You know: when I was a much younger man, I heard of the concept of the 5th column. For those who don’t know, the 5th column is a clandestine group of people, financed by a particular country’s adversary, who is dedicated to destroying that country from the inside. Think the human version of the Trojan Horse.
I’d always pictured this to be a relatively small movement, like a terror cell. A very insular group operating on foreign financing who leveraged an advanced guerilla war skillset to undermine the security apparatus of the country. To my embarrassment, I only realized recently (maybe 5 years ago) that that is not always the case. In America’s case, for example, the 5th column comprises some 70+ million people who are fed on a diet of Russian propaganda and home-grown racist rhetoric. Most of these people have no skillset to speak of, but all of them are willing participants in the utter destruction of a country based on the rule of law and constitutional government.
It seems very odd to me that 1 out of every 5 Americans is a full-on traitor. But, we do live in odd times. 20% of our country seems giddy to return to a monarchy, complete with the whole Louis XIV Sun King “Appointed By God” thing. And what’s strangest of all is that the guy they picked to be their holy sovereign… is a fucking moron. A complete god damned imbecile of the highest order.
If this is a simulation, I’d very much like it to stop.
Edit: I would like to hear from the people who downvoted this; what about what I said is disagreeable to you?
1 in 5 is unprecedented. Like legit so. Even in the 1930s Americans did not have that much support for Hitler and his regime. Even the racists of the time found the Nazis to be too much (case in point: After WW2, when WW2 veterans were in the KKK, they would get into fights and disputes with younger non-WW2 generation Klansmen because of their Nazi sympathies). This is because while to modern American racists, the old-school Nazis believed in the same ‘whiteness’ as American racists did, they did not. The German Nazis heavily divided European people into their own sub-races. The French were treated better than the Poles and allowed some degree of autonomy (such as Vichy France) and would not be subject to the same genocide as East Europeans. This was because they put people like the French, Dutch, and Danes above them. But a German was still superior and would be afford more privileges than others Europeans.
The Americans were viewed as mongrels by the Nazis due to the melting-pot nature of the US. You had people from all over Europe (all over the world even back then, but just not as many as today due to racist immigration policies), and what counted as ‘white’ was highly subjective. For example if I (an ethic Lebanese person) were to go to Alabama in 1940, we would not need to ride in the back of the bus and we could drink from the whites only fountain and stay at a whites only accommodation. Arab-Americans were legally and even socially considered whites until the 1970s when the Iranian revolution and increasing anti-Arabism by Zionist media started to portray Arabs far more aggressively as savages bereft of all civilization.
I left this comment cooking for hours and I almost forgot about it, so I’ll stop here.
I remember protesting the Afghanistan war in 2001 when the war was incredibly popular… with the Democrats. With the right wing, it was a fucking Jihad.
Everyone, including Democratic party members called the people against the war fifth columnists.
It doesn’t matter how many words you write, calling people with positions you don’t agree with traitors <EDIT> on a foreign payroll </EDIT> is the most boringly unimaginative way to describe people you don’t like to those you think you do.
You know why right wingers support Trump?
they’re financially hurting and don’t understand economics
things changed socially too fast for them and they’re scared.
they’re hurting, and do understand economics and are happy to burn if it also burns those they blame for their current status.
they’re assholes.
etc…
There may be fifth columnists, but it would be somewhere less then a thousand people, but honestly I think that number is closer to zero. Why buy the cow when the milk is free.
Meanwhile, the feckless DNC doesn’t have to fire it’s consultants, or purge the slotkins in their corner, because people are blaming Russia for American actions.
It makes listening to your enemy impossible, too. Why bother trying to win them over, or figure out what drives them so you can stop it, they’re just literal traitors.
I downvoted your post because, as with all accusations of fifth columnists, it is more a post of your failure of imagination and othering Americans with political views you don’t like.
The othering isn’t wrong, innately, but if your answer to the question ‘why are Americans becoming Nazis?’ is Russia, then you’ll never be able to fix the real reasons and stop the flow of fucking Nazis.
EDIT: none of the reasons above are good. But if you don’t know what they are, you can’t do anything about them.
This is like Germany trying to blame some other country for the Nazi Party.
I’m Canadian. I volunteered at the rubble at the WTC for a month as a rescue paramedic. Every time we “foreigners” brought up any resistance to the frothing and war mongering that was going on, we were told to “fuck off and go home”, “you couldn’t possibly understand what is happening here”.
