Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/05/25/turkeys-vote-for-christmas.html
…
7 Likes
Getting turkeys to vote for Christmas is a time-honoured tradition in right wing circles: convincing working people that they are temporarily embarrassed millionaires who should vote for policies that benefit the rich people they’re sure they’ll be someday.
The Libertarian billionaire greedpigs who think they can control the right-wing populists in their own countries are rubes, too, in their own way. We know from history how it works out for plutocrats who fund fascists.
The Russian oligarchs funding foreign Identitarian movements and parties, on the other hand, are aware of the history – in most cases only because the autocrat who uses them as cut-outs took the time to clue them in.
17 Likes
Really fucking well? How many major corporations and families were wrapped up with the Nazi’s, but are still around today? You can fund and fund and fund, but as long as you pull out before the real shit hits the fan, you can always claim ignorance.
16 Likes
Sure, if you put aside the destruction of the country’s economy and the inability to enjoy the lifestyle afforded by all that money. Those who got through it were still on top of the hill, but it was now a dunghill.
When bombs are dropping on your home and when the government will kill you if you’re caught having sex with the wrong person, money offers one a lot less consolation.
5 Likes
Well? The only thing that went wrong for the Nazis and their beneficiaries was FDR’s America, which is long gone. And even then, most of those corporations and families are still around and wildly successful and wealthy.
This just our weekly reminder that knowledge is not power, as our knowledge of the fundamental hypocrisy of the far right isn’t going to so much as slow them down in the upcoming elections.
15 Likes
And still deluding themselves. My aunt was sent to a boarding school in the early 1950s, and about half the other students were daughters of wealthy German families. Every last one of them continued to express bitterness about the war and blamed the Jews for causing it.
10 Likes
So you know better than us that there are no meaningful negative ramifications for oligarchs supporting fascists.
No, I’m pointing out that plutocrats who support their local fascists historically don’t end up with the “free”-market paradises they expect, and that when the opposite happens they still tend to blame everyone but themselves.
We’ve been so conditioned by 40 years of neoliberalism to define “doing well” only in terms of financial resources that we put aside other things that have value – including a peaceful and open liberal democratic society in which a wealthy person can truly enjoy the benefits of his money.
17 Likes
Let’s all have a good laugh today on Trump and his America. Past tomorrow’s election the jokes might be on our expense.
1 Like
The Nazi’s weren’t funded by just Germans. Think Hitler pulled all that money and technological achievement out of his ass?
One of the things people forget about that period in Europe is that the English and America were far more terrified of the Russians than they were of Germans. They needed Germany as a bulwark against invasion into the west of Europe, so they needed it big and healthy and warlike. This is the exact same reason why the Marshall Plan went into effect right after World War 2. Hitler rose promising socialist plans to his citizens and disaffected youth, but then turned when he got big enough and started Communist purges. The reason why the west continued their support of him, even while instituting anti-Semitic policies was that he continued to be a bulwark against Russia.
Depression-riddled Germany, completely wasting away, didn’t suddenly go into a deep hibernation for 7-8 years, develop advanced fighter craft and mechanized technology and all the manufacturing equipment and financing for those resources, then reemerge as a titan of war. Motherfuckers had help to get there.
Paralleling this with the article: the money going into the current right wing rise? It’s not all from the countries where it’s happening. A big, healthy EU (yes, they have problems, but they’re a force to reckon with on the political stage) is not in the best interests of Plutocrats. They want a stratification of power, with smaller countries that are easier prey.
14 Likes
I didn’t claim otherwise.
Absolutely. This is what’s motivating some wealthy Tories in regard to support in Brexit. But again, putting fascists in charge of the government is a mug’s game. Any financial gains under such a system will be offset in a loss of control over how and under what terms the business operates.
4 Likes
No, money offers you a compete reprieve.
- There will be no bombs. The “Arsenal of Democracy” is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Russia.
- No social order rules ever constrain the aristocracy, unless they are used as an excuse to punish disloyalty.
2 Likes
Only if you use it to leave the country and the violence and bigotry you fostered in it. Otherwise, life will get worse rather than better even if your bank account stays the same or grows.
There will still be violence. It’s the nature of fascist regimes, however much plutocrats want to pretend otherwise.
Fixed for accuracy. Eventually the fascist state will demand “loyalty” from the wealthy, at best in the form of a large tithe. Fail to comply and the tacit agreement for the authorities to look the other way about “moral turpitude” become null and void.
1 Like
…they also get forced labour with it. Certainy not “free market” but most likely what they expect. Don’t expect a fascist state to be a state of right where the same law applies to everyone. Fascism is exactly about the opposite of “all men being equal”. A sack of cash uses to make you a lot more equal - unless youhappen to belong to the actual group of primary scapegoats.
6 Likes
Give me one historical example of any of this. Which oligarchic families suffered at the hands of the Nazis? Under the current Russian government? What king of England was executed for sodomy?
1 Like
These organizers are taking advantage of nationalist sentiments which are rising all over the world (see Australia, India just in the last week).
If honest politicians and organizers decline to address those voters, it leaves a vacuum which the corrupt will easily fill.
2 Likes
Fritz Thyssen is the best-known example from the Nazi period. Boris Berezovsky is an example from Putin’s Russia. I don’t consider either to be towering heroes of the resistance, but they did suffer for defying the regimes they once supported and were made wealthier by.
To be clear, of the ones who stay in-country and are compliant, not many suffer if you’re only talking about economic suffering. I’m not limiting myself to that definition, but even if I were, if an industrialist or banker refused the strings that come along with “benefits” like slave labour or sweetheart deals that the a fascist regime offers then his best option is usually exile.
When was England under a fascist regime?
Aristocrats get a pass if they reach an arrangement with populist moral arbiters that allows them to remain heads of state. The KSA is a good example, but it’s an absolute monarchy that exists only because it pays up regularly and promptly to religious extortionists, and is not technically a fascist regime.
8 Likes
Honest politicians and organisers do address those voters by pointing out that the source of their woes aren’t ethnic and religious outsiders but wealthy greedheads of the same ethnicities and/or religions preaching Libertarian gospel. There’s just a hardcore 27% of any electorate that refuses to listen, and said wealthy greedheads are well aware that they’re easy marks.
I just wish the American and British plutocrats had stuck to the old “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” grift instead of supporting and funding “controllable” fascists in order to make Nativist and racist entitlement the centrepiece of the con.
5 Likes
Writing off 27% of the electorate (where did that figure come from) might possibly work in the USA, but not in a parliamentary system. Farage might get 40.
2 Likes
It’s one of those running jokes that turns out to have a rough basis in truth. Usually somewhere between 25-30% of any given electorate are Know-Nothings of various sorts (e.g. the GOP base since 1968).
That’s true. It gets more difficult when there’s more than two duopoly parties or two referendum questions, especially in FPTP parliamentary systems. Still, I don’t know if it’s worth wasting the money and resources of the reality-based community trying to sway born suckers with logic and facts.
4 Likes
