Maybe we should use a similar playbook but inversely to defeat fascism from within.
kvasir476@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Lol, many, many people knew that fascism would come from within and warned as such. Coincidentally, Sinclair Lewis wrote a book titled “It Can’t Happen Here” in 1935 about how a fascist would come to power in America. It’s been a while since I read it, but I recall it having some e eerily similar parallels to Trump’s rise to power.
birdwing@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yeah, precisely, a lot of successfully propigandized people believed American Exceptionalism grants a 100% nullification to internal Fascist corruption…
But, uh, more clever or curious or historically interested people have long known that… thats not true at all, lol.
Which, of course, is why the Republicans have been, for at least 40 years, had as a consistent plank of their policy and rhetoric be… public education should be defunded and destroyed.
Turns out, being uneducated actually grants a +100% bonus critical weakness to all kinds of propoganda.
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I haven’t read it but I will, eventually. But I must ask, I wonder though if George Lucas read the book and drew inspiration from it? Even some of the themes on how the republic fell and rise of the empire has kinda happened in real life. The toxic masculinity and alienation has real life parallel contributing to the decline of democracy, aside from the more obvious such as institutional corruption, wealth inequality and complacency. I also think Lucas was inspired from Hannah Arendt’s book, Origins of Totalitarianism, where she concluded that loneliness is precursor to totalitarianism. Anakin’s downfall is because he is lonely and alienated, and essentially told to “suck it up”. There is parallel to his experience and those in real life who have turned to the far right/dark side.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Lucas actually has directly stated that the original Star Wars trilogy was to some extent based off of the Vietnamese resistance to Western Imperialism.
amc.com/…/george-lucas-reveals-how-star-wars-was-…
“We’re fighting the largest empire in the world, and we’re just a bunch of hay seeds in coonskin hats that don’t know nothing,” he says, referencing the American Revolution against the British Empire, and how he based the heroes of Star Wars on real-life rebellions against powerful empires.
Lucas and Cameron discuss how during the Vietnam War, America became “the Empire.”
“The irony is that, in both of those, the little guys won. The highly technical empire – the English Empire, the American Empire – lost. That was the whole point,” Lucas says.
Another part of this same discussion with James Cameron, from another article:
cbr.com/george-lucas-vietnam-war-star-wars-inspir…
Cameron pointed out how the Rebels are a small group using asymmetric warfare against a highly organized Empire. Today, Cameron added, the Rebels would be called terrorists. “When I did it,” Lucas replied, “they were Viet Cong.” In other words, Lucas viewed the Vietnamese as the rebels and America as the invading villains.
He further explained that Star Wars was a “vessel” in which to place his worldview that the United States had become an empire during the Vietnam War, doomed to fail like every empire before it.
Its uh, honestly rather obvious, but uh, right wingers consistently fail at basic media literacy, so … ?
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m talking about the Star Wars prequels. George Lucas touched upon alienation and loneliness, which is what Anakin was feeling and then exploited by Palpatine. It is starkly prescient and parallel to real life.
tburkhol@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Came to say this. I recall especially the books private, paramilitary “marching clubs” being turned into law enforcement, which feels a lot like how the Proud Boys and 3% have fallen out of the media at the same time as ICE has co-opted their tactics.
“We’ll have fascism in [America], but we’ll call it anti-fascism” - Huey Long
The whole of US political commentary 1935-1939 feels very relevant today.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
The fascists declared antifa enemies, so I guess we won’t?