this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Yep. Claim victimhood. Fascism 101.
Fascists are boring. It's the same strategy for almost a hundred years. Orwell on Hitler:
Today's mice are an incredibly marginalised and incredibly small sexual minority. But fascists will pretend they're not, that they're part of the elite trying to cause degeneracy. Not billionaire rapists like Musk or Trump.
Not as if fascists are going to actually fix the big shit, like the economy, the environment, or affordable housing. Not as if they're going to stand up to the countries actually threatening western values, like Russia or China. No. Now they've decided it's some nobody in the arse end of America, who feels happier wearing a dress.
People who fall for that shit are morons. Not that most fascists actually believe their own bullshit. They just do it shock and disconcert people, and because they hate those they perceive weaker than them. Just like their Dear Leader considers them scum, has regularly said he is disgusted by them, because they're so weak that they've chosen to lick his boots.
What you write on argumentative strategy absolutely pertains to the topic and I'd say it also holds true. I just don't really see what it has to do with fascism. Aren't you conflating a couple of things here?
Even when "Fascism traditionally employs that rhetoric" holds true, there's no way that "Someone employing that rhetoric must be a fascist" can ever follow from that. A fascist might be a very special kind of moron, but it's dangerous to then start calling every moron "fascist", because it lessens the impact of that term, devalues it, if that makes sense. It makes undermining actual fascism much harder.
Their leader calls journalists vermin and they go on about the 'Lugenpresse', his followers shoot up synagogues, allied media spread Nazi/far right inspired anti-semitic canards like Cultural Marxism ('Kulturbolshewismus'), they go on about how the '''left wing intellectual elite''' are trying to undermine western values and cause a decline of morals and degeneracy ('Entartung'), they're afraid of difference, they hold the weak in contempt, they abhor nuance so use a limited newspeak vocabulary to limit critical reasoning, they're obsessed with plots, and on social media many of his followers spread the Q-anon conspiracy which is a reworking of the antisemtic blood libel canard.
Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is a duck.
Here's a Sartre quote that's also increasingly relevant (again):
I presume we're no longer talking about the movie's marketing department...?
What I'm reading here are things in the lines of "Good faith anti-Semitism doesn't exist" or "anti-Semitism is intrinsically confrontational and quarrelsome". I don't quite think that's a tenable position as it would be trivial to disprove. Am I misreading this? What is your take?
Are you sure the line is concerned with anti-Semitism in general and not only with a very specific kind of anti-Semite (e.g. mid-century, mid-Europe, Bierkellerputsch-y types)?