As actual living memory fades away it almost seems like a natural inevitability. It is already as mythologicial to many as World War 1 cavalry.
This.
Good people make soft people make bad people make good people.
The Nazis, as all the populists, offered simple answers to complex problems. The simple people who are struggling and/or in fear of change like that a lot.
My dad fought the Nazi’s they lost
“Oh I’m sorry. How did they die?”
“Die? No, we lost them. And now we cannot find them”
“Oh there they are! Right there!”
I guess people like to be lied to. They prefer to live in their own imagined worlds fueled by lies and propaganda instead of facing real problems, finding solutions, and sometimes just admit to being wrong. This is why rectionaries are getting so much approval in our fast changing world. sometimes people are not ready for speed of those changes, do not forget not forget it hasnt been long time since we left our caves. and billionaires propaganda is making it’s part too
Dude I live in Ohio and see the confederate flag on porches. OHIO!!! I’m so far north in Cleveland that only a lake seperates me from Canada!!!
We were NEVER part of the confederacy! And once you leave Cleveland area, into the rural farmlands, its all confederate flags and trump flags.
That should tell you everything you need to know.
Was at the musuem in Gettysburg recently and the amount of Confederate flag hats/shirts I saw was wild. I’m sure the contents of the museum would’ve upset them if they could read
That should tell you everything you need to know.
That morons live everywhere.
Iowa here, same thing. This state has a very progressive history, but that’s being erased at lightning speed
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Anyone now seeing how some people are slowly converting their house into like a campaign collage with these Trump banners printed on corrugated plastic.
Yes, and I live north of the Canadian border. They seem to think Trump is a viable alternative to Trudeau.
There is no “recent resurgence”.
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- Nazis never went away. Underground Nazi groups, as well as fully fledged Nazi political parties were common throughout post-WWII Europe.
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- The people fighting the Nazis weren’t ideologically much better than them. The Americans were still racist as fuck. The British and the French were imperialist world dominators. All of these allies were involved in their own genocides. The Soviets believed in sacrificing huge swaths of their own people to accomplish “great leaps forward”.
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- Nazism and similiar ideologies are fundamentally based on in-group bias, and that is just something psychological. There will always be people who are more open to others and people who are less open to others.
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- If you look at recent wars, you will see that even the non-Nazi, “moderate”, “liberal”, “centrist” political parties can have blood on their hands and be complicit in atrocities very much reminiscent of the evil the Nazis committed.
I think the bottom line is, you have to unlearn a lot of the just-so narratives that you have been taught about the world.
I will do you one better.
Compare USSR since Stalin to Nazi Germany.
Authoritarianism and personality cult in both cases.
As for the rest, it differed drastically.
Nazi Germany was a reactionary ultra-nationalist ultra-militarist right-wing state that pursued a neverending war to make “living room” for Germans at the expense of everybody else and death to Jews and Gypsies.
Soviet Union was built on the premise of equality and egalitarian society that was only militant against the bourgeoisie. It was built around internationalism and peace of nations.
Yes, it should be noted that during the war Stalin has ordered to move some national groups that were “strategically likely” to join Nazis away from the frontline, which is, let’s say, not great by modern humanitarian standards. But exterminating them was never his goal, and they were very much alive and returned to their homeland afterwards. Quite a contrast with Nazis actually shooting or poisoning everyone remotely Jewish, leaving them to a painful death.
I was thinking of Israel actually. I don’t think the comparison between the Nazis and the Soviets is apt. The ideological motivations are quite different. And it’s a typical Nazi talking point to point at the Soviets and try to argue that they were worse.
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It’s just the age-old cycle of bad losing to good losing to weak, losing to bad.
Is your dad still around? Maybe he was holding them at bay.
His dad sounds like a good man. I’d like to shake his hand. Or if thats not an option, salute his headstone.
Its been a long slow boil. And Nazis were only part of the problem. In the early 1930s many businessmen and Republicans in the US plotted a Hitler style coup against FDR. They did worse than Hitler, but escaped most consequences. And over the last century quietly plotted and built. Here and abroad. Fostering the “right kind” of fascism. Theirs.
It probably would have gone on a little longer. Because I don’t think they were quite ready to actually try to coup again. But they’ve been socially engineering a new class of supremely manipulable Voters who lack any critical thinking skills. However a childish malignant narcissist managed to get the attention of that tool. And stole it from the Republican fascist. Basically largely spoiling the plot. And causing them to have to move before they were ready.
