AustinRamsayGames

Austin Ramsay Games

@AustinRamsayGames

Bi / TTRPG designer / podcaster / streamer

log in
AustinRamsayGames
@AustinRamsayGames
dawnbreak
@dawnbreak
Halceon
@Halceon

On fascists

Okay, this one's gonna be a little long and probably a bit personal.

It's not a big secret that most of the anglophone internet is basically an American sphere of influence. Most people you see there will be from USA and they will come with a USA perspective on things. This isn't amazing, but whatever. It works for me, because I don't physically live anywhere near there and it's kind of a horizons broadening thing. And if I need to detach from whatever the current american discourse is, I have entire other language spheres to go to.

Anyway, a few years ago I had to recalibrate my concept of antifa. Specifically, I was seeing a lot of "antifa is fighting the good fight" kind of stuff and that didn't match my experience. And here's why: I live next to Russia.

When I was growing up, I new the historical context of the words "fascist" and "nazi". Well, kind of. I knew where they came from. The belief and action content of the words was a little nebulous, but that's fine. But at it's core, it was understood that they refer to some kind of bad people who historically had committed genocide. Maybe in danger of becoming generalized words for "bad person". I'm sure other people

I credit my parents a lot with keeping the concept decay to such a benign level, because of the bear in the room. The USSR, in trying to justify it's imperial and genocidal drive (not very "to each according to their needs" of them) basically built their entire identity on the fact that they defeated the nazis/fascists in WW2. Sorry, Great Fatherland War. The core of this is based on a few syllogisms. Nazis/fasicsts = bad. Fighting nazis/fascists = good. Russians1 defeated nazis/fascists. Therefore russians = good; russian enemies = bad; russian enemies = nazis/fascists. The words nazi and fascist being completely interchangable in this context.

This way, it's impossible for a russian to be a fascist and everyone who in any way opposes Russian2 interests must be a fascist.

Fast forward 40 years, USSR falls apart, but the fighters against fascism idea lives on. And I get it, it's very seductive to be ontologically moral, to be always on the right side of history just by having been born of the correct nation. It's also complete bullshit, but when has that stopped people believing in things. Anyway, we're an independent country now, but the russophone infosphere has a lot of influence.

Ok, history aside over, back to more contemporary language. Chuds love the phrase "The fascists of the future will call themselves antifascists.” And in this part of the world it's kinda true. Kinda. There's a strong correlation between a group in Eastern Europe calling itself antifascist and pursuing russian imperialist interests; and as Russia turns more fascist, so do its client groups. It's of course, complex and diverse. There are, of course, fascists who call themselves whatever the current acceptable term is (nationalist, patriot etc.). And there are people who honestly oppose fascism and refer to themselves as such.

So I was primed to disregard any group called something like antifa. But people I generally trust and like kept bringing them up in good contexts and, possibly more importantly, the worst people you know kept raging about their activities. So I had to recalibrate that globally the word has become a contranym and I should be checking context every time.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that you, reader who statistically is probably closer to the american infosphere, should be also be aware of the redefinition of terms over here. When the Russian regime claims that it's acting against fascists, they're essentially just complaining about experiencing opposition. A Baltic state isn't making Russian an official state language – fascism! Letting people who fought the Soviet occupation have a remembrance event – FASCISM! Russian opposition leaders being poisoned and assassinated – not fascism, just apolitical unfortunate accidents.

Importantly, they might refer to actual fascists as fascists. This is incidental. The thing that makes them "fascists" is their opposition3 to Russian interests. Y'know, you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them". And importantly, if you have any media influence, you do not have to use their wording for things. Cause you probably don't agree what the words mean.

  1. I'm using "russians" here deliberately, because any illusion of equal brotherly nations should've been killed around the time of Holodomor. And also wasn't really part of the identity being constructed.

  2. Side note on capitalization. English does a bad job of distinguishing between state, nationality/ethnicity and language, usually just using the same capitalized adjective when pertaining to any of these. I think the distinction matters, so I'm using caps to refer to the state or language as those are "objects" and no caps for nationality, because that's a "property" of a person.

  3. There's an entire journalistic career that could be built on writing about how a lot of right wing radicalization in Europe is funded by Russia as a means of destabilization and justification for intervention.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Halceon's post:

modulusshift
@modulusshift

Hmm. Hearing "fighting Nazis" as the justification for invading Ukraine came off as delusional, but it makes sense it's part of a wider delusional framework.

In (at least leftist circles in) the US, we have guarded the actual definitions of fascists/Nazis pretty well, because we do have a history with that ideology, Hitler notably took inspiration from eugenicist and antisemitic Americans from the 1890's-1920's, such as Henry Ford. There are also some striking images of a Nazi rally held by the German-American Bund at Madison Square Garden in 1939, a thirty foot tall portrait of George Washington with Nazi symbolism all around, and twenty thousand people cheering. We've never been able to cleanly us vs. them Nazis, Nazis are too close to our Overton window. And while war works wonders in suppressing domestic sympathizers, it was unfortunately tempered by the Cold War being even more ideological, pushing our politics firmly back in that direction.

In hindsight, it may have been critically important that FDR was president from 1933 through the bulk of the war. (He is the only US President not to respect George Washington's informal precedent of pursuing only two terms, and that two term limit was amended into the Constitution in response to his four terms in office.) FDR was notably sympathetic to the USSR, being left-leaning himself, unlike Churchill who was forced into alliance with them by the realities of war. It's not impossible that under another leader we would have been more sympathetic to Germany, instead of stridently neutral due to FDR wishing fervently for an excuse to enter the war against Hitler that would satisfy the sympathizers and isolationists. He even won his third term in 1940 on the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of War!" After all, the American heartland had plenty of German immigrants who still spoke German as their first language, some of my own ancestors included. WWII effectively suppressed German as a language in the US, it pretty much only persists in small pockets in Texas and Pennsylvania. It still somewhat astonishes me that FDR managed to use an attack by the Japanese to justify entering the war with a focus on Europe to begin with. It's also notable that FDR ordered the Japanese internment camps for ethnic Japanese in the US, who were automatically suspected of allegiance to the Emperor, but made little attempt to do anything to ethnic Germans.

login to reply