I gave a month of my life away from my family, my work and my home for the benefit of Americans. To give their families some closure, to help heal your country and all I got in return was vitriol and hatred. I stayed. I pushed through as did the rest of my crew.
I haven’t been to the state’s since. I could give a fuck if they self destruct due to their own hatred of others. Fuck em. They all deserve it. They come across the border and I’ll be there waiting.
calling people with positions you don’t agree with traitors is the most boringly unimaginative way to describe people you don’t like to those you think you do.
I’m not calling them traitors because I disagree with them. I’m calling them traitors because they’re god damned traitors. Do you not remember when Trump encouraged a bunch of his idiot followers to attempt to overthrow the sitting government on Jan 6th, 2021? It wasn’t that long ago. That’s treason. He is a traitor. Anybody who voted for a traitor is aiding and abetting the enemy, and is therefore also a traitor. The fact that we didn’t string him up immediately following that stunt is straight up appalling. The fact that we then allowed him the ability to run for president again is unconscionable.
The othering isn’t wrong, innately, but if your answer to the question ‘why are Americans becoming Nazis?’ is Russia, then you’ll never be able to fix the real reasons and stop the flow of fucking Nazis.
I think if you re-read what I wrote, you’ll see that I’m not just blaming Russia. I specifically mentioned home-grown racism as one of the driving factors. The nazis didn’t create American racism; American racism created the nazis. Hitler took great inspiration from our treatment of our indigenous population, our blatant antisemitism, and our oppression of black citizens. He modeled a lot of his policies on our behavior.
That being said, Russia is definitely to blame for quite a lot of the disinformation sphere in this country. It is a very well documented, and well financed operation designed to destabilize the country, and it has been wildly successful. I mean, hell, it’s partially responsible for 70+ million Americans becoming full-on traitors.
You don’t have to immediately look for a conspiracy to exonerate the guilty. Many Americans truly, honestly believed (and still do) that Hitler’s policies were the correct way forward. Black slavery didn’t just materialize out of thin air either, after all.
Oh I’m not looking to exonerate ANY of these motherfuckers. If I had my druthers, they’d all fucking hang. Whether they’re home-grown, or Russian sponsored, every single one of them is a fucking traitor.
Edit: honestly, the current situation in America gives me a whole new appreciation for why the French decided they needed to industrialize murder during their revolution, and invented the guillotine to do so.
Edit 2 (Treasonous Boogaloo): I truly mean ALL. Your sweet aunt, who voted for Trump because she was concerned about Fox’s reporting about the migrant caravans at the border? Fucking traitor. I sincerely hope she dies. Your uncle, who’s a bit of a conspiracy nut, who is an avid Alex Jones listener? I pray he gets trapped in a raging inferno. Your parents, who you cut out of your life because they kept ranting about immigrants taking American jobs at every social event? I pray they find themselves trapped in a Cybertruck that’s in the middle of a battery-overload event. Everybody who voted for Trump, regardless of how many times they voted for him, deserves a traitor’s death. 100% of them, zero exceptions, no backsies.
One of the mistakes Germans (+ occupying forces) and the Austrians made after WW II was pardoning / “washing clean” Nazis after the war. Eg. the Austrian far right party FPÖ was founded by an SS member, and I’d be surprised if the AfD didn’t have Nazis in its family tree as well.
People who support fascism can’t be rehabilitated, except for a tiny minority.
But that’s the thing: Nazis weren’t really even displaced, and many kept their jobs in eg. the judiciary because they were seen as indispensable. The failure of denazification was on display especially egregiously in Austria, where you’d have people openly wearing Nazi uniforms years after the war, and they concoted the idea that they were all just unwilling victims of Nazism instead of enthusiastic participants.
For all the issues with Rowling, her allusions to Nazis in Harry Potter was fairly good. People in those stories said they were forced to do evil using a charm, and it made it almost impossible to identify “real” Nazis and the ones who “didn’t know better” or “couldn’t stop it.” The same is true for Nazis in real life. The people will say they didn’t know or just kept their heads down to avoid trouble, but how do you know if they’re telling the truth?
The answer is, you can’t. You can be generous and just let them all go free (and bring Nazism back later) or be aggressive and root out the problem.
I have no idea if this is on purpose, but it’s made pretty clear how to solve the issue in the first place, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t agree with it. She has obvious “former Nazis” doing Nazi things in the open, but then no one does anything to stop them. How much simpler would the story have been if they had just killed the Nazis?
