Comment by veqq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by veqq | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> What would you even call their socioeconomic system?

China economically functions similarly to Singapore, with long documented connections and explicit emulation. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping already began this and hundreds of thousands of Chinese officials and leaders were trained there and in industrial parks with the explicit goal of knowledge sharing with the dream of "planting 1000 Singapores". [0, 1, 2, 3]

> fascist states, but without the typical racist scapegoating

Tangential, but Hitler added racism; Mussolini, Salazar, Franco/de Rivera (who used large Arab and Berber forces fighting the Republicans in Spain) etc. had none of that (until Hitler forced Mussolini's hand in 1938). Brazilian integralists and many other fascisms also weren't racially based.

[0] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/politics/article/3042046/does... [1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/24761028.2021.1... [2] https://www.fairobserver.com/economics/china-and-its-mentor-... [3] https://www.thinkchina.sg/politics/construction-singapore-mo...

You might want to freshen up your history lessons with maybe some less revisionist sources, because Mussolini-wise I have some bad news for you.

I'm not defending any of those people. Mussolini was a monster who used gas in Ethiopia and many other things, yes. But that wasn't the topic. Fascist Italy didn't do "racist scapegoating" and blame internal problems on people of other races.

Italy's favorite scapegoat was almost always Britain and the UN's predecessor.

Then deliver the news and have constructive discussions.

For what it's worth is well accepted among most fascism historians that racism, at least in the sense of adopting racial laws and such came late, and mostly as a byproduct of the German alliance.

As for what did Italy do itself before that, if you're referring to the wars in Africa, that has nothing to do with fascism, and the two biggest colonial powers at the time were both very sane democracies.

On top of that: I'm sick of people writing fascism when they mean dictatorship.

As best I understand it fascism originally described a sort of reverse socialism, I mean realistically it was socialist, it was after the same end goals as socialist policy, but it achieved them in the opposite manner, Where socialism seeks to balance corporate power usually by increased regulation and control of the corporations which has the side effect of incorporating them into the state. fascism seeks to balance state power by having corporations run the state. Which is the same end result, the corporations are incorporated into the state.

But any way you swing it fascism did not stand for that very long and now days usually is intended to mean a police or military state. Or more often because nobody knows what fascism is but everyone knows that it is objectively bad it is what you call your political opponent. case closed, argument won.

You can't have any authoritarian government labeled as fascist if:

- it lacks the reactionary qualities of fascism: ideological rejections of liberal democracy, rationalism, and it's equal distance from capitalism and socialism.

- it lacks the revolutionary qualities: the centrality of the creation of a new man, the overthrowing of institutions through total mobilization (not just military, but the entire society)

- it lacks the expansionist, colonialist, ethnic-and-cultural focuses of fascisms

Under this light, there is one, and only one other government that chased the same revolutionary and reactionary ideologies, nazi Germany, with a distant second one being imperial Japan.

Spain, Chile, Argentina, Portugal are (very, very) distant thirds.

And even the distant thirds often lack the fascist qualities:

- Pinochet's came from a coup, not from a movement. It had none of the revolutionary or reactionary qualities of fascism.

- Spain's Franco outright rejected overt fascism starting already since ww2 and purged its own party from fascist elements, instead embracing a more classical combination of nationalism-monarchy-religion authoritarian regime.

- Argentina's Peronism allowed both for elections, dissent and lacked any expansionist or totalitarian ambitions.

- Salazar's Portugal outright refused mass-mobilization and the revolutionary dynamism of fascism. It exalted obedience and order, not conquest and transformation.

> But any way you swing it fascism did not stand for that very long

It absolutely did, from start to the end of the regimes in all of Italy, Germany and Japan.

Eh, that's giving Mussolini more credit than he deserves. A core component of his platform was conquering swathes of Africa on colonial grounds.

It isn't "racist scapegoating" to conquer places in Africa, because it's not blaming some race for internal problems.

That has nothing to do with fascism as you may not be aware but Italy started fighting colonial wars well before WW1 and the other hard on colonialists were all democracies.

And this is why I can't take anyone's fascism definition seriously. Those definitions are contradictory, and include and exclude governments that don't deserve it. Especially when they try to imply that X = fascist = bad guy. If I heard about Umberto Eco one more time!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com