A return of Fascism in Europe?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > A return of Fascism in Europe?

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

SedanChair posted:

Can German chancellors promote policies other than austerity? For the rest of Europe, I mean.

German economics is about morality and orderliness as far as I have ever been able to work out.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 18:14

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 14:17

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

I didn't comment on the type of morality. I think it's a version of morality where frivolous eccentric poors who borrow money deserve to live an austere and stark life for a while as a gainful lesson.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 20:16

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Electronico6 posted:

Finland had several missionary outposts running in Africa during the 18/19th Century. The majority of them operated in other European colonial powers, but usually the point of these missions were to hide horrible exploitation under the guise of bringing Christ and civilization to the Dark Continent.

The Finns were famously a big part of the scramble for Africa.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 23:48

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

I think there is something structurally racist about the situation of a bunch of policemen wailing on a group of rioting black youths (not on its own, necessarily, but in the context of our societies). Nonetheless, I'm not really sure what the gently caress our society is supposed to do when people start rioting, beating people up and breaking poo poo apart from arrest the people doing it. What other response is there for the authorities? Nobody has yet suggested an alternative.

The only one I can think of is 'join in', and I think we'll all be waiting a long time if we expect the police force to be the 'vanguard party' of the revolution.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 10:43

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Usually this kind of stuff plays out a bit differently in Europe because the manner of migration of foreign persons was different from America (post-colonial migration vs slavery) and because there tends to be a deeper social safety net. On the other hand, because systematic racism was never as hardly ingrained domestically in as visible a way as American or Brazilian slavery (with some exceptions), European countries never developed the same kinds of responses when it comes to stuff like affirmative action and certain types of social integration etc. In the US it's way more commonplace for black people to obtain positions of high institutional significance than it is in the UK (for example). It's a very different experience again for countries without an extensive colonial history (say, Scandinavian countries) or countries which had exclusively European empires (Austria) and countries which were principally the victims of European empires (Balkans), and in all of these countries racism operates differently and is directed differently.

Saying the racism is exactly the same is dumb and ahistorical. There are quite a lot of interesting articles you can read, written by Black people who have lived and worked in America vs the UK (for example), explaining the very different ways in which racism and anti-racist agitation operate in the two countries.

Also, as the thread title explains, Europe is also undertaking a new expansion of racist and xenophobic sentiment, so people who draw a direct line from 19th century colonialism to the present are missing what has changed recently to explain the shift away from ideas of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism in Europe. They're also not caused by all of the same belief systems (Christianity and pseudo-scientific post-Darwinian ideas of race are less of a factor, for example - though you could say the same in the US).

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 12:28 on Jan 8, 2015

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 12:24

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Zombiepop posted:

So this thread is now about which continent is more racist?

I didn't try to compare the two in terms of more or less racist, but apparently yes.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 12:32

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

KoldPT posted:

Macedonian is a made up identity that has to steal the iconography of a guy who died a million years ago in order to appear like they're better than the other slavs. Also, they really loving hate Greeks.

Well, I guess really hating greeks is a national identity, because at this point it either means you're from FYROM or German.

All nationalities are made up identities. :ssh:

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 15:03

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

It's OK. When Greater Macedonia forms and conquers half the world, and then inevitably collapses, in 2000 years they can argue again about whether it was really Greater Greece or Greater Macedonia.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 15:48

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

KomradeX posted:

What happened in the thread? I stopped reading on like page 4 when it looked like it was heading to some uncomfortable places

It hit bottom, but I don't exactly think it's been redeemed.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 17:24

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

The Soviet system was very effective at producing a well-educated elite class of people who excelled in the arts and sciences, despite other atmospheric conditions of the Soviet system pulling in the other direction. Just because Soviet Communism didn't pan out, that doesn't at all mean it never produced anything of cultural or other value.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 14:24

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

HorseLord posted:

Really it's a shame they didn't incorporate the smart people they were creating into the ruling tiers of the party in a more constructive way. Then maybe they could have followed a better ideological path than revolution > war > i guess we have an empire now > i'm out of ideas, don't do anything > this sucks > whoops everything exploded.

They did in the military, but cultural elites are harder to subordinate because they inherently require free expression.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 15:47

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

HorseLord posted:

I think you should probably read my post again, champ.

I think I got it, slugger.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 16:54

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

HorseLord posted:

Given you responded as if I said they should somehow subdue them I don't think you did. It's okay, you made a mistake. Many people do that.

Nope, the mistake is your's I'm afraid - you just got defensive because you thought I was misreading you. I never thought you were encouraging the subordination or repression of the Soviet cultural elite, or anyone else. My point is that there was no way cultural figures in the USSR could have been included without being subordinated - the USSR was structurally repressive in its nature. A USSR that incorporates freely expressing cultural elites is not the USSR, by definition. However, because militarism was also intrinsic to the Soviet system, the system incorporated military scientists and leaders very readily (though they weren't above purges, in the Stalinist years in particular, at all).

So saying 'if only the Soviet union could have encouraged an open cultural community more!' is just as useless as observations and questions like 'what if Stalin hadn't done blah blah' - well, then he wouldn't be Stalin. There is a reason historians don't encourage people to play games with counterfactuals in this way.