Yeah, the US took in a bunch of Nazis, too, and we put them to work in research labs and our space program. I guess complicity in the slaughter of millions wasn’t a deal-breaker for our government at the time, so long as they could help get us to the moon.
I’m sorry but this just doesn’t work. A society that abandons hope for the redemption of the worst transgressors of its social norms is a society like the US, with the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world (after El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan). You can’t just kill the traitors just like you can’t just imprison all the murderers and political dissidents.
Redemption does work. It is documented within the most extreme circumstances. It’s not easy and it requires time and resources. But it can only happen with patience and kindness. And I admit that this brings with it a lot of contradictions but I won’t be a part of an extermination campaign no matter how grotesque the vermin might appear.
You can’t just kill the traitors just like you can’t just imprison all the murderers and political dissidents.
I agree that it’s impractical. If I could Thanos-snap them out of existence, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, such easy solutions are not possible. So if we ever do have any hope of recovering the ideal of a country based on the rule of law, we’ll have to figure out what punitive or rehabilitative measure to take against a fifth of our population. Rehabilitation would be extremely difficult, though, as anybody with a Trumper for a family member will attest.
You have to talk to them and admit they’re human beings worth talking to. You have to believe they act the way they do because of a deep pain, and you have to imagine what it’s like to feel such pain. And you have to accept that doing so is dangerous because you can’t trust them. Without a faith to guide you this sounds impossible. And it leaves us trying to engineer solutions that make things worse. I don’t have any answers either, I just wanted you to try to realize how painful it is to hear good people suggesting evil things.
Oh, I completely admit that they’re human beings. I vehemently disagree with the “worth talking to” bit of that sentence, though. As for their pain… I don’t give a flying fuck about it. These people are the root cause of an enormous amount of misery. It’s possible that they aren’t all cruel, but every single one of them decided that cruelty wasn’t a deal breaker for them. I have zero faith that the vast majority of them will ever be redeemable.
We saw the exact same thing after the civil war, by the way. Taking the federal boot off of their necks led to Jim Crow laws and the KKK. Talking to them didn’t fix that. Reasoning with them didn’t fix that.
I think that the main point of difference between us is that you believe that all life is sacred, and should be preserved at all cost. I do not believe that.
Propaganda doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People must make it, and people must spread it. Like spam, if there’s nobody dumb enough to click on the links, the spammers will soon stop sending spam for want of profitability. The receptivity to propaganda is a necessary component for the propagation of it.
I believe that in all human life there is an infinity of possibility. I don’t believe it can be realized in a single human life. So I idealize humans as sacred with the understanding that they are not. This grades into other organisms as well, but less complex beings have more definite boundaries. So mosquito life can be instrumentalized if it results in malaria, and this is why we spray them en masse with insecticides.
The logic of inflicting cruelty to save lives works in the animal kingdom, but I don’t extend it to us (or mammals generally but this is another discussion), so this is I think where we disagree. To me, extending this to human lives who suffer visibly results in the kind of thinking that ends in holocaust.
But I understand the counterargument. I understand why John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry and why he refused to surrender. I also think he should have retreated into the mountains when he had the opportunity, but this is again another discussion. I just don’t think another war will give us what we want, and this is I think what Frederick Douglas was getting at when he tried to dissuade Brown from carrying out the raid. Thanks for listening.
Yeah, man. It’s fucking messy, is what it is. We are sloshy bags of water and hormones feeding a mass of electrified gelatin. There’s no ideal solution because there’s no ideal human. We’re all fucked up in so many different ways.
I understand intimately the sense of loss that violence brings, but I also understand that violence has historically been one of the most successful strategies for resolving conflict. I’m consequently a huge fan of the John Browns and Malcolm X’s of the world, and not so much the MLK Jrs and Gandhis. Gandhi thought he could dissuade Hitler from genociding a people and plunging the entire world into a war by having a polite discussion. Churchill thought it needed to be bombs, tanks, infantry, and warships. Churchill was right.
On the other hand, I am also a huge fan of the Frederick Douglasses of the world. Courage doesn’t only manifest itself on the battlefield. It also looks like petitioning the president for policy changes and reading a speech reminding everybody of why “Independence Day” isn’t a universally beloved tradition.
