US Politics |OT|

[the-pi-guy]

TallSilhouette said:

I watched this video this morning, and I intended to share it.

This hammers on one of a few issues that I've had with a lot of the dialogue around fascism. I've said before that Hitler wasn't Hitler until near the end. You wouldn't say he's a Hitler until 1933 at the earliest. And it probably wasn't really until like 1939 or 1941 when people would have started really talking about it like that. Despite that, he wrote Mein Kampf in 1925, staged a coup in 1923 and did a lot of other things before 1939 that were problematic. If Trump was literally doing the exact same things, and was intending to do all of the same things, it would somehow feel inappropriate to make a comparison until several years from now.

The other important thing that I think gets missed is that we have this almost supernatural evil view of Hitler, as if he was the literal anti-christ and no one can ever be that evil. It becomes practically a joke if people compare something to Hitler. It gets dismissed as hyperbole, and people stop listening to you. It is probably actually easier to compare Trump to the devil, than it is to compare him to Hitler.  We talk about Hitler as if he was some almost imaginary nebulous monster, that no one should ever be compared to, and it's impossible to ever be that evil.

And I think that's a huge mistake. I've seen a few tumblr/Reddit posts where Hitler is with a little girl, or a dog, with text that boils down to "Hitler was a person, and this should remind you that people are capable of terrible things". And that's the framework that should really be taken. 

Putin doesn't need to kill 6 million people to be compared to Hitler. Shoving people he doesn't like in concentration camps, and imperialistic push into Ukraine. 

The general devaluing of people who feel differently or don't have the same status, should be enough to call out Nazism. But that feels ludicrous, and we let so much tragedy happen. We convince ourselves that nothing is that bad, until it becomes every bit as bad, at which point it is too late to fix the damage.  

Last edited by the-pi-guy - 2 days ago