There was a point where the National Socialist Party was actually socialist. But Hitler and his ilk saw a party with popular momentum, joined it, co-opted it, and betrayed the socialist ideals.

Its true when you see some legislation with freedom in the title you know they are about to take someones freedoms away.

Actually, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo are two separate countries that border each other.

Edit: Just to add to the confusion, there used to be more Republic of the Congos.

Looking it up now, Congo has removed Democratic from its name but still calls itself a Republic.

There's two countries called congo, the democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo. Both still exist today, there was no name change.

Tbf I'm not excusing the CCP but they seem to be a lot better about practicing democracy / voting in council and ability to advance in politics than the others on the list, as long as your Han Chinese. Still authoritarian though.

This, by the way, applies not just to in the name of the country explicitly including an ideal, but also to harping on, and on, and on about how the country is such a great beacon of an ideal (like they do in the US and UK about being Democratic all the while having First Past The Post voting systems).

I would say that the general rule (applied to people in all situations, not just in politics) is that if you feel the need to constantly state or imply that you or your group have some great quality, you don't have it.

If they were obviously democratic, like e.g. Denmark, then there would be need to them to lie about it in their name.

So it actually makes sense that non-democratic countries are more likely yo have a name claiming to be democratic.

Yep. Liars gonna lie

A revolution without a solid, detailed plan for how to actually run the country afterword is just teenage angst exercised at a larger scale.

"We're going to be a social anarchist commune!" does not count as a plan. It's an aspiration at best.

If there is no plan laid out, with strong community buy-in, then what always happens is that the "revolution" gets co-opted by someone to serve their own power-hungry ambitions.

and fascists took advantage of the resulting power vacuum.

The larger problem of projecting is universal, and worse if the west if anything. No child left behind is to leave children behind, big beautiful bill is ugly, take any republican bill, it's all opposite, which is not substantially different from these other countries having an ironic name.

It's not communist or capitalist, it's authoritarian.

Empathy is weakness.

Oh, they were "united", under.

This is deep man

Think that's a bit reductive, and an ironically manipulative use of language. It's important to remember that many of the countries which exemplify this pattern also emerged out of struggles against colonialism, and therefore contended with both the popularism of liberty and indepdence (democracy) and the inevitable response from external, imperialist powers.

So, there's some good explanations for why polities that are militaristic, itself conducive to authoritarianism, are that way since EuroAmerican imperialists don't just allow actually challenging resistance to appear in the periphery with impunity. Then, there's the fact that "post-" colonial states rarely exist over preexisting, unified cultural or ethnic spaces with a common material interest, and also must be organized into a specific, hierarchal structure to gain recognition from the EuroAmerican global imperialist order and participate in its economy. Inevitably, the political incompatibility of groups within those states leads to irreconcilable conflict, and therefore the need for any state established to defend itself from both external and internal pressures.

The reason why the US and Europe so often support authoritarian dictatorships in response to socialist -- or honestly, even liberal evolutions if they aren't favourable enough -- is because these conditions are so conducive to this form of state building, and they benefit from it even if they fail to topple a supposedly threatening government. In the same vain, the fact that you used "fascist" to decribe this, and not something that more clearly references the hegemonically liberal capitalist, EuroAmerican nature of this form of politics itself emblemizes how the production of knowledge under this system creates language that occludes the relationship between these kinds of authoritarian states and the historical processes that lead to them.

Fascists do indeed love to lie, though saying that they do so exceptionally is itself a lie. Most people under liberal capitalists systems don't even know what fascism is for that very same reason, and often construct it as synonymous with any kind of authoritarianism, or just the word you use when an authoritarian system loses its purported moral virtue. You'll notice that another commenter here made the typical mistake of associating this same behaviour with socialism or communism, which happens, but hardly happens in the same ways and for the same reasons.

Faux News is correct tho