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
Well, right now, it’s popular to be anti-zionist. And anti-zionists just aren’t gate keeping the way they need to.
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.
Because a specific group of populists ‘lost’, but populism still works and will continue to work wherever there is people in dire situations.
The more dire your situation is, the more you need a solution. And then someone telling you “it’s the fault of those other people”, that just offers up a real straightforward supposed solution.
Even if it’s pretty clear that it cannot possibly actually solve the real problem, the prospect of a mild improvement will have many going along and ignoring morals.
it’s the fault of those other people
This is what is tho… There people who are directly at fault. The issue who is who fascist blame and how they won’t ever name their daddies is part of the problem… When in reality owner class pushing this shit are the ones causing the dire circumstances for the working class to begin with.
It is a clever tactic and has proven very effective at manipulating men with fragile egos.
Funny enough, fake news will never call out anything that would endanger economic interests of the owner class. Why would anyone take these clowns seriously?
Fascism also thrives on fear. It’s not a coincidence that far-right populism grew massively during the pan.
It’s just the age-old cycle of bad losing to good losing to weak, losing to bad.
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.
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.
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.
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Because look at the world now. Hitler was right.
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.
The US imported a LOOOT of Nazis to get access to research - Operation Paperclip. So Nazis in government jobs given immunity
It makes a lot of sense how that bled out
Paperclip is the hangout for Operation Bloodstone.
You can lie and say nazis like Werner Von Braun were actually apolitical smol beans who just wanted to do science, you can’t even pretend random commanders and officers were.
Woo, I learn more horrifying things every day!
It’s because men with zuper tiny penis’ need something to do, to prove how “manly” and “strong” they are.
I hated nazi’s to begin with. But after reading all these comments it makes me hate them even more. I do not know when the US turned to listen to even the most remote nazi?
So just to add some factual context here. Your Dad fought actual nazis. The people we call nazis are not actually (nor will they be) that powerful. The world thanks men like your father for their success. The losers we call nazis today also go by many names, christians, christian nationalists, evangelicals, KKK, racists, bigots, white supremacists, dictators, etc. But the one name that actually describes who and what they are is Fascists.
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.
I hate to be negative, but people have shown a propensity to dislike anyone not like them for thousands of years. Plain and simple. I think this situation can improve, but I doubt seriously, it will ever go away completely.
I kind of wish I knew how to troll nazi’s or call them out irl or just make them change the narrative. I know I am one woman but if I went about it correctly and got more people smarter than me we can shut their stupid shit down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where does that growth come from?
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.
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.
