These laws in general may qualify but specifically is it really fascist not to tolerate protest of the coronation in a monarchy? It isn't fascist just to have rules.
Read up on how fascist regimes centralize power, arresting people who object was and is a major aspect of it. By outlawing decent you eventually normalize support for your regime such that even people who despise what’s going on are eventually unwilling to say so.
They may have gotten external damnation for it, but China’s cracking down on protests worked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... What seems counterintuitive is the CCP still makes it very clear you’re not allowed to talk about it because they want people to live in fear. Thus, they very much want people to know and not talk about it.
> Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_work
> 1. a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
> 2. a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
The current Uk government has introduced laws to limit protest as described in this topic; it's also looking to limit the right to strike (ref. current health service pay disputes). Both are consistent with the definition above.
¨Anwar Nasser Abdulla al-Awlaki ... was an American imam who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by a US government drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki became the first US citizen to be targeted and killed by a drone strike from the U.S. government.¨
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
He was a terrorist but he still had rights. And then there was the murder of his non-combatant son who was "collateral damage" from a drone strike on a restaurant:
¨Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki ... was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed while eating dinner at an outdoor restaurant in Yemen by a drone airstrike ordered by U.S. President Barack Obama on October 14, 2011.
...
¨Another U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity described Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as a bystander who was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," stating that "the U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki's son was there" before the airstrike was ordered.[8] When pressed by a reporter to defend the targeted killing policy that resulted in Abdulrahman al-Awlaki's death, former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs deflected blame to the victim's father: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don't think becoming an al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business."¨
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Aw...
Really? If Charles suddenly issued an order, "seize @trasz4, take him/her to the Tower of London, and chop off his head," do you seriously think anyone in the UK would obey him? More likely Parliament would start the process of declaring him to be Mad King Charles and appointing William as Prince Regent in his place.
I've seen messages online heralding how great it is that everyone loves the king, their evidence being the BBC had no news of any dissent, and there was no evidence of dissent on the ground.
The reality is police arrested people for planning peaceful protests, and the BBC provided their usual biased reporting.
This is not good.
The British government is seriously leaning into censorship, surveillance, and nationalism which is a very dangerous combination. They have even vilified an out group namely immigrants and cracked down on decent. Add in propaganda with strong ties between the government and large private companies really does make me nervous, though I am not expecting things to devolve very quickly the historic left/right divide isn’t particularly important here.
Totalitarianism equates dissent with violence [1]. And here in the UK we have the "Prevent programme" where people who dissent against the prevailing political opinions can be labelled "extremists" even though they have not done anything illegal [2]. Which is very, very concerning. The laws relating to this were passed in 2015.
I fear that those who complain about the restrictions on freedom of speech and erosion of civil liberties in general, here in the UK, could be considered "extremists" by this government and subjected to Prevent related surveillance by intelligence agencies such as GCHQ.
1. https://fee.org/articles/14-signs-of-totalitarianism/
2. https://www.rightsandsecurity.org/assets/downloads/Prevent-i...
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/fascist
“a person who is dictatorial or has extreme right-wing views.” Not the OR is intended as either applies rather than an AND where someone must also have extreme right wing view.
China is not just nationalist but often racist, two characteristics of Fascism but not Communism (which is internationalist and egalitarian). China pushes a market economy under strict government control, creating three legs of Workers, Business Leaders and Government, a facet of Fascism; this is contrasted with the single leg of Communism where everyone is a Worker.
Regardless of whether they're Communist™ or Fascist™, the Chinese government is brutal to its people and often threatens (former) citizens abroad with harm to family members in the PRC. The label is less important than recognizing what they're doing.
And then a switch flipped.
In every government which abuses its people, arresting dissidents was the first resort of the dictators and autocrats.
Beyond that they really just took things much further, it’s hard to find direct parallels to the scale and influence on society of say the Hitler Youth in the 1800’s or before.
History is full of dictators and political purges, but before this they focused on those with actual power.
Fascist political movements/governments however pioneered them. Thus they techniques are labeled fascist even if they where quickly adopted by communist countries etc.
PS: Fascism: “2: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
As to timing, it’s the same technological developments which resulted in large companies becoming common and being linked to government for the first time with new options for governmental control.
