https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
It is necessary to be intolerant of intolerance.
Someone somewhere said something smart:
View Tolerance as a contract. If someone is tolerant of others, tolerate them too. But if someone is intolerant towards others, they don't get to be tolerated either.
I really dont understand how anyone can look at the modern era of politics without a consideration for game theory, it is so useful for resolving these more nebulous or philosophical idea when it comes to thought conflicts. If your 'opponent' is constantly escalating and you arent responding, you are functionally forfeiting. and we all know the fascists are escalating as often and as hard as they can. if you seek peace or de-escalation you have to negotiate, and they wont do that. if you seek neutral ground you have to respond with equal escalation. and if you want to win you have to apply overwhelming force.
most conflicts in politics are not zero sum like this so its not a useful tool most of the time, but fascists are literally out for the destruction of democracy by definition, its existential by nature.
If it's the same writing I'm thinking of I'll try to remember to link it when I get home.
"Tolerance isn't an ideal, it's a contract you're automatically entered into at birth. The contract protects all involved who agree to the contract, but if you break the binds of the contract you are no longer entitled to it's protections. To be intolerant of an intolerant person does not break ones commitment to the contract because the intolerant person is no longer protected by the contract. "
Paraphrased AF
These people never seem to realize that even at its most basic level, ensuring equal rights and freedoms requires a level of forfeiting individual freedoms. In order for everyone to have equal right to physical safety, you forego your freedom to punch them in the face without consequence.
These people go to talk about democracy, describe anarchy, then get upset when reality doesn't meet their expectations. Your expectations don't meet reality, bud.
But intolerance to intolerance should be the last resort and not the default. You should try all the other methods of civilized discourse first.
Fascism isn't a legitimate political ideology so there's nothing to tolerate. It's just genocide in fancy window dressing.
It's always good to point out that that is philosophy, not science (neither political or any other kind).
https://youtu.be/BiqDZlAZygU?t=306 rowan atkinson (mr bean) has an interesting opinion about it, I'd recommend watching the whole video.
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Random person: Hey Hitler, can you please stop doing the Holocaust.
Hitler: Nein.
Random person: Damn, guess I can't do anything. If I used force to stop Hitler from committing a genocide I would be just as bad, because everyone knows killing a Nazi who wants to kill every Jew and killing an innocent Jewish person are equal moral acts.I honestly don't understand how people think like this. All they do is enable fascism and the imperial ambitions of more aggressive nations. As long as we live in a world with sovereign nations, some of those nations may do something extremely wrong that requires a war to stop, and that doesn't mean you just let them do it. Ultimately, war is bad but genocide is worse and sometimes sacrifices have to be made (exclusion existing for nuclear war, which would render humanity and most of life on Earth extinct).
Neoliberalism is how people think like this. In order to stop the wave of strikes, protests, and violent demonstrations for workers rights the capitalist ruling class started heavily pushing the doctrine that "All acts of violence are always morally wrong". They indoctrinate children into it through the education system and mass media. The intent was to stall the progress of workers rights movements in the long term, and it worked exactly as they intended.
You're correct, it's just a bit demotivating. There must be some way to reinvigorate the labor movement both in the United States and globally, but I'm not entirely sure how. I think the labor movement in the U.S. has recovered a bit from the massive damage that the Reagan administration caused it, but it's slow-moving.
They were taught their whole lives that violence is always wrong. That it’s never the correct solution. They can’t concieve of it being the only way out. When you trust liberals to run an education system, you get people with ingrained useless liberal ideas.
*To be clear, using “liberal” from a leftist perspective.
Your problem is comparing Hitler's holocaust to anything self proclaimed nazis do today. It's far more effective to just ridicule the handful of them instead of trying to be violent.
It is absolutely an apt comparison. Genocide is a favored tool of fascists because it's an effective way of quickly wiping away dissident civilians and destroying the mythical enemy they have in their heads. The Nazis alive today would absolutely do the Holocaust again given the ability, and fascism is too popular in too many countries for ridicule alone to work.
"Germany plz stop occupying Poland"
More like "Germany plz stop occupying Czechoslovakia".
Much of Europe celebrated the Munich Agreement, as they considered it a way to prevent a major war on the continent. Adolf Hitler announced that it was his last territorial claim in Northern Europe. Today, the Munich Agreement is widely regarded as a failed act of appeasement, and the term has become "a byword for the futility of appeasing expansionist totalitarian states."
