I’ve come to realize that the absurd beliefs of authoritarians are like a badge of honor. They’re willing to accept any untruth from their masters and will gleefully and violently enforce those untruths as a form of worship of authority.
Leveling accusations of authoritarianism here is kind of missing the point. As if the problem with their ideology is anything besides the fascism. It’s needless obfuscation and a liberal view of authority besides.
Could I ask you to take a read of On Authority? It is very brief and quick reading, like 5 minutes tops.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Hence it is absurd to speak of the principle of authority as being absolutely evil, and of the principle of autonomy as being absolutely good. Authority and autonomy are relative things whose spheres vary with the various phases of the development of society.
I hope you’re not seriously implying that fascism can exist without authoritarianism.
I’m telling you that authoritarianism is a useless word. It’s used as a pejorative against any government that the wielder doesn’t like, and it misses all the actual problems of the regime being criticized. Authority is not by itself a bad thing, you have to look at how and why it is wielded. Is the problem with fascism that there is an authority? Or is it all the fascism?
Seriously you could argue that any country that has ever existed is authoritarian, the proper functioning of a state requires concentration of authority. It’s incredibly silly to just throw the term at whatever you don’t like. Don’t conflate authority with whatever actual problems a political ideology might have. You just end up whitewashing them.
The western left’s use of the term fascism, is borderline white-supremacist at this point. Fascism was a form of colonialism that died by the 1940s, and is only allowed to be demonized in public discourse, because it was a form of colonialism directed also against white europeans. It was defeated, and Germany / Italy / Japan reverted to the more stable form of government for colonialism (practiced by the US, Canada, UK, Australia, France, the Netherlands, etc): bourgeois parliamentarism.
British, european, and now US colonizers were doing the exact same thing, and killing far more people for hundreds of years in the global south, yet you don’t hear ppl scared of their countries potentially “becoming british colonialists.” They haven’t changed, and their wealth is still propped up by surplus value theft from the super-exploitation of hundreds of millions of low-paid global south proletarians.
This is why you have new leftists terrified that the UK or US or europe “might turn fascist!!”, betraying that the atrocities propagated by those empires against the global south was and is completely acceptable.
