I’m sure you all, like I, am waiting for Adam’s update, which, I am also sure, will be filled with a fresh update on all of Russia’s warcriming.
I would like to put out that if you watched the Putin speech filled with eliminationist rhetoric, and what thhey are doing with the wholesale slaughter of the undesirable Ukrainians, that their actions are the end result of the same eliminations rhetoric that we hear every day from what in the past was the GOP and right wing fringe but is now mainstream Republicanism. If you go beyond their rhetoric on minorities, lgtbq, etc., it would be no different from what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. Maybe by different means, but the same end goal.
A Gratuitously Shameless St. Patrick’s Day Promotion: Celtic Conundrum
trollhattan
Oh hell yes! “I’ve been treated so unfairly” comes through loud and clear, as well as the attacks on “the other.” We’ve lived this movie.
pluky
When people show you who they are believe them the first time.
sab
Yes. As the first Democrat in my family I have noticed. My mother, born in 1926, bailed from the Republican party before she died in 2012. She loved Obama and was thrilled to vote for him. Didn’t change her voter registration because voted R down ballot.
schrodingers_cat
The eliminationist rhetoric has reached a fever pitch in India too. I am afraid that if the BJP is not stopped we will see rivers of blood that will eclipse the partition of India. I do think there is still time to stop them but it is running out.
Gin & Tonic
Which is why this war is so important.
FelonyGovt
The echoes of the totalitarianism and would-be genocide we are seeing here (and in India, and elsewhere) are really apparent.
Josie
Why do you think it is cropping up in so many places at this particular time? Is it being pushed by someone or is the time just right for some reason? Why now and in so many places?
citizen dave
A sad recurring phrase in my head in recent times is “It can happen here.”
Sorry for not remembering (I’m traveling and mostly accessing via phone), but I loved a jackal’s recent comment that too often it seems the Dem take is “what does the average white man think?”.
Our country is so much more than that.
Starfish
Our friends at LGM posted a link to Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco. Fascism is described as a softer, fuzzier Nazism, and when you get down to the numbered list of traits that lead to fascism, they look very much like a particular political party.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Josie:
Interlocked assholes – Putin, Mercers, Kochs, Bannon, Orban, Modi, Erdogan, Trump.
trollhattan
@Josie:
My theory, which is mine, is the horrors of WWII have effectively drained away and we are far more tolerant of fascism today than at any time since 1945. Guessing there’s also the interplay with the great wealth that is now concentrated amongst a scant few, and many of those people are either neofascists themselves, or benefit from having fascists in charge, in order to gain even more wealth and power.
Or maybe it’s fluoridated water. Either/or.
MomSense
It’s the same and we need to defeat it.
Cameron
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Eewww- the fascist version of The Human Centipede.
Calouste
@citizen dave: Yes, the US is more than that, but the media is mostly made up of average white men. If they even reach that high.
Rocks
Damn straight!
Lyrebird
@Gin & Tonic:
Wish I knew more ways to apply pressure. Planning to call my Congressperson, who already supports more aid to UA, and tell him to keep fighting the attempts to sweep the first impeachment criming under the rug.
Betsy
@Josie: telecommunications and electronic media and the Internet making the global concentration of wealth, and rapine of the world’s resources, possible, concentrating that in the hands of a few with good access to information and information networks. This is driving the global concentration of wealth into elite hands.
And the next step is that those wealthy elites want to control the political process to make sure that they can take all the wealth and it will be protected for them by the political powers that be.
This capacity to take advantage of information and electronic idranti networks is all happening worldwide at the same time, regardless of the degree of development in the various countries for most of their populace.
In addition, instability caused by global warming disasters and changed weather patterns is driving a shift in the stability of everyday life for more and more households. The elites want to consolidate power as much as possible to insulate themselves from the diasporas, exoduses, displacements, and migrations that will become the norm for most people worldwide, already and in coming decades.
Eliminationist rhetoric is spurred by that too.
The Moar You Know
@Josie: the now universal, worldwide access to social media.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: I agree. In India the generation that lived through the horrors of partition is mostly dead or dying. It is worth noting that it took BJP well into the 90s to get any kind of electoral traction in India. The generations who were alive during the eve of independence knew to never let these fascist ghouls any where near the levers of power.
marcopolo
@Josie: Think this piece by Greg Sargent in the WaPo (which I hope you can read) where he talks to the historian Francis Fukuyama about the pull between liberalism & nationalism really addresses your question head on:
Guess he has a new book out talking about this subject as well:
Liberalism & Its Discontents
Josie
@marcopolo: Yes, I have access to WaPo. Thanks for the link. Again here is the idea of the generation exposed to WWII and fascism vs. the generations that have lived lives blessedly free of those horrors. It’s as though we are getting an education through watching the pain of Ukraine.
Gin & Tonic
Volodymyr Zelensky was in middle school when the USSR broke up and Ukraine gained its independence. Most of his closest advisors are of similar age. Many of the people who’ve made Ukraine a dynamic, entrepreneurial, open society are younger. They have little to no memory of the Soviet Union, but have parents and grandparents who can tell them how things were, so they are in kind of an ideal age range to say “we want this, not that.” Contrast that with Putin, who lived the first 40 years of his life under the Soviet system. So not only do you have the centuries of oppression at the hands of “Mother Russia,” you have the 21st Century battling the 20th.