"Ah, darts. We didn't appease the discourse hard enough. You can keep Czechoslovakia if you pinky-promise not to invade any more countries! If you do, we'll be forced, to, uh, you'll see, and you better believe we'll do it!" (Narrator: They didn't, in fact, do anything when Germany invaded Poland).
"If you could stop killing people by the millions in a mass cultural genocide, that would be great. Thx."
Never thought I'd say this about the fucking Nazis, but to be fair, most of the world was entirely unaware of just how bad the concentration camps were until after the war, and those that were aware didn't become aware until the war was already past it's height and starting to wear down as Nazi Germany was slowly colapsing under its own weight.
Asking nicely and tolerance aren't the only other options or even necessarily the opposite of violence. Sometimes, it's just a necessary measure and last resort. Beating people rarely changes their mind, other methods must be used, like reasoning and education (preferably even before the person has gone fascist). Obviously, the reasoning isn't gonna work with everybody, in which cases you do whatever must be done to ensure safety.
Think of fascism as if it's a zombie pandemic. Once it's in progress, you save those that you can and liquidate those that are too far gone. But the real method against a zombie pandemic is to have preventative measures in place, like not letting Umbrella Corp. develop the virus in the first place.
The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it's obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.
In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.
Note that it works because its instinctive. We don't like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don't have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.
Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don't feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.
Otherwise, we're going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they'll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they'll start a civil war.
If we don't want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that's what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.
Once civil war breaks out, though, or they're harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.
rising genocide of transfolkAre you saying modern society is less accepting of trans people than a few decades ago? From my perspective, it seems to be the opposite.
Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.
It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.
Do I know when it was last this bad? No.
For most of recent history, we were routinely beaten and raped by cops, and legally murdered by men who felt insecure in their masculinity. Things got better for about a decade, and now they want us to return to the way things were. If the GOP were trying to bring back sundown towns, forced labor for made up laws, Jim Crow laws, etc. we'd call that a genocide too.
Yes, people are saying that because it's true:
Human Rights Campaign https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2022#introduction
ILGA-Europe Annual Review (under page 9, bias motivated violence) https://ilga-europe.org/report/annual-review-2023/
Anti-Defamation League https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/online-hate-and-harassment-reaches-record-highs-adl-survey-finds
Oh, right, fixing every structural problem we have despite the legal levers of power being controlled by corporate money? I’ll get right on that.
We’re past prevention now. It’s too late.
Contemporary Untermench Nazi Toilet Stains: We're going to terrorize innocent people and threaten them with violence and jump them simply because they exist and we're gonna celebrate past genocides with flags and marches and then we will overthrow the government and create the third reich with even more atrocities and and and...!!
Everybody else: Well, we're going to fight you every step of the way and respond to your violence if necessary.
C.U.N.T.S: SO MUCH FOR THE TOLERANT LEFT!! I'M ENTITLED TO MAH OPINION!!1! YOUR OPPRESSING ME!!¤#!!! 😨😰😥😢😭😱😖😣😞😓😩😫😤😡😠🤬👿
I also remember how we got to WW2 by appeasing the rising fascism instead of debating and disassembling it word for word. If we need to get to the physical violence and war to fight the evil, then we failed the early stages of disproving and debating why it's evil. And then, just like now, its mere idea will rear ist ugly head
it's that you have to disprove it to everyone. the ideology that "our tribe is better than theirs" is a cancer in and of itself so the more people think that and are programmed to tell others the same thing, the harder you have to work you suppress it
Yep, that is how wars of ideas work. You will have to fight generations of reactionaries and debate against those ideas point for point. Before fascism and ultra-nationalism there was the religious "our religion is better than yours". This fanaticism still fuels religious tensions and wars in Middle East, but the reason why in Europe we have so much fewer of these tensions is due to hundreds of years of fighting both in ideas and in wars and revolts. And you should give them no quarter, because they will gather their strength and adepts and will push these ideas again. Education is the best prevention against this cancer
Fascism was defeated in the UK by some clever jokes and having a monarchy.
The UK helped defeat a couple of fascist Regimes through spending the last power of the Empire on it.
Fascist Regimes were defeated, not the concept of fascism.
The concept of fascism is not defeated through violence, it is through education and debate.
