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If you think your dad was sent to fight against the Nazis for ideological opposition, i have bad news for you. Maybe he personally fought out of that motivation, but must countries at the time were either fascist themselves or on the edge to fascism.
If you look at the US there was the ongoing genocide against native Americans, the racial segregation, eugenics, despicable human experimentation carried out on minorities, concentration camps for Japanese during WW2... Even the pledge to the flag in the schools was something Hitler admired and copied. Until the German Nazis became unpopular in the US the pledge to the flag with done with the "Bellamy Salute" that is the same as the Nazi salute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
The truth is, they never left.
What is different though is that after WW2 it was understood which social problems, in particular fucking over the lower and middle class, create the breeding ground for fascism to be successful. Since the 1980s with Thatcher and Reagan and then the neoliberal wave over Europe, we had 40 years of deliberately empowering fascism. Now they reap what they sew.
I have to differ on your last point. I don't think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.
I think it would be more accurate to say that fascism is an extreme form of imperialism, because they are ultimately very similar sentiments. A more powerful group taking advantage in various ways, of a less powerful group. Now you could say, "it's all the same thing", capitalism, imperialism, fascism, it's all the same "hierarchy is the ultimate source of evil dynamic", but it seems to me that this just reduces all these concepts to absurdity.
Fascism is also on the rise because of improved technology for thought control / propaganda / public relations / advertising. Social media lets the worst of humanity band together and pool their energy.
But wealth inequality, both worse effective quality of life for the poor and increased economic power by the wealthy is I believe a main driver. Technology is just the tool. The ultra wealthy and their lackeys today have more power than ever and are more isolated and inundated with ideology that is basically insane.
I wonder if there are studies that show correlations between quality of life and fascism in different nations.
That's not right, at least not for the fascist regimes in Europe that emerged prior to WW2. The countries where it happened (specifically Germany/Italy/Spain) had all seen civil unrest or even civil war in the recent past, they were hit hard by the global financial crisis in the twenties and had high unemployment and widespread poverty. This was the very thing the fascists used to ingratiate themselves to the public at large, by creating jobs through massive public building and rearmament projects.
By the way "first world countries" is post-WW2 terminology and didn't originally have a connotation of superior economic status, but was referring strictly to ideological alignment. Whether a country belonged to the capitalist/communist/unaligned block in international politics during the cold war.
Capitalisms' unsustainable model of infinite growth requires something like imperialism to keep going, and even if you could point out alternative venues for capital acquisition, it's still what people in power want, since it gives them more than just fuel for capitalism, but also more power. Countries and companies that do not rely on imperialism directly, most often rely in others that do. While it's not entirely futile to discuss whenever that has to be the case in theorethical capitalist solution, it is the case in one we're living under, and since it's the ruling class of hyper-wealthy that make decisions about the worlds future and current state of affairs is result of those decisions, it is the system we have to deal with. Unless, you know, we bring out the guilottines and start over, but I don't see much point in retrying capitalism to see if it won't lead us down on the path to facism again.
I guess we have to disagree. Growth is an inherently good thing in my view, and I don't based that on capitalistic ideology. Without growth, the metaphorical pie is finite. What does this mean? It means there is some distribution of this pie, however equal or unequal. Now on one side you will have people like you trying to make the distribution more equal. On the other side you will have war lords, dictators, and power hungry individuals trying to grab more of the pie for themselves. All of you will have to resort to violence to make that happen.
And the magic of economic growth is that you can enrich the world without having to physically fight other people to steal their shit.
The bottom line is, we would have even more imperialism if we did not have economic growth.
Where does that growth come from?
Growth isn’t a problem when it’s sustainable. However, there are natural limits to how far and how fast technological development and resource extraction will allow us to grow the economy.
Additionally, competition within capitalism forces the wealthy to seek out any and all means of growth. If they do not they actually risk all of their wealth becoming devalued. This drives innovation but it also is the driver of imperialism, exploitation, environmental degradation, all of which grow the economy.
When growth because less attainable due to various natural constrains, the wealthy start to cannibalize the systems that keep society stable. Again, they can’t help themselves. If they don’t their class position is threatened as some other capital owner beats them to the limited profits that come from privatization and austerity.
This usually results in mass unrest across all the various classes in society. That includes some of the middle classes who also rely on exploitation to maintain their standard of living. In response to threat of social unrest, the wealthy usually align themselves with right wing authoritarians that claim to be able to bring order to the chaos and renew growth through imperial expansion. This kind of politics is often supported by some of the downwardly mobile middle classes. That’s how we get fascism.