Yep.
The European fascists didn’t have a lot of domestic PoC to target (although they went at North Africa as soon as possible), so they ramped up the antisemitism and anticommunism instead. That fed into the global zeitgeist, which had an influence on the USA.
Because I don’t believe that to be true.
Yep.
The USA is a white supremacist nation, and always has been. That isn’t just a fringe thing, or a Conservative thing; it’s at the core of American history and politics.
Fascism is a trans-national global movement. Condor Legion etc.
So is socialism. So is anarchism. So is liberalism.
The Australian League of Rights have mostly been an insignificant fringe group with no real power. Their failed attempt at an entryism-based takeover of the Country Party was the closest they ever got to any genuine influence.
For historically significant Australian fascists, you want Francis de Groot and the New Guard. For currently significant, look to Patriot Blue and similar bastards.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/22/asia/australia-far-right
Although there’s no reliable evidence, it’s generally believed within the Australian left that groups such as the League of Rights recieved substantial financial backing from America during the Cold War. CIA front groups such as the CCF were active in Australia throughout the period.
I agree with the second half, I’m unsure about the first.
My ideas here are not based in my critique of the US electoral system. That’s likely more of a symptom than a cause, although it’s a symptom that helped create the current mess.
Racism is certainly not unique to the USA; America inherited the white supremacist tradition from the European imperialists. But while the Caribbean slave revolts eventually forced the Europeans to abandon slavery, the more successful suppression of resistance on the US mainland allowed it to persist.
Then, of course, the Slaver’s Revolt. That was a chance to really fix the problem, but it was thrown away in 1877. The power of the slavers rebuilds, transforms into a more modern proto-fascism via the KKK, and then gets locked into place in 1919:
That gets us to the suppression of US socialism and the establishment of the nationwide security state. The US almost went full fascist in the 1930’s, but Pearl Harbour and Roosevelt’s scheming put a stop to that.
After the war, Cold War competition forced a few decades of Bismarckian social concessions. The end of the Cold War dropped that limitation, and it’s been brewing towards the current catastrophe ever since.
White Australia is most certainly an intensely racist state. We began as a concentration camp, turned into a slave plantation and then expanded via genocide. The condition of Indigenous Australia is a national disgrace, and our treatment of refugees is a crime against humanity.
The partial survival of Oz socialism prevented the suppression of the working class that was seen in the US, but it didn’t stop them from being racist.
We were making significant progress on racism from 1970-95, but most of that was reversed in the mess around the beginning of the 21st century. And it had a major stumbling block early on thanks to the Whitlam coup.
Modern political manipulation in Australia is primarily based in media distortion rather than gerrymandering or voter suppression. Murdoch controls almost all of our media.
I post rather more about Australian politics in other places than I do here. There isn’t much point in ranting about local issues when speaking to Americans.
