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Comment by LB232323 | Hacker News Reader

Even before this, cops in the klan have been murdering minorities with impunity for a long time. This is what fascism looks like, no accountability for state-sponsored murder of innocents.

If anyone is interested in American history: Before we had our modern police departments, our earliest systems of law enforcement were actually slave patrols and organizations called Indian Constables. These institutions are rooted in controlling the behaviors of minorities. If you know your history, you know that slavery and colonization never really ended. The 13th amendment, world-leading prison labor system, and border camps are part of this living legacy.

You can read more here:

https://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-a...

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While I, like you, am against both state-sponsored murder of innocents and fascism, I believe you are using the word “fascism” incorrectly here. In my understanding of the word, fascism is a principle where corporations and the state make common cause against the people, whom they seek to exploit or control, respectively. This is not the same kind of thing as state-sanktioned death squads; even though they might be equal in their offensiveness, one should take care not to equate them. It is a grave mistake to bundle up all of one’s dislikes and call them all the same; they are not. Many things are even fundamentally opposed, but equally abhorrent.

> corporations and the state make common cause against the people, whom they seek to exploit or control, respectively.

That's exactly the primary purpose of the police. The police serves capital and the state (which also serves capital) in order to exploit and control the people.

"serves capital" capital is a conscious entity here?

> fascism is a principle where corporations and the state make common cause against the people, whom they seek to exploit or control, respectively

I'm not in a position to do the research at the moment, but I'd suggest that African-Americans have very clearly and for a very long time suffered state control for financial exploitation, and they are not the only ones, but simply the largest and most visibly egregiously maltreated minority.

Look at property values in areas with high levels of police violence. It's a chicken omelette in a way, but your definition of fascism does seem to fit the situation for this and other US subpopulations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto...

It's my own preferred definition (Eco's definition), the essay itself is very short, highly recommend it. No mention of state or corporation.

God, reading that is so depressing.

Fascism is the cloak used to conceal the dagger of ethnonationalism. To quote a memorable video introducing extremist ideologies by explaining what life in those societies is like [0], "In the fascist village, the village itself looks really bad. The villagers themselves are doing pretty bad. But at least they all know they're not one of those other types of villagers." It doesn't matter whether races exist; they will invent races, and then use racism to justify hatred and oppression.

You are thinking of fascist corporatism [1], indeed a much more pointed critique of the USA's political practice than traditional fascism. But also, "traditional fascism" goes only back as far as Fascist Italy, which practiced corporatism, so perhaps all fascism is corporatist.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ymg5FsruGEk

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatis...

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