I don’t claim to have any of the answers. I believe that people are complicated, but also that good and evil are also things that exist. For example, I think that the majority of the people who voted for the Nazi party were doing so out of economic concerns, or anger at the wave of migrants taking German & Austrian jobs, or fear that they were the butt of the rest of the world’s jokes. If you’d asked any of them before they voted whether they would be cool with industrialized murder of German citizens, they’d almost certainly say no. But that’s what it turned out that they voted for. Hitler didn’t pull the wool over anybody’s eyes; he was pretty open about his intentions, even at the outset.
The people who voted for the Nazis had a myriad of different reasons for voting the way they did, but in the end, none of that matters. They contributed to one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. Many of them even took a more active role in perpetrating that evil. Artists, comedians, writers, mechanics, doctors, scientists, grocers, homemakers, attorneys; people from every walk of life. Just your ordinary, average populace. All of them fucking evil.
The truth of the matter is, evil isn’t some bald guy sitting in his volcanic lair stroking his persian cat while plotting the destruction of the world. Evil is very often banal. And that’s the most insidious thing about it, in my opinion.
I get the strength of your feelings, but for now the MAGAts aren’t actually killing people. Yet, maybe, but that remains to be seen. By calling for their deaths, and doubling down on it, you are making yourself worse than them. Killing political opponents is something we see in places like Russia and Iran, not in a (supposedly) advanced democracy like the USA, where a wide political spectrum is meant to be part of the design.
(BTW I’m British, and a big fan of what America SHOULD be. Somewhat less enthusiastic about what you’ve become.)
The reason we’re seeing this sort of stuff coming to the forefront, IMHO, is because the mainstream political parties aren’t listening to the people’s legitimate concerns about immigration, poor public services, lack of work and so on. So when the Nazis strut in, apparently championing all that stuff, it’s hardly surprising when people vote for them. The solution is not to murder those voters but for the mainstream parties to take that stuff into consideration and make sure the far right remains “fringe”. There will always be far-righters, the trick is to minimise their influence.
The rise of Nazism really needs to be a wakeup call for the moderates: you aren’t listening to some really important stuff, you need to start, and no it’s not “racist”.
but for now the MAGAts aren’t actually killing people.
Killing people is not a requirement for being a traitor.
By calling for their deaths, and doubling down on it, you are making yourself worse than them.
Death is the prescribed punishment for treason in this country. I did not invent that punishment, I am simply saying that these people are traitors, and we hang traitors here. Or at least, we should, according to the laws on our books.
advanced democracy like the USA, where a wide political spectrum is meant to be part of the design.
Hey - I’m all for horrible people having horrible political takes and being able to voice their awful opinions in the public marketplace of ideas. But when you storm the capital and attempt to overthrow the government, that is no longer expressing an opinion. That is being a traitor. Anybody who voted for Trump after that is aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States.
The solution is not to murder those voters but for the mainstream parties to take that stuff into consideration and make sure the far right remains “fringe”.
Yeah, well, it’s a bit too late for that. The Republican party has long since embraced the cult of Trump. They’ve been completely hollowed out by Trumpists and there’s no going back without the entire party collapsing. The sane ones in that party know this, and so despite the fact that they’re terrified of Trump and his cultists, they’ll still vote for everything he wants.
I understand that you see an extreme position like mine, and find it anathema to your sensitivities as someone who doesn’t have to live among these people, but let me assure you: the US is a full on fascist country now. The only way to claw back any semblance of a normal country is through extreme measures. Talking it out is not going to cut it anymore.
Or more accurately you have the causality reversed.
“Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” by James Q Whitman cites the nazis using Jim Crow as their model for Germany.
Nazi legal theorists saw the U.S. as a “pioneer” in racist legislation.
I doubt that. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s a lot. Like a lot a lot. Hell, we even couped Australia, for fuck’s sake. I’m not sure how many governments in the world the US has fucked with, but I’d reckon it’s probably in the triple digits.
I didn’t downvote you, but it’s probably because you said you wanted 70 million people to hang. A lot of people are going to find that pretty distasteful
Ever since I learnt of the 5th column (thank you video games) it became incredibly obvious that that is precisely what the MAGA movement is.
But that black and white image is all anyone needs to know about America.
Fascism has long been the end game for the Underrepresented Slaves of Autocrats (USA).
To be specific, I think only those sources spreading the (mis/dis)information to those people would be considered the fifth column. The ones they’re manipulating would be useful targets to spread it further, but I think, by definition, they wouldn’t be called members of the fifth column. This is only semantics though and it doesn’t really change anything about what you said.
