The narrative of "If you don't like unfettered illegal immigration you're a Nazi" has really lost its stopping power. No one in the centre believes that anymore and most mainstream political parties see the problem quite clearly. What you decry as the rise of fascism is really just the decline in persuasiveness of this tired rhetoric.
The most charitable interpretation of your statement is that it's a straw man argument. Who said anything about "unfettered illegal immigration"? Even that's an objetively false characterization.
Take the Haitian migrants in Ohio that are currently the victims of intentional blood libel. As an aside, identifying, villifying and demonizing an out-group like this, particularly to intentionally incite violence against them, is a key aspect of fascism.
The objective falsehood here is that they're "illegal immigrants". They're not. They're Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") holders. It is 100% legal and moral to seek asylum.
And then we proceed to the myth of "the center", much like the myth of the "swing voter". What the US has politically is a choice between the far-right and the center-right who have completely capitulated to far-right messaging on immigration.
Every aspect of far-right anti-immigrant messaging is verifiably and objectively false. The latest lie is "they're eating the cats" [1] but there are so many more. The "migrant crime" hysteria is blood libel [2].
Where? In the first available country of safe refuge because you're fleeing political persecution or war? Yeah, I'd say that's 100% legal and moral. That's how you get from Syria to Turkiye.
Is it legal and moral to then pass through 5 or 6 countries on your way to the USA or Sweden and request "asylum" because you want to find safe refuge in the country that has the best economic opporunity (or benefits)? How about buying a plane ticket from MENA to Mexico and then claiming asylum at the US border? Certainly the Mexican gov't isn't beholden to whatever dictator you were escaping in the Middle East. Could it be you're actually just abusing the asylum system to improve your economic outlook?
Mayyybe that abuse is legal, but if you want to say it's moral you'll have to answer to the millions of people who pay money, fill out the forms, and immigrate to the US legally in search of the same opportunities. My take on it would be that cutting the line isn't moral, but maybe your values differ.
I’m a legal immigrant and I had to wait in line like everyone else. How is that fair to people like me when someone cuts in line?
I’m not exactly from a “paradise country” myself so I understand these people very well so please don’t use that “you don’t know their situation” talking point with me. We all feel for them but we need to be practical. Rules are rules and they must be followed. That’s how societies function.
I’m a legal immigrant too. But I don’t take issue with people escaping horrible circumstances and making a better life in my country. Nor do I see it as “cutting in line.”
How? Them being allowed to stay will significantly reduce the chances of those who play by the rules and follow the standard process.
Also you’re implicitly supporting a sort of “hunger games” and think that it’s perfectly acceptable to allow immigrants to risk their lives in the Mediterranean/English Channel/Sahara etc. for a chance to get in.
Of course it’s not your personal fault and in any case it doesn’t matter as long as you don’t think about it but thousands of people are dying because ignoring the rules became an option.
Yes, I always point out the journey a lot of them take to the USA is extremely dangerous. I wouldn’t care if it were just grown men doing this since they have some life experience but a lot of times these are children not “teenagers” but literal kids being guided by strangers.
I know people who have crossed illegally through Mexico and the horrors they witnessed, it’s inhumane. So glad you pointed this out in your comment.
Well I won’t be in that situation in the foreseeable future, and I’d rather make my life better at the polls than altruistically throw a bone to strangers
> In the first available country of safe refuge because you're fleeing political persecution or war? Yeah, I'd say that's 100% legal and moral. That's how you get from Syria to Turkiye.
Is it moral to put the burden on a random country (Turkey in this case) just because it happens to border a country at war? Why shouldn't the huge economic costs be spread out more evenly?
Why should Turkey accept any immigrants that have no right to asylum? Why should the spreading of economic migrants all over europe be morally correct towards any european citizen? Why should anyones hard earned tax money go towards such people and not our own? In Germany, bridges are collapsing and the train network is massively underfunded and derelict which would need a massive investment. And yet, there is no money left. I wonder what is such a massive financial drain that this can't be done.
