The SD brownshirts here in Sweden seem to think hard discipline is the cure for gang criminals. That’s the opposite of what they need. The gang world is already one of fear and obedience.
SD har lämnat in en motion om särlagstiftning mot gängkriminella.
I motionen föreslås bland annat utegångsförbud kvällstid,
obligatorisk fotboja och möjlighet att låsa in gängkriminella i
förebyggande syfte. Fängelsestandarden: lägsta möjliga.
För unga gängkriminella som fyllt 15 år föreslås förflyttning från
skola till uppfostringsanstalt där »militärdisciplin« råder och
dagarna ägnas åt arbete. Gängkriminella under 15 år ska gå på
pliktskolor med »hård disciplin«. I grova fall, som mord, ska en
15–åring kunna få livstids fängelse.
“Locked up precautionarily”?!
Of course it’s “do as I say, not as I do” since their own leader is palling around with gang leaders.
Jimmie Åkesson (SD) hävdar fortsatt att han inte kände till att en
av hans bröllopsgäster hade kopplingar till den kriminella
mc-miljön. Trots att partikollegor kände till uppgifterna.
That reminds me of this exchange from Checkmate, Lincolnites!:
Billy Yank: You mentioned Shay’s rebellion which is a perfect example of what Pinkney was talking about here. In 1786, a year before the constitutional convention, Massachusetts raised taxes to insanely high levels.
Johnny Reb: What a shocker… 🙄
Billy Yank: Under the articles of confederation, the state government was basically unaccountable and these taxes disproportionately affected the very poor. When they inevitably couldn’t pay, the state seized their homes. So, led by a veteran named Daniel Shays, they picked up their guns and went down to their county seat to physically prevent the courts from issuing further foreclosure orders.
Johnny Reb: Sounds like a bunch of troublemaking freeloaders, looking for a handout… 😒
Billy Yank: They were white.
Johnny Reb: Brave rebels! The tree of liberty must be watered by the blood of patriots! 🫡
SD’s policies are built around the wrong-headed idea that The Other isn’t like us, that we never need to try to imagine ourselves ending up in those hard discipline camps, that if there ever were any white gang leaders they’d instead be invited to our weddings.
The other take I’ve been on the last few years, that the fachos’ “harsher punishments”, “harder tactics” line is not the answer, I’m still on that. That should’ve been my take from the beginning. Those harsher punishments are not evidence-based, they don’t help you catch the shooters, and they increase alienation since they target immigrants specifically.
Don’t get me wrong here. I’m not judging SD’s leader for his wedding guests. I’d be in a fragile glass house if we were judged by our connections to friends and fam. One of my partners is literally Dracula, but everyone knows I’m my own person.
The point isn’t exactly the hypocrisy either—I’ve made my own fair share of mistakes—although that’s closer to the main point which is that their brutal policy proposals are based on a dehumanized view of the people they think they’re dealing with while in reality these perps are actually real people, as is evidenced by how they can also be wedding guests, which is why I brought that connection up.
Jesper wrote in, saying:
I think the desire for a harder, more authoritarian, state is the primary desire for the fascist sympathisers. It’s not that they actually think it will reduce crime: their attitude to crime is that they are happy for it, and happy for anything else that gives them excuses for more authority, more enforcement.
That’s definitively how it comes across, but part of that perception is teleologic bias (i.e. how we tend to think things are more “by design” or “on purpose” than they are).
My own take is that fascism has since its original conception in 1920s Italy been designed to twist the political cleavage point away from worker vs owner and towards other splits like straight vs gay or citizen vs ganger or antivaxx vs medicine in order for the rich to get richer and keep the exploitation machine churning. Wedge issues.
(And in before it seems like I’m committing the same “it’s by design” teleology: the initial idea for fascism being an arena twist was by design, but the sickening success of fascism lately has been emergent since it has been such an efficient fit to the parameters of political discourse and the needs of those already in power. I grew up in the era where liberalism was the enemy to our progressive anarchopunk bread distros but these days liberalism is a joke—the lie that “capitalism is good actually” has become increasingly hard to swallow as the market failures are on full display for all, so the rich has turned to promoting outright fascism instead, along with how it promotes itself because it’s just a well-fitting misthought for our circumstances right now.)
When I was young, socialist hegemony was (or appeared to be) the biggest threat, and then the owners pretended to be liberals: they wanted to lower taxes because that meant more ”freedom”. Now they stopped talking about freedom but they still want to lower taxes. What they are using now is a popular desire for authoritarianism.
Right, exactly. That’s what I was trying to say, too.
But they didn’t invent it, they are just using it. […] Economically powerful people are just often able to fish out and use parts of rising movements to their advantage.
Yeah, that was also what I was trying to say. It’s an emergent “evolutionary” consequence of systems. Right wing used to be an incompatible mix of “freedom” and “conservatism” where they cherry picked whatever they needed to make the rich richer (or rather, there’s not always a teleological “they” but ideas that made the rich richer are evolutionary a good fit for a corrupt system where money increases power).
I don’t think fascism was originally designed for what you say, I don’t think it was designed at all. It was a messy cluster of new and/or radical ideas.
While this is a trivia point so tangential to the main points we agree on, I guess I should’ve clarified that I meant corporatism specifically, which sought to sidestep class conflicts. Which sort of lives on in the tripartite system that workers suffer under here in Sweden.
Sertaç writes in:
Clara Mattei’s “The Capital Order” elaborately shows the process in Italy and Britain, pointing at the concrete “they”, and that it was not a mere ‘consequence of systems’.
I would call it ‘designed’ — albeit stochastically.