this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Lefty Memes

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An international (English speaking) socialist Lemmy community free of the "ML" influence of instances like lemmy.ml and lemmygrad. This is a place for undogmatic shitposting and memes from a progressive, anti-capitalist and truly anti-imperialist perspective, regardless of specific ideology.

Serious posts, news, and discussion go in c/Socialism.

If you are new to socialism, you can ask questions and find resources over on c/Socialism101.

Please don't forget to help keep this community clean by reporting rule violations, upvoting good contributions and downvoting those of low-quality!

Rules

0. Only post socialist memes That refers to funny image macros and means that generally videos and screenshots are not allowed. Exceptions include explicitly humorous and short videos, as well as (social media) screenshots depicting a funny situation, joke, or joke picture relating to socialist movements, theory, societal issues, or political opponents. Examples would be the classic case of humorous Tumblr or Twitter posts/threads. (and no, agitprop text does not count as a meme)

1. Socialist Unity in the form of mutual respect and good faith interactions is enforced here Try to keep an open mind, other schools of thought may offer points of view and analyses you haven't considered yet. Also: This is not a place for the Idealism vs. Materialism or rather Anarchism vs. Marxism debate(s), for that please visit c/AnarchismVsMarxism.

2. Anti-Imperialism means recognizing capitalist states like Russia and China as such, as well as condemning (their) imperialism, even if it is of the "anti-USA" flavor.

3. No liberalism, (right-wing) revisionism or reactionaries. That includes so called: Social Democracy, Democratic Socialism, Dengism, Market Socialism, Patriotic Socialism, National Bolshevism, Anarcho-Capitalism etc. . Anti-Socialist people and content have no place here, as well as the variety of "Marxist"-"Leninists" seen on lemmygrad and more specifically GenZedong (actual ML's are welcome as long as they agree to the rules and don't just copy paste/larp about stuff from a hundred years ago).

4. No Bigotry. The only dangerous minority is the rich.

5. Don't demonize previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals. We must constructively learn from their mistakes, while acknowledging their achievements and recognizing when they have strayed away from socialist principles.

6. Don't idolize/glorify previous and current socialist experiments or (leading) individuals. Notable achievements in all spheres of society were made by various socialist/people's/democratic republics around the world. Mistakes, however, were made as well: bureaucratic castes of parasitic elites - as well as reactionary cults of personality - were established, many things were mismanaged and prejudice and bigotry sometimes replaced internationalism and progressiveness.

7. Absolutely no posts or comments meant to relativize(/apologize for), advocate, promote or defend:

(This is not a definitive list, the spirit of the other rules still counts! Eventual duplicates with other rules are for emphasis.)

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[–] Linkerbaan 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Are you saying a country built upon colonization, Genocide and slavery has a systemic problem of oppression?

We just need to vote harder for Genocide!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

a country built upon colonization, Genocide and slavery

Which country wasn't?

Probably the two most unusual things about the US are that instead of either absorbing and assimilating, killing off, or enslaving the natives we mostly relocated them and that we imported most of our slaves from overseas instead of primarily enslaving the conquered people(s). I mean those, and we're one of the later examples of all of it in history.

[–] Linkerbaan -2 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

Which country wasn’t?

America is an outlier. Concentration camps and intentional shipping Europeans overseas with the intention to colonize an 'unpopulated land (see "thinking the Natives weren't human")

Most of history lands were conquered and populations were absorbed into a kingdom. Occasional Genocides too place but wiping such an area to replace the natives is special. Not to mention it all happened just 250 years ago.

Adolf Hitler was literally inspired by how America wiped out all the brown natives and replaced them with the white Ubermensch.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

Tell me that you don't know what fascism is without telling me you don't know what real fascism.

What the USA has been for a long time is an oligarchy, and there are literal Princeton studies to support it. It's only now that it's following Russia into becoming full-fledged dictatorships.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The Ku Klux Klan is quite literally the genesis of the modern fascist movements

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The Ku Klux Klan was a tool of the slave owning oligarchs.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is*

The slave owning oligarchs in the American South are classical fascists. They still own slaves but they are now inside prisons.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I would argue it's fallen out of favor with the preferred organization nowadays being the GQP Trump personality cult. But yes, and they still trade in what slavery basically was, insurmountable debt.