You know: when I was a much younger man, I heard of the concept of the 5th column. For those who don’t know, the 5th column is a clandestine group of people, financed by a particular country’s adversary, who is dedicated to destroying that country from the inside. Think the human version of the Trojan Horse.
I’d always pictured this to be a relatively small movement, like a terror cell. A very insular group operating on foreign financing who leveraged an advanced guerilla war skillset to undermine the security apparatus of the country. To my embarrassment, I only realized recently (maybe 5 years ago) that that is not always the case. In America’s case, for example, the 5th column comprises some 70+ million people who are fed on a diet of Russian propaganda and home-grown racist rhetoric. Most of these people have no skillset to speak of, but all of them are willing participants in the utter destruction of a country based on the rule of law and constitutional government.
It seems very odd to me that 1 out of every 5 Americans is a full-on traitor. But, we do live in odd times. 20% of our country seems giddy to return to a monarchy, complete with the whole Louis XIV Sun King “Appointed By God” thing. And what’s strangest of all is that the guy they picked to be their holy sovereign… is a fucking moron. A complete god damned imbecile of the highest order.
If this is a simulation, I’d very much like it to stop.
Edit: I would like to hear from the people who downvoted this; what about what I said is disagreeable to you?
1 in 5 is unprecedented. Like legit so. Even in the 1930s Americans did not have that much support for Hitler and his regime. Even the racists of the time found the Nazis to be too much (case in point: After WW2, when WW2 veterans were in the KKK, they would get into fights and disputes with younger non-WW2 generation Klansmen because of their Nazi sympathies). This is because while to modern American racists, the old-school Nazis believed in the same ‘whiteness’ as American racists did, they did not. The German Nazis heavily divided European people into their own sub-races. The French were treated better than the Poles and allowed some degree of autonomy (such as Vichy France) and would not be subject to the same genocide as East Europeans. This was because they put people like the French, Dutch, and Danes above them. But a German was still superior and would be afford more privileges than others Europeans.
The Americans were viewed as mongrels by the Nazis due to the melting-pot nature of the US. You had people from all over Europe (all over the world even back then, but just not as many as today due to racist immigration policies), and what counted as ‘white’ was highly subjective. For example if I (an ethic Lebanese person) were to go to Alabama in 1940, we would not need to ride in the back of the bus and we could drink from the whites only fountain and stay at a whites only accommodation. Arab-Americans were legally and even socially considered whites until the 1970s when the Iranian revolution and increasing anti-Arabism by Zionist media started to portray Arabs far more aggressively as savages bereft of all civilization.
I left this comment cooking for hours and I almost forgot about it, so I’ll stop here.
I remember protesting the Afghanistan war in 2001 when the war was incredibly popular… with the Democrats. With the right wing, it was a fucking Jihad.
Everyone, including Democratic party members called the people against the war fifth columnists.
It doesn’t matter how many words you write, calling people with positions you don’t agree with traitors <EDIT> on a foreign payroll </EDIT> is the most boringly unimaginative way to describe people you don’t like to those you think you do.
You know why right wingers support Trump?
There may be fifth columnists, but it would be somewhere less then a thousand people, but honestly I think that number is closer to zero. Why buy the cow when the milk is free.
Meanwhile, the feckless DNC doesn’t have to fire it’s consultants, or purge the slotkins in their corner, because people are blaming Russia for American actions.
It makes listening to your enemy impossible, too. Why bother trying to win them over, or figure out what drives them so you can stop it, they’re just literal traitors.
I downvoted your post because, as with all accusations of fifth columnists, it is more a post of your failure of imagination and othering Americans with political views you don’t like.
The othering isn’t wrong, innately, but if your answer to the question ‘why are Americans becoming Nazis?’ is Russia, then you’ll never be able to fix the real reasons and stop the flow of fucking Nazis.
EDIT: none of the reasons above are good. But if you don’t know what they are, you can’t do anything about them.
This is like Germany trying to blame some other country for the Nazi Party.
I’m Canadian. I volunteered at the rubble at the WTC for a month as a rescue paramedic. Every time we “foreigners” brought up any resistance to the frothing and war mongering that was going on, we were told to “fuck off and go home”, “you couldn’t possibly understand what is happening here”.
I gave a month of my life away from my family, my work and my home for the benefit of Americans. To give their families some closure, to help heal your country and all I got in return was vitriol and hatred. I stayed. I pushed through as did the rest of my crew.
