For me, it was Citizens United. I moved to the US decades ago with full faith in the system here. The checks and balances all seemed to work, I love American culture, and there seemed nothing that you couldn’t do here. Even though the politics are conservative, things were slowly getting more progressive, so I wasn’t worried. Then that Citizens United ruling happened, and it was like, “oh- I see- the corporations have been in charge all along, and the checks and balances are a lie”. It’s been downhill for me from there. The last three Republican presidents all losing the popular vote and/or winning by judicial crony coup really sold me that the system is all a lie.
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The difference isn’t who they see as the “bad guys” (Obama compared to Biden), but it’s who they think of as their Leaders. In the Before times, politicians who supported their goals were few and far between, and rarely made it into public office or high government positions. Now, they have one of their own in the white house, who has replaced the bulk of the government agency heads with his Fascist Cronies, stacked the Judiciary, and a Senate filled with authoritarians who are perfectly willing to go along with that. In short, they are no longer the crazy fringe. They are the now the crazies in power. They are emboldened, and see a real chance to finally take over the country.
Addendum: what they have now is an actual leader in power they can gather around, which they did not really have before.
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Regrettably:
And:
And see this thread:
https://twitter.com/lukacsleninist/status/982680983383060482?s=21
West German power elites during the Cold War were absolutely riddled with unpunished Nazis.
That, OTOH, I completely agree with.
They also should have, at a minimum, dispossessed and punished every slaver in the country. But that was never gonna happen, because (1) the slavers were rich and white, and (2) a lot of Northerners were also slaveholders.
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Thank you, you’ve just said what I was thinking, but better than I could have said.
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What I think as a german with all that education of “It must never happen again”. My honest thought is that it is already too late to turn around and that all non cis hetero whites (and maybe even then if you are outspoken against Trump) should flee the country. There is however a catch. Fascism follows a strong wealth divide. I wasn’t clear how the exact mechanisms work out until I got a life demonstration over the last couple of years, but I knew it was already a given. And that wealth divide is pretty much globalised. It can happen anywhere else as well. Even in Germany where we just had 30k+ covidiots demonstrate in Berlin with heavy support from far right groups.
Well, start with ripping up the tracks, sell the rails for scrap, and use the sleepers to build a pyre to burn Drumph and all his works on.
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As a Hungarian, my genuine reaction is: “well, at least people are protesting on the street and putting pressure on those in power, instead of the all-encompassing apathy and complete lack of social empathy/solidarity we have here. But holy shit, those cops are scary - I’m glad we at least don’t have that.”
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From that perspective I guess ironically you might be safest where there is already a heavy troop presence. With all that is happening it is easy to forget that the US has a nuclear capacity to almost sterilize the earth. But I guess the fascist government would equal military presence with occupation and a strike not necessary. Obviously avoid everything between north east africa and south asia. I’d almost say even south east asia.
Fascism does not necessarily lead to a war. Thus, as I said, I fear more for US Americans than for other countries, and if there is a 3rd world war, you know what they say. They 4th will be fought with sticks and stones. No hiding place.
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Certainly more should have been executed than there were. But from a practical stand point - who should have lead West German defenses after the war? People who weren’t previously German military leaders? Foreign military leaders assigned to Germany?
I don’t think WWII is unique in that previous military leaders were retained after a war and later used against new enemies.
What would you have suggested?
It’s nowhere near 40%, but the truth doesn’t really make the situation any better. It’s less than 1/3. In 2016, Clinton, of course, got more votes than Trump. But if you include the eligible voters who did not vote, Did Not Vote beat both of them. So Trump was around 30% in 2016, and while his support hasn’t dropped a ton, it has gone down.
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No, but WWII is unusual in that those leaders were directly responsible for the deliberate and unjustified slaughter of millions of civilians.
It may have been reasonable for the Bundeswehr and NATO to have found some junior officers who were relatively uninvolved in the worst atrocities and used them to rebuild the core of the West German military.
But that isn’t what they did; the West deliberately and actively whitewashed the reputations of senior Nazis and installed them into the upper ranks of the NATO command structure.
