Politics in Media - The Good, the Bad, and the Preachy

I disagree. German fascists who promoted the myth of the "Clean Wehrhmacht", who were members of the NSDAP and supported its genocidal campaign of Lebensraum, very much promoted loyalty and discipline within their ranks. Imperial Japan was similar.

I would appreciate knocking it off with the strawmanning and the condescension, this is not the first we've had this happen and I'm getting very tired of it.

Yeah, it isn't the first time we've had people argue that everything totalitarian is automatically fascist against people who argue that things are more nuanced. It does get very old, but I'm not sure I have a lot of respect for the first side.

I'm literally not arguing that, though?

Did Kemalism have an "our culture is under threat from others" element that Nazism had with the whole Aryan purity bullshit? After all, the whole narrative of "a great culture that was degraded by foreigners" is a core aspect of fascism isn't it, while Kemal Attaturk was more fond of western ideals of secularism and republicanism, than his own country's past wasn't he?

I have also heard Hitler was inspired by the British Raj too which was hardly fascist. Hitler saw what he wanted to see and cherry picked what he liked from others which was mostly their worst aspects and nothing else. I also heard Attaturk had a quite diverse group of people who were inspired by him, from Hitler to Nehru.

Edited by xyzt on Sep 24th 2022 at 4:29:12 PM

I mean, he was western influenced, but he'd use the British as a boogeyman quite often, and his "republicanism" was still a one-party state (he "wanted" a multiparty state but, in practice, he still ruled as an "enlightened dictator"). That's not getting into the Turkification campaign which forced minorities to abandon their identities and language, never mind the mass resettling campaigns, the suppression of Kurdish rebellions with thousands of casualties, and a strong Turkish nationalism that was very much an idealized view of past history. Kemal literally promoted a pseudoscientific theory that all languages in the world date back to Turkish.

Considering the British Empire's reputation in the Middle East and beyond, that really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Sep 24th 2022 at 12:56:15 PM

It's not, but it was also obviously opportunistic. Kemal pursued good relations with the British government, but he'd blame Kurdish rebellions on foreign influence.

A qualification to this is that presenting themselves as a "third way" representing the extremes of both ends of social discontentment is how the Nazis originally got their name (before purging the parts that were more "Zi" than "Na" to secure Hitler's leadership over the party).

The classic examples of democratic governments could both be considered illiberal to different degrees. Ancient Athenian democracy was explicitly non-universal enfranchisement. The democracy of the modern US is theoretically universal, but has accessible and constitutional mechanisms for depriving citizens of their voting rights, and half its legislature is intentionally non-representative.

Basically, "democracy" just means "people get to vote on what their government does". The fewer people get to vote, and the less impact their votes have, the more illiberal the democracy, with dictatorships with democratic trappings like fake elections on the far end.

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 24th 2022 at 12:26:51 PM

So, like Orban's government in Hungary, right? Where there's an obvious powerful party that's corrupt, kinda dictatorial, and thumbs its nose at liberal democracy, but the parliamentary system is still *technically* going on with a sizable opposition? I guess that makes sense.

Hitler didn't "purge all the socialists", the NSDAP was still committed to an ideal of "national socialism" that was rooted in Spengler's "Prussian socialism" (itself inspired by some of Bismarck's policies). It's, in essence, a conservative socialism that is meant to be anti-Marxist. He just purged a more radical faction within the NSDAP who had a particular idea of national socialism that Hitler and his followers didn't buy into.

Edited by Diana1969 on Sep 24th 2022 at 9:15:13 PM

Yes, Hungary would be a good example.

(Also, yes, I was oversimplifying the Night of the Long Knives. I've edited my comment to be closer to my intended level of flippancy.)

Edited by Noaqiyeum on Sep 24th 2022 at 1:43:21 PM

Okay, I think I get it now. So like Hungary, Poland, *maybe* Iran and Turkey? I guess you could call Russia a case of an illiberal democracy, but at this point I think it's pretty obviously fascist.

I suspect we're getting a bit off topic.

RE: Parable

I'd consider fascism to be the political system & theory of - as Benito Mussolini put it - "All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state". It's totalitarianism pursued as an end in and of itself. Though most variants of fascism equate the state with some other ideal (e.g. Nazism does so with the Aryan race), but the general idea of the state (often equated with a national identity) as the highest wordly good.

That's what sets it apart from Marxist-Leninism (which sees 'state socialism' as merely a step in history) and more 'generic' right-wing juntas (who frame themselves as authorities meant to deal with a specific problem, usually left-wing opposition).

I agree. Is there a "politics and history general" thread somewhere here?

Edited by m-95 on Sep 24th 2022 at 7:27:39 AM

There's the General Politics thread, we can continue it there.

Amusingly, defining fascism is also a topic this thread comes back around to on a regular basis.

