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Top-level
@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. 35 comments
@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  @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. @jeffzugale @cstross I'd reccomend Umberto Eccos' essay on Ur-Fascism too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ur-Fascism  I remember when the #BBC showed a docu series called "The Nazis: A Warning From History" and people complained it was too political and left wing. That told me a lot about the UK right there. I don't see America as much different.  @jeffzugale @cstross The trouble is, half the people who do read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich seem to take it as an instruction manual, not a warning. |
Gregory's Server
@jeffzugale @cstross yeah, we re at chapter six right now: the seizing of power. What comes next is as sudden as it was brutal