No I’m not catastrophising.
The world is slowly lurching towards a fully fascist led America, India, Hungary, Russia, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Argentina.
Instead people are either ignorant or blaming “wokeism”* for their problems.
I have no clue what to do and this is literally a car crash in slow motion.
I’m despondent because I’m going to be crushed under the boot when the time comes and my morals get in the way of my survival instinct.
Humans are repeating the mistakes of the past. It’s just so anxiety inducing.
*Woke is a useless term promulgated by fascists to dog whistle the things they really want to hate - feminism, socialism, LGBTQIA+, immigration, brown/black people, equality and diversity.
I want to get mad at your apathy, but really, it just makes me sad.
Of course it won’t be the end. In the same way climate disaster isn’t the end of the world, but it is the end of the world as we know it.
A fascist takeover of many of the most powerful countries in the world wouldn’t mean the end for all, but it does mean the end for whoever is deemed “other”. In the case of 1930s/40s Germany, that was political opponents, Jews, disabled, and LGBT people.
Today and in the future, who knows what arbitrary definition of a person will be chosen to make people “other”. It could be anything from traditional hate categories like race or sexuality to something new like length of hair.
I don’t know what kind of person you are but you clearly feel confident that you won’t be one of the ones on the receiving end of violence and the fact you think that’s okay because it’s not happening to you is so… depressing. If you don’t have a moral compass for the sake of others, at least try and have one for the sake of yourself because as fascism rears its head, whatever demographic you fall into may be next at the receiving end of the violence.
Where did I say that? Just because I don’t agree with your extremely pessimist predictions means I think fascism is OK? WTF?
America, India and Russia where a terrible, terrible places for democracy and minorities for decades now. Only because you’re just now waking up to this fact doesn’t mean the world is sliding into fascism.
Netherlands, Germany and Italy still operate inside EU and still follow all the rules. EU has powerful tools for enforcing those rules, they just managed to force Hungary to back down over Ukraine funding. Poland just had w big swing to the left, as did Spain. EU is sliding to the right, yes, but it’s more a typical, generational shift than embrace of fascism.
Argentina has terrible economic issues, their populism is completely different.
Basically what’s going on is that the American illusion of a democracy is finally collapsing and since I don’t think it’s the end of the world I’m OK with fascism. We all should hold hands with Americans and help them cope with the realization their country is not as great as they thought…
I really don’t think you understand what facism really is…I think you’re looking at Republicans flirting with openly enacting facism, and thinking “well, if it’s just to that degree it’ll be ok”
Facism is like this - you have an authoritarian group, and they promise a perfect world if only everyone believed their ideology.
But their ideology is garbage, and so we’re going to have problems. And so they’re going to look around and say “it’s LGBT people, they’re ruining everything!”. Then they’re going to directly or indirectly outlaw their existence, and use that to imprison them.
They’ll milk it for as long as they can… But as this goes on, you get more and more “true believers” who escalate and speed up the process
But that’s not going to fix anything, obviously. So they’ll look around again for people they can declare different… Maybe it’s black people, or Mexicans, or alleged spies from China. Maybe it’s stem workers, or college grads. Maybe it’s just anyone who doesn’t play along hard enough, and we go the ideological purity route
But again, that’s only going to make things worse, so they’ll have to find someone else to target. They require an enemy to blame for everything that goes wrong. And a lot is going to go wrong…
You can say this is all hyperbolic, but it’s really not. The Nazis started just like this, with book bans, control over education, and going after trans people. Then they went after political opposition, then things really got into swing.
Oh, ok, I see what’s going on here. You see, since you started listing all those other countries I thought you actually are referring to global situation. Now I see you’re only talking about USA, That’s why I said you’re exaggerating. USA is not the whole world. The world will be fine. USA taking more isolationist stance may even be good for everyone else. But thanks for explaining to me, an European, what fascism is. We really don’t know anything about it here. Only Americans understand this phenomenon. Can you also explain to me what democracy and freedom is?