Mastodawn

Gary Houston Sep 19, 2025

@ThatWeltschmerz It's all intense these days, free speech vs outlawing hate speech, and open borders vs ethnicities with their own territories. Europeans remembering their own colonisations and fearing the reverse?

I remember when it took off in the Netherlands with Pim Fortuyn. He had a particular objection (as a gay man) to Muslim immigration, seeing the immigrants as non-integrating and religiously conservative. I suppose his right wing successors are mostly Christian conservative.

@ghouston

Yeah, the right (broadly speaking) has really conflicting ideas about Muslims: on one hand, they think they're all rapists and pederasts who won't ever properly integrate and whose values are just totally different from and irreconcilable with "ours".

On the other hand, they often really approve of their own stereotyped Muslims (based on what they've seen of entities like the Taliban or life under ISIS): extreme control freaks with respect to women, religiously conservative, often antisemitic, violently homophobic, etc.

Ultimately, it's not really about religion, cultural identity, integration or anything like that. It's about dominance and power. Immigrants generally, and asylum-seekers in particular, are generally people with no real power in the world, and because fascists are giant bullies, those immigrants are targets. But in Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia, Muslims aren't a beleaguered minority: their most fundamentalist assholes are the ones with real power. So those ones are cool and worthy of respect.

Depending on who you ask, they're the same about Latin American immigrants in the US.

Gary Houston Sep 19, 2025

@ThatWeltschmerz Some of the "non-integration" is surely imposed on certain groups through discrimination by employers, police, etc.

Then they can end up wanting to make money by irregular means, if they want to succeed in this "money is the most important thing" system we've got. Cue lots of articles about higher crime rates among those with certain immigrant backgrounds.

@ghouston

Yeah, agreed on all counts. And let's be honest: there are people who benefit from maintaining a deeply marginalized underclass (e.g., people who own companies and want to keep labor cheap, a massive law enforcement and security industry, etc.).

I don't agree that the reason fascists persecute immigrants is because they just love bullying people. Fascists do it for a more emotionless, clinical reason. They are manufacturing an enemy, a bogeyman that they can use to manipulate the majority into doing their bidding. They don't really hate immigrants, not the ones creating this propaganda. They're just using them to influence their true target: people of their own nation, who are not yet in chains. Those are who fascists hate. The independent, and the free.

So either they (literally) hate freedom, or they're duped into thinking some minority is an actual dangerous threat. But few of them do it just for the fun of being a dickbag.

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Gary Houston Sep 19, 2025

@cy @ThatWeltschmerz Are you suggesting that fascists have some higher calling than simply obtaining power for its own sake and then using it to bully people? What do fascists actually want?

Generally someone said something they didn't like once, and so they want to throw a temper tantrum and hurt that person without getting in trouble. Some of them hurt as many people as they can, just because they can get away with it. Far as I'm concerned, fascists are just anyone who (for whatever reason) seek to make people obedient and predictable, to reduce man to machine, citizen to slave.
simply obtaining power for its own sake and then using it to bully people?
It's a seductive trick to believe that obtaining power for its own sake is bad. The bullying is what's bad. Taking power away from others and subjugating them to your will. If you can get more power without doing that, then please do!

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@cy @ghouston

I basically agree with almost all of this, but I think all the points you raise here still ultimately come down to power and domination. Sometimes that takes the form of straight up "bullying" (in the broad sense of intimidating or violently attacking people who are already in a weaker position than oneself), and sometimes, as you say, it's about creating fear of the "other" with the objective of making "people of their own nation" dependent the fascists and, ultimately, compliant.

I'm not suggesting that people should go out and read it, but this is spelled out pretty clearly in, for instance, 'The Turner Diaries.' The neo-nazi insurgents in that book attack and kill their pronounced enemies (most prominently Jews, Black people, Latin American immigrants, and white people who collaborate with any/all of the above), but their main goal is to destabilize the state so that regular (white) people will turn to the fascists because the fascists can offer stability, where the government can't. And then, with the war won, the fascist utopia begins, and there's no way that means actual independence or freedom, despite what fascists may promise.

So I think this way of thinking is pretty deeply rooted and widespread in fascist ideology.

The one thing here that I really disagree with: I believe they do, in fact, hate immigrants. They don't hate them in the same way that they hate "race traitors," but they do hate them. They fear them, and they think that they pose a threat to the "future for white children" or whatever (it's not only overt neo-nazis who think this way). That kind of fear, coupled with a pronounced lack of empathy, will basically lead to hate and even eliminationism pretty much every time.

Really there are two kinds of fascists. The first kind of fascists don't even victimize minorities. They keep their hands squeaky clean. Their victims are majorities, who will then victimize minorities. They become fanatically devoted to fascism, which makes them also fascists, but not in the same way. People who think immigrants are a threat to white children are deluded fools, but the ones making them think that are something else entirely.

CC: @[email protected]

@cy @ghouston

I'm not sure how you can make that distinction. As far as I know, Hitler never actually killed anyone himself (apart from as a soldier in WWI, but that's not what we're talking about here). He was a (certain kind of) fascist and the people who supported him -- some of whom were fanatical devotees who killed lots of people -- were also fascists.

David Lane, who concocted the "14 words" slogan (where the "future for white children" thing comes from), "kept his hands clean" insofar as other people did lots of violence under the banner of that slogan without his direct involvement. But he also spent decades in prison for murder.

I mean, I don't really think there is one without the other: social movements have their intellectuals and their footsoldiers (and some people manage to be both). And when people carry out violent actions in the name of fascist ideologies, typically both are implicated.

I guess I'm just confused about how the people with the clean hands "don't victimize minorities" while "their victims are majorities who victimize minorities." It's all still "kicking down" in a kind of pyramid scheme of violence.