• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Fascism is intolerable and should be resisted by any and ALL means.

    True. But also…

    If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.

    Civil Rights leaders of the 1960s were routinely described as bigoted, fascist, and psychotically violent. This lead to a country-spanning crack down on civil rights organizing in the 70s and 80s, and the functional extinction of national movement by the 2000s.

    We had a brief resurgence of civil rights protests following the Great Recession, which peaked with the BLM protests of the late 2010s. But media slanders quickly tarred these protest movements as violent and dangerous, while a rapid police response supplemented by our advanced national surveillance crushed the leadership in short order.

    The Gaza protests were quashed even faster and with still greater violence, while news media had Palestinian peace marchers tarred as Hamas terrorists and Russian double-agents.

    What do you do to resist fascism in a fascist nation, without being targeted and labeled a fascist yourself? What weight does the term “fascist” carry when it serves as nothing more than a label to legitimize state and vigilante violence?