https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/dec/11/gilets-jaunes-emmanuel-macron-french-rebels
The key bit being
Personally I think this is the consequence of socialism failing as a positive project, while capitalism continues to vindicate many of the bad things socialists said about it. What is scary to me is that a confused mixture of left-and-right anger seems historically to be what leads to fascism. It also, to me, shows how national historical contexts lead to different responses from the angry (I don't see Trumpists demanding increased spending on welfare, and I think it's the US history with race that explains that).
I also think that the tendency to blame all these (global) developments on an all-powerful Putin is a bit of a comforting illusion. It's deeper than that.
No idea where you're getting that? How is it socialism failing, let alone vindicating capitalism? That's straight up nonsense considering that America, supposedly the most capitalist major society, was suffering through that exact situation before then (which, uh, I take it you're forgetting that nearly collapsed and that it nearly sent the rest of the worlds' economies spiraling similarly? Plus that being the primary driving force for why there has been so much anger to exploit?). Arguably the US has been dealing with that for about a decade as conservative groups have been trying to push similar shit ever since the recession (by that I mean, they had full on active campaigns to try and exploit, beyond the divisive rhetoric they'd been pushing). Have you completely forgotten about the Tea Party? Sure it might sound different from the French situation, and it is, somewhat, mostly because France just has more political extremists (always have, it seems to inherently be an aspect to their culture), and then they also have a more sizeable group of anarchists. But don't forget the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street seemed to be pushing for similar goals, or rather the Tea Party tried to claim they did in order to prop themselves up (but that quickly unraveled when it was revealed to be a sham and in fact be an old school conservative ploy wherein it transitioned into basically just being another PAC).
That you see that, and ignore the blatant parallels (same thing happened in Israel, then the UK, then America, now its happening elsewhere in Europe) is just baffling. Its blatantly similar, to the point that you'd have to be blind to not see it.
First, I don't think people are doing that. The only people I know actually saying that, are the right wing morons trying to claim that's how the people calling them out are, so they can try to paint people seeing their (conservatives) lead role in all of this as crazy. The other thing is, it really wasn't deeper than Putin/Russian manipulation that has triggered all of this. Now, absolutely it is deeper, in that they're merely exploiting things that were already issues (in fact most of that stuff is always an issue, even in good times), but he's magnifying them, and then targeting the extreme views/people to make things more chaotic, which will just fuel itself.
Its not "all powerful Putin", its just that they've been able to access and exploit shit that groups in those places were already trying to exploit for their own gain. Especially on the conservative side. People have wondered why there hasn't been the big reveal from all the conservative hacks, its because they're in cahoots with and have been exploiting the resources that conservatives built (stuff like the NRA, Cambridge Analytica, etc, that was all conservative shit, and the Russians buddied up to them to exploit it, they basically just found a way to actually make them effective where the conservatives on their own were not). The other thing is that, Putin/Russia's government are very conservative to the point of pretty much being full on fascists, which is why all these situations are all the more stupid, as Conservatives all over are blatantly lying and just going "we're not being this way its the ____ that are". Russians have been saying "we're not fascists, we're super anti-fascists" and then pointing back to WWII and the Nazis attacking them yet conservatives chose to go "yeah, that checks out" because they're idiots. The Soviet Union were fascists too. And just like American conservatives are using the immigrant boogeymen, Putin has been using Nazis. Its ridiculously transparent bullshit but people have been falling for it because they're so pissed off about other shit they're blinding themselves to what's been going on.
So yes, it is deeper than just Putin directing some social media campaigns and hacking, with that serving just as the match that lit these fires properly. Honestly, I doubt Putin even imagined it would be as effective as it has been, and yes it was because all of those societies had been deliberately refusing to address a lot of those issues and because we had a huge near cataclysm which as left a lot of lingering emotions while we're also trying to address many other issues (health care, discrimination/bigotry, and tons of others), and that was the actual fuel of the fire. I don't think Putin is some grandmaster overseer (honestly, he's a shrewd but often ridiculously stupid, like insisting on showing off new military hardware during his parades, when that hardware isn't actually working right, so it breaks down in the middle of the parade, or letting his military help the undertrained idiots they were trying to help shoot down a passenger jet with a Russian anti-aircraft missile; or trying to do a show of force only for their aircraft carrier to catch fire and have to be towed to port), he basically just decided to use some old Soviet tactics from his old KGB days to try to enrich himself, and because of societal issues, it ignited into a much bigger thing, and then he's just made moves to exploit situations as they arose. He got pretty lucky a lot (because seriously him and the Russians are bumbling dumbshits themselves). But its like Turmp. There's enough corrupt assholes who will help them, and there's enough idiots that will support them, that they can be effective in spit of themselves.
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