On Monday, September 30, the Berlin police, on behalf of the public prosecutor’s office, conducted house raids with a total of 125 officers, on the homes of five pro-Palestinian activists ranging in age from 18 to 40. The simultaneous raids took place around 6:00 a.m., in what police describe as a series of “pro-Palestinian motivated crimes.”
My dude, people might commit crimes while having opinions that you support. If your only way to deal with it is populist rhetorics against a vague (ofc overarchingly powerful :| ) enemy, then you fit right in with the populist right wing crowd.
Hey, please don’t try to equate the left and right by calling them both populist. We are not friendly to horseshoe theory or trivialization of fascism here.
Please read my comment carefully, I did not do that. It is pretty obvious that the dynamics of how groups work and how you get people to believe in certain goals are pretty universal. Populism is designed to abuse how everyone perceives and judges outside information for political gain. Therefore it is viable for any political orientation. Other strategies are very significant as well (left&right). Populism can be found on the left and the right and should be criticized everywhere.
I honestly think you’re just throwing around buzzwords, how is all of this this directly related to fascism? You’re essentialy making fascism appear pretty harmless by using it as a catch-all phrase.
And if you can’t be friendly to people with different opinions, your opinions are only a result of one-sided socialisation, not of discussion and reflection with the help of others. And therefore on the same level as any other unreflected opinion.
Why do you believe this? Because I’ve studied how fascists currently recruit and the methods are very different from how socialist orgs recruit. I have also studied how fascism developed in nazi Germany, Spain, and Italy, and they seem incredibly different from socialist forms of movement building.
How can you have left wing populism then?
Populism is a strain of buzzword designed to equate two very different ideologies. Obviously you can’t try to minimize fascism directly so since the holocaust fascists have been trying to downplay fascism by making it a symmetrical evil with communism. If you want to learn more I would suggest looking through some of Dovid Katz’s writings on holocaust collaboration in Eastern Europe.
I didn’t say we weren’t friendly to people, I said we aren’t friendly to certain ideas.
And being unfriendly to mainstream ambient opinions that we have decided to reject isn’t an indication of one sided socialization. While you might not be socialized to understand socialist ideas, socialists in the west grew up around and are intimately familiar with liberal ideas.
Luckily though, socialists invest in the social practice of group learning and reflection, including engaging in ruthless criticism of our own ideas. So no, we have established that it is not at the same level.