted fascist ideology in their life is not something to brag about. Nor should that be the goal.

                People have families. People have childhood friends they’ve known their whole lives. People have classmates with the same or similar schedule as them. People have adult friends in their social circles. People have co-workers at their jobs. People cannot control the political ideology of the people around them. If someone is informed enough to know exactly who in their life is currently a fascist and can disassociate exactly from those people then good for them. The majority of people will not be able to do that. Nor will doing that solve the problem.

                When the response to this

                The people in our lives need love, not violence.

                is this

                The people in my life aren’t Nazis

                That’s a purity test. Your argument is to sort ourselves by political ideology.

                Easy to be a bit more understanding and accepting of Nazis when you wouldn’t be one of the first people they’d shove in a camp.

                I am a Jewish, atheist, social democrat, lesbian, trans woman. I’m white and pre-transition, so I get to benefit from white male privilege for now. But if the fascists could put me in a death camp they would.

                If a person is in danger from someone in their life and can dissociate from that person, then by all means dissociate from them.

                The way to defeat fascism is to defeat the ideas that make up the political ideology. Isolating ourselves does nothing to forward this goal.

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          People are afraid of a uncertain future? When was it any different in the past? When did people have power over the future that we do not have today?

        • ToastedPlanet@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          4 months ago

          We defeated the Nazis, but not their ideas. Fascism is a collection of ideas, so it’s an ideology and a political one at that. People had to invent these ideas. They were not an inherent part of human psychology. Fascism is a collective puzzle that we all have to solve together.

          Violence in self-defense is necessary to stall for time. However, no matter how many fascists die, if fascist ideas are not defeated then there will always be more fascists. There is no benefit in breaking the social contract of tolerance first. We are in an information race, so the spreading of true information is always more useful than violence.

          People should defended themselves regardless of the political ideology of their attackers. Once that’s done for the day though it’s back to spreading socialism. Fascism is growing because neo-liberalism denies people the ability to solve their economic problems. Which in our case are caused by late-stage capitalism. edit: typo

        • masquenox@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          it is an expression of human psychology.

          Bullcrap. Fascism is a feature specific to liberal nation states and there’s absolutely nothing fundamentally liberal about human psychology.

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      As satisfying as it may be, the problem is that the fash gets back up after the bash. There was a pretty extensive study done on this in the 1940s, and they found quite a few methods for better handling the fash.