It's OK though, you rushed for the patronising remark right on the first reply. You got defensive. Many people do that.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 17:25 on Jan 12, 2015

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 17:21

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

HorseLord posted:

"You should have used the correct fuse instead it would've worked out better."

"stop being ahistorical and wondering about counterfactuals. What's done is done, if I hadn't replaced the missing fuse with a nail and burned our house down when the power surged then I just wouldn't be me."

Now you've finished wanking over the inability to go back and correct past mistakes and mankind's objective lack of freewill, or whatever, do you have anything good or useful to add to the conversation?

Your argument is like saying 'what if fascism didn't involve nationalism irridentism, expansionism, militarism and state repression' - then it wouldn't be fascism. The Soviet system was built on repression backed by force. Once you remove the repression the Soviet system dissolves or is overthrown.

So saying 'What if the Soviet Union stopped repression' translates practically in to the question: 'what if the Soviet Union wasn't the Soviet Union?'. This becomes even more obvious if you examine the actual history of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

It has nothing to do with concepts of free will and determinism.

HorseLord posted:

The entire history of the soviet union wasn't already decided when Lenin got out of bed one fateful day in november.

Edit: in response to your edit:

No, it wasn't, although the jacobin early period of Soviet Communism was necessary to put it in to power, and thus negated a lot of its moral force. It's for this reason that Ryutin, Trotsky and others, refer to Stalin as 'the gravedigger of communism'. Putting aside that famous argument in Soviet theory, just look at what happened in the USSR when a more open policy with regard to speech, thought etc. was adopted.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 17:35 on Jan 12, 2015

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 17:31

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

HorseLord posted:

The soviet system is a bunch of councils arranged in a pyramid. They started and ended as multiparty entities, even.

At this point the troll/mental defect becomes obvious.

Edit: can you try actually writing the main body of your post out before unceremoniously scrambling to edit it. To continue on with this horrendous derail:

That is an incredibly obtuse literal interpretation of my words. 'The Soviet system' both simultaneously means 'the system of organisation by Soviets' as well as 'the general system of governance of the Soviet Union', without any real conceptual or linguistic difficulty. The only reason to emphasise the first definition by being overly literal is to troll.

quote:

And what happened was directly caused by what I suggested they shouldn't have done.

It's quite clear from the scholarship that no matter what direction the leadership the Soviet Union had taken post-Lenin, it was always going to go to dark places. There was no realistic good outcome possible, even if anything-but-Stalin might quite possibly have been the most preferable option.

quote:

Hell, you talk about "early period of Soviet Communism" negating it's moral force but like, what does "early period" even mean? The early period was full of free expression and avant garde loving everything, the Stalin and post stalin USSR you speak of was a much later thing. That alone puts the nail in the coffin for your argument that somehow the USSR had to be the way it was to meet the definition of being the USSR. I would have thought being the same state with the same name would be enough, but hey ho.

I'm not sure that the Leninist era is quite the happy era that you seem to imagine it was. There was repression even then, even if it was sometimes married to avante-garde ideas. That Trotsky liked to write literary theory doesn't undermine the fact that he was also a butcher. I am principally referring to the Stalinist era, but there are no shortage of things to point to back to earlier on, both in Leninist theory and in the practice of the party. But yes, noted one party state Bolsheveik 1920's Russia was indeed a hotbed of 'free expression'.

I'm not trying to be a cold warrior about this, as the best critiques of the USSR tend to be left critiques, including the Luxembourgist and Trotskyite critiques.

HorseLord posted:

This conversation between us started because you couldn't understand the basic human tendency to wonder how something could have been better than it was.

[Citation needed]. Historians don't like counterfactuals except when they're trying to be sensationalists, generally speaking, but mine would be: something would have had to have gone differently very early in the Soviet project. Even so, I believe (as do many modern communists) that Marxist-Leninist theory was inherently flawed in such a way that it was bound to produce bad results.

And I believe the way that the USSR was taken apart demonstrates what happens in a repressive one party state when more advanced freedoms are permitted - it disintegrates rapidly.

I'm happy to engage in wondering how it could have been better, but there's not much use in doing that by imagining things that were extremely unlikely to happen, or never could have.

Disinterested fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Jan 12, 2015

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 17:35

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Yeah that argument is actually close to being totally opposite to the truth.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 14:43

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

If most of Russia's modern foreign policy decisions are made out of paranoiac worries to do with getting invaded (sometimes justified), the rest are motivated by a desire to be taken seriously as a civilised modern European country/empire.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2015 14:51

Disinterested: Jun 29, 2011; You look like you're still raking it in. Still killing 'em?

Velisarius posted:

Us Greeks do not consider ourselves as 'western', merely trying to integrate further with western Europe and whatever goes with that (although it is obviously a slow/failing process). Despite 'the west' appropriating various aspects of our culture, it does not imply that we are part of the vague nebulous concept you all enjoy referring to in your discourse.

When it suits your politics. It's not like this opinion is a consistent theme across all of Greek history.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2015 14:31