|
Top-level
 Footnote about Nazis and their targets: You might think you're safe. But … they start with their political rivals, and the trans, then the rest of the LGBT+. Then it's on to "auslanders", folks who aren't the pale patriarchal penis people. Jews, blacks, asians, indians, hispanics, muslims—all of us are at risk. Women get beaten back into the kitchen, kept barefoot, poor, and pregnant to make soldiers for the fatherland. Finally, when they run out of others, they eat their own. NOBODY IS SAFE. 89 comments
@juniper I grew up attending a synagogue where some of the older congregation members had concentration camp tattoos on their wrists. My father was drafted by the Royal Navy during the war. I may have studied the Nazis a bit too closely as a child because it happened during living memory: it's still happening elsewhere around the world today. (Gaza right now; the USA next February if the election breaks bad.) All of my neighbors are immigrants. Our children played together. You know who is NOT going to ethnically cleanse our neighborhood? Kamala Harris. @Phosphenes @cstross @juniper She's helping ethnic cleansing in Gaza RIGHT NOW. Lucky it s not YOUR neiborghood dough. @disisdeguey @cstross @juniper The American genocide of Gaza is horrifying. What do you recommend we do about it? @disisdeguey @Phosphenes @cstross Look, we have two choices here in the US, okay? Trump or Kamala. And I know which one is going to do A LOT LESS HARM. I've never liked her, but I will begrudgingly support her over A FASCIST TYRANT. Please get some perspective and pragmatism, PLEASE. @juniper @disisdeguey @Phosphenes@glasgow.social As someone-or-other said: casting your vote isn't a declaration of undying love, it's a chess move to stop your worst enemy making progress.  @cstross @juniper @disisdeguey as a German Trump and his gang sounds very much like what we had in our history lessons about the Nazis. Same taking points, same plans, as you indicated. And it scares the hell out of me. However, there is one big difference. 1931 a country with 80 Mio inhabitants headed into fascism, had no nukes and was not the hegemon of the Western world. This time it is. And that scares me even more.  @juniper @disisdeguey @Phosphenes @cstross they said nothing contrary to any of this. they correctly pointed out that she is actively complicit in ethnic cleansing, with the implication that making glib jokes about how she’s the candidate that doesn’t do ethnic cleansing is pretty inappropriate. @disisdeguey @Phosphenes @cstross @juniper trump is literally calling Netanyahu every day to fuck up ceasefire talks. Harris losing will make things even worse.  I already know I'm not safe and have begun to make 'thought experiment' plans for where to go and how to get there. What I want to sell first, what I'd want to bring. How to transport my cats. It's *terrifying*, but I'm not going to repeat the mistakes my lost ancestors did. @JoanGrey @cstross That's so heartbreaking. @mcnknopp @JoanGrey @cstross when it reaches that point, it's already too late. Even people who saw the Nazis coming and applied for refugee status, e.g. Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, who moved to the Netherlands and tried to emigrate to the US in 1938 and 1941 (he was rejected both times, with the consequences we know). @fazalmajid @mcnknopp @cstross My husband is a British citizen, we live four hours from the Canadian border, I figure if things go bad, I won't be (as awful as this sounds) in the first wave. I know *exactly* why people were rejected by the US (it's not like we've really *changed* as a country, in some ways), but I fall, extremely luckily, into a slightly less at-risk group. I'm also willing to walk away from everything, if push comes to shove. I have read history. @5ecurityChemist The full version is the P7: Pale Patriarchal Plutocratic Protestant Penis People of Power. (But that's a bit too long for most toots!) Extremism is not a position, it's a direction. It solves zero problems, so has no halting condition.  