I haven’t been to the state’s since. I could give a fuck if they self destruct due to their own hatred of others. Fuck em. They all deserve it. They come across the border and I’ll be there waiting.
I’m not calling them traitors because I disagree with them. I’m calling them traitors because they’re god damned traitors. Do you not remember when Trump encouraged a bunch of his idiot followers to attempt to overthrow the sitting government on Jan 6th, 2021? It wasn’t that long ago. That’s treason. He is a traitor. Anybody who voted for a traitor is aiding and abetting the enemy, and is therefore also a traitor. The fact that we didn’t string him up immediately following that stunt is straight up appalling. The fact that we then allowed him the ability to run for president again is unconscionable.
I think if you re-read what I wrote, you’ll see that I’m not just blaming Russia. I specifically mentioned home-grown racism as one of the driving factors. The nazis didn’t create American racism; American racism created the nazis. Hitler took great inspiration from our treatment of our indigenous population, our blatant antisemitism, and our oppression of black citizens. He modeled a lot of his policies on our behavior.
That being said, Russia is definitely to blame for quite a lot of the disinformation sphere in this country. It is a very well documented, and well financed operation designed to destabilize the country, and it has been wildly successful. I mean, hell, it’s partially responsible for 70+ million Americans becoming full-on traitors.
I bet genestealer cultist were based on this
You don’t have to immediately look for a conspiracy to exonerate the guilty. Many Americans truly, honestly believed (and still do) that Hitler’s policies were the correct way forward. Black slavery didn’t just materialize out of thin air either, after all.
Oh I’m not looking to exonerate ANY of these motherfuckers. If I had my druthers, they’d all fucking hang. Whether they’re home-grown, or Russian sponsored, every single one of them is a fucking traitor.
Edit: honestly, the current situation in America gives me a whole new appreciation for why the French decided they needed to industrialize murder during their revolution, and invented the guillotine to do so.
Edit 2 (Treasonous Boogaloo): I truly mean ALL. Your sweet aunt, who voted for Trump because she was concerned about Fox’s reporting about the migrant caravans at the border? Fucking traitor. I sincerely hope she dies. Your uncle, who’s a bit of a conspiracy nut, who is an avid Alex Jones listener? I pray he gets trapped in a raging inferno. Your parents, who you cut out of your life because they kept ranting about immigrants taking American jobs at every social event? I pray they find themselves trapped in a Cybertruck that’s in the middle of a battery-overload event. Everybody who voted for Trump, regardless of how many times they voted for him, deserves a traitor’s death. 100% of them, zero exceptions, no backsies.
One of the mistakes Germans (+ occupying forces) and the Austrians made after WW II was pardoning / “washing clean” Nazis after the war. Eg. the Austrian far right party FPÖ was founded by an SS member, and I’d be surprised if the AfD didn’t have Nazis in its family tree as well.
People who support fascism can’t be rehabilitated, except for a tiny minority.
We had the same problem after the civil war.
The slavers were kept out of power for 10 years, with excellent results.
Then political priorities shifted and they were allowed back into power.
Cue the KKK, Jim Crow, and the resumption of ‘Southern Culture’ (ie evil racial brutality).
The nazis were largely displaced for decades, the slaver class wasn’t, and it destroyed America.
But that’s the thing: Nazis weren’t really even displaced, and many kept their jobs in eg. the judiciary because they were seen as indispensable. The failure of denazification was on display especially egregiously in Austria, where you’d have people openly wearing Nazi uniforms years after the war, and they concoted the idea that they were all just unwilling victims of Nazism instead of enthusiastic participants.
For all the issues with Rowling, her allusions to Nazis in Harry Potter was fairly good. People in those stories said they were forced to do evil using a charm, and it made it almost impossible to identify “real” Nazis and the ones who “didn’t know better” or “couldn’t stop it.” The same is true for Nazis in real life. The people will say they didn’t know or just kept their heads down to avoid trouble, but how do you know if they’re telling the truth?
The answer is, you can’t. You can be generous and just let them all go free (and bring Nazism back later) or be aggressive and root out the problem.
I have no idea if this is on purpose, but it’s made pretty clear how to solve the issue in the first place, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t agree with it. She has obvious “former Nazis” doing Nazi things in the open, but then no one does anything to stop them. How much simpler would the story have been if they had just killed the Nazis?
