My partner was driven out of rural Ohio on death threats. People there take their hatred seriously.
OP if you’re queer or a visible minority then you might have to consider moving. If you aren’t, well, they’ll come for the queers first. Help your fellow humans if you can.
Even disregarding motives, acts like the power substation attack in NC put everyone in danger of right wing extremism.
To answer the question directly - no, it would have to get a lot worse for that. But it can. And it will get worse if unresisted.
The scary part about fascism is how fucking banal it is. Morally despicable acts become normalized.
How did modern countries become fascist or totalitarian?
It’s a mystery. No chickens little.
Many countries become dictatorial or fascist every decade. Nazi Germany rose to power as a reaction to the internal contradictions of unrestrained capitalism and the harsh punishment of WW1 surrender. WW1 itself being caused by the contradictions of a fractured multi power Europe in the late stage of capitalism.
America has been the center of gravity since WW2. In that time the US has installed genocidal dictators in many counties such as Indonesia. We export fascism.
Empires decline when they run out of frontier. Then the terror turns inward. The Iraq War was a last gasp attempt at getting more frontier. It failed. America has no one to turn its guns on besides itself.
The only saving grace long term is that fascism itself is a self defeating and contradictory ideology. But going through all that is painful for everyone.
Yes, he was. Unfortunately, some people take the entirely wrong idea as to what he said, and apply it inappropriately. Often, they will then declare themselves the winner and smugly pat themselves on the back as they take a victory lap out.
So, you know where the OP lives and you personally know his neighbors? If so, then you and him have different opinions on these people you know. In that case, based on your constant misunderstanding of what people have actually said in this thread, I’d side with his interpretation.
If not, then your personal experience was completely irrelevant and added nothing useful to the conversation.
I thought the USA went to war with Iraq because they tried to kill Bush’s daddy.
Are you suggesting that fascist and totalitarian governments are set up from outside the country rather than internal politics? I would suggest countries turn totalitarian by a guy who wants to be president for life.
One of the things with these discussions is that it does not need to get to the point of the second coming of the Nazis (though yeah, hearing celebrities be Nazi apologists and seeing Nazi paraphernalia and iconography being used as “cool symbols” does NOT help at all). There were plenty of fascist-nationalist regimes who did not get to that psycho level where you would not want to live, either.
It doesn’t have to get to that to be a cause for fear, and we don’t even have to go abroad or outside living memory.
In a large part of the US of A people still alive today grew up in a stratified society where Everyone Knew Their Place (including what literal places not to be in past sundown), “Christian ways” were hypocritically enforced in an “honor culture” social structure where deadly force was easily justified, with Company Towns where you’d shut up and obey or starved, or communities where a few families were in charge and God help if you crossed them, virtual one-party governments based on disenfranchisement, and “unofficial” armed groups targeting those who Did Not Know Their Place to make examples and teach lessons, confident in that the Sherriff, Judge and Jury would have their back.
It doesn’t gave to be trucking whole households of your neighbors off to camps. It didn’t have to be, back then
Either you don’t remember back very far, or you just don’t remember well. Nutpicking some random people that made incorrect claims as a way of invalidating current claims by different people is a complete falacy of logic.
It would be like telling a NASA researcher that you’ve seen people with billboards saying the end is coming, so you won’t believe them when they say an asteroid is heading towards us.
Sure, you may be tired of it, but wearing people down until they no longer maintain vigilance against authoritarianism is exactly the playbook. And you are exactly being played.
The scary part is the number of people who think that they won’t be affected, so they go along with it, while admonishing those who try to resist it.
Do we know this? Fascism was defeated from the outside, not the inside. Once it gets a grip, I don’t know that it can be overthrown from the inside.
Spain got past Franco and turned itself into a modern democracy without being conquered by an outside force.
Granted, it took thirty nine years.
Not on the map that I posted. For some reason, the NYT map didn’t include any counties in Alabama.
Fair enough, but there was still a fair amount of pressure from the outside.
And the death of Franco.
Oh… i see now. I had read it a bit disjointedly. Thanks.
BTW, anyone have any updates on that?
No, those counties have a lot of different people and factions in them. The US tried to pick winners and losers throughout the Cold War. Overwhelmingly the factions they supported were right wing, played nice with international capital, and suppressed the local population.
I really have no interest in pursuing a conversation like this, because it always goes the same way:
This is why those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. They refuse to admit the parallels until they’ve already happened, and then it’s too late.
I don’t think we can know definitely because of what happened to Germany and Italy. The 3rd Reich economy was not managed well at all and could not have sustained itself without conquest.
Internal contradictions bring about the wars and outside forces in the first place. The US was neutral to supportive of Nazi Germany prior to the 1940s.
Doesn’t hurt to mention how many nazis the US pardoned and brought into the government under Operation Paperclip.