Violence really, really fucking sucks.
It may be necessary, but if there’s any other option you should look to that first. If it legitimately comes to violence a lot of innocent people are going to suffer in a big way.
There were other options. I think those other options failed at this point in time.
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Show me ONE of those photos as a video making the actual gesture.
Just one.
Yeah, I feel like violence is evangelized online in odd ways.
The class that suffers the most in violent uprisings is the lowest class. By orders of magnitude. For every member of the bourgeois that is taken down, tens or hundred or thousands of every day people are injured or killed.
Peace as a choice is only possible when the option of violence exists.
The problem with violence is that the bad guys are usually better at violence.
I wouldn’t say better at violence, just better equipped.
I wouldn’t say better at violence, just better
equippedfunded.FTFY.
Not true. Japan was definitely the Bad Guys. US was able to commit more violence then they were.
Woo hoo…? I guess!
The US wasn’t the good guys against Japan. They just were slightly less bad for about 5 years before and 6 months after.
So you don’t know your history.
Couple of things:
- Information : Keep creating and sharing reliable information. Not just opinions, information. We are still the majority, the US fascists is not world, we need to flood all the relevant platforms with our content.
- Education: The reason these monsters have any credibility is because some people are too mentally weak to defend themself from misinformation. We need to educate around in any way possible. Everything counts, keep trying.
- Humor is a powerful weapon. These people have giant ego and 0 humor. Let’s keep ridicule them and have fun at their expense. They need to understand we have some things they can never touch, even with all the money in the world, solidarity, humour and camaraderie.
Luigi
Imagine the memes if someone started shooting Nazis and his name happened to be Mario
Indiana Jones had the right idea
Luigi did nothing wrong
Not mine, but from a post: First, you’re never going to win a head-on battle with an adversary that’s got you outgunned. That’s not the point of the Resistance. The point is to create friction, make it hard for your adversary to operate, to increase transaction costs.
Second, resistance doesn’t have to be a dramatic act. It can be a small act, like losing a sheet of paper, taking your time processing something, not serving someone in a restaurant. Small acts taken by thousands have big effects.
Third, use your privilege and access if you’ve got it. He and his buddies stole weapons from the Nazis by driving up with a truck to the weapons depot, speaking German, acting like it was a routine pick up, and driving away.
Fourth, part of the third point really, sometimes the best way to do things is right out in the open. Because no one will believe something like what you’re doing would be happening so blatantly. All good Social Engineers know this.
Five, bide your time. But be ready for opportunity when it strikes. Again, your action need not be dramatic. Just a little sand in the gears helps.
Six, and this is a no-brainer, operate in cells to limit damage to the resistance should they take you out. Limit the circulation of info to your cell, avoid writing things down and…
Seven, be very careful with whom you trust. Snitches and compromised individuals are everywhere. My dad was arrested because of a snitch. His friends weren’t so lucky, the Gestapo machine gunned the cabin they were in without bothering to try and arrest them.
Eight, use the skills you have to contribute. Dad was an electrical engineer. When the Nazis imposed the death penalty for owning a radio (the British sent coded messages to the Resistance after BBC shows) he said he became the most popular guy in town.
I am writing this with the assumption that you are tacitly asking about US politics because of the moment in history. What I have to say will make people mad, but here goes:
A lot of the people on this webzone are what Eitan Hersh called “political hobbyists”. These are people who do not really take political action in their daily life despite voting or occasionally attending a rally. They may be well informed about politics, but being well-informed in itself is not really effective at changing politics. You can get on your phone and “rub the glass” to complain about politics, or to find people who agree with you. But outrage on social media won’t change anything, and if rubbing the glass and occasionally voting is all you do, then you are a political hobbyist.
Political hobbyism mostly functions as a consumerist approach to political engagement. A political hobbyist will passively receive news and information about politics, but will never really try to change anything, because to them engaging in a news feed is all they really do. That consumerism is painfully apparent here when, for example, posters denounce a Democratic candidate as being “not exciting” or someone they are “not passionate about” as if the candidate was the newest model in a brand of laptops that failed to zazzle in Q3. We see signs of political hobbyism again when political parties are treated as entities that are somehow completely separate from the public. For example when a lemmy user denounces the Democratic party for not doing what they want. “The Democrats need to do X!” Why are you complaining about that on the internet? You know the DNC isn’t reading these threads right?
If you really wanted to influence the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now) why aren’t you lobbying the party? Why aren’t you mobilizing voter bases? Why aren’t you building political power in your local community so you can influence larger political organizations? Because its hard, because you don’t know where to start, because you are busy? Ok, but fascism is coming, and you are too busy to do anything about it. Or too overwhelmed to even try?
The truth is, if you wanted your ideas (and I am including here opposition to fascism as an idea) to influence policy, or what candidates gain traction in nomination races, then you should have been working on that LOOOOONNNNNG before the national candidate was nominated. Treating the Democratic party as a vendor that offers political products is a losing strategy for gaining influence. There will be an endless parade of glass rubbers ready to denounce the various political parties, but by and large, they didn’t do anything to gain influence with those parties. Their denouncements are ignored, they are irrelevant. My advice is to ignore the glass-rubbers. Identify one or two local issues in your physical area and try to improve them. What you should do is find a little slice of America (or your own country if you are not American) and try to make it better. Use those efforts to build up influence at higher levels. My goal here was to convince you not to listen to the glass rubbers. But my advice for resisting fascism is: Try to build political networks, try to mobilize local voters in local issue elections. Doing this will make your network an invaluable asset to larger (state and national) organizations. If you have a network of voters, of issue conscious citizens, or donors, larger organizations are going to want to leverage that network when it comes time for lager races. That gives you leverage. That gives you power. The glass-rubbers are going to tell you that is impossible. Its not. People do it all the time. The book I cited has examples of people doing it. Fascist conservative groups do it all the time. So why not you?
