this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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I need to make a bot to post this any time fascism gets mentioned.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially “becoming british colonialists.” They haven't changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
Yo man
You seem to assume that lefties are against fascism, but don't decry previous colonialism?
Why?
Allow me to present to you a person who hates Nazis AND the British Empire: Me!
Wow what an utterly ridiculous statement. No wonder it came from lemmygrad.
Are you joking? Every scholar of Fascism will tell you that Fascist Italy inherited numerous colonies from the prefascist period: the Dodecanese Islands, Eritrea, Libya, Somalia, and arguably a portion of Tianjin, and later Fascist Italy added Fiume in 1924 and Albania, Ethiopia, and Tavolara in the 1930s. The very expression ‘mutilated victory’ was quickly adopted by the Fascists because they were outraged that the Kingdom of Italy didn’t gain more territory from World War I. Did you seriously not know this?
(Source.)
More Lemmygraders? Yawn
Source.
Well, I can thank you for sharing this unique perspective on the matter with me, even though I do find some of its conclusions either unconvincing or bizarre (‘Franchi (whose real name was Edgardo Sogno) was a monarchist, so strongly anti-Communist that after the war he joined very right-wing groups, and was charged with collaborating in a project for a reactionary coup d’état. Who cares? Sogno still remains the dream hero of my childhood.’ Seriously‽), but that still doesn’t justify hostility to a conclusion that’s very easy to reach. The statement ‘Fascism was a form of colonialism’ may be somewhat of an oversimplification, but I gave you some very good reasons why there was nothing ‘utterly ridiculous’ about it.
You didn’t answer my second question whether you know of Fascist Italy’s colonial history or not. So, you already knew of the ‘reconquest’ of Libya, the massacre at Addis Ababa, the forced marriages in Somalia, the concubinages in Eritrea, Benito Mussolini referring to Emperor Haile Selassie as a ‘Bolshevik pig’ in front of a crowd of thousands, and even the unofficial annexation of Tavolara in 1934?
On a side note, respectable scholars such as Robert Paxton would consider Iberia’s 20th century anticommunist régimes to have been at best parafascist, in part because they weren’t adventurer‐conquerors, but also for more complex reasons. For example:
(Source.)
Ur-fascism is about semiotics, not history.
There’s a bunch of great stuff in there, but you gotta read the twenty pages before and after any quote to get what’s being said and why.