Radio, telegraph, calculators/computers, and trains allowed for much larger a more homogeneous organizations. The Hitler Youth for example didn’t have similar parallels in the 1800’s and before.
At the same time individuals became less useful to the state. Large prison populations are really expensive in terms of guards and lost productivity. Similarly execution means removing potentially productive people. Historically, only a small number of people within a society would get made examples of until industrialization increased productivity to the point where states could suddenly afford to have secret police capturing large percentages of the population.
Mostly because the technology and bureaucratic mechanisms were not yet sufficiently developed to implement it. It's not as though kings wielding absolute power, ostensibly justified by their god, were champions of liberalism. Maybe a handful liked to think of themselves as liberal humanists, but that was just vanity. More often, these kings had every inclination to be an overt absolute tyrant but simply lacked the technical and organizational means to control large populations in the ways which were developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Calling internet censorship etc fascist is a natural evolution of things, but IMO somewhat dilutes the idea. Creating an out group and book burning are part of the playbook, but public spaces have always had some regulations.
A real monarchy with absolute power is a facist state by today's standards.
Like you literally didn't have any rights and could be killed on the whim of a noble. Even Magna Carta didn't grabt any rights to peasants and riffraff. The times before it were even more tyranical
But yes, fascism typically includes an appeal to a (imagined) past glory, a close collaboration between corporations and the state, a designated enemy who is both weak enough to be an easy target and strong enough to pose an existential threat and an empowerment of the military and police force. This list doesn't cover most monarchies by any stretch of the imagination even though there are obvious overlaps.
EDIT: I also think it's simplistic to call fascism an ideology as even the historical examples share as many differences as similarities when analyzed as ideologies. I think it's more accurate to call it a strategy or mechanism, or maybe a meta-ideology. There is no "fascist economic model" for example. It's goal is to bring about a social hierarchy through the use of excessive force and typically waves of ever-expanding mass killings of undesirables. It needs an other to eliminate to maintain itself, making it inherently self-destructive.
I think the most accurate description I've seen of fascism is as an "immune system of capitalism" or "capitalism in crisis": it primarily kills the weak, those unable to work, those unwilling to work and those posing a direct or indirect threat to the social order required to maintain the owner-worker hierarchy (e.g. trade unions, socialists, even progressives) and when it eventually collapses, is overthrown or fades away, it reinstates a liberal market economy (i.e. capitalism) while having mostly maintained the power of those that were previously wealthy or were even able to expand their wealth through collaboration.
In the context of this thread, there seems to be the implication that the new laws the UN is objecting to have something to do with the arrests of protestors. After some digging, I can't find evidence that more than a few people (6) were arrested under that law (which generally seems rather bad)? And these people weren't even all charged? It seems to centre around the claimed possession of devices to lock themselves to things in public. Arresting a handful of people you think are maybe going to chain themselves to infrastructure to disrupt an internationally important event---maybe the government didnt act the best here but this hardly seems indicative of a great threat to human rights or a rise of fascism in the UK. I would personally worry more about airport security.
It was literally conceived as an economic system between socialism and capitalism. I think your interpretation is simply incorrect.
https://www.stupidlaws.com/it-is-lawful-to-kill-a-scotsman-i...
The king has no power, that's why he's able to easily bend the national broadcaster and the police force to his will with ease ... that's why we have to get his consent to pass any laws ... that's why the armed services pledge allegiance to him (as monarch) and not to the UK ... that's why we pay him 100s of £millions from taxes ... that's why we organise a hugely costly parade for him in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis ... these are all signs he has no power /s
Of course we do, the order would be ignored. (To whom would he even give the order?) English history is written in constitutional crises.
Well, the death penalty was abolished in the U.K. in the 1990s, so there's that. More significant: habeus corpus, which goes back to somewhere between the Magna Carta and Interregnum.
Even at its height, the Crown's power to unilaterally command executions was intentionally curtailed for centuries.
Liberal democracy is a check on the possible dangerous consequences of full naive democracy.
Hitler's regime came to power democratically.
Breaking the rules to prohibit protest in one specific case may not be fascist, but it isn't the rule of law...
So I guess the MET can point to that as an example of historical precedent and how they handled themselves with relative restraint.