That’s quite a claim. Any evidence that Germany’s purported lack of money for fixing their infrastructural issues is due to immigration? Because it sounds a lot like the baseless red meat that the far right likes to throw at their base. (See “£350m a week for the NHS.”)
I did not say that this is the main reason, I said it is a drain on taxpayers money. And since every migrant costs lots of money, not just directly in the form of unearned social welfare but indirectly due to health insurance, etc., this is money that can not otherwise be used - for example, as investments into infrastructure. Paying welfare to millions of economic migrants is simply not possible without other areas suffering and, as can be seen from recent polls, is not wanted by many Germans.
But if the total “drain” is, for example, 1%, especially when other budget categories are much larger slices of the pie, then it is effectively a non-issue. And you also have to factor in the economic contributions of immigrants, many of whom presumably have jobs and pay taxes. So having the actual numbers on hand is very important. (Even if we’re assuming that Germany’s declining infrastructure is due to lack of money, which seems suspect to me. More likely to simply be a lack of political will.)
Germany is struggling to meet its 2% military budget requirement, as mandated by the EU. It's not a non-issue at all. And other budget categories - like healthcare - are already expensive, not only for the government spending but normal people because contributions are rising.
> And you also have to factor in the economic contributions of immigrants, many of whom presumably have jobs and pay taxes.
Yes, a whole third has some form of employment. And employment can also mean a mini job that pays practically no taxes and costs the taxpayer due to additional payments for rent, etc. The number of migrants who actually contribute is small. The rest receives welfare.
> And then we proceed to the myth of "the center", much like the myth of the "swing voter". What the US has politically is a choice between the far-right and the center-right who have completely capitulated to far-right messaging on immigration.
A gradient or spectrum always has a centre. It's less a myth and more of a mathematical property for this sort of object.
Your inability to see this centre as the centre is just you broadcasting that you're a political extremist. If you stand insanely far enough to the left I'm sure everyone looks like a Christian fundamentalist. Similarly if you stand far enough to the right everyone looks like a cat-eating illegal immigrant. It must be tough to live like this but I don't think you saying "Everyone else is conservative" bolsters your credibility the way you think it does.
Well Americans keep voting in the successors to a a racist, segregationist openly pro KKK party (and I’m obviously not talking about the Republican party). I don’t see any fundamental problems with that, though. People and organizations change over time.
As much as one might dislike someone like Meloni she isn’t exactly Mussolini or closer to him in almost any way than to liberal/moderate politicans.
I don’t care much for Meloni but how exactly is she fascist or anything like that, compared to most other conservative politicians (who I don’t care much for either..)?
I’m not talking about parties like AfD or others funded by (objectively) fascist regime in Russia.
My original comment doesn't claim these parties are exactly fascist or nazi, but that it's reasonable to call them fascist and nazi. Given we have the hindsight of WWII, flirting with fascism or nazism is bad enough. One doesn't need to tick every box and grow a Chaplin mustache.
If a bunch of fools join a party with roots in, and affection for, fascism, then decent people ought just to call them 'fascists'. There are only so many hours in a day. If an Italian, post '45, still has any doubt that fascism was a disaster, then he or she is a dangerous idiot: not worth splitting hairs over.
If others want to wade in a metaphorical lake of vomit and entertain excuses like 'only some of them are nazis' or 'the roman salute might have been ironic' or 'they just said that to trigger the woke leftists' then fine, that's their business.
I'm too old to bother. I'm not going to weep myself remorsefully to sleep over calling cretins 'fascists' or 'nazis'
One might as well argue over whether it's acceptable to call a lady who occasionally kills kittens, a 'cat killer'; with the opposing view being "but she's not a career cat killer"
This seems like an extremely high bar, that doesn’t seem to be practical in real world conditions (in the context of people like Meloni, not people who openly call themselves fascist/nazis and/or embrace their ideological beliefs).
Why don’t we apply the same standards to British Conservative politicians?
