General Politics Thread

Stuff the general public has known since Dr. Strangelove shouldn't count as news, it's just doomongering.

That is referring to the context of a war. I'm not suggesting that China will fire off nukes (or even just do public North Korea-style testing) right now. The point was more that I still consider a war between nuclear powers very dangerous, even though nobody's crazy enough to believe they could win a full-scale nuclear exchange, because of thought processes like that.

Edited by nrjxll on Aug 2nd 2022 at 8:33:26 AM

"Humanity is one step away from nuclear war" is one of those statements that's technically true but ultimately meaningless. It's more rhetorical flourish than realistic analysis.

When politicians fight: Making sense of physical violence in national legislatures. In which a pair of LSE researchers take a look at the moments over the past few decades where legislators the world over decided to go ham, and try to discern the common threads (though as a preliminary study, it doesn't claim any definitive conclusions). Some observations:

• Legislature brawls happen more in countries that are "middle of the pack": neither very democratic nor very authoritarian. Strong democratic institutions and authoritarian control over the legislature both reduce the likelihood of parliamentary processes peaking in powerbombs.

• Violence is also more likely to be employed as a disruptive tactic by fringe parties, who seek out to energise their base and bring attention to themselves by slamming and suplexing the senatorial supermajority.

Systemic slides towards authoritarianism seem to have different, context-dependent effects on parliamentarian violence. For instance, brawls in the Russian State Duma, a common occurrence in the '90s, died down under Putin's tightening authoritarian rule, while they became more common in the Turkish National Assembly under Erdoğan.

The latter makes sense. Putin is not a Trump-style populist demagogue (he's a top-down authoritarian), while Erdogan in many ways is.

For what I have read, Putin dosent really care that much on Duma, see them as useless most of the time.

Researchers have looked into over 12.5 million posts on 8 far-right, 7 salafi-jahidist, and 2 incel forums and found a very small elite of hyper-posters accounted for a third of all extremist posts.

Orban even brags that Hungary is an illiberal state.

Okay so continuing from this post

A couple of things I'd want to note.

I continue to define fascism as being, in part, rooted in an open opposition to liberalism and, more specifically, the "chaos" of parliament. The parliament is a host to different political parties that each espouse a particular ideology, fascism attacks this and places the state itself as the master of government. The Mussolini quote exemplifies that stance. The parliament is weak and the mewling of stuffed-shirt politicians who do not have the best interests of the people, the only salvation for the people is a powerful, centralized state that will *truly* service them via smoothing over class conflict, all power to the state, etc.

Now, I suppose I can see the difference between this and something like the current regimes in Hungary, Poland, and other countries in Eastern Europe and beyond, where there *are * opposition parties, but the ruling party is pushing more and more for eroding liberal democracy The parliament is not liquidated as a governing body yet. There's a difference between Lukashenko's Belarus, which is most definitely a fascist dictatorship, versus Orban's Hungary, where the opposition can still seat itself in parliament.

Where I disagree is the idea that military juntas are outside of this. The military junta operates under the ideal of the armed forces of a country being "above" the state, and focus their attacks on liberal democracy. It's supposedly meant to be "temporary" (though, in practice, it's not really common for military dictators to relinquish power willingly...it happens, but it's not common), but it still places the state in the same position as Mussolini advocated. Now, I guess you could argue that the more "radical" military dictatorships (I'd use Peron or Gaddafi as examples) differ from the "generic" ones (Pinochet, Stroessner, Suharto, etc.), but there's still far too many similarities for me to say they should be grouped into their own two camps.

Edited by Diana1969 on Sep 24th 2022 at 9:57:39 PM

@Diana

Velasco in Peru is touted as leftist, but personally I still view him as fascist. He's mostly touted as a leftist for his land reform campaign (which isn't exclusively a leftist policy...Marcos, Pahlavi, and Park all committed to vast land reforms), his ties to the USSR, and his "revolutionary" rhetoric. I honestly do not see Velasco as any different than someone like Gaddafi or Nasser, who touted themselves as "socialist" but were openly anti-communist and advocated a mix of traditionalist conservative and ostensibly "revolutionary" positions.

And frankly, I think there's a line of continuity between Velasco, Peron, and the pro-Nazi military socialist governments in Bolivia, which were also fascistic (Peron especially, for many, many reasons).

Edited by Diana1969 on Sep 26th 2022 at 12:45:50 AM

@Diana 1969

x3

That I do not deny. Obviously, totalitarianism is by it's nature opposed to liberalism.

I should clarify that I don't think military juntas are outside of fascism. They can be fascist, and they can not be fascist. A military junta is just a type of government. Fascism, I would say, is both an ideology and a system. The ideology and system of fascism is completely compatable with a military junta.

