Its leader is a former supermarket manager who created his political party on YouTube in the depths of the coronavirus pandemic and campaigned on the Trumpian message “Japanese First.”
Now Japan’s burgeoning right-wing populist party Sanseito has emerged an unlikely winner in parliamentary elections this weekend.
Inspired by other populist right-wing groups that have sprung up in recent years, Sanseito bagged 14 seats in Japan’s upper house, according to public broadcaster NHK – a dramatic increase from the single seat it had occupied previously.
“Now ______’s burgeoning right-wing populist party…”
Is a sentence I’m REALLY fucking tired of seeing over and over and over and over… The future is depressing enough ffs.
i genuinely think what we have to do is start speaking in terms of the future we desire. fascism presents no hopeful vision of the future and only offers a return to an imagined past. i think the best way to dislodge people from the right wing beast is to offer them hope. the lower classes are suffering currently, and the right wing is saying to them “it used to be easier, didn’t it? back when the police beat rodney king to within an inch of his life? we could go back to that”
but the reality is they want to take us back to when we were all property. never forget that black people were enslaved by europeans around the time european serfs demanded and won their freedom. backsliding on slavery will not make anyone freer, it will just get everyone closer to being enslaved. same goes for women’s rights, gay rights, trans rights, civil rights, everything.
the only way for any of us to be free is to work together towards a shared future where everyone is fed, everyone has shelter, and no one has hoards of what anyone else needs. for the record, i’m an anarchocommunist (and i coalition most closely with religious anarchists from my time learning from jewish and native american anarchocommunists). this is our vision for the future. and lest anyone from a post soviet country think i’m advocating for bolshevism, i am decidedly not. any system that requires gulags to sustain itself is not a system that any anarchist can agree with. i believe in freedom from structures of power. that includes fascism, authoritarian communism, capital holders, and organized crime. the power must belong to the people because we are the ultimate originators of all of it.
when the greedy parasites declare war, who do they draft? us. when the greedy parasites get hungry, who feeds them? us. when the greedy parasites needs their homes heated and connected to water, who do they call? us. it’s always us. we’re who runs all this machinery. we just need to awaken to the power that we have: the power we have always had
I totally agree about hope. Hope and joy are revolutionary, especially when it seems like the world is falling apart. Cynicism is a trap - we need to dig deeper and come together.
Bad example, since this never stopped in any way.
oh i know. but that’s the promise the fascists make. “let us take away some rights and things will get easier for you” when what they’re really saying is “we will change nothing, you will get nothing”