The Marxists Internet Archive has a huge amount of left/communist non-fiction. It’s very broad in its scope, so there’s Stalin and Mao on there alongside William Morris and HG Wells. You could also check out Timothy Snyder and Rebecca Solnit, who both had interesting books about resisting fascism from a more contemporary viewpoint.

In fiction, there’s The Man in the High Castle, by Phillip K. Dick, which has a similar alt history concept as Roth’s The Plot Against America. And of course there’s George Orwell’s writing, both fiction and non-fiction, much of which explores the nature of fascism. I’d also recommend Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, if you like magical realism.

Temu. No idea what scam they’re running but I will never buy anything from them.

As other people have said, it was borrowed from the Italian fascists, who themselves got it from an 18th century painting showing a famous event from Roman history/legend. There’s no evidence that it was ever actually used in Ancient or Classical Rome.

Funny side story is that some Nazis and other German nationalists thought it wasn’t ‘German’ enough, so the leading Nazis felt they had to invent an older ‘Germanic’ tradition to justify its usage. So, it’s a fake German tradition that was in fact borrowed from the Italians, who got it from a fake Roman tradition that was actually made up by a French guy.

Yes, exactly. There are some things on this list where, if everyone opposed to fascism did one of them, we’d win tomorrow. Realistically, not everyone will, but it’s still the right thing to do, to prise every bit of power from their grasp.

There are lots of Fediverse alternatives to social media, including Lemmy (which I guess you know about?) and the ones people have mentioned here already (Mastodon, Pixelfed, Loops, PeerTube). The advantage of the Fediverse is that it can’t be co-opted by a single bad actor, in the way that Musk took over Twitter and made it into a Nazi bar.

I won’t say just vote, but you should do that, too, at every level!

Depending on how much time and money you have:

• Join a union (and give time and money to organising the union)
• Join an antifascist political party (and give time and money to organising the party)
• Lobby your representatives to demand they oppose fascism
• Join protests against fascism
• Join civil society groups that are antifascist (either directly or because they’re pro human rights or anti-racist, or what-have-you) (and give time and money etc.)
• Boycott businesses that are owned by or enable fascists
• Join co-operatives (and give time and money etc.)
• Join community groups (these don’t even have to be political)
• Support local, independent media and good freelance journalists
• Spread the word about all of the above

I’ve ordered these roughly by how effective I think they’re likely to be (this is of course just one guy’s opinion); you should pick the one(s) that are most attractive to you and best fit your current situation.

Fair warning, none of the above will instantly fix the problem and I grant that some of them probably seem pretty weak sauce in the face of fascism, but the more people do them, the weaker the fascists will get.

Musical ability — perfect pitch, great rhythm. I’m an okay musician after years working at it, but I’d love to be better.

I don’t think it was terrorism, either, as the rest of my comment - indeed, the rest of that sentence - makes clear!

I’m not saying they never happen (the South Korea thing the other day apparently involved a false flag) but nowhere near as often as some people online like to suggest!

Apologies, I thought this was a reference to conspiracies:

Fly a plane into another tower? Found “evidence” that Luigi is a pedophile? distract us with a war with china?

It seemed to suggest various ‘false flag’ type ideas, which are a hallmark of conspiracy theorising.

There’s no need to indulge in conspiratorial thinking, here. Whatever you think of Mangione’s motives, it seems overwhelmingly likely that he did it and, if so, he will almost certainly be in jail for the rest of his life. There’s no need for them to do anything else to him. It seems as though he acted alone, so a broader anti-terrorist crackdown is possible but unlikely, and even less likely to be effective.

As for the CEOs, I imagine a lot more money is going to be spent on security and they’ll probably demand the businesses they work for pay for that, which actually seems fair, as far as it goes.

While I don’t have any sympathy for the Republicans, they didn’t seem to even consider more gun control even after Trump was actually hit by a would-be assassin’s bullet, so I doubt they will now. They might pass a law against 3D gun printing, but it’s not even slightly enforceable; I believe owning such a weapon is already illegal but, as Mangione has demonstrated, there’s not much to stop someone making or using one.

No, only lovers or enemies. Very much a binary.

Lots of good answers here - it’s the kind of question where lots of explanations are partly correct. For me, the decision by early communists to advocate for violent revolution as the only or main way of bringing about communism is a key factor.

It’s pretty common for revolutions to produce dictators, going right back to the fall of the Roman Republic. Ironically, the Roman Civil War that preceded the fall was won by the populares - the people’s movement, as opposed to the optimates, the aristocracy. And yet, the end result was the abolition of the tribunes, which had been the people’s branch of the legislature, and the establishment of the Dictatorship of Julius Caesar, then the Principate of his nephew, Augustus, who we now regard as having been the first Roman Emperor. It wouldn’t be accurate to project back our exact ideas of democracy or class politics to the Romans, but it’s pretty telling that one of the first explicitly ‘class-based’ civil wars in history turned out this way.

Many centuries later, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British Isles had a similar outcome: the royalists were defeated by the parliamentarians, only for the victorious generals to set up one of their own as what we would now call a dictator (Oliver Cromwell as ‘Lord Protector’), who was virtually a king himself.

(Worth noting here that many people assumed George Washington would turn out to be another Cromwell. The fact that he didn’t and the question of why he didn’t, is not something I know enough to even begin to speculate about, but is definitely something to look into when trying to understand this topic.)

Most relevant for the early communists was the French Revolution, which led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte who, more or less explicitly imitating Caesar and Augustus, made himself sole ruler of France, first as ‘Consul’ (a title also borrowed from Classical Rome), then Emperor. He was also followed, a little later, by his nephew doing a very similar thing, again explicitly imitating the Romans.

Ironically, Marx himself wrote about this exact tendency, even calling it ‘Bonapartism’, to warn revolutionaries to try and avoid it. I don’t know how exactly he missed the point that the very thing he elsewhere advocated for - violent revolution - was itself the cause of Bonapartism but it seems he did. Plainly, the early Marxists didn’t sufficiently heed this warning, for whatever reason (and see other replies in this thread for many good suggestions!).

Basically, if you’re going to advocate for the violent destruction of a system of government, you are running a major risk that in the ensuing chaos, someone very good at being violent and decisive will end with far too much power.

Yeah, you’re right about the footnotes. I read someone the other day saying they felt like Kuang was writing with an imaginary social justice scold hovering over her, and I think that’s about right. I find it odd that someone feels they have to say ‘racism — which is bad, by the way — exists in this society’. We know it’s bad! Even racists don’t like being called racist!

I started reading it yesterday, so I’ll let you know.

Why did you dislike it?

My advice is to try it out at an indoor gym first! And also never to free solo anything! Ever!

Yeah, free soloing is the one. I climb all the time, totally happy doing anything at any height with a rope but without one? Nah.

There used to be a very similar shop near me that was actually just a front for selling cannabis.

Do you mean where people use it as an adjective? E.g., ‘This house is very aesthetic’ where they mean ‘beautiful’?

How deep does the rabbit hole go?