What I was claiming is that the more 'generic' (I don't like using that descriptor but I can't think of a better one) anti-communist Cold War juntas like Pinochet or Suharto weren't fascist simply by virtue of being authoritarian regimes. From what I know about them, they didn't have the philosophy of totalitarianism that marks fascist regimes.

You can argue that there was no practical difference, and alright I can see that. But fascism is both a "what" and a "why" (meaning, "what they do" and "why they do it"). A military junta is simply a "what" and isn't inherently bound to any specific "why".

Edited by Risa123 on Sep 25th 2022 at 7:02:36 PM

I don't believe in that anymore. Leftism is a spectrum of ideologies with some overlapping ideals.

Even the 1940's military socialist regimes in Bolivia tried courting the Indigenous population, and that was an obvious pro-Nazi government. Velasco's attempts to court the Indigenous population definitely led to him gaining some support (I've talked to one Indigenous activist who praised him and his coup, and theres others in Peru who praise him) but he was suppressing other groups on the left like APRA.

Even then, fascists often use vaguely "left" rhetoric to make populist appeals to the masses.

Could you explain what you mean by a philosophy of totalitarianism?

Just stupid cynicism I guess idk, it's not really relevant.

I mean the ideology behind fascism, which I summed up with the Mussolini quote ("All within the state ...") from before.

Edited by m-95 on Sep 25th 2022 at 2:53:30 PM

Ohhh, that.

Well, I don't really see how that's different in the case of Pinochet or Suharto?

Don't know whether this is the right place to ask this but can someone explain what a Kindleberger Trap is? Came across that term in this article

India and the Kindleberger Trap: Multipolarity Amid the Taiwan Crisis

It's from the article linked there:

Basically that China refusing to act in a way fitting with it becoming a major global power (and instead remaining focused purely on its own limited interests) will create instability.

@Diana 1969

So, about the (supposed) difference between totalitarian regimes and those which are just authoritarian. For a regime to be authoritarian, it just has to remain in charge of the country.

Totalitarian regimes have higher aspiration, they as the name implies want total control. Not just control, but transformation of the country. That is why the Mussolini quote is relevant. I genuinely like it because it describes what a totalitarian regime wants to be in a short and clear manner. This is, for example, why youth organizations are a feature common to both Nazism and Stalinism.

The goal is to control the life of a citizen from childhood to death, not just to be in charge. It also should be even more intolerant to dissent. Authoritarian regime can in theory at least tolerate some dissent as long as it is not dangerous to them. It does not have to care what people think as long as they are not dangerous to it.

A totalitarian regime wants to eliminate all dissent and force people to accept its ideology or be destroyed.

Are there any examples of a country in the last 100 years or so that was afflicted with rampant corruption in a majority if not the totality of the state institutions, but managed to eventually purge said corruption and put itself on a much better path? I'm trying to find if there are even remotely viable data points to draw upon for a near-future scenario revolving around the possibility of Russia extricating itself from the horribly messed up state it is in (I'm assuming that a wide-scale popular revolution had erupted and successfully overthrown the Putinist regime and miraculously managed to install relatively non-corrupt leaders in their place).

Edited by MarqFJA on Sep 30th 2022 at 5:00:43 PM

I think your real question is, "Is there precedent in post-revolutionary Russia for a popular overthrow of Putin's government?" To which the answer is "no."

Well, I've said before, but the way I view fascism is that it does not necessarily *require* a proposal for a total transformation of society, though it can sometimes include that. That's the problem of viewing fascism through the lens of Hitler and Mussolini: it's not always going to play out that way. Did Japanese fascism advocate a total transformation of the country? It certainly had, as described here, an aspiration to control life from childhood to death, but it was an outgrowth of Japanese society at the time, not really a transformation in the guise of a pseudo-"revolution" like Hitler and Mussolini pushed for.

In the case of military dictatorships being fascist, I really think it's just down to the conditions of these given countries. In Latin America's case, the history of the old caudillos was the bedrock for the fascist caudillos of Vargas, Peron, and beyond. It is an historical outgrowth that emulated the fascist movements in Europe (Vargas took influence from Salazar, Peron took influence from Mussolini and later sought out refuge in Francoist Spain). The old caudillos weren't exactly looking to bring about a transformation, they were seeking stability in the face of economic and political turmoil. Fascists in Latin America only continued that. How many juntas go by some variant of a committee of "national restoration" and other names? Some populist nonsense about returning stability until "the time is right" For democracy, whenever the fuck that would be. Pinochet was only removed from power when he lost a referendum he had hoped would keep his position intact. He wanted a state of "stability" where the dissent of the left-wing, of the communists and social democrats and whoever else opposed him, would be swept away and crushed. I don't know, to me it feels like a particular variant of fascism that's rooted more in the particular circumstances and histories of these countries. A "classical" variant a la National Socialism wouldn't rise to power, even if we've had a few leaders that sought to emulate it to a degree.