| It's pretty trivial to apply these signals to nearly any collectivist social movement. 1. Action for action's sake - Black Lives Matter protests to block highways. 2. Exploit the fear of difference - Those horrible racist uneducated people are nothing like us, we can't let them take the country! This is basic tribalism and it applies to every major social movement. 3. Rewritten: "To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Anti-Fascism says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be good, moral egalitarians. This is the origin of anti-fascism." Here I've applied them to Western progressivism, but if you deny the basic assumptions of any collectivist social movement you could apply them. Scientology, communism, socialism, fascism. Switch a few unimportant words and there you are with the same meaningless parallels. The human mind is a great pattern matching machine but has a problem with false positives. EDIT: It's important to remember when comparing Trump to old fascists that the people who defeated those fascists enacted Trump's policies. For example, in 1945, immigration policy in all western countries was effectively, "whites only". So if you're gonna notice parallels between Trump and Hitler, you have to notice even closer parallels between Trump and the people who defeated Hitler. You should also notice the differences: Trump is an isolationist who wants to start wars less than Hillary - a lot like pre-WW2 America. |
But, I think you have stripped the context from the quotes you offer, and in so doing, made them applicable to anything.
For instance, regarding point (1), you're stereotyping the BLM protests. Read their website and it's all about intersectionality and inclusion and a bunch of other academic buzzwords. It's not really about protest for protest's sake: specific demands have been given. And it's not anti-intellectual, which is the context you removed from point 1.
You have done a similar thing with the next point. The original point is about fear of intruders from outside the nation
I would agree that there are parallels of certain parts of, say, the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests) with this synopsis of fascism. A lot of that was action for action's sake: dress up in black and break store windows.
But take, on the other hand, the OWS protests. It was partly because of the authoritarian tendencies of other protest movements that OWS adopted various egalitarian habits - not addressing crowds with bullhorns, the consensus process, etc. (For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street#Main_organi...).
In sum, I think you're not being careful about your reasoning, and you are reasoning backward from the answer you want ("a pox on both their houses"). We're not talking about mere groupthink, smug activists, or misguided protesters. We're talking about actual fascism.