Climate, technology and chaos Blog

I keep reading people who argue that Lock-down to defend against covid is a form of Nazism, and that it is State tyranny.

It may be a form of unwanted intervention, but it hardly mobilises people to fight for the State and business which is the classic purpose of tyranny. In fact it prevents that from happening, makes the State unpopular amongst quite a large section of the population and crashes the economy, for no purpose except for slowing the spread of covid.

It seems to me that real fascism involves, something like the following:

• Intense nationalism and anti-globalism.
• Claims that the leader can make the country great again (whatever that means).
• Rewards go to the elite in-group. Constant cronyism.
• Finding out-groups they can denigrate and attack to blame for things that go wrong, and use to build in-group loyalty.
• Encouraging racism, to help build national in-group.
• Strong borders to keep out outsiders.
• Denigration of anyone who disagrees with the leader.
• Purging the party of anyone who disagrees with leader or stands up for principles.
• Encouraging violence against those who disagree with the leader.
• Hatred of ‘intellectuals’ – that is anyone who disagrees with the leader, or who might have specialist knowledge that suggests the leader could be wrong.
• Alleging that media which is not 100% behind the leader it is biased fake news. Being 95% behind the leader is not good enough.
• Lies, lies and more lies. Truth is whatever helps the leader get victory.
• Claiming democracy is, or elections are, a sham if the leader does not win.
• Trying to produce the ‘correct’ election results through intimidation of officials.
• Mobilisation of the people to support the State and/or business.
• If weak people die because of the mobilisation, its not a problem. It is their fault; they were to old, too unfit, decadent, of weak parentage, etc….
• Encourage aggressive masculinity.
• Law and Order. Law and Order, with violent enforcers.
• Increased military spending.
• Eventually a war.
• Being supported by people who claim to be neo-fascists and white supremacists.

By everything real that I know of, Trumpism comes closer to fascism, than does a State applying a traditional method to slow the spread of a deadly pandemic.

Tags: fascism, social category theory

This entry was posted on February 11, 2021 at 12:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.