Ask Lemmy

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.