You think some young nazi is going to wake up from a baseball to the head and think "oh wow, I was so wrong about the concept of 'might makes right'"
Fascists don't believe in might makes right. If they did, they'd all be liberals and communists, according to the end of WW2. What fascists believe is that their 'enemy' can be crushed because the enemy is too weak and effete to fight back. The proper way to dispel such a notion is to crush them and look fabulous doing it
Fascism was not defeated in WW2 only Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Japan. Everyone forgot about fascist Spain and Portugal. What's more they even made deals with them. My country was left alone to suffer because the war was never against fascism.
Better to see WW2 as a war against fascist expansionism. But yes, Spain and Portugal were left to their own devices, and because of that, millions suffered under the rule of Franco and Salazar.
"I want to take away your human rights."
"Actually that is bad so can you please not do so?"
"Oh I see it now, you're right, thanks for educating me!"I can get people wanting a "one-size fits all" solution where we peacefully resolve all problems and the violent one are obviously evil.
But the unfortunate thing is, you do have to fight for "the right beliefs", and yes the right beliefs are technically subjective and this could be abused. But there's just no alternative to taking a specific stance and physically fighting for it no matter what.
Yeah fascism really ended in 1945 /s
Millions of Nazis were permanently cured of fascism through the noble efforts of the Allies. :)
You are making jokes about it but there is actually a measurement to proof this: a lot of former fascists got high positions in post war Germany in politics, economy, jurisdiction, media, ... and if a former fascist gets an influential position in a liberal democracy like post war Germany, there is no doubt they are cured. /s (if not obvious)
"Peace in our time"
I heard this claim somewhere that the reason why Neville Chamberlain agreed to it was because UK was nowhere close to being ready for war. Something along the lines of having been instructed to secure peace at all cost.
In retrospect it's easy to see the Munic Agreement as a mistake, but I have to admit that I am curious if he had any real alternative.
The UK was nowhere close to being ready for war, but in truth, neither was Germany. Chamberlain made his decision with noble intentions, but in retrospect, even just strategically, it was still the wrong decision.
They learned the wrong lessons for this war from the previous one.
Politically motivated threats of brutal physical violence covers pretty much every war ever. Much to broad a definition
Violence against fascists just sounds like plain old self-defense to me.
It also describes a lot of the US' police system.
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The only way to beat shitty people is to prove that you're better at whatever dumbass game they're playing than them. Evangelicals? Just pretend to be a DesNat/fundie. When someone is being violent towards you, the only way to "win" is by returning it 10 fold. Their worldview is based on superiority, do not let them delude themselves and others.
I saw a dude with nazi tats on the bus today and while I didn't hit him what I told him after he got all huffy and in my face for saying "fuck you nazi" would probably get me moderated. But it involved a famous Inglorious Bastards reference and how it would be the centerpiece at a party I'd be arranging if he touched me.
"Correcting a broken bone out of alignment is... Strategically re-aligning through use of force to snap it back into position in order to enable proper healing?
That's literally breaking a bone again."
I'm trusting the doctors more than you on this one, buddy
The only solution.
It's amazing how versatile a simple baseball bat is
Have you ever heard the story of how people defeated mussolini by playing bowls?
Huh, the more you know. I thought they hung his body upside down. Must have been a fake AI image
Governments are inherently fascistic entities. Ruling by so-called democratic majority excludes too many, even when you pretend that the way propaganda works doesn't completely extinguish the concept of democracy. We are all living in a conservative socioeconomic reality that for the most part has many many, many many fascistic elements.
No. States are inherantly authoritarian entities, but authoritarianism is not simply a synonym for fascism. Authoritarianism is essential to fascism and fascism is always authoritarian, but not all forms of authoritarianism are fascist.
If you strip them down to their base mechanics and throw in bigotry and elitism, then yeah, but that's not what governments are. It's like calling all people spooky pale skeletons. When you remove someone's bones and dry them out they are, but inside a living person they are pink and only a part of the whole. Fascism refers to a particular state that a government can be in, but does not apply to all governments.
Fascism is at its core about maintaining societal heirarchy. Bigotry and elitism naturally follow from the belief in heirarchies.
It's no surprise that Mussolini advocated for "class collaboration" (and also coined the term himself), in direct opposition to the fundamentally leftist concept of class struggle.
Authoritarianism is not always fascism, even if I did accept your premise. Fascism isn’t just “governments I don’t like.” Perhaps read some political philosophy before coming in with metaphorical guns blazing?
Here’s a link to Ur-Fascism, to start. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism
