The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it’s obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.
In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.
Note that it works because its instinctive. We don’t like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don’t have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.
Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don’t feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.
Otherwise, we’re going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they’ll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they’ll start a civil war.
If we don’t want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that’s what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.
Once civil war breaks out, though, or they’re harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.
Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.
It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.
For most of recent history, we were routinely beaten and raped by cops, and legally murdered by men who felt insecure in their masculinity. Things got better for about a decade, and now they want us to return to the way things were. If the GOP were trying to bring back sundown towns, forced labor for made up laws, Jim Crow laws, etc. we’d call that a genocide too.
Bringing back 1950s racial politics would be evil, but I’m pretty sure that even under the loosest definition, it’s not genocide. See, the idea was to oppress and use black people intergenerationally, not wipe them or even all their cultural practices from the face of the earth. Want to use the word “genocide” to make a political statement on the attempted democide of trans people? Go nuts. But check your definitions. There are lots of kinds of evil.
The nice way to beat fascism is to make it less appealing. When families live in precarity or in poverty, they start looking to blame someone. Sometimes it’s obvious, like billionaires forcing workers to pee in bottles.
In response, the affluent elite utilize their resources to create a propaganda campaign to blame scarcity on already-marginalized groups (in the US and UK, the rising genocide of transfolk is an example). Hangry communities feeling insecure + Tucker Carlson spewing hatred every night leads to fascist action.
Note that it works because its instinctive. We don’t like living in societies with more than a hundred people, even when it means we get infrastructure like running potable water or internet or electricity or food at our grocery stores so we don’t have to farm and hunt, ourselves. We actually have to train ourselves to live and let live, and not start a centuries-long family feud every time someone cuts us off on the freeway.
Social safety nets and better standards of living can pull people out of poverty and precarity, so they don’t feel they have to begrudge everyone outside their front door.
Otherwise, we’re going to keep trying to organize labor, and in response, the companies are going to try to distract with hate campaigns. Remember Trump commandeered the GOP in 2015 and 2016 because he gave permission to hate while the other candidates wanted to just continue to quietly oppress with code-worded fears. Even if we quash Trump, they’ll find new Mussolini-wanabes to back and worship, and eventually they’ll start a civil war.
If we don’t want the civil war, we need to make shit less bad for the 80% living paycheck-to-paycheck (or worse) and we need to reform elections so that their outcomes are better informed by the interests of the public (not the elite). Or at least that’s what CIA analysts (retired) interviewed on PBS think.
Once civil war breaks out, though, or they’re harassing marginalized people and committing hate crimes, yeah, feel free to [REDACTED] off the face of the earth. And anytime a law is passed or a rule is adjudicated that retracts a civil right, remember that is violence.
rising genocide of transfolkAre you saying modern society is less accepting of trans people than a few decades ago? From my perspective, it seems to be the opposite.
Currently there are an awful lot of bills currently in process in federal or state legislation in the US that aim to restrict healthcare, education, legal recognition, access to gender-separated public spaces and so on. Furthermore, hate crimes against trans folk, and suicides by transgender persons are at elevated levels and have been since 2016.
It may be specific to the US, the UK, Australia and a handful of other countries, but right now a lot of bad shit is going on. Yes.
Do I know when it was last this bad? No.
For most of recent history, we were routinely beaten and raped by cops, and legally murdered by men who felt insecure in their masculinity. Things got better for about a decade, and now they want us to return to the way things were. If the GOP were trying to bring back sundown towns, forced labor for made up laws, Jim Crow laws, etc. we’d call that a genocide too.
Bringing back 1950s racial politics would be evil, but I’m pretty sure that even under the loosest definition, it’s not genocide. See, the idea was to oppress and use black people intergenerationally, not wipe them or even all their cultural practices from the face of the earth. Want to use the word “genocide” to make a political statement on the attempted democide of trans people? Go nuts. But check your definitions. There are lots of kinds of evil.
Yes, people are saying that because it’s true:
Human Rights Campaign https://reports.hrc.org/an-epidemic-of-violence-2022#introduction
ILGA-Europe Annual Review (under page 9, bias motivated violence) https://ilga-europe.org/report/annual-review-2023/
Anti-Defamation League https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/online-hate-and-harassment-reaches-record-highs-adl-survey-finds