Also the ability for instance Global and often still largely Anonymous communication made propaganda easier and cheaper than ever before. The old style leaflet drops over territories were never very effective. And even radio broadcasts or easy to thwart. Now enemy Nations only need to pay a few people for online shitposting in hot beds lacking critical thinking. And they can turn their enemies people into their own tools.
Short version: the Nazis lost but the fascists won.
WWII basically ended in fascists vs fascists - Nazi Germany pulled a lot of their ideas from the US and before Pearl Harbor the US stance was ambivalent. They thought Hitler had some good points, but it would be OK if he lost.
Are you serious they pay people to troll? Kind of make me wonder how much and is it even worth it.
Definitely. In a lot of developing countries with basic internet access these people can actually make good livings doing that. As long as they’re skill in the foreign language is adequate enough. Though today a lot of that is being taken over by basic low-end generative machine learning models. Something else false information faster than it takes to debunk it.
So if I learn a couple languages and put a post on craiglist that I am a willing troll. I will get hired?
Not unless you live in a country with a low standard and cost of living. And not likely even then. Because even at a Payday they generally work ed for larger businesses and weren’t a freelance Craigslist sort of thing. That and here in the United States there’s too much free competition to really be effective for them to pay anyone over here as well.
Funny that you mention payday and am sitting here in the hospital eating one.
I hope you’re having your head checked!
Economic despair, political instability, and rampant nationalism are key conditions that facilitated the rise of Nazis in post-World War I Germany and are similarly contributing to the resurgence of such ideologies today. Modern times have seen these conditions fostering the rise of leaders like Donald Trump, where both he and historical figures like Hitler capitalized on themes of national decline, utilized nationalist rhetoric, exploited fears about outsiders and minorities, and exhibited authoritarian tendencies. This recurrence of historical patterns underscores how past ideologies can be revived, shaping contemporary political climates and contributing to the emergence of movements that mirror the early 20th-century Nazi regime.
billionaires are so afraid of being taxed they’ll happily fund people and groups who want to kill people who want to tax them.
The real billionaires love taxation. It helps them getting rid of the competition.
To give an intellectually honest guess, I’d say the honest among them think that form of socialism is the best way to handle resources and that violent revolution is the only way to get there effectively. The dishonest among them likely just wanna exploit the rest of them.
Yea but what happens if the succeed in a violent revolution. Then the other side comes along and overthrow them?
With another violent revolution? Iunno. Ask those guys.
Wouldn’t really be violent we just take back the government then put them on trial for the world to see.
But how?
With peaceful violence
The Nazis called themselves “national-socialists”, because socialism was popular at the time. Anyone who actually wanted socialism would have voted for the social-democratic party (SPD) or the communist party (KPD). The actual politics of the NSDAP were very much focused on the nationalist, xenophobic part. You just rarely have the baddies calling themselves “the baddies party”.
But what about the dudes doing it today?
The dudes doing socialism are socialists. The dudes doing racist and inhumane shit are nazis.
Do the Nazis even have a cover story at this point?
If you think your dad was sent to fight against the Nazis for ideological opposition, i have bad news for you. Maybe he personally fought out of that motivation, but must countries at the time were either fascist themselves or on the edge to fascism.
If you look at the US there was the ongoing genocide against native Americans, the racial segregation, eugenics, despicable human experimentation carried out on minorities, concentration camps for Japanese during WW2… Even the pledge to the flag in the schools was something Hitler admired and copied. Until the German Nazis became unpopular in the US the pledge to the flag with done with the “Bellamy Salute” that is the same as the Nazi salute. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellamy_salute
)The truth is, they never left.
What is different though is that after WW2 it was understood which social problems, in particular fucking over the lower and middle class, create the breeding ground for fascism to be successful. Since the 1980s with Thatcher and Reagan and then the neoliberal wave over Europe, we had 40 years of deliberately empowering fascism. Now they reap what they sew.
I have to differ on your last point. I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.
I think it would be more accurate to say that fascism is an extreme form of imperialism, because they are ultimately very similar sentiments. A more powerful group taking advantage in various ways, of a less powerful group. Now you could say, “it’s all the same thing”, capitalism, imperialism, fascism, it’s all the same “hierarchy is the ultimate source of evil dynamic”, but it seems to me that this just reduces all these concepts to absurdity.
Fascism is also on the rise because of improved technology for thought control / propaganda / public relations / advertising. Social media lets the worst of humanity band together and pool their energy.
But wealth inequality, both worse effective quality of life for the poor and increased economic power by the wealthy is I believe a main driver. Technology is just the tool. The ultra wealthy and their lackeys today have more power than ever and are more isolated and inundated with ideology that is basically insane.
