It’s been over a decade since the last american WWI vet passed away and the number of living WWII vets is rapidly dwindling. I wondered recently if the uptick of americans who like the idea of charasmatic authoritarians might not be entirely unrelated to the demise of two generations of people who witnessed the horrific death and destruction caused by very similar despots.
It might be nice to think that, but many Americans fought fascism abroad and supported it at home. I don’t know that the correlation is all that strong.
The unfortunate reality that I think too many people are uncomfortable admitting is that a fuck load of WWII vets who fought tyranny in Europe and Japan fought for tyranny when they came home.
How many millions of US WWII vets fought to stop the Nazis, only to gleefully embrace the fight against the civil rights of racial minorities, the LGBTQ+ community, women and non-Christians? Has to be countless.
Truth is, many millions of Americans didn’t fight the Nazis over ideological opposition.
On the upside, it does mean that many people, who are otherwise objectionable, can be harnessed for good purposes from time to time. Means we don’t need a perfect society to get good results - thank the gods, because otherwise we’d be screwed conceptually and not just… circumstantially.
I actually disagree with how valuable that is.
I get many people hold a position of “it doesn’t matter why someone is doing good. Just as long as they’re doing good”.
I believe that’s a bad position to take and we’re living the consequences of that now. If millions of Americans fought to end Nazi Germany, just to come home and vote in Nazism or its closest representatives with every subsequent election, leading us to fascism today, then their “good” is null.
They cannot claim to have fought for the constitution and freedom, just to come home and spend the rest of their lives fighting to destroy both. And if we do not curate these clowns out when their usefulness ends, the cancer on society they are will only grow and spread. The why always matters.
My point isn’t that it doesn’t matter why they did good as long as they did good, or that they, as individuals, are in some way redeemed by being manipulated to do something good. My point is only that the horrific amount of terrible people in our society does not preclude positive achievements which can reinforce the position of good people and good views, and help propagate the same.
I absolutely agree that fascists should be curated out of society whenever and wherever possible. Only pointing out that, without need for a literal genocide, we can still make progress even with our… current demographics. Even our enemies are not necessarily obstacles if approached with the proper strategy, though they doubtlessly wish to be, just as many American fascists ended up being used to end fascism in Europe and discredit it at home.
We just have to fight hard, fight smart, and fight with an eye towards shrinking their ‘share’ of the population and enlarging the ‘share’ of the sane and decent.
Neo-Nazis are like cultural parasites. they try to subsume everything they touch.
Norse gods, runes, Greco-Roman culture, Christianity, Stoicism, Punk, Gaming, Nerdom.
Neo-Nazis fuck off. They don’t own shit.
Just emphasize that beating Nazis was the good part. WW2 was pretty good in that regard
Where my “War of the Roses” peeps at? 1540s represent!
I always try to be quick with the caveats when talking about ww2.
"UNDERSTANDING that the abstract engineering used by the Nazis, and often appropriated from non-Nazi sources, IN NO WAY JUSTIFIES OR DOWNPLAYS THEIR HORRIFIC CRIMES, IDEOLOGY, OR GENERAL POLICY OF AGGRESSION…
Some dieselpunk-ass looking firearms, I love them"
MG-42 go BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRAK
When even the guys on the front thought Hitler’s Zipper was a cool gun, we should be able to appreciate the engineering of the cool gun and not the murders committed by the people wielding them.
