@gaditb right the train of thought playing out in my mind is:

(first thought) there is definitely a difference between {someone who is willing to commit a genocide because they believe in an ideology} and {those who are willing to commit a genocide because of an ideology they don’t believe in}. the first group is a more immediate threat but also, maybe you can break them of that ideology someday. the latter group seems a lot more difficult to get a handle on

(second thought) but, is the existence of the first group actually a prerequisite for nazi·ism?

(further pondering) is the point of the quote maybe in fact that {our tendency to treat fascism as an ideology which people do or don’t have} causes us to miss how it actually functions?

idk here. if the difference between the nazi and the not-nazi is just that the nazi finds violence politically expedient in the short term while the not-nazi doesn’t (yet), that's less a difference in the quality of the person themselves and more just one of their current political situation

which is still important to measure but less essentialist

@Lady That's certainly not how the quote is used, if that IS the point of the quote.

I think very few ideologies actually actively BELIEVE IN genocide. And I don't think they're that popular, or politically practical.
I'm pretty sure they exist -- my source for this is a, uh, VERY ideologically-deliberate book, but assuming it wasn't fully lying you can find the diary of Jurgen Stroop as he was liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, which is pretty direct about it? -- and.. MAYBE a solid core of people actually believing it is necessarily to actually DO the genocide? maybe?

@Lady But I think getting to the position where a genocide is politically possible doesn't require that. (And, potentially, the "actively believe in genocide" ideology develops as its made possible). I think THAT point just requires the belief that some people are not, in fact, people. That's not a non-violent belief -- that gets you proving-a-political-point killings, random attacks on busses, etc. -- but I don't think it's a positive drive to genocide.
And that can be a lot easier to build and share than "we want to do a genocide" -- you can do it just by internal focus, by painting a vision of "just us, free to be just us" utopia rather than painting an enemy. (I'm thinking of Amanda Rogers' work on ISIS propaganda-towards-Muslims, eg.)

@Lady And then... I think there's the people who just don't have a strong opinion, but are willing to sit back and be friendly as it happens. Maybe they'll join if pressured and put off considering their feelings until later, maybe they'll eventually start picking beliefs up after some time but first they're just tagging along, or doing what's convenient, or whatever.

@gaditb i guess my hesitation with the last point is whether people not having an opinion is just a function of them not having power, because the people with power tend to need to have an opinion

having power can happen to anyone so figuring out what they will do when they have it is important even when they don't have it presently

@Lady People do have power.
People always have power whether or not to attack someone on public transit or on the street, whether when driving empty roads at night to just run the lone pedestrian down, whether to just up and stap the person standing next to them.

Existing in proximity to people in society is a huge exercise in trust, which is a surrender of power to the other.

And -- for the vast majority of people in the vast majority of situations -- it utterly works.

@gaditb (can’t say i agree it works when i go to the grocery store and nobody is wearing a mask, but there’s no need to delve deeply there)

(i’m asking questions because my background is in literary criticism and social constructionism, and i acknowledge that those aren’t always the best tools for analysing these things, they’re just the ones i’m familiar with. i think you have different tools and value your opinions)

(but if a guy gets appointed CEO of CNN and decides to publicly air a promotional interview with a fascist on primetime television, that doesn’t require “having a strong opinion” but also it is a fascist act (and one he couldn’t have performed without being so positioned). people aren’t motivated along a single axis of ideology; they are also motivated by profit and personal history and cultural values and emotion. i think it’s reasonable to ask how people might change in a situation where, say, enabling fascism is profitable even if you don’t agree with it. and since we live in a world where enabling fascism often IS profitable, does fascism even require actual fascists besides?)

@gaditb @Lady i definitely do think its true that there is very little overlap between the group which you might describe as Nazis because they are interested in actively orchestrating a political situation in which genocide is considered expedient and the people who you might describe as Nazis bc they are interested in being the next school shooting incident/hate crime on the bus over. To the extent that those groups have any contact at all, it is in fact group A whipping group B into a frenzy that turns potential violence into actual

So if I have to pick one to label as nazis I think I would definitely personally pick A, even if the hypothetical bus that group A is on is much less likely to break out into immediate violence

@gaditb @Lady whether or not group C “people who are casually friendly with groups A and/or B and thus indirectly enable them” is also nazis is I guess more up in the air, but the issue is that group C is MUCH more likely to actively enable or even eventually become group A—eg. M’s CNN example—than they are to abruptly develop a taste for violence

@Lady Oh no I agree about that! But it's not that "enabling fascism" as a category is profitable -- it's that many actions which are part of enabling fascism are profitable individually. (There's a similar thing in how opposing anticaptialism is not categorically profitable -- there's the quote "the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with", e.g. Which is always stated as far more of failing of capitalism than I think is warranted by it.)

@Lady I don't think it's necessarily THEORETICALLY impossible to have things keep aligning such that enabling/bringing about fascism is incidentally the move everyone keeps choosing to take for their own reasons because things happen to align, but I think it's unlikely?
Usually, enabling fascism for the audience it brings has at least some of that audience, or those performers, actually in it for what is in front of them and giving a frame to align it to that makes it end up being specifically fascism.
Or, like, the action that is doing-fascism that is also useful to a not-necessarily-fascist to have happen... is going to find SOME of its enthusiastic participants there plainly for the fascist action they directly value.
If it were so far out of the public imaginary that there'd be nobody unironically for it, it wouldn't have enough support or intention to happen at all.

@gaditb i think there is truth in that, but i’m not sure i fully believe it without qualifications

specifically, i think fascism or something like it is the end state you eventually wind up in when a society always chooses politically convenient lies over politically inconvenient truths. it has a foundation of misinformation.

the line between people actually believing misinformation and pretending to is (i think) pretty fuzzy. but what makes truth politically inconvenient is precisely the consequences it would have within people's ideologies: people are lied to BECAUSE they have ideologies which would not tolerate the current situation if they were told the truth. if people's ideologies were content with fascism, there would be no need for misinformation

this is an aside though, because my actual question is more along the lines of “is eliminating fascists enough to eliminate fascism?” i’m not convinced it is, and if fascists are the symptom and not the cause, then maybe the suffix -ist is doing something different than we might usually expect