Re: Pedo Guy to the rescue!
The F-word is always difficult. It has two meanings.
Kind of.
From a quick Bing query "Define Fascist"-
an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization.
Similar:
authoritarianism
totalitarianism
dictatorship
despotism
derogatory
extremely authoritarian, intolerant, or oppressive ideas or behaviour:
"an outright ban is just fascism"
very intolerant or domineering views or practices in a particular area:
"this is yet another example of health fascism in action"
The first is objective, on the basis of certain attributes. These are hard to pin down because fascism has no intellectual substance, but generally speaking it would have most of these qualities: a love of violence, a hatred of the out-group, a narrative of victimhood which usually takes the form of a conspiracy theory, a myth of national renewal, contempt for socialism and to a lesser extent liberalism, a belief in totalitarianism, total obedience to the leader, conformity, and the complete submission of the individual to the group identity.
Fascism does have intellectual substance given the number of intellectuals that have debated what it means, ever since Mussolini coined the term. Then Stalin added 'right wing', because although his rule was very much fascist in many respects, he want to distinguish himself from other fascists like Mussolini, and of course Hitler. Which also becomes even more complicated to debate properly when you lump in terms like Left, Right, Socialist etc etc. This is the problem with lables, or mislabling groups. Hitler & the Nazis were undoubtedly fascist, but also included aspects of socialism, and most amusingly, a lot of current Green policies. But that doesn't automatically make Greens fascists..
What I think is simpler is to just pick on the Authoritarianism and 'hatred of the out-group', which has been carefully culitvated and exploited. If you're on the Left, you're on the side of the angels. If you're on the right, you're a racist violent thug who is the greatest threat to democracy and must be locked up immediately!
So back to the current protests. They're to a large extent, protests against immigration. Specifically, illegal immigration. So we have a government because we're a democracy. We consent to allow government to rule our lives. Government makes laws, and we expect governments to enforce those laws. So you (OK, I) can argue that the government is failing to do this. There is a big clue in the words "illegal immigration". So we have law(s) defining routes to legal immigration, and laws defining illegal, along with penalties, up to and including deportation.
But the UK's also had an estimated 17,000 illegal immigrants crossing the English Channel. In theory, any of those without a valid asylum claim should just be turned back from whence they came, ie mostly France, potentially fined and barred from future entry. But the government, who we entrust and empower to uphold the law isn't doing this, which creates problems. So currently the UK has an unknown number of illegal immigrants already here. This creates challenges, ie every person living in the UK is entitled to a range of services that cost money or create competition. The government, in its infinite wisdom has decided to close immigration centres and place illegal immigrants in hotels or rental properties. This will cost a lot of money, create problems for people looking to rent, but could be nice business. After all, protests and perceived violence in the UK has caused a drop in tourism. And of course our new government has reported a 'black hole' in public finances, so taxes are going to have to go up.
So a very toxic state of affairs, with the government being derelict in its duties, and protests have kicked off because of this.
Then it's back to fascism. The government seems both powerless and clueless regarding stopping illegal immigrants. People protested. The governments response has been to propose increased use of facial recognition, travel restrictions, arresting people for mean tweets or retweets, threatening to use anti-terrorism charges rather than simple public order ones, threatening even more crackdowns on (anti)social media companies and will probably use this as an excuse to railroad in ID Cards.
So dare I say it, but the government isn't letting this crisis go to waste, and is behaving in a very authoritarian and fascist way.. And of course using the political divisions to enable this. Anyone who disagrees with authoritarian government policies are automatically far-right extremists, and bizzarely 'fascists', even though the political right tends to favour small government that doesn't try to interfere with every aspect of our lives.. That's traditionally a characteristic of the left.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
