I’m not on Twitter, so I get my news elsewhere, but most of the actual pictures I see are from here. So is there some kind of bias where only the fascist imagery gets posted here in the the dunk tank? Or do the libs scrolling through Ukrainian posts on Twitter literally see and ignore fascist imagery on every single post? Like, if they see 1000 Ukrainian soldiers, will they see 1000 fascist symbols?
I struggle to see a clean argument that Putin isn’t fascist. Russia’s economic system looks fascist; the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.
Isn’t Russia’s economic system basically normal as hell neoliberalism? I won’t argue about it being fascist, but since the west is also neoliberalized, there may be some questions you need to grapple with.
Tbf, what we think of as neoliberalism (in this case, referring to post-Reagan/Thatcher US/UK) is closer in practice to fascism than anarchocapitalism. Anarchocapitalism at least doesn’t have the government picking winners, working with tech companies to spy on its citizens, and corporate welfare. Not to say that anarchocapitalism is viable, but Neoliberalism (which is supposed to be like diet anarchocapitalism), is definitely not what we have in the US and Russia. There’s far, far, far too much intermingling of power between government and big corporations for that. So, yeah, in pure economic terms, both Russia and the US are fascist economies, and that should be a pretty uncontroversial statement.
There is a ton of centralized control of the economy (gazprom, 99% of the media, etc) though which is more fasc than neolib
Nope, fascism involves privatization. Nationalization is a communist/socialist/social democratic move.
The word privatization was invented to describe the actions of the Nazi government. The biggest lie you have ever been sold by Liberals is that Fascism is “when big scary state” exists. Fascism is the domination of the petty capitalists, the complete freedom of them to act with impunity. “Free Market” and “Small Government” are synonymous with fascism, not antithetical to it.
The intermixing of the capitalists and the state happened in Nazi Germany not because private capital was being nationalized, but because national capital was being privatized and sold off. Private industrial barons became warlords. Notice how all the big German war production companies were private companies making massive profits (Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porshe, etc.) while all the USSR war production companies were 100% soviet controlled?
Russia’s economic system looks like typical industrial-ish capitalism.
Targeting internal minorities has been America’s playbook since the response to Bacon’s Rebellion and is a key tenet of every European country’s history. You’ll still find huge numbers of Europeans justifying the modern and historical persecution of Roma.
Targeting gay people has been the policy of The West for centuries. The colonizers wrote all about their disgust at “savage” people that embedded spectra of sexualities into their societies. The US only adopted a rainbow capitalist “acceptance” in the last decade.
Fascism is rooted in a particular approach to anti-left reaction. A series of methods by which to co-opt and oppose groundswells of anti-capitalist sentiment. The primary goal is to disseminate a false consciousness that redirects frustrations away from capitalism itself and instead to reactionary scapegoats, and a key part of doing so is the destruction of communists and others on the left.
Like all Western-installed capitalist regimes, whether it’s France or Russia or Japan, there are fascistic elements to the existing systems of control. Fascism was never fully defeated. The West incorporated it into their own societies. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascisms were the prototypes. The red scare, genocidal anticommunist campaigns, the cold war, the anti-civil rights campaigns, mass incarceration, the police state are all the modern incorporations, and every single one of them justified through nationalist, nativist, white supremacist rationales.
So yes you’ll find some fascistic elements in the Russian state.
But you won’t find that it’s run by the ham-fisted Hitlerite fascism that’s taken over large swaths of Ukrainian power structures. As a head capitalist of an existing order that has no fear of an organized left, Putin has no need to stoke outright ham-fisted fascism in his own country, as the whole point of it is to deputize a violent anti-left paramilitary. He doesn’t want one of those, he already has the army and is doing the opposite by consolidating Wagner. In addition, fascist false consciousness tends to target some of the bourgeoisie. Putin is the symbol of the system that fascists claim to oppose.
This does not make Putin a good guy. He’s as fascist as any US president. But he’s not like Sonnenrad-tatted white supremacists looking to create a neo-Bandyerite society on top of the mass graves of Russian-speakers.
For comparison, Ukraine also has many anti-homosexual and anti-trans laws, while also having a history of attacking ethnic minorities and having doctrinally Nazi military brigades, along with a persistent campaign of whitewashing and lionizing Holocaust collaborators like Bandera, and has a ton of ethnonationalist policy (with its President openly declaring wanting to emulate Israel, an exterminationist ethnostate).