In general I will have to side with Spartan here Diana, authocracy is more a model and sometimes autocrat because personal preference often can swing one way of another, Chavez was autocrat indeed and engage in many thing we can call facist like natonalism and militaristic past against imperalism but he didnt engage in this cult of violence for violence sake for example.

I think the reason people often conflate things is because at pratical level it feel kinda sorta the same: people in power who crush people below them, when someone is trying to put a boot in your face forever, is hard to care what color it is, so to speak. Is also another reason why "vaguely whatever" ideology crop of often.

I've already linked to the General Politics thread to continue this, but I'm just going to briefly say that I don't agree that a "cult of violence for violence's sake" is an inherent part of fascism.

To get us back on track a bit, I think this is actually a really interesting question. I can't think of any good answers though, so I tried to think of the ideologies of recent iconic villains and I can't really think of any. Our villains keep getting grayer, and our heroes spent a long time getting deconstructed, so it's hard to identify clear themes of positive and negative ideologies.

So as a separate, supporting question: What are some recent villains with clear ideologies, and what do you think those ideologies are?

Edited by Readersprite on Sep 24th 2022 at 10:32:21 AM

Let's see. AFAIK

• Magia Record:
  • The Wings of the Magius (again): Meguka liberation and supremacy. The torch is then carried by the Neo Magius after Iroha and co convicnes the former to give up the latter bit (and until she eventually convicned them to do likewise)
  • Folklore of 0: a nihilistic Resignation. Namely the idea that fate itself will conspire to foil any attempt to quell the suffering that becoming a puella magi entails, and will render harsh judgment onto them for even trying.
• Black Panther: Killmonger, wants Wakanda to share its resources and prosperity with the rest of the world. Succeeds in that part as T'Challa opens Wakanda up.
• Arknights prolly has several that is better ask in its thread. I think the relevant bit here for his similar to Killmonger here is Andolin and his Pathfinders from the ongoing Guide Ahead event, similar in motive (wanting their people to share their gifts and prosperity, in this case the gifts are the Skanta race's extreme empathy) but here has more of a tinge of futility [[spoiler: as the source of said empathy is some sort of Deus est Machina AI that also binds them to its "law" meaning that even if they wanted too, their special gifts couldn'[t be shared with the other races of Terra. Worth noting that despite the killmonger comparison, Laterano is more of analogy of both Switzerland and the Vatican)
• The Owl House: Belos, Puritanical hatred of Witches/Demons and by extension a desire to exterminate them (for framing's sake, keep in mind that they aren't Madoka-style witches)
• MCU in general: Thanos, Malthusianism. Plain and Simple

They're a bit fuzzy TBH, but that is more on there being a fine line betwixt philosophy and ideology IMHO. And only the MCU ones can certainly be claimed to have pierced the cultural zeitgeist

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Sep 24th 2022 at 7:49:27 AM

possibly the Golden Path leaders in Far Cry 4? i haven't played through it all the way, so i can't offer too much insight.

Most of the factions in Fallen London aren't strictly villains, though some are much more so than others.

• The Judgements: Absolute monarchy - "Our Word is Law"
• The New Sequence: Technocratic futurism - "The sun will never set on the British Empire, we built our own to make sure of it"
• The Presbyterate: Theocratic oligarchy - "No one is allowed to live forever, no one anoints our new pope, old popes retire by ritually becoming 'no one'"
• The Iron Republic: National anarcho-libertarianism - "Hell is for the Devils, we import souls to keep it that way at the price the market demands, caveat emptor"
• The Revolutionaries -
  • Liberationists: Anarcho-accelerationism - "No gods, no masters, no idea what comes next"
  • Emancipationists: Socialist pacifism, sort of? Not sure what a good term would be. They just want to establish their own sanctuary city but don't have any plans to stop their oppressors from going on making new victims, and can end up uncomfortably close to the Iron Republic as a result
  • Prehistoricists: Fully-automated luxury green Neath communism - "It isn't 'uplifting extinct organisms into specialised slave races', it's 'achieving post-scarcity through genetically-engineered labour-saving devices'"

One's a genocidal hypernationalist theocrat and the other's a wannabe drug-lord who wants to turn the nation into an enormous opium farm powered by slave labor, because the politics of Far Cry often boil down to "hey you know dictators? You know how they're really terrible? Well everyone who wants to get rid of them is also terrible so suck it up and pick fifty green plants and one terrible leader to not kill."

I suppose you could argue the second is just some kind of weird corporatist who's trying to turn the country into a company, but the first seems pretty close to actually fascist.

It is possible for Ajay to get rid of them too, but having him in charge of Kyrat arguably isn't much better.

Depending on how you play him, Ajay still has a better moral compass compared to all others. After all, he still maintained some agency like him deciding that he would be the judge of Noore Najjar's fate and still having some sympathy for her situation compared to everybody else. Or even later when he is told by one of the 2 leaders of the rebels to off the other and you can choose whether to have him go with that or refuse at the end.

Far Cry 6 seems to have ditched the Evil vs. Evil angle for once, from what I heard.