Nowhere Girl
People's failure to understand that fascism is a fairly banal worldview reflects a refusal to understand how common and ordinary looking it is and how well it hides behind our modern high tech lifestyles.
Fascism doesn't have to have 1930s pomposity and daily military parades.
It can look like America, right now, today, depending on who and where you are. America already has military jingoism, mass incarceration, mass surveillance, unchecked paramilitaries, and theocrats denying our rights.
Nowhere Girl
"We have to fight fascism!"
Yes, but you don't even know what fascism looks like.
It's been here for a while. It just wasn't threatening you.
Nowhere Girl
Many Americans are fascists and always have been, including people you know, and they look perfectly normal most of the time. Virtually every Republican is a fascist and has been for years; they've just worked hard to convince you they're not so they can continue advancing their agenda, hiding in plain sight.
Nowhere Girl
Which gets at the real problem -- fascism isn't new and in fact, it's been winning for years, dismantling democracy, corrupting institutions, seizing power, and inserting itself in the lives and choices people make on a daily basis. The fact that you haven't noticed reflects how well their propaganda has worked on you.
Nowhere Girl
The belief that there are Real Americans, that those Real Americans are white, cis, het, Christian, and conservative, and that those Real Americans are inherently good and deserve to prosper while others should suffer, and that those Real Americans should have the power to control and subordinate people who are different, here and abroad, backed by the threat of violence from a massive police force and an even larger military, is an inherently fascist one.
Nowhere Girl
Honestly, I don't trust anyone who doesn't find stuff like the Pledge of Allegiance or the bombastic jingoism of the Fourth of July at least a little creepy.
But a lot of people -- cis-het white people specifically -- have internalized so much of this stuff as "normal" that political discussions are derailed by having to convince them that things are already bad for other people and that it's been happening for years.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.