I wonder if there are studies that show correlations between quality of life and fascism in different nations.
Capitalisms’ unsustainable model of infinite growth requires something like imperialism to keep going, and even if you could point out alternative venues for capital acquisition, it’s still what people in power want, since it gives them more than just fuel for capitalism, but also more power. Countries and companies that do not rely on imperialism directly, most often rely in others that do. While it’s not entirely futile to discuss whenever that has to be the case in theorethical capitalist solution, it is the case in one we’re living under, and since it’s the ruling class of hyper-wealthy that make decisions about the worlds future and current state of affairs is result of those decisions, it is the system we have to deal with. Unless, you know, we bring out the guilottines and start over, but I don’t see much point in retrying capitalism to see if it won’t lead us down on the path to facism again.
I guess we have to disagree. Growth is an inherently good thing in my view, and I don’t based that on capitalistic ideology. Without growth, the metaphorical pie is finite. What does this mean? It means there is some distribution of this pie, however equal or unequal. Now on one side you will have people like you trying to make the distribution more equal. On the other side you will have war lords, dictators, and power hungry individuals trying to grab more of the pie for themselves. All of you will have to resort to violence to make that happen.
And the magic of economic growth is that you can enrich the world without having to physically fight other people to steal their shit.
The bottom line is, we would have even more imperialism if we did not have economic growth.
Where does that growth come from?
Growth isn’t a problem when it’s sustainable. However, there are natural limits to how far and how fast technological development and resource extraction will allow us to grow the economy.
Additionally, competition within capitalism forces the wealthy to seek out any and all means of growth. If they do not they actually risk all of their wealth becoming devalued. This drives innovation but it also is the driver of imperialism, exploitation, environmental degradation, all of which grow the economy.
When growth because less attainable due to various natural constrains, the wealthy start to cannibalize the systems that keep society stable. Again, they can’t help themselves. If they don’t their class position is threatened as some other capital owner beats them to the limited profits that come from privatization and austerity.
This usually results in mass unrest across all the various classes in society. That includes some of the middle classes who also rely on exploitation to maintain their standard of living. In response to threat of social unrest, the wealthy usually align themselves with right wing authoritarians that claim to be able to bring order to the chaos and renew growth through imperial expansion. This kind of politics is often supported by some of the downwardly mobile middle classes. That’s how we get fascism.
I don’t think capitalism is necessarily at fault, nor must the working/middle classes be struggling for fascism to emerge. If anything, quite the opposite. It is the better off countries that end up turning fascist. All fascist countries are/were first world countries, in various states of advanced development.
That’s not right, at least not for the fascist regimes in Europe that emerged prior to WW2. The countries where it happened (specifically Germany/Italy/Spain) had all seen civil unrest or even civil war in the recent past, they were hit hard by the global financial crisis in the twenties and had high unemployment and widespread poverty. This was the very thing the fascists used to ingratiate themselves to the public at large, by creating jobs through massive public building and rearmament projects.
By the way “first world countries” is post-WW2 terminology and didn’t originally have a connotation of superior economic status, but was referring strictly to ideological alignment. Whether a country belonged to the capitalist/communist/unaligned block in international politics during the cold war.
They have kinda always been a thing. Nazi’s were just one flavor of nationalist, after all.
Charles de Gaulle defined nationalism best: “Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”
For most people, it’s extremely easy to blame others for problems of their own creation. By the same token, people who can’t see their own shortcomings will also usually latch on to leaders who are able to amplify that bias. For the Nazis, it was mostly against the jews.
Also, what you are seeing in the news is partially amplified by the news itself but also, politicians are getting more brazen in mustering the support of those groups. This has lead to people being a little more open about something that needs to stay taboo, IMHO.
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Another interesting property of fascists is how their “enemy” is described in lurid but contradicting ways that don’t make any sense when you think about it for more than half a second.
One minute, the “enemy” is described as weak, pathetic, disgusting, sub-human, sickly, cowardly, stupid little losers who can’t punch out of a wet paper bag. The next minute, the “enemy” is described as threatening, all-seeing, clever, oppressive, bold and brazen, powerful, influential, dominating the government, ruining people’s lives, etc.
It’s maddening. And some people are absolute suckers for it.
Like Schroedinger’s Immigrant. At all times he is stealing your job and a lazy, jobless, criminal.
We need to spend more research funds observing these immigrants to collapse them into a single state!
Well shit, that’s a much shorter and better way to put it.
You forgot cunning and plotting