That second group (the non-LGBT stuff) are things that Russia notably does not have. It is literally “just” a modern liberal state with homophobic policy, revanchist rhetoric, and, depending on how you define it, expansionism (here I am thinking of Georgia rather than Ukraine). It is by no means a good country or a moral country, but it is not fascist in the sense that liberal darlings like Navalny are fascist
Russia having the same anti-LGBT policies as 1970s West Virginia is fascist (they are oriental and primitive)
(Please do not mention 1960s liberal America not allowing black people to vote)
The same anti-LGBT policies as …checks notes… 2023 Florida. (Is Florida worse than RF right now? IDK)
It’s interesting that Putin’s fascist mistakes are normal to you, but Navalny’s are not.
Navalny’s explicitly a great Russian chauvinist though, right? He is anti-immigration and suspicious of the national minorities within the Russian Federation. I don’t know if Navalny has said he’s pro LGBTQ but his racism makes me suspect he’s categorically different than Putin. Putin may hold these less bigoted views for pragmatic or even cynical reasons, but that is a qualitative difference between the two.
And what conclusions does that interest draw you towards?
Do you think that contextualizing something to show how Navalny is exceptional equates to an endorsement of what Navalny is being compared to?
The only reason this comparison is being made is because of how often Navalny is promoted as an alternative to and preferable opposition candidate to Putin in liberal spaces.
I didn’t get a notification. Uh, he would probably let pogroms against Muslims, Jews, etc. run wild if you look at the groups behind him. Putin mostly fights gay rights organizations, which is bad but not on remotely the same level. Putin doesn’t say we should deny poor people welfare for being gay, Navalny marches in front of “Stop Feeding the Caucasus” banners.
Putin is a liberal, he is your guy not ours,
He was appointed by your Yeltsin clique that previous liberals openly appointed to liquidate socialism.
Instead of accepting him as one of your own you did a little orientalism and pushed Putin towards China.
Maybe you should support an alternative that is left-wing.
Nalvany is even more right-wing than Putin, calls immigrants cockroaches to be exterminated.
the targeting of internal minorities, particularly homosexuals, seems congruent; the regime’s media mouthpieces say things about nearby countries that sound fascist.
Liberal nationalism does a fine job doing all that on its own, can’t just apologize for all the things that all variants of liberalism do by saying “all the bad stuff was actually fascist, not liberal”
Manifest Destiny and the extermination of native Americans was a liberal project, at minimum as bad as lebensraum? Yes.
Fascism is the immunological response of capital that manifests at the dawn of a socialist revolution, the death throes of capitalism where capitalists employ an unending wave of terror to destroy and murder socialist networks, and so thoroughly traumatize the population that it can never have the social cohesion again necessary for socialist organizing or construction.
This was first done in the murder of the Communist Party of Germany by the Freikorps as ordered by the liberal wing of Weimar, and the rise of the Nazi party in its place.
Kissinger outlined and formalized this policy, widely recognized by social democratic and social democratic leaning liberals as “shock therapy”. Repeated and iterated upon as standard U.S policy from Korea, to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Chile, etc.
Putin came out of the Russian national bourgeoisie’s resistance to shock therapy. Naturally, right-wing, anti-communist, and extremely reactionary, but from a project based around protectionism of Russian bourgeoise interests rather than breaking open the Russian market for Western capital (which would loot the oligarchs).
This was first done in the murder of the Communist Party of Germany by the Freikorps
To add to your argument, this wasn’t even the first time. Marx himself described a form of pre-fascism in 18th Brumaire, decades earlier, with french cops freely executing anyone they thought could be associated to the workers movement, following a failed revolution
You can’t argue that he isn’t a fascist, you have to argue he is something, whether you think that thing is fascist or not.
Fascism is a European ideology as much as liberalism and socialism, and therefore has intellectual roots you can trace back. In finding out whether or not Putin’s a fascist, an analysis of his speeches and any written work would be needed to pin down his ideology. It’s not something that can be concluded from ticking all the boxes in a checklist
Putin is a conservative Liberal, akin to Merkel, Assad or Singapore’s leadership. The difference between him and Merkel though is that he has been forced onto the anti-imperialist side of the world and shoved out of the core and pushed into the periphery, which has forced him to ally himself with AES nations and anti-imperialists.
It’s fairly easy by comparing the central factions of United Russia, which doesn’t even reach Salazar levels of Fascist organisation, to the actual “Black Hundreds were good actually” fascists to Putins right.
Putin started as a compromise candidate holding the collapsed remnants of the state together with duct tape, and his system while certainly nationalist is more like Peron or something similar. He just isn’t powerful enough even with the GRU on side to force class collaboration.
It doesn’t rise to corporatism since he can’t adequately control the oligarchs and force the workers into a cohesive whole. I’m not sure he even wants to.
This is not an endorsement of Putin who I dearly hope gets the wall when the Communist Party or one of it’s less cringe splinters undergoes backbone replacement surgery
