The fascist playbook revisited Imagine that the fascists we thought we had vanquished for good in the mid-twentieth century had actually deposited a blueprint in some vault – a plan bequeathed to their spiritual successors to make fascism great again. What would it say? It would begin with the strategy of plagiarising the left. Start with taking aim at crony capitalism, it would recommend. Copy the leftists’ arguments against the corrupt financial sector and the central banks’ role in supporting it. Criticise the electoral system relying on two factions of the same oligarchic regime or ‘uniparty’. Target the state for doing Big Business’s bidding. At the same time, plagiarise the neoliberal mantra, presenting yourselves as more neoliberal than Thatcher and Reagan combined. Call out civil servants as lazy freeloaders leeching on the working classes, thus driving a wedge between public and private sector workers. To forge a movement, unite the victims of neoliberalism with people who maintain a fond memory of Thatcher or Reagan. To turn them all against the neoliberal radical centre, portray as neo-communists the Blairites and the Clintonites who cut their political teeth fighting and neutering the left. To solidify this alliance, promise a return to some fictional golden past. Wax lyrical about a national rebirth that requires an insurrection against both the decadent bourgeoisie and the left’s treacherous class struggle. Never underestimate the power of the Purity Cult. No one, of course, is pure. We are all mongrels with a dark side in us. It is this dark side within people that can be excited into a frenzy of enthusiasm if you, first, portray their cities as crawling with impure, foreign, dangerous miasmata and, then, promise to purge these, to make people pure ‘again’, to defend them from the impurities that spread like viruses in their communities: Jews, Muslims, trans people, whoever can be stigmatised at little cost. Furthermore, infect the souls of the most dispossessed, of society’s battlers, with a moral panic that they are being replaced by people even more wretched than themselves. Then and only then promise to make them great ‘again’. As your new fascist coalition is forming, animate it with lashes of misogyny and promises that Daddy, the Great Leader, will put the national house in order, hinting at white men’s current inability to put their homes in order. Taking great care never to mention the true causes of this inability (austerity, privatised council houses, savage cuts in public education and health), offer them a simple social contract: We shall look after you, make you proud again. You, in return, must grant us absolute power so that, released from the restraints of the liberal state, we can purify the body of the nation and reach into that golden past whence to retrieve your sense of power and superiority. Make sure you tell people that this is not a one-off, momentary rupture. Portraying the nation as a battalion at war where insubordination and loose talk leads to the collective body’s death, explain that your movement is planning a never-ending process of militarising society. In this vein, advocate for a huge military buildup. At the same time admonish war and regime change as the left-liberal cabal’s fixation with global government. Signal that deterrence is your game but also imply that your army will be as useful in quashing the impurities at home as it is to defend the newly electrified border fences. To enter into government, exploit the fact that conservatives and radical centrists are more afraid of the left than they are of you. Espouse ultra-Zionism to rinse out your Nazi legacy and, thus, make yourselves more palatable in their eyes. Forge an alliance with them, exploit their delusion that they can beat you in the contest for popular support with their fascism-lite and, once they feel safe, shove them to one side, take over fully, and put them in the same concentration camp (perhaps in posher cells) as the leftist rubble that they feared more than you. Once in power, the first thing you should do is ban all migrants, except white supremacists from failed Apartheid states. To show you mean business when promising to haunt the most impure, marginal people, declare there are only two genders. Create a Praetorian Guard of masked men to whisk people off the streets and transport them to domestic concentration camps as well as in virtual colonies or occupied lands. To advertise your unconstrained power, send stormtroopers into your major cities to shoot and terrorise. Behind the scenes, get into bed with the Big Finance, Big Business, Big Tech lads that you admonished while in opposition. Send a techlord and his minions into government offices to emulate Gleichschaltung, the Nazi policy of firing public sector employees, replacing them with his flunkies while siphoning off citizens’ data and feeding it to his servers for future surveillance and control purposes. Pardon your felon allies, attack universities, take over cultural centres and use the courts to pursue as enemies of the people figures of authority that opposed you. Most importantly, be prepared for the moment your base grows impatient, seeing your promises to look after them go up in smoke against the backdrop of the cacophonous money-making of a ruling class you were meant to reign in. It is then that you need to turn to the geopolitical version of the ‘flood the zone’ strategy. Sequentially project unbridled, naked power abroad. Withdraw from international organisations and treaties and wreck what is left of International Law. Call your regime change wars for what they are: imperial take-overs. Luxuriate in displays of vile power. Above all else, keep escalating. And if it all blows up, make sure you leave an updated blueprint for the next generation of fascists. After all, as long as the wealth of the very few depends on the poverty of the many, fascism will always be necessary. project-syndicate.org/commen…

Van Badham: Australians, stick it on your fridge, give thanks every day. 1/2

LOL. He clearly wasn't British 😆

So well written.. Oliver you rock

You first, J Dunce.

Then, quit acting like Nazi 's. Quit trying to take away our rights! Quit trying to silence us. Quit attacking and violently kidnapping people off the streets! Quit threatening to sue or lock up your opponents! Quit attacking journalist and the media!

It's fascinating to me that the same people who claim paracetamol taken during pregnancy causes autism, refuse to believe that anything could affect the development of gender identity in the womb, despite us all living out our lives drenched by endocrine disrupting pollution.

November 17, 1938. 50,000 devotees of “Western civilisation,” “traditional family values,” “positive Christianity” (the official religion of German N*zism) and rabid anti-communism gathered to mourn the assassinated German diplomat Ernst vom Rath.

Australia has one of the most class segregated education systems in OECD. Concentrations of disadvantage in underfunded public schools is increasing at 2nd fastest rate in OECD. These results are entirely predictable and we should be ashamed of them. smh.com.au/politics/nsw/publ…

My quote of the day: ""Lying constantly is not aimed at making people believe a lie, but at ensuring that no one believes in anything anymore. " ~ Hannah Arendt, philosopher.

I think everyone should take a moment and watch every second of this and ask themselves why the media is not showing any of these clips on TV.

True Story.

Clojure Tensor and Deep Learning library Deep Diamond now works on Apple M CPU. Check out the fresh #Apple Silicon support in 0.36.1! Please RT this message so Clojurists actually hear about it :) #Clojure #AI #Pytorch github.com/uncomplicate/deep…

⚠️ Heads up: Twitter is throttling this account. If you enjoy my tweets, please follow and share to keep the signal strong. Let’s make sure the truth keeps moving. ✊

Pocock is right

The transition from a constitutional federal republic to an authoritarian regime typically follows a series of observable patterns, though the specifics vary by context. These patterns often emerge gradually, exploiting existing political, social, and economic vulnerabilities. Below are the usual patterns, based on historical and contemporary examples, presented concisely. Let’s dive in to The Dictator’s Playbook! 🪡

OH: "Every time you create something idiot proof, you just create smarter idiots. It's like antibiotic resistance."