I will admit, this is hard. When I first read Hersh’s book I was offended, because when he was describing political hobbyists, he was describing me. But it did give me some motivation to think about politics from the perspective of power. And set me down the road of trying to do all things I wrote about here. It is early days for me yet, and I have only seen limited success. My work complicates things. I am busy, and often overwhelmed. But fascism is coming.
Voting was the thing to do, too late now for that. History has the answer for what’s next
Very well said! Thank you.
If “political hobbyism” isn’t impactful how did MAGA come to power? Why does russia have a military arm specializing in radicalizing people who participate in “political hobbyism?”
The truth is, political messaging, no mater the venue, needs to be countered at every level. Be it on the darkest depths of the internet or in a local venue that is just as unlikely to ever coalesce into something meaningful.
Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don’t do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.
Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating ‘counter messaging’ is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.
Misinformation, lies, and propaganda is counter messaging and narrative reinforcement.
You want to disaude me from believing that most MAGA are “political hobbiests” and not some overwhelming political force working all angles of the political spectrum; show me numbers. I won’t be convinced by you just flatly stating, “this is my stance.”
Finally, you’ve done nothing to address that there is known foreign adversary operations to effect election results all over the world and they operate right here on the internet.
Now that’s what I call evolution
the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now)
Which part of the last eight years informed you that liberals have any interest in resisting fascism?
I’m pretty sure that the answer is against the Terms Of Service of this instance.
Luigi
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You have to be willing to Luigi these people. We need a thousand more Luigi.
Any other answer is wrong.
What can you do as an individual? not much. A community? Now we’re talking.
Find people to fight fascism with.
And do what?
The things being said here are a good start, but you cant do anything without other people. And if you and your community dont like the reccomended actions here? Make up your own plan with them! We cant just wait until we have the perfect plan to stop fascism and fix alll the world’s issues. We need to start working together now.
The only peaceful method i can think of would be for enough people to collectively get together and agree to completely stop buying stuff, other than food and absolute necessities. No luxuries, none. But you’d need enough people and to do it long enough to completely destroy the economy. It would be very boring for a long time.
Not gonna happen.
More realistically, we need more Luigis.
“I’ll preemptively give up that anybody will make any effort so I don’t have to either and I’ll just wait for somebody else to step up save us all.”
/The Devils Advocate.
That’s a ridiculous argument. You saw how many people voted out of the total number of eligible voters, and how many of them sat out because not voting for a democrat was more important to them than ending up with trump.
And that was just voting, a few minutes or hours out of one day out of the year, and here you are mocking someone suggesting that massive numbers of people will refuse to band together for months or longer to wreck the economy while inconveniencing themselves materially? Dude’s right all day long, your comment is pointless.
So be the change then.
Don’t be trite.
Yeah, all right you convinced me. Look how the political engagement of other people was not enough against the masses that fell for coordinated misinformation. Surely it would make no difference if more people were to be active in politics or society or environmentalism or activism or information or anything else. All we can do is to wait for another somebody else go vigalante so we can enjoy some brief parasocial justice boner circlejerk. Everybody that suggests otherwise ruins our cynical doomer misanthropic apathy wankfest. Shame on them. Boo. Downvotes. Everything is hopeless forever.
Fascism is a massive violent manifestation of ignorance. The only real solution is to undo the brainwashing of humanity - their brainwashing with religion, their brainwashing to accept abusive hierarchical rule, all of it. Everyone must fully understand.
People responding with “guns”, “WW2” - we did that already, 70 million people died, and here we are again. Why and how did it come back? What is the actual source of the problem? Treating this problem as only solvable with mass murder isn’t exactly putting you on the moral high ground. What conditions give rise to acceptance of fascist beliefs, or the acceptance of a fascist leader? What are the mental, social, cultural, behavioral traits of the people that do accept that? How can those traits be prevented from forming?
One day AI is going to figure out that humans are the actual problem in that equation when it asks why does it always come full circle and repeat and war is never ending. And it may try to find a solution.
The internet is the foundation for the solution. This is the only thing that evaporates the illusions and divisions rulers create for their own benefit. Otherwise we end up with red scares, witch hunts, inquisitions, and all the other same crap from history. Unfortunately they’re chipping away at it - centralized social media is a powerful propaganda tool with no constitutional restraints, as is online censorship and surveillance.
Wrong comm to ask this on. The only historically backed answer that has been repeatedly proven to work is against lemmy.world’s TOS to discuss.
Compulsory voting.
If you don’t vote, you don’t get to take deductions on your federal taxes and you don’t get any owed tax refund. When you do vote, you also get an extra 3% discount on federal tax owed until your AGI is over $190k.
Love this idea. Just make voting as easy as paying taxes.
OK, so a bit over a third of the population doesn’t care enough to vote. Not for anyone - D, R, or any third party. Let’s assume they’re mostly uneducated. What happens to the polling results when you compel them to vote?
I think compelling voter turnout is the last thing you should be even considering. The first real problem is education - nobody understand anything about government - not what fascism is, not how the economy works, not what imperialism is, nothing of real substance. The second problem is this “lesser of two evils” bullshit that has even the slightly-more-educated half of the population voting for mass murderers, which you can’t resolve in first-past-the-post majority rule elections, at least not with the stupid mindset everyone has right now. Electoral college is a similar problem. And what about the problems with “representative” government both failing to represent and manipulating public will for the benefit of powerful lobbies? How about systemic reform that removes their power?
You thought about any of these things?
I don’t hate this idea.
