It’s begun
*Shrugs* kind of? We still haven’t had anything like the crisis WWI was. Americans can’t comprehend what it would be like to have millions of their sons die in a pointless war that they lost. And then follow that with an unfathomable economic quagmire. We would need some kind of collective national trauma to plant the seeds of a widespread fascist community that bases it’s idea of national rebirth on racial purity.
What we have now is a realization that the personalities that made up the third riech can totally exist in America. Thankfully there is no national trauma for them to exploit, we have a 241 year history of a successful democratic republic, and the media/free speech apparatus makes it easier to coordinate resistance to these pigs.
Those are good points, but I think it depends on what you take this tweet to mean. I don’t take it to mean that the circumstances are the same. I take it to mean something more like:
Don’t forget that the Nazis didn’t wake up one day and convince everyone Jews (and gays and Roma and and and) dying was a good thing. They dehumanized the groups they hated in stages, and rounding them up was actually not the first stage.
So I take the tweet to mean “dont think to yourself ‘we’re taking our first baby steps into fascism.’ We may indeed not be there yet, but by the time we’ve gotten to ‘rounding up innocent kids for the supposed crimes of their parents, who the government openly calls an “infestation,” and having a favored news outlet that defends this as “summer camp,”’ we’re not on the edge of a metamorphosis, were straight up in the middle of one.”
Well, yes I’d agree with that. But the grounds for a holocaust existed in Europe (and America) for decades prior to the Nazis. What happened in Germany could’ve happened anywhere under the right conditions. If just having dehumanizing sentiments means that “we’re already several steps along the way” then, sure. But we’ve been “several steps along the way” for well over a hundred years now.
I agree that this is a wake-up call that “it can happen here,” but I don’t think we’re necessarily in danger of a government sponsored genocide. It is frightening to see how easy a group of radicals at the top, coupled with apathy from the conservative elites, can do something this monstrous. However…
I think the response and backlash to this has been very encouraging. I wholeheartedly believe in cultivating a strong moral base that will draw attention to and resist these kinds of actions. We should be ready, in case we do experience a national crisis, to defend human rights. I get the idea behind the tweet, but I would still say that we’re fortunately in a far better situation to fight back against this kind of dehumanizing state policy then Germany ever was.
That’s fair. I think we’re actually saying similar things from different perspectives and agree on a good bit.
My concern is more that… the way that i usually hear the history discussed, people don’t really realize that everyone wasn’t instantly taken in by Hitlers speeches. It’s often discussed as if everyone privileged enough not to be targeted was bewitched.
And… that’s not what I gather really happened. He did bewitch crowds, but they weren’t everybody. The Nazis did not win fair elections by landslides.
Which means it’s not the sort of thing where resistance just sort of melts somehow, it’s a process over time where resistance is made to disappear.
And while I don’t think we’re seeing that now, I think it’s very important not to assume “loud resistance exists” equals “they’d never go further.”
They absolutely will, so we need to understand how serious what we’re seeing is.
One way things are different now that I think the author of that tweet is alluding to compared to how things were before is that it wasn’t just dehumanization coming from the public at large but also from people in power. Like sure in the 2000’s there were racist White kids at my high school running around saying racist things against Latino kids but it wasn’t coming from Bush and his administration. Bush won the 2004 election because he was popular among conservative Latino voters.
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