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[–] exanime 7 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, ultranationalist political ideology and movement, characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.

As per the wikipedia definition, it does seem the USA has been fascist towards the rest of the world, just not towards its own citizens (overtly) until now...

So if we agree fascism can apply internationally but not domestically (which is not usually how the term is described) then the meme is accurate

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

The term you are looking for is Imperialism. It's fucked up but probably the most correct for the last 150 years. Fasciscm doesn't really work as most of it's definition is internal. Though we do have parties working towards it unfortunately.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 2 days ago (2 children)

brain dead take.

Always a racist slave state? sure. A military cult since like 1910? sure. A broken oligarchy? sure.

Fascist? defs heading that way. Not always.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The US is 50 governments in a federal system. We have had fascist governments in the US internally in regions for over a hundred years especially in the south east.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Which definition of fascism are you applying?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

In the SE the KKK were the brown shirt enforcement wing of the ur-fascist state governments ruling over an apartheid state until the 60s.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

yeah fair actually

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Not the guy you replied to, but we hit most of Umberto Eco's points IMO:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco

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[–] aliteral 17 points 2 days ago (1 children)

We could start by agreeing on the definition of the term. Because 30s fascism is no more, and that is a fact. What constitutes fascism in todays world? As an Argentinian, the USA meddled with my country via dictatorship whthin operation Condor. That amounts to fascism, or at least, a subtype of it. I think Frank Zappa warned us about this...

[–] LANIK2000 8 points 2 days ago

It's authoritarian tribalism based on nationality. In other words the forced elimination of opposition, because of the belief in one's superiority. And since one's superiority derives from their nationality, it inevitably has to include some traditional values. Any in fighting is just arguing over the meaning of their nationality. I don't understand what people don't understand or how they keep getting it wrong.

[–] TrickDacy 149 points 3 days ago (41 children)

And this is why the right accuses us of misusing the word fascist. No it wasn't "always" fascist.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

i mean theyve always been openly couping and subjugating the rest of the world. its just been successfull for their own population for most of this time.

as the meme says, its just ran out of space to expand and its now fucking over their own people and allies instead.

what fascists are doing right now in the us is not much different from what they have been doing to south america, africa and east asia for quite some time now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Imperialist ≠ fascist

America was often imperialist, only had periods of fascist political movements and has been transitioning for a while.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

they are not the same thing per se, but imperialism is a fascist strategy. genociding brown people or otherwise oppressing them for money sounds pretty fascistic to me.

its just that its on a worldwide stage now, so the in-group is even more insulated from seeing it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Racism is not fascism. Imperialism is not fascism. Nationalism isn't facism. They are characteristics that sometimes or often lead to facism. Facism has a fairly explicit definition. Things can be a part of each other and overlap each other without being each other.

If I make a snowman, that doesn't mean that the carrot is a snowman or every snow sphere is a snowman. You can say that when you see me laying out the carrot with 3 balls of snow and a hat, it is leading to a snowman, but it has not always been a snowman.

But yes, facism is a huge danger and on the rise all over the world. Not even just in white western countries either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

when racism, imperialism and nationalism have been a main part of a given country's identity for decades, yea thats fascism, and its precisely my point here!

don't forget US segregation laws inspired the nazi treatment of the jews, and you havent changed much in that aspect since then, honestly. i don't even need to say anything about nationalism, even americans can see it clear as the day. these things don't lead to fascism, they are the alarm bells.

fascism is rising outside the west because of how tight of a grip you have on us and how you meddle with our electoral system (eg. imposing dictatorships on us). milei is widely and openly supported by western institutions. brazil has seen a lot of meddling for bolsonaro to succeed, also somewhat in the open. i could go on about this one.

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[–] kameecoding 70 points 3 days ago (26 children)

I think it's stupid to say they have always been fascist, but people definitely don't grasp what fascism is, they think it's people marching in nice grey uniforms on the street and concentration camps out in the open and if you try to call anything that's not that they call you stupid and overreacting

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