In a move that experts say could significantly hurt Israel’s military readiness, pilots and other personnel issued a warning after Benjamin Netanyahu pressed ahead with a plan to limit judicial power.
More than a thousand pilots and other personnel in the Israeli Air Force reserve said on Friday that they would stop reporting for duty if the government pushes through a contentious plan next week to reduce judicial power without broader consensus.
In a joint letter released Friday, 1,142 Air Force reservists — including 235 fighter pilots, 98 transport plane pilots, 89 helicopter pilots and 173 drone operators — said they would not serve if the government proceeded with its plan to reduce the ways in which the Supreme Court can overrule the government.
Absolutely, I’m gobsmacked nobody seems to read history.
Although, a lot of these nowadays fascist leaders are being supported by very large swathes of their own populations, as much as 48%, which is the truly shocking thing.
Reading history … that tends to be how it works. Fascism is good at getting popular support for it’s ideas, without overtly being fascism to the people who support it. Fascism’s gateway drug is populism, and populism works best when the ‘common’ population is under strain too complex to address as a single issue.
The worlds ongoing climate crises, economic issues, and political instability within developing economies are all placing unusual and complicated strains on the common populations of developed nations - which in turn opens the door for populist rhetoric and leaders to thrive and gain a foothold on the political discourses in their nations. The biggest single pro/con of populist rhetoric is that it is at its strongest as challenger or as opposition - much like armchair quarterbacking, it’s very easy to criticize what has been done, and even easier to sound like you could do it better, but very hard to deliver on promises from the drivers’ seat. As a result, populism is good for getting elected, but is not good for staying there - or getting re-elected later.
So given that many populist talking points in current economies are fascist-adjacent, pivoting towards fascism makes for an easy and natural segue in the event that they gain power or hold sufficient security of position and supporter base that populism alone cannot serve to maintain.
I like everything you wrote, thank you, but perhaps disagree with your last part about not remaining in power. It seems to me that the current crop of neo-fascist (or fascist-adjacent as you call them) leaders have remained in power for a very long time, even with more or less fair elections. Erdogan in Turkey, Netenyahu in Israel, and Orban in Hungary come to mine. I guess with each of those, they don’t even have to deliver any meaningful policy just so long as they keep hurting the people their voters want hurt, they’ll keep being re-elected.
I think maybe some of that is on me; I’ve been using “in power” somewhat colloquially and to me there’s a gap between ‘gaining power’ in a soft sense referring to achieving a station that possesses power - and complete seizure of power. The latter is always the goal of the former, but the former is generally a necessary intermediary step.
Those three for sure have held power quite a while - just that they’ve held power long enough I don’t really consider them representative of modern neo-fascism so much as inspirations for it. In the sense I was thinking of when I wrote the above, I was thinking more of the factions and leaders that exist within states that are not clearly semi- or pseudo-fascist in their structure. The ways that Erdogan, Netenyahu, and Orban maintain their power are not yet in place in those other states, but implementing some forms of them are goals within those movements.
The neo-fascists’ I was talking about have to win elections and hold legitimate power within the current structure of the state before they can alter that structure enough to fix elections or bypass them. And in getting that initial foot in door, creating the opportunity to hijack the state, benefits strongly from using populist rhetoric - as genuinely pro-fascist voters are relatively rare, those factions and leaders need to use other causes to win over voters who wouldn’t support their “real” goals directly.
They only read what is presented to them and as we all know the “official narrative” lacks a lot of details and includes outright lies. Any true telling of history would always result in “oh so we should probably do what the Soviets were doing… and improve it.” Instead the US being dominant after WWII has led to so much ridiculous and insane propaganda that can even the light suggestion to Americans to rethink their ideas on China and the USSR (and the US or Israel on the other side of that coin) is instantly smashed with YOURE A COMMIE FASCIST! Great world to live in…
I think this was all fairly well predicted by many people way before my time and smarter than me, but it seems kind of obvious that in a world of declining hegemony and in turn declining material conditions that the average workers of the world either push to the far left and embrace socialism or to the far right into fascism. It’s basically inevitable in the long run.
The problem is one ideology seeks more equality, fairness, etc. and to end exploitation by capitalists around the world so everyone can live lives of dignity and we can all work in our own and each other’s common interests of, you know, not destroying the world.
Fascism kind of plays on the same mindset of “someone is fucking me. But who?” and smashes in whatever ethnic or racial group is convenient to hate. Black people, “the Jews!”, Arabs (“Muslims” to Americans), South Americans and Mexicans, Chinese people, etc. Instead of the logic of cooperation towards a common goal it just sells cooperation but only within your assigned group for their betterment and the extermination of other groups.
given two paths basically, one which requires overcoming whatever baked-in resentment, fears, racism, whatever people all are raised to have in this world and the other which says “no, all that bullshit is actually correct. most basic primal urge to kill everyone else because you think you’ll die otherwise is correct.” Obviously there’s some amount of “some people are like that” because I don’t think I’ve ever really thought like that, but of course there’s also a learned and socially instilled component helped along by lack of education and straight up misinformation (propaganda) that can lead otherwise “good” people to just follow along, believe the zero sum game bullshit, and commit any atrocity in the imagined grand idea of defending themselves and their people from the others who they were purposely denied ever actually knowing and learning about.
We’re kind of at an unfortunate point now too where it seems like (and who really knows?) we’re heading towards some incredibly bad times. More wars and a shitload more deaths as the world transitions from US hegemony to sharing it with other nations, China being the biggest right now. It feels like we’re fighting an impossible battle of winning over minds already complacent to the right wing. The Marxist, et al. education in “the west” is essentially zero and the world can basically count on the US/EU to fight every step of progress along the way if any progress is to be made at all. I mean look at the whining over China who has explicitly pretty much stayed out of foreign politics. They have a few loans around the world and the west is in full-on baby crying mode. Just imagine where it’s likely headed (and this is not blaming China who has every right to do what any other nation does. The US/EU are clearly the ones in the wrong here).
So I dunno. Shit’s fucked, people are uneducated and falling for bullshit fascist shit, and the left seems unable to keep up with radicalizing people. Not for lack of trying or for lack of “being correct” but because of really too many reasons to go into… probably the chief reason being the fucking US lucked into its position post-WWII and that basically setup the world to get bent over and fucked by fascism sold under a different label. The US isn’t called “the fourth reich” for no good reason after all. I’ll stop rambling.