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From a justice perspective more deserved to be punished, but pragmatically so many people in the military, justice system, administration etc had been nazis that it would have been hard to kick them all out and still have a working country. Instead you had a ban on the ideology, and those former nazis were too busy denying they had ever been nazis to spread the ideology.
There’s a joke:
A time traveller comes home and says to his roommate, Well- I’ve gone back in time and killed Heinrich Gruber.
Roommate says, Who was that?
Time traveller says Oh, it was terrible- He was a ruthless dictator who took over Germany in the 1930s, started the second world war, and executed millions of people.
Roommate says, No, that was Adolf Hitler. That all happened.
Time traveller says Dammit! This is like the fifth time!
History follows inertia. This shit show spent 40 years in preproduction. Trump just showed up for the casting call.
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I’m American, but I don’t live in the US. The first wave of the pandemic arrived here in Europe a bit before it arrived in the US, and just before we got locked down I ran into a neighbor in the courtyard. He seemed surprised that I was not going back to the US to ride it out and had some mild words of criticism for the politicians here.
Fast forward a few months and I run into him again. “Wow, I bet you’re glad you didn’t go back to the States! It’s hard to believe what a mess they’ve let it become! We have our problems here, but … [shakes head].”
Thing is, even if we had a reasonable president who was capable of handling … well, anything related to the presidency, really, I wouldn’t have gone back to the US because riding out a pandemic with no insurance in a country with a completely broken health care system sounds like a really bad idea.
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The election will be recognized as the official start of our second civil war. It’s already started, but people still seem to have this fantasy that electing Biden will somehow fix things.
Trump’s militias will help seize power the same way the Brownshirts did in Germany, the Taliban did in Afghanistan, the Facisti did in Italy, et cetera et cetera.
A resistance will form, but our side will have a disadvantage because the other side has been literally preparing for exactly this, while liberals prefer to outsource our violence- Imagining that the police or military will put down an insurrection despite all evidence that both police and military widely support the Trumpers, and that white supremacists and radicalized Christians have been making a documented and concerted effort to take over those institutions for at least 30 years.
There are three places where we do have an advantage, though- Firstly, that the coastal (blue) areas control the most wealth, secondly that they control the technology, and third, that the rest of the world, with the possible exceptions of Russia and N Korea, like us better. We also control most of the coastline, so that makes things a bit easier.
People tend to forget how instrumental France was in the American Revolution, or how much effect foreign markets had on our first civil war. Logistics and Supply lines are ultimately more important than weapons. China and the OPEC states will stay neutral until there’s a clear projected winner. Russia might aid Trump, or they might pull out laughing at the chaos, depending whether their endgame is destruction or annexation. We’ve got most of the rest of the civilized world, and enough ports to keep supply lines open.
I’m reasonably sure that we can cripple their communications, fight from a greater distance, and maintain better resource management.
But it’s going to get really bloody. This isn’t going to be like last time with North versus South and a clear line of contention between them. This is going to be fought on a neighborhood level, and that’s much harder to predict. I honestly don’t know whether the guy with the giant Trump banner 6 houses down is going to go hunting people one night, or whether someone in the neighborhood will take him out first, or whether we’ll end up with a standoff for the duration.
I am unbelievably terrified at just how fucked we are right now. I have looked over every historical precedent I can find, and any time political polarization, wealth inequality, or violent counterprotests- Let alone ALL those things- have gotten to this level- Let alone during a pandemic- it’s always ended with bodies in the streets. Like, I was afraid of something like this happening, but seeing the number of people that are actively defending that 17 year old shooter… I don’t think we can continue to pretend it isn’t.
And I literally have no idea what I’m gonna do if it comes down to it.
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Oh, people can whip up some armbands really fast.
If you are seriously interested in how that sort of thing might go down, may I suggest looking at, say, any civil war ever.
The intermittent confusion about who is on which ‘side’ is part of what makes them so horrible. It’s never stopped anyone so far.
(And incidentaly, if you think the US civil war had two nice shiny armies, one in spiffy blue uniforms, one in grey - I’d take another look at your understanding of the US civil war. Life is never that neat and logistics is a bitch for anyone with pretensions to uniformity.)
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