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Bulletins and News Discussion from April 28th to May 4th, 2025 - Competent Fascism? - COTW: El Salvador

Image is from the Britannica article on CECOT, known as the Terrorism Confinement Center in English.

This megathread's topic is inspired by our lovely news regular, @Frogmanfromlake@hexbear.net, who talks often about the conditions inside El Salvador and gives nuanced and informative takes.

As the Trump administration continues to make foreign policy blunders that would make even the staunchest anti-imperialist accelerationist blush - and we are barely three months in! - it's interesting to compare and contrast his policies of incompetent imperialist and domestic management to the dictators in other countries.

Bukele is somewhat unique among fascists, in that he seems to not hide - and seems to even admit to - his evil, self-describing as the world's "coolest dictator". El Salvador has no particular shortage of prominent fascists in their history, but one major example is Maximiliano Martínez, who led the country over much of the 1930s and the early 1940s. He was responsible the deaths of many thousands of communists and indigneous people, and yet joined World War 2 on the side of the Allies and against the Nazis.

The comparisons between Martínez and Bukele - and, indeed, between Bukele and Trump - in terms of their impact on minority groups are slowly growing as world attention is being drawn to the country. The recent meeting between Bukele and Trump has shifted a spotlight onto El Salvador's crime policy; the internal conditions of El Salvador's prisons are genuinely monstrous. One gets a similar feeling as when reading descriptions of the conditions of Holocaust victims in German concentration camps. Trump has made statements to the effect that he want a similar crime crackdown inside the United States, and I certainly believe that he wants this (ICE is already just kidnapping people off the streets into vans), but his administration has been so chaotic and mismanaged that it's difficult to determine whether this will be an interest he rapidly drops in favor of some other hair-brained scheme.

Last week's thread is here. The Imperialism Reading Group is here.

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768 comments

  • As the UK Labour right's increasingly circular firing squad intensifies after expected blowouts across recent local elections they're announcing (via the political editor of The Times) that they're going they're going to chainsaw - as in shut down - the Department for Media, Culture, & Sport, while their ministers are on Twitter screaming about how they have to do "more deportations, faster".

    The DfMCS supports and strategises for a huge amount of sport and tourism in general, but it also oversees two very obvious and important things that the far-right (in Labour, Reform, and the media) are desperate to be able to sack and dismantle...

    The first is that it oversees funding and provides support for things like galleries, museums, their links with education, and also things like music and the arts. It's a massive culture war target for the frothing at the mouth fash who believe that anything other than white-supremacy and the glory of the British Empire is critical race theory and the woke mind virus. It's history rewriting time folks, not to mention that no doubt the government is probably eliminating it at least in part for retribution against artists like Kneecap (who the Met Police anti-terrorism task force have now assigned units to trawl through every online video of the band ever posted to try and find grounds to charge them with offences, it was revealed the other day) as well as literary and art figures who have spoken out against the genocide in Palestine.

    The second is that it also oversees matters of press freedom and media regulation. Dismantling it provides a perfect attack vector for not only directly forcing media to follow the party line (as oppossed to implicit method of it being one big club of about 300 privately educated lunatics funded by foreign billionaires at the moment), but also eliminating whatever tiny sliver of regulation there is on the right-wing newspapers and television news, the protection of journalists, and defence of ordinary people / groups from smear campaigns and libel (& frivolous libel suits too).

    I've been saying for months that Starmer's government is following the Trump policy agenda in everything but speed and tone and here we have the tone shifting as they scream to speed up the process.

768 comments