Yeah, the US took in a bunch of Nazis, too, and we put them to work in research labs and our space program. I guess complicity in the slaughter of millions wasn’t a deal-breaker for our government at the time, so long as they could help get us to the moon.
I’m sorry but this just doesn’t work. A society that abandons hope for the redemption of the worst transgressors of its social norms is a society like the US, with the fifth highest incarceration rate in the world (after El Salvador, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan). You can’t just kill the traitors just like you can’t just imprison all the murderers and political dissidents.
Redemption does work. It is documented within the most extreme circumstances. It’s not easy and it requires time and resources. But it can only happen with patience and kindness. And I admit that this brings with it a lot of contradictions but I won’t be a part of an extermination campaign no matter how grotesque the vermin might appear.
I agree that it’s impractical. If I could Thanos-snap them out of existence, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, such easy solutions are not possible. So if we ever do have any hope of recovering the ideal of a country based on the rule of law, we’ll have to figure out what punitive or rehabilitative measure to take against a fifth of our population. Rehabilitation would be extremely difficult, though, as anybody with a Trumper for a family member will attest.
You have to talk to them and admit they’re human beings worth talking to. You have to believe they act the way they do because of a deep pain, and you have to imagine what it’s like to feel such pain. And you have to accept that doing so is dangerous because you can’t trust them. Without a faith to guide you this sounds impossible. And it leaves us trying to engineer solutions that make things worse. I don’t have any answers either, I just wanted you to try to realize how painful it is to hear good people suggesting evil things.
Oh, I completely admit that they’re human beings. I vehemently disagree with the “worth talking to” bit of that sentence, though. As for their pain… I don’t give a flying fuck about it. These people are the root cause of an enormous amount of misery. It’s possible that they aren’t all cruel, but every single one of them decided that cruelty wasn’t a deal breaker for them. I have zero faith that the vast majority of them will ever be redeemable.
We saw the exact same thing after the civil war, by the way. Taking the federal boot off of their necks led to Jim Crow laws and the KKK. Talking to them didn’t fix that. Reasoning with them didn’t fix that.
I think that the main point of difference between us is that you believe that all life is sacred, and should be preserved at all cost. I do not believe that.
Not the propaganda they are fed? Or their education, pledging the flag every morning during their childhood?
That would still not be the root cause.
Propaganda doesn’t exist in a vacuum. People must make it, and people must spread it. Like spam, if there’s nobody dumb enough to click on the links, the spammers will soon stop sending spam for want of profitability. The receptivity to propaganda is a necessary component for the propagation of it.
I believe that in all human life there is an infinity of possibility. I don’t believe it can be realized in a single human life. So I idealize humans as sacred with the understanding that they are not. This grades into other organisms as well, but less complex beings have more definite boundaries. So mosquito life can be instrumentalized if it results in malaria, and this is why we spray them en masse with insecticides.
The logic of inflicting cruelty to save lives works in the animal kingdom, but I don’t extend it to us (or mammals generally but this is another discussion), so this is I think where we disagree. To me, extending this to human lives who suffer visibly results in the kind of thinking that ends in holocaust.
But I understand the counterargument. I understand why John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry and why he refused to surrender. I also think he should have retreated into the mountains when he had the opportunity, but this is again another discussion. I just don’t think another war will give us what we want, and this is I think what Frederick Douglas was getting at when he tried to dissuade Brown from carrying out the raid. Thanks for listening.
Yeah, man. It’s fucking messy, is what it is. We are sloshy bags of water and hormones feeding a mass of electrified gelatin. There’s no ideal solution because there’s no ideal human. We’re all fucked up in so many different ways.
I understand intimately the sense of loss that violence brings, but I also understand that violence has historically been one of the most successful strategies for resolving conflict. I’m consequently a huge fan of the John Browns and Malcolm X’s of the world, and not so much the MLK Jrs and Gandhis. Gandhi thought he could dissuade Hitler from genociding a people and plunging the entire world into a war by having a polite discussion. Churchill thought it needed to be bombs, tanks, infantry, and warships. Churchill was right.
On the other hand, I am also a huge fan of the Frederick Douglasses of the world. Courage doesn’t only manifest itself on the battlefield. It also looks like petitioning the president for policy changes and reading a speech reminding everybody of why “Independence Day” isn’t a universally beloved tradition.