Why aren’t they expected to unequivocally denounce Churchill and most other major British politicians that preceded him (I’m not directly equating him personally with Mussolini but he and many other British prime ministers before him were brutal imperialists whose actions regularly directly or indirectly resulted in millions of deaths). I don’t see how British Imperialism was somehow fundamentally inherently less evil than Italian Fascism (it might have been to some extent but where do we draw the line?). Yet we accept or tolerate all sorts of symbolism from that period with little controversy.
British Empire might not be on the same level as Nazi Germany, the USSR, Mao’s China but I don’t see how it (or British Imperialism as an ideology) was particularly less evil than Fascist Italy.
On one hand it didn’t ally itself with an even more evil and genocidal regime (largely due to strategic reasons and not ideological affinity, these were still rival ideologies after all), was a limited democracy and occasionally allowed some freedom of speech on the other hand it did directly cause much more deaths and suffering over its existence). I think the main difference is that Britain (unlike Italy) was actually actually good at subjugating and exploiting other countries (with an occasional “lite” genocide mixed in), therefore it was in a position to shape the historical narrative and we have collectively decided that their positive contributions more or less outweigh all of the other stuff..
What I said might sound pretty distasteful, maybe even disgusting but I don’t see how is it particularly worse than selective [hypocritical] moral indignation).
Meloni isn’t anymore fascist than Boris Johnson is someone who wants to re-subjugate Ireland and reestablish the British empire.
And what other options are there? If we demonize people like her we’ll just end up with someone who might actually publicly embrace fascist values and ideas and would actually openly support fascist states like Russia (unless there is some way to suddenly convert 20-30% or of the electorate in Italy and other European countries to social-liberalism…).
Although FdI rejects the "neo-fascist" label, it has been applied due to the party's history dating back to the Italian Social Movement, its far-right ties, its appeal to neo-fascist themes on social media like Facebook, and some party leaders' nostalgia for Italian fascism, including Roman salutes. Some party members have celebrated Benito Mussolini, with fascist memorabilia in some local offices. Some members of the Mussolini family have run for FdI, such as Rachele Mussolini, granddaughter of Mussolini, for the City Council of Rome, and Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, great-grandson of Mussolini, for the 2019 European Parliament election.
According to Expo, it is generally agreed that the Sweden Democrats have never been a neo-Nazi party, although some of the SD's early members and founders had previously been connected with Swedish fascist and white nationalist groups. A study by Expo documented that around nine of the original 30 people who played a role in founding the SD had direct associations to known Nordic fascist organisations such as the New Swedish Movement and the neo-Nazi Nordiska rikspartiet, although most of these members were no longer active within the party by the mid-1990s. The party's first auditor, Gustaf Ekström, was a Waffen-SS veteran and had been a member of the national socialist party Svensk Socialistisk Samling in the 1940s. The SD's first chairman Anders Klarström and deputy board members and party co-founders Fritz Håkansson and Sven Davidson had all been active in the Nordic Realm Party. Klarström later elaborated he had briefly been part of the NRP as a teenager before distancing himself from it by the time he became SD leader. The SD's logo from the 1990s until 2006 was a version of the torch used by the British National Front. Political historian Duncan McDonnell has argued that it is disputed as to whether the SD was explicitly founded to be a neo-fascist movement, but it was widely known to publicly align itself with extreme fringe politics and faced criticism in the late 1980s and early 1990s for attracting skinhead gangs to its public events.
'Only' 30% of the original SD were fascists or neo-Nazis. My bad /s
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"What you decry as the rise of fascism is really just the decline in persuasiveness of this tired rhetoric."
> Some members of the Mussolini family have run for FdI, such as Rachele Mussolini, granddaughter of Mussolini, for the City Council of Rome, and Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, great-grandson of Mussolini, for the 2019 European Parliament election.
Son of Rachele, or some other branch? Either way, some humongous balls on his parents there, naming him Caius Julius Caesar... (Wonder how much that fucked him up?)
> > What you decry as the rise of fascism is really just the decline in persuasiveness of this tired rhetoric.
> Sigh.
Yeah well, sucks to be wrong. Best you can do is man up, admit it, change your views to conform with reality, and move on.
