• Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Replace the word race with party

    That’s a pretty significant difference, don’t you think? Exalting racism and exalting a political organization that opposes racism are diametrically opposed things, not equivalent.

    • cooljacob204@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Let’s not act like certain race and cultures didn’t get heavily oppressed in USSR and China.

      No idea why op would even mention the political stuff.

      • socsa@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I would not be surprised if legitimately not a single person on hexbear has ever actually been to China. It’s an extremely racist place. The vast majority of hotels in China will not even rent a room to anyone without a Chinese passport. Even if you are traveling with Chinese people - if you look foreign, they will deny you service at a glance.

        I have been all over the world, and China is the only place where this happens.

    • Plibbert@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Not saying it is a fair exchange, you are correct. But do keep in mind the wording in the definition is “often”. My suggestion of replacement was to emphasize that race is not a requirement to the definition, it’s just pointing out that it is usually the characteristic used to define who is the most loyal or desired type of citizen. From what I understand party loyalty could be definitely be applied there.

      • Zuzak [fae/faer, she/her]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        There’s a reason that race is included though, and that reason is that fascism aims to strengthen and reinforce existing hierarchies. That generally includes race, gender, sexual orientation, class, disabilities, etc. Theoretically it’s conceivable that you could have a political project that includes all of that except for race, but in practice it’s extremely unlikely that a fascist project would exclude it, which is why it’s mentioned in the definition.

        Communists (esp. Marxist-Leninists) believe in using political power to reduce or remove these hierarchies, even if it requires the use of force. For instance, I think it’s good that slave owners in the US were forcibly suppressed and the people they enslaved were liberated. Does that “willingness to forcibly suppress the opposition” make me (and Lincoln) a fascist, even though my goals and values are completely opposite to those of fascists?

        If “the opposition” in your definition is taken to include groups that would also forcibly suppress their opposition given the opportunity, then it seems that Webster’s has unintentionally baked in assumptions from which the only conclusion is something like anarcho-pacifism, while labelling all states as inherently fascist. This is either a bad definition, or a bad interpretation of the definition.

        • Plibbert@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          That is a good point. It’s a really interesting application of the tolerance paradox. This is some good perspective I’m getting, glad I made this comment thread.