Manuel Rodriguez: Back to politics. What is going on in Bolivia is worrying me. We have fascist squads lynching “undesirables” like peasants. We also see that there have been placed barricades with rubbish and tires that block vehicle mobilization, causing people to be fed up and remove the barricades. You know what this all reminds me? The guarimbas of 2014 in Venezuela and Nicaragua. I can see where this is going.
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Separate: There is an tendency that is pretty worrying going on at least in Latin America.The people are tired of the structural inequalities from the neoliberal policies of the right, causing them to lose in elections whenever they appear as they are, and the people are conscious enough.
The mutation consisted on swapping in the public’s mind the Traditional Right image with Center-Right, which seems like a more popular alternative. The complementary tactic is for thee Center-Right to dress up as the Center-Left, which in reality are already prepared sell-outs whose main purpose is try to divert votes from the Left to help the Right win.
The media did their thing, which was to help Center-Left Boric would win over the Leftist Jadue. The whole purpose of Center-Left Yaku Pérez’ candidacy was to make the Leftist Andrés Arauz lose.
That strategy seems to be being recently changing. They are changing the Center-Right for populist Trump-style fascist Far Right candidates. The most worrying thing is that they are getting a lot of support from the population. Bolsonaro is an classic example. Jose Antonio Kast is a more recent example. It seems that Vamos in Argentina is going to win in the parliament.
I would like to point out that the election in Ecuador was profoundly unfair. First of all, the main opposition party kept getting banned, and its leaders all have warrants out for their arrest on fake charges. This “lawfare” is similar to what was done in Brazil. By the way, the FBI greatly assisted the Brazilian fascists in the lawfare against the Left down there. The US is also engaging in lawfare against Venezuela.
Vamos are Argentine fascists?
Obviously Bolsonaro is a fascist, and Kast is clearly a Pinochet-style Chilean fascist.
Why are people voting fascist? I don’t get it. Although Chile and Argentine both have deep fascist blocs in each country, in my opinion mostly because those are majority-White countries. Brazil is also a majority-White country, which may be why they are going fascist too.
In Latin America nowadays, where you lack a White majority, fascism is hard to install because Latin non-Whites hate fascism. They’ve had quite enough of it. However, they do support it in Colombia. On the other hand, Colombia is also a fairly White country. Fascist roots in Colombia go back to Independence. The country simply has developed a culture of popular fascism for whatever reason. Turkey is very similar. The people get no benefit for voting fascist, but they keep doing it anyway.
There are fascist governments in non-White Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay, but all of those are dictatorships. The Right seized power with fascist coups – armed in Haiti and Honduras and legislative in Paraguay – and they have ruled by dictatorship ever since.
In the Americas, Whiteness is associated with rightwing authoritarianism and fascism. In Europe this is not the case, but Whites are a huge majority over there. It appears that Whites go fascist when they are in the minority, but Argentina and Chile are majority-White, so I don’t get it.
Really any population descended from the Catholic Spaniards divides into the typical Far Right-Far versus Left Collectivist pattern. This pattern is also seen in Greece, Italy, Portugal, Turkey, and Lebanon, all Mediterranean countries. This is also seen now somewhat in France. Spain, France, and Italy are Catholic, Greece is Orthodox, Turkey is Muslim, and Lebanon is mostly Catholic and Muslim. Mediterranean countries are collectivist, so politics tends to be collectivist. Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity are collectivist religions.
Left collectivism is Communism and socialism, while Right collectivism is fascism.
The Catholic East European fascism in Poland and Hungary is different and has a Catholic socially conservative and anti-Communist tint. Liberation theology never took hold in Eastern Europe except in Czechia, where there is a long tradition of “Catholic Communism.”
In Ukraine, the Baltics, and Belarus, the fascism is simply Nazism, pure and simple. Ukraine and Belarus are Orthodox, and the Baltics are Catholic (Lithuania) and Protestant (Latvia and Estonia). The Nazism here stems from World War and the independence movements in these countries making alliances with the Nazi occupiers who promised them independence. The Communists in turn were seen as anti-nationalists who thwarted these nations independence dreams. See below for more on that.
In Orthodox Georgia and Russia, fascism nationalist – ethnic nationalist in Georgia or simply nationalist or “Russian Empire nationalist” in Russia.
Protestant Northern Europe is more individualistic. The Right there is just about dead except in the UK and the Baltics. The Right in the UK is a pale copy of US politics. See below for the anti-Communist roots of the Right in the Baltics.
The Right in the northern individualist parts of Europe is mostly anti-Muslim. It’s conservatism is toned down like all politics in Northern Europe is toned down, so it’s not really fascist, instead a type of Woke Anti-Islam. Otherwise they are very left on social issues. One of their leaders in the Netherlands was a gay man. And they support a more socialist economics, but this is the case for both the Right and Left in most of Europe proper other than the Baltics.
The Economic Right is only popular in the UK, where the political economics mirrors the US, and in Czechia, the Baltics, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. In all of these places except the UK, it is an anti-Communist reaction where many people are angry about living under Communism in the past, so they have gone to extreme Right economics as an overreaction.
In Estonia and Latvia, support for the economic Right has been disastrous and has almost destroyed both countries. The Economic Right has little power in Russia and Belarus, with only 10-20% support. It is in power in Ukraine but only because Ukraine has outlawed the parties of half the population, the Russian-speakers. In the Baltics and Ukraine, the anger towards Communism is because the Communists stifled independence movements, though it was Communists who set them free. Anti-Communism is also part of Hungarian and Polish fascism. Anti-Communism in both countries often had an odd socialist tinge.