I don’t claim to have any of the answers. I believe that people are complicated, but also that good and evil are also things that exist. For example, I think that the majority of the people who voted for the Nazi party were doing so out of economic concerns, or anger at the wave of migrants taking German & Austrian jobs, or fear that they were the butt of the rest of the world’s jokes. If you’d asked any of them before they voted whether they would be cool with industrialized murder of German citizens, they’d almost certainly say no. But that’s what it turned out that they voted for. Hitler didn’t pull the wool over anybody’s eyes; he was pretty open about his intentions, even at the outset.
The people who voted for the Nazis had a myriad of different reasons for voting the way they did, but in the end, none of that matters. They contributed to one of the greatest evils the world has ever seen. Many of them even took a more active role in perpetrating that evil. Artists, comedians, writers, mechanics, doctors, scientists, grocers, homemakers, attorneys; people from every walk of life. Just your ordinary, average populace. All of them fucking evil.
The truth of the matter is, evil isn’t some bald guy sitting in his volcanic lair stroking his persian cat while plotting the destruction of the world. Evil is very often banal. And that’s the most insidious thing about it, in my opinion.
I get the strength of your feelings, but for now the MAGAts aren’t actually killing people. Yet, maybe, but that remains to be seen. By calling for their deaths, and doubling down on it, you are making yourself worse than them. Killing political opponents is something we see in places like Russia and Iran, not in a (supposedly) advanced democracy like the USA, where a wide political spectrum is meant to be part of the design.
(BTW I’m British, and a big fan of what America SHOULD be. Somewhat less enthusiastic about what you’ve become.)
The reason we’re seeing this sort of stuff coming to the forefront, IMHO, is because the mainstream political parties aren’t listening to the people’s legitimate concerns about immigration, poor public services, lack of work and so on. So when the Nazis strut in, apparently championing all that stuff, it’s hardly surprising when people vote for them. The solution is not to murder those voters but for the mainstream parties to take that stuff into consideration and make sure the far right remains “fringe”. There will always be far-righters, the trick is to minimise their influence.
The rise of Nazism really needs to be a wakeup call for the moderates: you aren’t listening to some really important stuff, you need to start, and no it’s not “racist”.
Killing people is not a requirement for being a traitor.
Death is the prescribed punishment for treason in this country. I did not invent that punishment, I am simply saying that these people are traitors, and we hang traitors here. Or at least, we should, according to the laws on our books.
Hey - I’m all for horrible people having horrible political takes and being able to voice their awful opinions in the public marketplace of ideas. But when you storm the capital and attempt to overthrow the government, that is no longer expressing an opinion. That is being a traitor. Anybody who voted for Trump after that is aiding and abetting an enemy of the United States.
Yeah, well, it’s a bit too late for that. The Republican party has long since embraced the cult of Trump. They’ve been completely hollowed out by Trumpists and there’s no going back without the entire party collapsing. The sane ones in that party know this, and so despite the fact that they’re terrified of Trump and his cultists, they’ll still vote for everything he wants.
I understand that you see an extreme position like mine, and find it anathema to your sensitivities as someone who doesn’t have to live among these people, but let me assure you: the US is a full on fascist country now. The only way to claw back any semblance of a normal country is through extreme measures. Talking it out is not going to cut it anymore.
You’re wrong.
Or more accurately you have the causality reversed.
“Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law” by James Q Whitman cites the nazis using Jim Crow as their model for Germany.
You’d be surprised at the amount of 5th column groups USA has helped one way or another around the globe
I doubt that. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s a lot. Like a lot a lot. Hell, we even couped Australia, for fuck’s sake. I’m not sure how many governments in the world the US has fucked with, but I’d reckon it’s probably in the triple digits.
I didn’t downvote you, but it’s probably because you said you wanted 70 million people to hang. A lot of people are going to find that pretty distasteful
I mean, I’m sure you don’t have to hang all of them.
Even as incredibly dim as they are, you’d imagine some people would start to get the message after the first few million or so.
Probably. Fuck 'em. Plenty of space on the galley.
Ever since I learnt of the 5th column (thank you video games) it became incredibly obvious that that is precisely what the MAGA movement is.
But that black and white image is all anyone needs to know about America. Fascism has long been the end game for the Underrepresented Slaves of Autocrats (USA).
To be specific, I think only those sources spreading the (mis/dis)information to those people would be considered the fifth column. The ones they’re manipulating would be useful targets to spread it further, but I think, by definition, they wouldn’t be called members of the fifth column. This is only semantics though and it doesn’t really change anything about what you said.