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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Spain. Sure they killed a few people and in many cases they were communists and a necessary thing to do to protect the country. Saudi Arabia is probably the most livable country in the ME. People do tend to select authoritarian governments when you have bad that kind of need to be killed if you want to be civilized.

How is Singapore fascist? they have Free and fair election under a Westminster system? The others aren't really fascist either. The fascists in Spain were the Falange who were in a coalition with Franco but not the leading party. I don't think fascist just means "right wing authoritarian" The self identified fascists in the interwar period were all about state intervention over free markets and there was an element of futurism in both Italian and German fascism that we don't see in those governments.

Calling Singapore and Saudi Arabia "fascist" is a stretch, and Chile and Spain during their fascist eras were at least as bad as living under communism. As for Saudi Arabia, it's a pretty chill place to live if you are a Muslim man with no significant dissident tendencies, but otherwise not a great argument for your case either even if we label it "fascist."

Chile and Spain during their fascist eras were at least as bad as living under communism.

Hard disagree. Nothing Franco or Pinochet did seems comparable to the Holodomor or the Great Chinese Famine. Both embraced economic liberalization programs that led to high growth; Spain experienced the Spanish Miracle and Chile remains one of the richest countries in LATAM to this day. Meanwhile, communist countries are notoriously poor even when they aren't literally starving to death, because communism is the creationism of economics. Pinochet only killed a few thousand people, most of them literal communists; Stalin killed a million people during the Great Purge alone.

If we compare them to like Yugoslavia or East Germany though they are pretty comparable. I wouldn't call Pinochet or Franco fascists anyway.

Not every communist government has created famines, either. You can debate the relative badness of fascism versus communism if that scratches it for you, but objectively they have both always been pretty bad wherever they have been implemented. "His brutal police state only killed a few thousand people and was good for the economy" is not a ringing endorsement just because Stalin was worse.

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