| > What is "fascist" stuff? Most people have absolutely zero idea what Fascism is/was; they have a Hollywood confabulation in their head, perhaps mixed images of Star Wars and Harry Potter bad guys, anyone in a uniform, etc. Zero historical understanding of what Italy was all about in the early 20th century, no understanding of the modernizations and cleanups Mussolini brought to his country. I would hardly defend his every act, but the idea of nationalism combined with an aesthetic informed by history and myth has proven to be a very powerful one for galvanizing a society into action. Evola's "Critique of Fascism from the Right" is one very good place to get an understanding of what the underlying ideology of "real fascism" is, separate from the inevitably-flawed implementation. (We don't need to pretend that perfect implementations of anything are possible, of course, and we similarly forgive communists their lack of a proper implementation of their own idea, which at its heart still has the same impetus of improving the state of mankind by changing the structure of civilization.) Nobody is bringing that back. In a young and multi-cultural country like the USA, the founding mythos is neither powerful enough, aesthetic enough, or common enough to be a driving force for change any longer. There may be small pockets of adherents, but numerically they are insignificant, non-violent, and not worth worrying about in comparison to other drivers of change. Instead of that specific and mostly-dead political ideology, the word "fascism" has become a standing for "authoritarianism" of any kind - whether it's left-wing, right-wing, or even what I think is more properly labelled as Totalitarian Liberalism, which is the era we are heading into now. Remember that term: Totalitarian Liberalism. It is only under this system that you're ostensibly free, except everything is controlled by corporations, and people who pretend to be left-wing and "of the people" will defend the rights of billion-dollar corporations to restrict freedoms that were enshrined in law hundreds of years ago. This action by Youtube is a perfect example of this. Each precedent they set is met by a legion of comments on sites like HN and Reddit that defend their actions, because of course it's only Fake News badthinking idiots that are kicked off. Nobody seems to notice that the scope of control increases each time, slowly but continually restricting free speech on the platform, in concert with efforts to make it more difficult to host things elsewhere, more difficult for locked-down walled-garden devices to be able to access unapproved content, etc. It takes a real fool to think that this will never be used to suppress something legitimate. |