Stas Bush wrote:How do you fight fascism then?
Seriously? Are we really having this discussion right now?
Strongmen are elected when citizens become desperate enough to believe that the only way out of whatever predicament they are in is to elect a strongman to cut through red tape, reverse the runaway inflation, create jobs, shoot his corrupt predecessors, eliminate the undesirables, or do whatever the fuck else to resolve whatever the predicament is / is being blamed on.
That's why extremists of any stripe become popular whenever countries are in dire straits: because they offer easy solutions to complex problems. Follow us, we have what it takes to make this country strong again! All we need to do is remove [insert group to blame here] from power to [insert crisis to resolve here]! Use rhetoric, shift blame, take power. Welcome to extremist political ideology 101.
So how do you fight it? You fight it by fighting desperation. Hell, Stas, you said it yourself: "provide people with [a] semblance of a decent life". Take away the desperation and you remove the fascists' source of power. People in tight spot will flock to whoever promises them a quick fix. Get them out of that tight spot and they're infinitely more likely to view strongmen as an undesirable solution.
That's why the EU doesn't kick out states that have fascist parties in power: because it's
counterproductive. Kick them out, remove them from the common market, cut them off from EU subsidies, raise the trade barriers -- if their economy was doing badly before it'll be sure to spiral out of control now. The result? Dire straits get more dire, and the fascists will have an easy external target to blame their countries' woes on: it's not us, it's those bad guys in Brussels! They fear us, they don't want us to be strong, but if you just follow us and step up the beatings we can overcome anything!
Fan-fucking-tastic, you've just made a bad situation
even worse.
Do you honestly think the people in charge in Brussels don't see the Nazi symbols, that amongst the teeming hordes of bureaucrats there's nobody checking the manifestos of the parties now running the place, that they can't figure out that there might be some deeply unpleasant people involved with the revolution? Come off it. Of course they know. That's precisely why the €20 billion credit line is being offered, because if it's not Ukraine will be even worse off, and then what? Brussels cannot afford to just let Ukraine collapse into an even worse version of itself because that doesn't solve anything, it just makes problems worse.
How do you fight fascism? Well in this case, you hand the country sacks full of cash in the hopes that the economy will do better or at least keep going so that the appeal of fascism will diminish or at least not get bigger. You know, the exact opposite of what shutting the door on Ukraine would achieve.
This isn't exactly rocket science guys.