Hello Everyone; I'm Nathan Rich, AKA, Hotpot King.
Today, I want to talk about this very strange idea that I hear sometimes that
China is a "fascist country.
" If you've been following my videos recently, you've seen one that I made
about Sargon of Akkad.
And in there I mentioned something very strange, which is that Sargon has sort
of jumped on this bandwagon of other people who call China "fascist." And I
get a lot of arguments in my comments section of people who say, "Yes, it's
definitely a fascist country." Which seems very weird to me.
It's almost like all these people either intentionally are pretending that
they don't understand what fascism is or they're just trying to use the most
inflammatory word they can think of.
The way I see it, though, is that fascism is actually quite incompatible with
China's basic principles.
Normally in the West, especially in America, where I'm from, in spoken common
language in the United States, any time somebody is very strict you can call
them "fascist" or a "Nazi." For example, you can say somebody is a grammar
Nazi or you can say that "She's a fascist because she really is strict about
driving rules," or something like that.
But that's not the definition that I'm interested in, because that's just a
light conversational word.
What I'm interested in is fascism - the actual government.
What is the theory of fascism?
Let's talk a little bit about political structure.
If we were able to simulate a bunch of people suddenly existing on some
island and observed them, the moment that they began existing, that would be
anarchy. Nobody would be in charge of anything and everyone would feel that
they have ultimate rights.
But as soon as we see one person try to do something to another that would
infringe on that other person's rights, for example, kill somebody, then
we'll start to see a hierarchy form.
So anarchy is very unstable.
In fact, it can only really last in a frozen moment.
As soon as anything starts to change, that anarchy starts to develop into a
hierarchical structure.
So some basic hierarchies would be, for example, authoritarianism, where
somebody is generally in charge of the rest of the group.
Now, it's interesting to note that just because something is an authoritarian
rule doesn't mean that it wasn't put there democratically.
So let's take this simulation as an example.
Let's say that there were ten people on this island and all ten said, "Hey,
we need some kind of government.
Why don't we all choose Nathan?
Nathan, you're in charge.
You're in charge of the whole island.
Everybody needs to do what you say.
And we don't get a vote in the future.
It's just whatever you say goes." Well, that's an authoritarian style rule
that was democratically established.
Now, this is something that a lot of people have a really hard time
understanding. Just because something isn't currently adhering to universal
suffrage doesn't mean that it wasn't democratically established, because at
the time that there is no government, there's no way to vote, there's nothing
in place. And so the only way to really vote is to have combat or to have
discussions or to just some way or another agree on a quorum and to make a
popular change.
And so if the popular change is, "Hey, this guy is in charge," that's an
authoritarian government put into place by democratic means.
So that's one example of something that could happen from the momentary state
of anarchy. Authoritarianism is like most families, I think in the world.
You have at the top of this hierarchy might be someone's grandparents or their
mother, their father usually.
The rest of the family will have a tendency of following that direction.
And that person or persons may have the ultimate authority of, for example,
that family. This is also how most places of work are set up.
The boss is the person in charge.
It's usually an authoritarian setup.
There's not really such a thing as a democratic workplace for the most part,
because generally speaking, the people at work doing various jobs don't have
any concept of what's good for the overall company.
Authoritarianism is a very vanilla term.
It's not really tied to a particular ideology other than "somebody should be
in charge, not generally the people and not nobody." There should be somebody
or some people who are wielding authority over others.
Within one country, you can also have a totalitarian rule, which would be
essentially that rather than simply having a source of authority, you would
actively try to permeate that authority through all avenues of life within
that country.
Where things start to split off historically with the actual manifestations of
these types of governments that have happened here on Earth is mostly split
along a few major lines.
And there's a big difference between communism and fascism, including Nazism
and other types of more vanilla fascism.
And it kind of comes down to this.
What people consider themselves to be in the center is libertarian.
And libertarian is "We care the most about the individual and their rights.
" And it, just like any other political system, can never truly be manifested.
You can never grant full rights to every individual because full rights means
your right to infringe on other people's rights.
So it's paradoxical; it doesn't really make sense.
But you can definitely push in that direction.
That's the sort of centrist view on things, is that the individual is key.
So with anarchism and liberalism, the focus is primarily on the individual.
