dear (western) liberals, please remember: you already had this wayyyy before Trump or other (proto) fascists took over

undercover cops aren't the secret police. ICE is the secret police. they operate completely immune to transparency and local control and with only secret courts to oversee their warrants

They wash the same hands and serve the same purpose. Undercover, act like a random citizen in public, being a watchful eye for the state.

ICE has secret courts, undercover agents use public courts, but the difference is just one happens in newspapers slightly more often. Either way, your life is fucked if either one wants you, even if you're innocent.
- all police are fucked but not all fucked police are secret police

I was wondering why this thread was so unapologetically anti-American until I realized this is dbzer0. Good stuff.

dbzer0 is like the one major safe haven from lib bullshit that also doesn't fall into the pit traps of "well China is uncritically great".
- exactly, that's why I love it here
  
  I may not be an anarchist, but I'm not a Dengist either, so I get massive headaches on both Hexbear and grad with their unconditional support for state capitalism. There are good (or rather less worse) aspects to China when compared to the US, but dogmatically supporting it to the hilt just reeks
  
  (not to shit on Hexbear too much, they have quite a handful of more or less genuinely leftist coms; I just stay clear of the more political/theoretical one's)
  
  and even as a revolutionary Marxist (read: "non denominational" lmal) I feel welcome and think that this instance is a really nice corner of the Lemmyverse
  (even with it being largely anarchist/libertarian socialist. not in the sense that I have a problem with those ideologies, more that I feel that the difference in strategy and tactics doesn't cause as much enmity as it might in other online spaces)
  
  also the free/libre and pirate spirit makes it an even better place <3
trying to counteract the lib .world tide post by post :3

/hj

the usa has a sad legacy of disappearing activists from COINTELPRO to the BLM leader murders

From a personal musing from my discord server with friends:

I think I kinda personally hate how everyone blames everything bad on Putin/Russia, ignoring the decades of national born Americans who were fascists and laid the groundwork for this.

Steve Bannon is American. Peter Thiel is American. Bush is American. Reagan. Nixon. There are countless more rich and politicians who enabled and wanted this who are American, not any other nationality or ethnicity.

Putin is a dickhead but I don't think we can blame every small thing Republicans/conservatives have wanted and gotten since the 1960s on one man half way around the world.

It feels like deflecting blame to an "other" to ignore how liberal democracy enabled the slow rising tide of fascism because it was better for profits than treating people with dignity or rights.

"It's the fault of immigrants" and "Trump's working for Putin" are just two faces of the same "Americans good, foreigners bad" thinking: the problems in America couldn't possibly the the fault of the American power and money elites.

American Liberals are just as prone to preach prejudiced, nationalism and exceptionalism to the riff-raff in the defense of the very same American elites as American Conservatives.
well Amerikkka has been a genocidal colonial project since day 0 that hardly ever was a functioning democracy (two party state much?), de facto has an elected Monarch and it's the worst thing to happen to humanity right after the British empire and the Third Reich (in that order; Spanish, French and Portuguese ones' trail (this is my personal ranking, I'm also not perfectly versed in that part of history just fyi))

btw it also was – in same aspects – the primary inspiration for the German fascists who applauded it for it's history of slavery, racial laws and "manifestation of destiny" (that's where the concept of "Lebensraum" comes from btw: "slaughter the untermensch ~~indigenous~~ slavic population to make place for the ~~white~~ German master race")

also ye, bourgeois democracy is just a different side of the capitalist coin that flips to fascism in the instant capital feels too threatened

edit: forgot to use "Amerikkka" instead of "USA" lol