Oh, it solves a single problem very well: fulfilling an individual or collective death wish. @mcnknopp Sein ganzes Leben lang hatte Niemöller Juden gehasst - obwohl er selbst Geisel der SS war und aus dem Pragser Hof befreit werden musste. Das darf nie vergessen werden - er war auch Täter, nicht nur Opfer!!!! @Andreas24071958 ja, das stimmt wohl. Sein Wikipedia Eintrag ist hier auch interessant. Ich muss gestehen, dass ich bis dato nur das Zitat kannte (das mir gefällt), ich aber nichts über den Autor wusste. Danke somit für die Zurechtrückung. @Andreas24071958 @mcnknopp To me, it makes the poem itself more powerful to know that. Niemöller is speaking as a card-carrying member of the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party, and about getting his own face eaten as a direct result. @cstross I simply don’t understand why there isn’t a year-long mandatory high school course based solely on Shirer’s The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich. Anyone who’s actually read that book has been just ticking off item after item on the Nazi Playbook Checklist. It’s not subtle. There’s no nuance to it. Evil is boring. It does the exact same shit in the exact same order every single time this happens. @jeffzugale @cstross yeah, we re at chapter six right now: the seizing of power. What comes next is as sudden as it was brutal @stevel @cstross Yep. Although, one difference here is that it’s unclear how much of the military is in Dump’s pocket. The difference between the Weimar German army - a badly beaten humiliated bunch of former aristocracy generals full of arrogant pride, once loyal to the autocratic Kaiser - and the modern US military is like night and day.  I did that checklist back in 2016. Everyone told me I was overreacting. In 2018 I spent six weeks in Ecuador, to see if I could handle living there, if necessary. By 2020 it wasn't necessary and I kind of stood down from that. Lately I've been checking house listings and political news in Ecuador and Uruguay. It's one of my coping mechanisms… @jeffzugale @cstross Stefan Zweigs The World of Yesterday, is also very, very relevant to where we are today. @cstross at this point I’m thankful that these guys are a bunch of yahoo dumbasses compared to Hitler’s crew. May be the only thing that helps us.  @jeffzugale Have a look at Project 2025 and the people behind that. Dig a little. It's worse than they manage to make it look like.  @jeffzugale @cstross You're assuming it's axiomatic that nazis are bad. Being a nazi is one of those simple, obvious, and wrong solutions to an insecurity management problem about having lower social value than you can stand having. (Generally speaking, if you have the capacity to fix that problem yourself you don't have the problem in the first place. This awkward fact doesn't help with the general tractability of the entirely real issue.) @jeffzugale @cstross Not in the slightest. You can argue that it _ought_ to be axiomatic that nazis are bad, but this very obviously isn't the case considered across the population. Trump's dad was at the American nazi rally in Madison Square Garden; there's a French far-right party that's hereditarily at least Vichy since Vichy, there's any number of people out there with completely voluntary swastika tattoos, and so on. About a third of the US electorate appears to fall into this category.  @jeffzugale The claim is not "Nazis aren't that bad", it is "Nazis exist, they don't see anything wrong with it, and they would see a course like that as an instruction manual, not a warning". @barubary that was well-stated, thanks. I agree with this - in fact the person who gave me my current copy of the book has turned out to be a deeply racist elitist Republican- but you have to read past the chapter where they invade Russia, or you don’t get the lesson. The fact that a third of the US thinks Nazis are just fine doesn’t validate it as in ideology. It indicates that they’re assholes who need to get taught the lesson again. To wit: @barubary and my point is, why in hell does ANYONE think that this time, it will be different? On the left and center, people aren’t getting that, as @cstross has stated, NO ONE is safe. On the right/fascist side, why do they think that THIS time, it will work, and they’ll be able to cleanse the world and enslave everyone they don’t kill? If they win and consolidate power, MILLIONS of people are going to die. That’s how it always works. This is what they do.  @graydon @jeffzugale @cstross The Front Nationale or whatever they're calling themselves these days is also not OK by the way. @econads @jeffzugale @cstross I entirely agree that just because there's a lot of it doesn't mean it's OK. Quantity does constrain the effectiveness of responses, and some of the responses need to be directed at preventing replication irrespective of quantity. @jeffzugale @cstross because at least 10% of them would consider it an instruction manual, in the sense of "here's what not to do if you want a Nazi regime", rather than "Nazi regimes are bad and here's how and why". @hutchingsmusic @cstross yeah but see, because they’re boring and stupid, they’ll just repeat the same shit verbatim thinking this time it will work. It’s what they’ve actually been doing for the last 15-20 years. They’re not going to innovate an effective way to Nazify the world. They’re going to try to grab all the worst weapons and murder people into submission. Period. Depend on it.  @jeffzugale @cstross Because it's built into our capitalist system. It's the same every time because there's only been -one time-, it never left. @comradeferret @cstross let me caution you that the communist version of this is even less subtle. They just shoot everyone including any comrades who have misgivings about mass murder. @jeffzugale @cstross Oh, you're a conservative, got it. Read a book that isn't George Orwell. It's crazy how people just make up this random garbage and then regurgitate it like they heard it somewhere, so it must be true, no matter how insane and unreasonable it sounds. You talk about a failure of education, and this is it.  @jeffzugale @cstross this here or anything by Timothy Snyder ( Yale ) @jeffzugale @cstross @jeffzugale @cstross a truly great book/trilogy. And Netflix Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial does a great job of bringing parts of it to life for the masses.  @jeffzugale @cstross First you have to find a history class where the curriculum reaches the twentieth century. @jeffzugale @cstross I completely agree. Putin also has followed the same path in ginning up excuses to invade countries to protect the people living there. @cstross Honorable mention for disabled people. Even the officially not so fascist governments regularly mess with us. All the more so the fascists.  single women. men and women who "sleep around". single mothers. disabled people. depressed people. impotent men. people who don't want children. men who are too "feminine". the list goes on.  @cstross I've noticed that every ideology based around Us and Them thinking relies on that constant conflict, so the Us has to be forever shrinking as that standards of "purity" are pushed higher and higher, in search of new "weakness" to root out... These things tend to fall apart eventually if left to their own devices as there's just a few lonely bitter people left, but they cause a lot of misery on the way, and death if they get that kind of power. @cstross One of the reasons I support the right of trans people to live their lives in peace is that I know who the Nazis, religious nutcases, and sundry other fascists are coming for next once they've finished with the "men in dresses". It'll be the people undermining the natural order by not doing man on top woman on bottom in bed, and then it will be the cishet women who don't do performative femininity to their satisfaction. But the Face-Eating Leopard Party has no shortage of voters. @cstross And being of a similar age to you, I went to university with people whose parents had concentration camp tattoos, and my parents have at least one close friend who does. If simple moral principles weren't enough - the closest I get to being on the Pastor's list is "trade unionist", but I don't want to be saying "and then there was no one left to speak for me". @cstross good post thankyou - we appease the beast only to be surprised when it turns on us too First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. —Martin Niemöller @cstross Exactly this. If nazis “win,” they continue to find more people to declare “other,” to be hated and hunted. If they kept winning indefinitely the last two nazis would destroy one another with greater fervor than ever.    @cstross Fascism cannot exist without an enemy. When an enemy is no longer available, a new one will be created. As time progresses, fascists must become increasingly extreme in an unending cycle, lest they get grouped in with the newest enemy. In the end there are no bystanders, only victims of the atrocities, and the perpetrators.  I wish there was a concise enough way to communicate this. As Berlin was falling, the Nazis were calling up their blonde, blue-eyed Aryan 12-year olds to be cannon fodder against the advancing Russians. To fascists, everyone is a tool to employ in pursuit of their power. Everyone is instrumentalized. My greatest worry is the reality that a fair number of people enjoy being instrumentalised. @cstross https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Asperger #KemiBadenoch has already told us what she thinks of #ActuallyAutistic people: "NOBODY IS SAFE." 100% this. "First They Came", the poem of Martin Niemoeller, teaches this best. |
Gregory's Server
@cstross These things you say are one of the reasons you're our favorite author :)