100 year old WW2 veteran: "the sacrifice wasn't worth the result of what it is now"

[Shadow1980]

Sometimes a decisive strategic victory might not mean much in the long run. You can defeat your enemy, but defeating an ideology is much tougher. We defeated the fascist governments of the Axis powers, but our goal technically wasn't to defeat fascism itself. And we didn't. It was just temporarily delegitimized. The U.S. had its own homegrown Nazi movement before WW2, and if Japan never attacked and we never entered the war, I honestly believe that groups like the German-American Bund would still be around today in full force acting all buddy-buddy with the Third Reich and pushing our government to do the same. But WW2 put a stop to those movements of the 1930s, and for a few decades, it was considered gauche to be an overt Nazi. They were seen by most as irredeemably evil.

But the war ended a bit over 80 years ago. We've had multiple generations of people grow up after the fact, totally removed from the war and its immediate consequences, all while fascist movements steadily and slowly regrouped, some of them trying to make fascist ideals more acceptable to the public. While the literal swastika-waving goose-steppers have also been emboldened to come out in force (the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 being a notable recent example), others have tried to be less overt, trying to incorporate neo-Nazi and white nationalist talking points into mainstream right-wing politics.

Just a couple of years ago you had Tucker Carlson espouse the "Great Replacement" theory, which originated in neo-Nazi circles, on Fox News prime time and is clearly catching on and forming the basis of immigration policy. They basically turned "Jews will not replace us" with "The Left will not replace us," because they know that overt antisemitism is still not socially acceptable by most, even among their own side. We have people, some of them in various positions within the Republican Party, sharing Nazi memes. And the de facto leader of the GOP for the past decade has been a virulently racist man who envisions himself as a dictator, and who, along with close advisors and complicit political allies, has taken steps to ensure that he's capable of doing whatever he wants with absolute impunity, and who felt that those neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were "very fine people." Most of them reject the label "fascist" because it's still considered an ugly word, but if it honks like a goose and steps like a goose, well...

There is precedent for this in American politics with another defeated government: the Confederate States of America. An avowed white supremacist nation that, by their own admission, seceded from the United States for the express purpose of defending the "right" to own other human beings as property. A nation that drew first blood when the Confederate garrison at Fort Moultrie fired on Fort Sumter. A war was started for morally repugnant reasons, that war was lost, and a multi-generational grudge resulted that persists to this very day.

Despite being defeated and forcibly reintegrated back into the United States, the Confederates and their descendants spent the next century doing everything in their power to make sure that, even though they could no longer own slaves, that there was a perpetual legal framework that ensured that the black man could never be the equal of the white man. Everything from Jim Crow to memorials to Confederate military and political leaders existed for that purpose, all while they attempted to rehabilitate the Confederacy in the eyes of the public with ahistorical nonsense like the "Lost Cause" myth, which had later historical parallels with the "stabbed-in-the-back" myth in Germany.

Their racism was handed down generation to generation, indoctrinating millions of new people into white nationalist ideology, and spreading well beyond the boundaries of the Old South. Not just racism, but racialism as well never left American politics. Suffering a military defeat in 1865 didn't disabuse them of their beliefs. Suffering political defeats 90-100 years later did not disabuse their descendants of the same beliefs. Centuries-old racist attitudes still cling to our politics like a stubborn stain. Oh, and racist conservative American Southerners and their Jim Crow laws were major influences on Adolf Hitler, so they arguably helped create that monster.

It's perhaps no surprise that modern-day Confederate apologists dovetail politically with fascist ideology. These are people that believe that white cishet Protestants are superior to everyone else, and believe that this should be reflected in our laws. This is the whole point of the "Culture War." They view themselves as needing to win by any means necessary a war against nefarious "cultural Marxists," a term that's the modern approximation of "cultural Bolshevism," which was used by the Nazis to tarnish any aspects of then-contemporary German society that they didn't agree with. The fact that they've appropriated so much of fascist rhetoric ought to be a huge red flag, but they always have a knack of finding ways to give themselves plausible deniability among their base.

Ever since the Reagan Revolution unified the GOP with the Religious Right, modern Republican politicians, propagandists, and activists have been telling whoever would listen that "The Left" (which they define as anyone who isn't a Christian conservative) was actively conspiring to do all sorts of horrible things to society. They view emancipatory movements, much of art and science, and increasing secular attitudes as existential threats to the nation that must be defeated, that they must take freedom away from others to save the soul of the nation. They know they're in the minority, which is why they're so desperate to ensure that they at least have a perpetual political majority (easy to do when you have a two-party system and can just enough influence to dominate one of them), one that can enshrine their regressive social views in law and give their base some sort of demographic group to serve as a scapegoat, which is currently trans people and, their old perennial favorite, immigrants.