Comment on Just coincidence
robomuffin79@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Oh. If it always has been, then why fight it
NullPointerException@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
If you’re diagnosed with cancer, would you sit and wait to die?
isgleas@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Well, when you are american…
BonsaiBoo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Nah, here in America if you have a fatal disease or become crippled physically and you sit there half the nation will call you lazy for not getting on your feet 18 hours a day to work for slave wages, not even making a dent in your cost of living, not able to even get treated still.
then_three_more@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The genetic condition is the better analogy than cancer. Cancer develops you’re not born with it.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Awooooooga@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
What the USA is doing right now is unique to her history and it does the gravity of what’s happening a disservice to pretend otherwise.
cabbage@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
When I had the misfortune of travelling in the US one of the many things that were striking to me was the use of fasces in monuments, including engraved in marble on a war monument in Washington Square Park in NYC.
Of course it’s far from the most fascist thing about modern day America, but it was fascinating to see how blunt it is. I’d jump if I saw the same thing in Europe.
Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
Many in Madrid in Spain too. So there’s that, I sure thought it was weird too.
cabbage@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Huh, I missed them when I was there. At least it makes sense historically, and considering how Spain deals with the memory of Franco I guess it makes sense that they wouldn’t erase symbolism from public spaces.
Will pay attention next time I’m there!
redhorsejacket@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I feel like there’s a term for this sort of backwards misattribution of a symbol’s later meaning onto examples which predate their modern connotation, but I can’t think of what it would be. The war memorial you’re referring to was dedicated in 1920. Considering fascism as a political ideology had just started coalescing around Mussolini in Italy circa 1919-1920, it strains credulity to link the two. In a similar fashion, you wouldn’t suggest the presence of swastikas outside a Hindu temple indicates support for Nazism by default.
Fasces have represented the strength of the state dating back to the pre-Roman Etruscan kings. Therefore, seeing it on the national architecture of a Western nation which fancies itself as a descendent of Greek and Roman civilizations shouldn’t be that surprising, nor taken as a tacit endorsement of capital-F “Fascist” ideology. Case in point, do you know what’s prominently featured on the cover of every French passport? It ain’t a baguette, I’ll say that much. Heck, in 1953, France elected to keep the fasces as part of their diplomatic emblem, despite their very recent experiences in WW2 under Fascist rule. If we can give France a pass for continuing to use the symbol after post-war, surely that can extend to a 1920 Revolutionary War memorial in America. Unless every example of nationalism is equivalent to Fascism (and I readily grant that nationalism is a core tenant of that ideology, but allowances should be made for nuance), sometimes a fasces is just a fasces.
All of which is not to say that America is fascism free. Obviously not. Just that the above comment made me roll my eyes when there are so many better examples to cite, like the roving gangs of brownshirts disappearing people into nebulously legal holding centers.
cabbage@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
To a degree, fair enough. I hadn’t studied a French passport.
But also, it was always a symbol of the strength of the state through violence. It is fundamentally fascist in nature. When France still embraces it it’s the same France that is currently beating the shit out of schoolchildren and harming them for life for wanting to receive education. Like most western countries France has a huge cultural problem of state violence.
So I still think the historical use of this symbol does not align with pretending fascist ideology is something new in a society. And anyone giving France a pass is not paying attention.
redhorsejacket@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I don’t disagree with you in any particular part, and almost wrote a paragraph clarifying that the swastika and fasces are not 1:1 equivalences specifically because the Nazis divorced the swastika from its original meaning for their own purposes, while the Fascists selected the fasces as their core symbol because of its already established symbolism.
However, you can understand that the circular logic of calling something “fascist” which predates the codification of “Fascism” is doing my head in. If you want to counter that that’s a semantic argument which doesn’t invalidate your point, I tend to agree, with the significant caveat that this entire discussion is semantic in nature, so it’s more relevant than usual.
Long story short, I don’t equate every example of a state using violence to achieve its purpose as fascism, though it’s certainly a necessary ingredient, so I won’t yuck your yums if you do. To me, a war memorial is an appropriate venue for the fasces to appear, given its martial and reflective nature (as in, reflecting on the past), whereas including a fasces as the centerpiece of the nation’s diplomatic emblem is significantly more concerning as a forward looking statement of intent (so to speak).