Dan B
As a gay boomer I experienced the fear and heartbreak of McCarthyism followed by the stifling 50’s and early 60’s. Then the horror of the AIDS crisis under Reagan. It felt like half my gay friends died. There are 280 pieces of legislation this year to silence and shame LGBTQ kids and teachers in schools. With the added stresses in the world there will likely be added calls to “clean up” society. Instead of making a more happy society there will be increased effort to double down on mistrust. Only course is to keep resisting.
Mike in NC
Everything old is new again, including Fascism, which became very popular in the 1920s. Almost nobody alive then is still with us.
debbie
Makes the next election that much more important.
craigie
@trollhattan:
I see what you did there.
RaflW
A couple weeks ago Cheryl Rofer basically said from bounties in women who want a (previously Roe-authorized) abortion, or forcing the parents of a trans or genderfluid kid to surrender medical decisionmaking to the state, we’re not far at all to rounding up people and putting them in camps.
I don’t think of Cheryl, from her time here, as being hair-on-fire alarmist. So if she says that, then yeah, things are deteriorating badly here.
I am increasingly of the opinion that most name journalist have been smelling their own both-sides farts so long, they can’t smell the reek of the GOP at all, and have precious little idea that they’d be given the Renaud/Zakrewski treatment asap if the power struggle really tips as badly as it might here in the US of A
And to @Dan B’s point, my partner and I have no immediate plans to depart, but we’re definitely watching how things go (more than watching – we’re working on election issues and supporting candidates so that we can stay) but we also won’t wait for the Talibangelical iron curtain to fall across Gilead, either.
craigie
Not to be a downer but here is a futurist’s prediction for 2050:
Betsy
@Mike in NC: Is it any coincidence that the 1918-1922 global pandemic was on a similar timeline? You probably can tell what I think.
CaseyL
I’ve definitely seen the similarities between the descent into theologically-flavored totalitarianism in Russia and Hungary, and that of the Western right wing (remember, it’s not only happening in the US).
Watching the Russian variety become an honest-to-god cancer eating its entire government (and, consequently, country) has been… startling in terms of its speed and sheer nakedness. Putin threw off all the wraps in his speech, and sounded very much like what we hear from the Trumpist wing of the GOP when they think no one but themselves is around.
It’s interesting, in a gruesome way, to see Americans mostly recoil in horror at what Russia is unleashing in Ukraine even as Republican states push for, and pass, more vicious policies against women, non-cis, non-straight, non-white persons. Two sides of the same coin.
But I’m not at all sure the great mass of the American public that is uninformed and apathetic will notice, or make the connection.
sukabi
What you said John. They started “othering” democrats & liberals in earnest in 1999, has only gotten worse since then, to the point where enacting laws legalizing running over protestors is taken for granted.
Villago Delenda Est
These people are the heirs of Hitler and Pol Pot.
Captain C
@sukabi:
Probably before that, even. Newtie’s list of horrible things to call Democrats was in 1994, along with the Contract On America; and Rush was treating liberals as The Enemy Who Must Be Destroyed Lest They Destroy Us Real Americans(TM) as opposed to political opponent for as long as he was national.
Villago Delenda Est
@Captain C: Ronald Reagan got it started.
sukabi
@Captain C: I meant on TV, cable “news shows”….had been without cable for a couple of years and the shock when I plugged back in…was horrifying.
Yes Newt, Delay were all over that “trend”.
Captain C
@sukabi: I imagine it was. Fox News really made that sort of hate acceptable.
Soprano2
@citizen dave: Thanks, that was me. I think most of us still suffer from thinking that because for so long it was true, but the press seems to suffer from it more than most. Maybe that’s because most reporters are still white people.
Sister Golden Bear
I’m a regular reader of JoeMyGod.com who follows the MAGAts so you don’t have to, and shares the low lights.
They’re full on ready to “filter” as the Russian general put it, trans folk like me from society. Followed by LGB people and BIPOCs. The only reason for not getting to the latter groups simultaneously with trans people is their larger numbers make it more difficult to eliminate them. Which is why trans folks are (scared and feeling somewhat left to fend for ourselves)* canaries in the coal mine.
*Yes I know folks here our backs, but among Tempe general population, not so much. All too often the reaction is the Loki “Yes, very sad. Anyway.” meme.
JAFD
President Biden (and I) grew up in an age when most of the students came to school carrying their books in their dad’s Army knapsacks, and remember how that golden age of the 1950’s really worked.
Omnes Omnibus
@craigie:
A bunch of words from a futurist with a substack. I am not convinced. The future is unwritten. Joe Strummer is a better prophet.
different-church-lady
It’s going far beyond “similarities”. It’s starting to seem like there is no longer any distinction between the two.
different-church-lady
@Villago Delenda Est: psst: Stalin.
different-church-lady
@The Moar You Know:
Ding ding ding ding Is correct! Greatest accidental Stalinesque disinformation tool ever. Putin really recognized an opportunity when he saw it.