Progressives are using words like Nazi and fascist, purely as a slur against a political rival, without really understanding what those words mean nor the attrocities they represent.
What the Nazi's did was horrifici, and it's incredibly insensitive, inappropriate, and, yes, juvenile, to water that down by using it for political point scoring.
I guarantee you’ll still be seeing people doing this long after Trump is dead. The point isn’t that there is an actual line. The point is that there IS NO actual line. The goalposts will shift forever.
They’re literally erasing transgender people from all federal websites. Even going so far as removing the T from all LGBT references. If that’s not information control and erasure of humanity from these individuals I don’t know at what point you will draw the line.
Not only progressives are calling it fascism or proto-fascism, do you understand the steps fascism takes to fully take hold? Don't you see any parallels? Have you read any books on the subject?
It seems like you get butthurt from reading people calling moves very similar to fascism done by politicians you support, fascism takes many flavours, Italian fascism was different from German fascism. The way it's going the past month looks like to be shaping an American flavour of fascism.
There's no watering down, you are seeing with your own eyes a movement happening where the leader of the executive is attempting to snatch power, it never happens at once, it's always through salami slicing. What will be the breaking point for you, specifically? What signs do you expect so it can be called fascism?
You are all around this forum whining about "progressives" trying to heed a call about a dark path being traced. You never seem to acknowledge there are very worrying moves happening, for some reason you do not want to hear it, you want to shut off the discussion at every turn by using progressives as a slur, and anything said by that out-group as wrong or hysterical a priori. Can't you see how stupid it is? You are always attempting to throw a wrench into these discussions with vitriol, as a non-American I really ask you to inform and educate yourself better, to learn about the process of fascism before coming with knee-jerk reactions because you don't like "progressives".
Go read "Hitler's Beneficiaries", read any book on historical recounts of the process of fascism unravelling from the 1920s to the 1930s, you are behaving exactly as the citizens enabling Mussolini and Hitler. American Fascism will not be Nazi or Italia Fascista, it has its own shape and form (such as not being anti-semitic, completely different to Nazis) but even though the topography differs, the core principles are pretty much the same.
Don't be an enabler, you won't like to be on the wrong side of history.
Few days ago, in Poland died a journalist, historian and former Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner. He was known for speaking every year there. His last speech was - remain vigilant.
I think that speaks for itself and I need not to comment on this.
Americans, why? Why are you so keen on dabbling with a homegrown fascism of yours? Why are you so keen on setting the world aflame?
> What signs do you expect so it can be called fascism?
I think some people just know a few images from the Nazis at the height of their power. Or the death camps, that were only discovered because the Nazis lost the war (the plan was to erase all traces, after all). No concept of the 1920s, not even "Mein Kampf", nothing.
That's been my impression too, seems like people (even more Americans) are extremely uneducated about the whole process of fascism. Instead they end up with this cartoonesque picture of what it looks like: SS officers standing guard over concentration camps, Hitler's speeches to huge crowds wearing swastika armbands, war.
No, that's the fucking end point of it, after all is done and the wheels have been far gone from the wagon, the process itself is much more nuanced and step-wise but the uneducated ones never ever heard of it. Feels like they live in a world where someone turned on a switch and everything changed at once...
Worst: it's coming from people who have lived through a pandemic, watched the social strife and divisions unfolding right in front of their faces, how can those same people not see that massive social movements aren't ever clear-cut? It's all just so stupid and ignorant.
As an American, I'm not surprised, unfortunately. When we learn about history in grade school, we don't really learn about the rise of fascism in the 1920s and 30s. If we do, little time is spent on it. Most of the time is spent on WWII itself, with of course a bunch of self-congratulatory stuff about how the world would have burned if the US hadn't joined in (conveniently ignoring how long it took for the US to join in).
Most Americans couldn't tell you much about how Hitler came into power. (Or Mussolini? Forget it.) The majority of what Americans know about it all are exactly what you said: black-and-white scenes of SS officers, Hilter giving speeches, and swastika armbands.
There's no lingering WWII war damage in the US. We don't have monuments dedicating places where major battles were fought. The war wasn't fought here. We don't see reminders of what all that was like.
When I was born, WWII was only 35 years behind us. Many of the people who were involved in it at the time (politicians, soldiers, etc.) were not only alive, but still active in public discourse in major ways. But today, WWII ended 80 years ago. Most everyone who experienced it is dead. Awareness of all of it is still present in Europe because it was all literally close to home. Not so in the US.
This honestly shouldn't be all that surprising. History repeats and rhymes, over and over throughout the decades and centuries. All it takes is a couple generations to forget its lessons.
I see comments in these threads from people who lived through the forming of dictatorships in their countries. I wish more people would listen to them.
> "Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
> "Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from the Socialists.
> "Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is patriotic.
> "We might have called ourselves the Liberal Party. We chose to call ourselves the National Socialists. We are not internationalists. Our socialism is national. We demand the fulfilment of the just claims of the productive classes by the state on the basis of race solidarity. To us state and race are one."
Fascism is a reaction to a capitalist crisis, Nazis weren't socialists by any definition except for using populist agendas like sharing of profits and welfare to rally their base.
Nazis never nationalised any industry and rather used corporatism to take hold of them while those were still private entities, same in Italy, industry and fascist regimes walked hand-in-hand.
Saying those are equivalent to socialism just due to populist rhetoric is misleading and historically wrong...
Saying they are free market capitalists is misleading and historically wrong.
This complaint is also like saying communists weren’t authentic because the government withheld power from the Soviet’s and used the Soviet narrative to gain popular support.
We compare ideologies on a political spectrum. It’s harder to compare implementations because they all look like corruption. Hitler is one person in a political movement. He did write the platform I linked to though.
They did actually implement many of these things, such as universal healthcare (for their race).
We aren't in agreement that the continuum has only two opposite ends: socialism-free market where anything not free market is immediately socialism, definitely not.
Ok. But the nazi platform is labor unions, universal healthcare, retirement programs, profit redistribution, etc. your quote doesn’t contradict this.
If you have some specialized definition of socialism that this doesn’t meet. That’s fine. But this is nothing like the libertarianism or small government conservatism.
> If you have some specialized definition of socialism that this doesn’t meet.
I don't know that “when the working class democratically (either via democratic control of the state, through democratic control at the level of individual firms or industries, or otherwise) control the means of production” is actually a “specialized” definition of socialism.
Socialism is not centrally about the state providing goods, Its about who controls the means of production. Provision of public goods by the state is an expected outcome of the kind of socialism where a democratic state is the vehicle of proletarian control of the means of production, but it is not the production and delivery of those goods, independent of the nature of the state and who is empowered to control the means of production through it, that makes the system “socialist”
Führerprinzip is about as opposed to socialism as any element of any real or hypothetical system can be.
Stated platform can be an absolute lie, have you fucking read what I mentioned about how the Nazi government almost literally erased all forms of labour unions? Did you check anything about the German Labour Front instituted by them? Have you read any of the history about how labour unions were treated by the Nazis?
Seriously, why would you believe the stated goals instead of their actions? Do you trust Nazis?
Have you done your nerd research on how Nazis dismantled the democratic state? If so, at what step would you have gatekept calling it fascist?
Blanket calling worried people as "juvenile" as a dismissal is in itself pretty fucking juvenile, hope you can see that.