Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

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I have not only never shared a "spomenik photo", I have never seen one before this moment. Nevertheless I read the article and am left puzzled.

"Yet not only in Croatia, but in France, the USA, Britain, real, open fascism – fences, walls, racial laws, deportations, camps – is once again mainstream. "

Oh really? Fences are fascist now? And deportations?

And remind me, was the Berlin Wall fascist? The labor camps in Siberia? Or were those created by totalitarian communist regimes?

Am I the only one too dense to really understand what broader point is being made in this article? It contains so many sections like this:

...as she puts it, “our lived historical experience of a revolution becomes only a cultural artefact”. Sekulic argues that “a better way to engage with these monuments would be to use them as a tool do [sic] re-connect to the near past in which as a society we did not see space only as a commodity”.

Umm, okay, we should do what now?

> George Orwell wrote in 1944 that "the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. ... almost any English person would accept 'bully' as a synonym for 'Fascist,'"[71] and in 1946 that "...'Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies something not desirable."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism

That would depend on your level of scholarship. Sure, common parlance does not provide deep political analysis. But even fascism wasn't an homogeneous beast and its instances vary wherever it continues to spread, there are nonetheless a number of scholars who capture its essence and describe what its commonalities are.

Of these, the most accessible may be that of Umberto Eco. [1] While it has many points in common with other totalitarianisms by its very nature, there are traits unique to fascism that situate it as ultra-conservative, promoting imperialism based on a glorified account of the past, and using racism and mass culture as a propaganda tool; characteristics that not all totalitarian states share, and that taken together make an identifying profile.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto...

The Berlin Wall was maybe not fascist, but the actions of the Soviet Union have in general been filed under the term totalitarianism, which is also used for fascism. So some sense of equivalency is being provoked there for a long time.

The wall in Berlin is a good example that it doesn't take much to make this leap. It was meant to keep people in, and the walls now -- on the US border, the Mediterranean -- are meant to keep people out so in that way they are not the same. But if you look at them as a tool of preserving a way of life by forceful and brutal isolation then they are the same. If we conclude that the Berlin Wall was bad then surely the walls we see now are also at least bad. Only they are in the present and there is no textbook to spell it out that it's bad. And some might argue it's fascist, and I don't think we should dismiss it completely.

> If we conclude that the Berlin Wall was bad then surely the walls we see now are also at least bad

“If locking someone in your basement is bad, that means locking your front door at night is bad too”

Is it also the case that since locking people behind the Berlin Wall is bad we can make a simplistic analogy that locking people behind bars in prison is also bad? Or is life in general more complex, especially on the level of entire societies and their history?

That feels like a rather insincere interpretation but you’re arguably right. And in fact a great many people don’t lock their front door at night.

It's not a great comparison. I could also say "if locking someone in jail is bad, that means locking the jail to outsiders is bad too", and it supports a completely different point of view. Countries are not basements or homes, and are not private property.

That would depend on whether or not you first burnt down your neighbour's house, creating a refugee crisis...

"Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.” ― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

It wasn't ambiguous as to which side people wanted to be on, and which side wanted to flee.

What walls, what "forceful and brutal isolation"?

Traffic between EU and other countries (Turkey) works normally except COVID restrictions. People can buy tickets, there is no need to climb walls or swim. We have embassies all around the world, it is easy to ask for asylum.

If you are comparing current situation to fascism and Berlin Wall, you are out of your mind.

> What walls, what "forceful and brutal isolation"?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Alan_Kurdi

If you don't think what is on the link above is brutal, then you are out of your mind.

Yes, it is brutal, photo was arranged to be brutal. His father and people smugglers should be in jail.

Turkey is a safe country, and Greece has embassies there. There was no need for this boy to die.

> The Yugoslav experience of fighting against it on the basis of intercultural solidarity — and, also, of failing to maintain that memory, and of its collapse in the 1990s into resurgent fascism — has much to tell us.

Intercultural solidarity? Doesn't the article mention the Ustashe death camps? Didn't Serbia wage war on its neighbours before and after Tito's forceful union Yugoslavia, and even commit genocide in the recent past?

I think the broader point of the article is that you can throw words together that sound quasi-philosophical and create a problem where none exists, to draw attention to yourself.

> Oh really? Fences are fascist now? And deportations?

I believe you lack some context here. There are a lot of migrants and refugees coming to Europe through the Balkans. Whether to let them in or leave them waiting in improvised camps in countries that are themselves very poor is a very hot political topic in the region and in most of Europe.

The problem is how those people are treated by the police in some places and how everyone, the government, the locals and the neighboring countries are complicit in this. They're constantly being beaten up, their belongings destroyed for no reason and so on. There exists a movement of right wing politicians, journalists and so on, that openly call for killing migrants that approach the border of my country. That's supposed to be a crime, but absolutely nothing happens to them.

I can understand the fear of foreign people and their culture. But the hatred and the fact that political parties actively participate and support that hatred sure sounds like fascism to me.

They aren't missing context. They are ignoring context: walls, fences, racial laws, deportations, camp.

"Oh are walls fascist now" is a bit to obviously naive bad faith.

"Oh are racial laws and [detention] camps fascist now" a bit too unambiguous.

Fences and deportations though feel like things that good faith actors should debate though. By cutting a list of symptoms down to just those two it... Well we've got sibling posts debate the merits of analogies to the abstract concept of fences. Pretty successfully derailing a nice article about some interesting monuments.

> But the hatred and the fact that political parties actively participate and support that hatred sure sounds like fascism to me.

Fear and hatred are siblings. In this case, the fear is one of the migration waves cresting on a level unmanageable by Europe.

We could somehow (with a lot, lot of internal friction that put a strain on the intra-EU diplomacy) manage about two million immigrants in 2014-2021, but the potential for migration in our neighbourhood is orders of magnitude higher. Egypt alone could supply 50-60 million people in case of destabilization.

In such situation, deterrence seems to be a functional game strategy.

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