(Context: the conversation in the screenshot was under a post about China and LGBT)
Fascism is an expression of Imperialism. That's the way we usually understand it. We analyze its very essence, its goal, its cause, its necessity. In contrast, liberals, especially liberal media, and their entertainment industry, have a tendency to define Fascism by its symptoms and aesthetic. They'd like to blame it on "hatred" and moral failings. At least, that was my perception of liberals due to the few interactions with them through the limited medium that is the Internet.
It is for this reason that I now think the average Westerner doesn't know what Fascism actually is. This perhaps was one of the factors that have enabled them to act like online Fascists without shame.
The Twitter comment in the screenshot is not the only instance I have encountered in regards to online chauvinism and stupidity. I've seen them many times before, be it on YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, and more. It almost always[^1] come from the English speaking space, likely by some American.
Online Fascists are ignorant of history. They also don't know they are acting like Fascists.
[^1]: I wrote "almost always" to give room for errors but my memory certainly did not register exceptions.
Well, obviously, the bourgeoisie's schools are not going to teach children that fascism is inherent to capitalism. It is to be expected that the capitalists will not provide the youth with a thorough understanding of political economics.
When settler colonists enslaved black people and killed the indigenous populations of America, they were simply “distracting the masses?” Is fascism a method or a historical process that developed alongside capitalism?
Are the zionists liberals in the occupation of Palestinian lands simply “distracting the masses” from fighting the capitalists in the regime? I would think the so-called masses are benefiting from the killings of Palestinians and expropriation of their lands.
The root cause of fascism is the exploitation of labor and expropriation of land. Both have been justified and aggravated by racism, then and now.
I think we disagree on the breadth of the application of the term fascism in this instance. I am referring to fascism mostly within the Western imperial countries, where it is used as a distraction to reinforce existing capitalism (Germany, Italy, Spain, also Pinochet's Chile).
I don't really think settler colonialism of the Global South should be included under the definition of fascism, at least when taught to American students. Otherwise, things become very messy and too broad, as we are now including a process which brings capitalism to areas that were never under capitalism before. Why can't we just use the term 'settler colonialism' for that?
You claimed fascism was a method. As if fabricated in a lab of Elon Musk, only to then consciously unleash racist ideology on the population. Americans and the West, in general, are racist, not simply because of a racism made in a lab with the intentions of brainwashing citizens, but rather because of a complex historical process that grew alongside capitalism.
Imperialism abroad is analogous to fascism at home. When imperialism is no longer functioning properly as a process of extracting super profits, fascism at home intensifies. When the ruling class applies a victimization habitually reserved for people of colonial origins to white people, that's what most refer to as fascism. However, the fascism affecting whites was always in the USA against ethnic minorities.
Settler colonialism birthed imperialism and fascism, which are essentially twins in a dialectical relationship.
I agree that imperialism and fascism are twins. Imperialism (sometimes alongside settler colonialism) is applied to subordinate countries, while fascism is applied within.
I would argue that fascism is a method, when the bourgeoisie decides that the appearance of bourgeois democracy is unnecessary and decides to retrench into a mask-off bourgeois dictatorship. However, different cases of fascism can have different symptoms based on the exact response of the capitalists, because fascism does not have hard beliefs other than ensuring capitalist domination. In Nazi Germany, they decided to redirect all anger toward killing minorities as well as leftists. In Spain and Chile, they didn't bother killing that many minorities, they just focused on killing leftists. Fascism behaved slightly differently in Indonesia, where they focused on killing all leftists and also anyone who was Chinese.
When the bourgeoisie deals with an imperially colonized country, often they do not bother with the appearance of bourgeois democracy. They just do bourgeois dictatorship from the beginning, which is how imperialism and fascism are siblings.
Ultimately, I think our disagreement is simply one of word usage. If you want, we can divide between "Imperial Core Fascism" versus "Periphery Fascism" (if you know better terminology from your reading, I'd love to learn). It's just that from what I see in common US usage, fascism is only used to refer to when capitalists do it to their own countries. The US education system never says that US capitalists massacring protestors in banana republics proves the USA is fascist, even though the USA doing so within itself would immediately be termed fascism.