As you go up the channels of authoritarianism, focus is more to the group.
So communism will focus more on groups, fascism will focus more on groups.
And so, so far, it sounds like they're almost exactly the same thing.
If you haven't actually thought this through, but you're kind of just going
along with the mainstream message of hate, because you're weak and you have
no actual principles or integrity to do real truth seeking, then it's very
easy to just conflate all these together and say, "Well, X country bad,
therefore X country fascist.
X country Nazi.
Every other bad thing that you can think of.
" But actually there are huge fundamental differences between these two paths.
Let's forget the whole left and right thing because that can just cloud the
issue. A lot of that has to do with the size of government and the sort of
attitude towards social policies.
Forget all that. What is the fundamental difference between communism and
fascism? We know that liberalism and centrism and anarchism focuses on the
individual, and we know that communism and fascism both focus on the groups.
But what is the difference?
It's huge.
In the center they're pushing for something called "unenforced inequality,"
meaning the people in these states will definitely end up creating
inequality. But the system itself is not forcing those inequalities.
It's passively forcing them.
It's an unenforced inequality.
So in other words, if you take a bunch of people in this simulation, you dump
them on an island, definitely hierarchies will form and there will be
inequality, although technically speaking, you're not forcing that to happen.
You're just allowing the natural order of things to establish those
hierarchies. So that's the center.
To the degree that you're on the left, you're pushing more towards an
"enforced equality." In other words, you're kind of going against nature and
you're trying to create equality where otherwise there may not be equality.
And that means you're pushing some people down and you're lifting some people
up and you're ending up with a more equal society by helping people who
you've deemed need it, and by stopping some people from getting so far ahead
of the others. OK, that's socialism.
And communism is basically the extreme of that - everyone is exactly the
same. Now, of course, none of these governments can ever fully be realized
because there is no such thing as an absolute state of these things.
But that's the direction that they're pushing in.
The more communistic a place is the more the core values is that everyone
should be exactly the same - for better or for worse.
But if you look at the right wing and the fascist chain, it's a totally
different concept. They do not believe that at all.
What they believe in is "enforced inequality." What the right will tend to
push for is groups, sure, but unequal groups.
This is why...
you can argue there's racists all over the place
but in the normal mainstream concept of what racism is in the West, you tend
to find those clusters on the right.
Because they're already in this mindset of superiorism.
America is number one.
America is better than other countries.
This is the basic tenets of all the fascism.
It's the basic concept of "We are the elite ones and we are better than
others." And that's also why imperialism is on the right and aggressive
expansionism is also on the right.
You're establishing spheres of value, assigning people into those spheres.
This is exactly why Naziism is considered to be on the right.
Because in Nazi Germany, life was great if you're a Nazi of a certain race.
But if you're of a different race or a different status, then you're in this
lower level. It's not an accidental situation.
The lower you are on this ladder, the worse that you're treated by the
government specifically, directly, intentionally as part of the entire
philosophy and core values of the system.
Now, let's go back to communism again.
Communism doesn't trying to do that.
In the core tenants is not that it should be going and finding the large
groups of people, separating them out in a permanent way and creating
multiple classes throughout the society.
In fact, is the total opposite.
Of course, people practice it very different.
The Khmer Rouge is very different than the USSR is very different than...
You know, there's all these different implementations, but the ideology is
that of molding people together into one group, whereas the right wing
fascist ideologies is to take one group and to separate it into multiple
groups. It's just...
it's not compatible.
This is one of the big reasons that the number one destroyer of fascism in
the entire world ever, has been communism.
If you look back at who killed all those Nazis, those were communists.
And the reason for that is their ideologies are not even compatible at all.
So why do people call countries "fascist" when they're not fascists?
It's both because in a common language, you can say anything is a fascist
that you don't like or you think it's authoritarian or you think it's strict
or it did something that you disagree with.
But also because it's a very sneaky way to fool people who haven't thought
about this clearly into thinking, "Oh, yeah, I guess it really is a fascist
country." No, it's not.
We have words and words have meanings.
Anyway, there's so many things like this that are just easy to debunk.
If you guys want me to do more of these, let me know and I will do my best.
Thanks, everybody. Xiexie.