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Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

I'd be really curious about his viewpoints on the current US political landscape, considering he experienced real, actual fascism and not the label everyone throws around willy-nilly trying to tar and feather each other. Personally, whenever I hear the terms racist or fascist thrown around, racism and fascism never actually enter my mind, or at least extremely rarely. I just think "Oh, another person who disagrees with someone else," because that's how the words are used in modern day politics. The words have lost their actual meaning to me due to their incorrect usage, and over saturation of their usage. You can only cry wolf so much.

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If the only time you can recognize fascists is when they already have power, then you are completely helpless at preventing fascists from attaining that power.

There are always fascists. Some people who "throw around" that word have correctly identified them, perhaps others are mistaken. Surely it is up to you to figure who's figured it out if you would like to prevent fascists from seizing power.

That's a little difficult given that he died in 2016. There are not so many people left alive who remember the hard end of WW2-era fascism.

The one I always refer people to, written in 1995 but applicable to any time, is Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism". http://www.pegc.us/archive/Articles/eco_ur-fascism.pdf - written from his personal experience as a young boy in fascist Italy at the time of its liberation.

The full essay is long and detailed, and interestingly contrasts Italian fascism with Nazism; Eco's view was that Nazism was a specific philosophy and programme that was capable of clearly delineating what it was about, while fascism was much less intellectually coherent.

> Fascism became an all-purpose term because one can eliminate from a fascist regime one or more features, and it will still be recognizable as fascist. Take away imperialism from fascism and you still have Franco and Salazar. Take away colonialism and you still have the Balkan fascism of the Ustashes. Add to the Italian fascism a radical anti-capitalism (which never much fascinated Mussolini) and you have Ezra Pound. Add a cult of Celtic mythology and the Grail mysticism (completely alien to official fascism) and you have one of the most respected fascist gurus, Julius Evola.

But he ultimately distils it down to fourteen characteristic points. It is up to the reader to apply them to modern movements and see how well the resemblance holds.

(cult of tradition; rejection of modernism; irrationalism; disagreement is treason; appeal against intruders; appeal to middle class; obsession with a plot against the nation; feel humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies; life is permanent warfare; popular elitism; heroism as death cult; machismo; selective populism & anti-parliamentarianism; and "newspeak")

So Peter Thiel is an alt-fascist (via Evola)?

I confused Guénon (Evola's friend) and Girard. My bad.

That boy is always crying wolf, said the wolf.

Because putting a certain race in literal concentration camps isn’t fascism but just different opinions.

People losing their minds over this would sound a lot more sincere and principled if they'd been even half as upset about Obama placing kids in actual cages with a much higher per capita death rate. Now they just sound like ideologues grinding a political axe.

But maybe that's just my differing opinion.

The policy before Trump was to hold children who arrive unaccompanied at the border and find their family to reunite them with. The policy under Trump is a zero-tolerance separate all children from their parents policy. Trump HHS currently cannot account for around 6000 children they have separated. This is new. The new rules around immigration seem to be focused around overwhelming the system's capacity for processing people fairly and with proper oversight.

Obama's immigration policies were criticised by liberals (as were many other aspects of his presidency, or are we going to rewrite history to state that OWS was just a public Obama fan-club gathering?). They were even outed by left-leaning publications and subject to a documentary on PBS.

Back on the topic of the comment you shifted away from - "deporting" in US-speak means sending people to a private prison where detainees are effectively forced to work, but without even allowing the accused their fair time in court. At some point after that they might get sent back to another country.

If you call them concentration camps, if you call them private prisons, if you call them anything besides detention facilities, you likely haven't thought about it much, because only a detention center will allow you to sign up to be let go back at the border. "Hey, I've decided this sucks, I'd like to head back home," is something you only say when being processed at the border in a queue.

Are you actually free to say "Hey, I've decided this sucks, I'd like to head back home?" My understanding is that they aren't, and that to leave the detention center, they need to have their application for "voluntary departure" approved by an immigration judge and pay for their own transportation out of the country:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/immigrants-free-leave-dete...

[citation needed] - were the Republicans complaining about this at the time?

Perhaps those on the receiving end of those labels have an interest in blanket dismissing that criticism as a thrown-around "willy-nilly" wolf-cry.

I saw a lot of people called racists because they disagreed with the implementation, if not the goal, of the US ACA health care reform. Now I see nearly every single presidential political candidate dumping on the ACA - whom I assume will shortly be labeled racists by all right thinking people.

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