[cormacrelf]

I think you have failed spectacularly at understanding fascism. It was not only racial purity that they went for. That wasn’t even a thing in Italian fascism, it simply did conformity and allegiance to the state and took that to an extreme. Nazism used racial purity to exclude people from its cohesive in-group and enhance the cohesion that in-group had. It built an extremely cohesive structure that worked at every level to enforce itself. No aspect of life was not subject to this enforcement. You had to demonstrate cohesion everywhere you went. The power to control this was necessarily centralised; there had to be some figure outside the cohesive mass who was not subject to the cohesion enforcement regime, who could interpret the rest of the world and then direct the mass to respond etc. The same can be said of Stalin, and these ideas are all laid out explicitly in the communist “vanguard” doctrine too. The results are not only bad because of the racism, they are also bad because of the day-to-day experience of living under such a regime, the weakness that comes from relying on a single fallible leader to direct the cohesive mass, the waste in rejecting independent minds, the brain drain from smart people leaving, the brutality required to hold all of this together, and finally the destruction it enabled. All of that is true of organisations and “institutions” (a term that excludes companies, by the way!) but with all of the sliders scaled down and the potential harms a little lower because companies don’t have armies.

So yeah, mate, I am very aware that there are groups who would murder me for expressing the views I have on cohesion and diversity. Was that meant to be a threat or just an appeal to tribalism as a natural thing? Everything else you said is… You seem to be grappling with the idea that there are a lot of people in the world. I don’t really see a point emerging from it.

[brnaftr361]

Fascism has been a catch all for "other" forever. Orwell, an expert wordsmith who was present at the time actually described this phenomena not only in terms of the fascist movements but also the Communist movements, crucially, if you read An Homage to Catalonia this actually caused a considerable deal of internal manipulation which was coordinated in such a way that foreign press promulgated [by Orwell's account] false stories.

It was really an economic classification wherein business was subordinated to an authoritarian government. And again to my point, hierarchy, institutions, power, and scale are what lead to the immense destructive forces witnessed in the early 20th century.

And by that logic I don't see a whole lot of distinction between the Axis and Allies - there was a difference in values but hardly one in architecture at the time. There was also the point of aggressors and aggressed which paints moral connotations.

And companies do have armies, really it's private property, but... Companies own all of the property that's valuable. Corporations in particular, which mind you do have a history of directly or indirectly leveraging government power, in some cases military or "intelligence". You don't need an army when you can threaten someone with global sanctions for attempting something like a sovereign default or violation of international IP law. There is no distinction between starving someone out and killing them in war, in fact, that's what war used to consist of. Siege the city and hold the walls, wait and watch as they starve to death and wallow in their own filth as disease creeps in.

Your last point is grasping at straws. You know as well as I do I wasn't specifying you, or your particular values. Stop parading legitimate diversity around as tribalism and painting it, self-righteously, as some inexorably evil idea. I can do the same with your naive globalist cosmopolitanism: whatever intrinsic real diversity does emerge, it's amalgamated into a uniform homogeneity because the elements within are pigeonholed, and expected to behave in a narrow band of "cosmopolitan acceptability". Isn't that what you don't want? One totally uniform population and a flat earth? Politically, nationally, racially, philosophicallt identical, because to me that is the logical conclusion.

Schismogenesis is a self-limiting principal and had ought to be embraced. It would be hard for a continuously dividing society to accrete enough power to do what the West did to the Americas, or colonialism or Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler or the Russian revolution... The scale is the important factor. And those dividing lines that we create in these nuanced differences in value are important by that nature. Some will fail, some will succeed. It's hardly any different than mitosis. Forbidding that from occuring is holding back evolution, isn't it? That was the whole proposition democracy was suppose to solve in the US - it was a laboratory for experimenting with... Everything, and yet the accretion, centralization, scale, and institutionalization has all but defeated that.

https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/e...

[cormacrelf]

I think it would help if you visited a museum instead of reading Orwell dissecting wartime hysteria. That was written in 1944. All people had to go on was propaganda and tiny snippets of reporting on atrocities, of course people in the survey had no idea what the word meant. It serves as nothing more than a caution about words losing their power through overuse, not evidence that the word fascism is actually meaningless. There is actual content in the word and you can use it to refer to its particular brand of totalitarianism and set of methods for imposing and sustaining it. It is worth doing that in order to avoid it happening again because it is a successful formula and there is a danger of that. Maybe it bewilders you, but it seems everything bewilders you. Everything would be easier for you if we all lived in communities of no more than 150 people. You’re free to go and do that up in the hills and leave the rest of us down here.

[brnaftr361]

Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he had a direct view of the interior workings of the politics of these ferments because of that. He was also apprised of the disparate reporting by foreign journals as he made it a point to read them, this is something he writes at length about in Homage.

I would expect that very few people of today would be able to define it accurately. And because of that, yes, it remains a catch-all for "enemy" and lacks meaning aside. Nobody else abides by your methods, just as every "Classical Liberal" fails to label themselves strictly as a "Liberal" as prescribed by Mises (or was it Hayek?). Thus there is a stunning failure to identify internal mechanisms as, at an elementary level, fascistic in both organizations and institutions. It's a pretty considerable failure.

It's a wildly successful formula because we're all doing it and we're ignorant of it because it's a word without meaning and that makes it a contagion of stupidity.

But of course I'm bewildered. Watching people naively building cities housing tens of millions of people, driving millions of cars, rampantly reproducing so that millions more people and millions more cars might grace the congested arteries. Then being so audacious as to complain about pollution and urban sprawl in the same breath as they have their prepared tangerines in light syrup canned in a plastic cup shipped from some developing nation 4000 miles away, but damn that smog! And it's all enabled by what had ought only be described as a fascistic imperialist regime.

Nobody is free to do that, by the way. It's a forced participation scheme. Pay taxes or it's taken, if it's not given violence is deployed. To pay taxes you need money, to get money you must work and make yourself culpable. These are the things that Ghandi railed against and pointed to as agents of moral decay, and likewise Tolstoy - perfect heteronomy by which we can lease all our deference to the state and institutions that make up "civilization" - another ill defined word.