This is not what America is.
Is it though? After all the Nazis were inspired by the US.
There are really 2 Americas. The one that tries to do better and the other one that only exists because Sherman didn’t go far enough.
Fuck Andrew Johnson. I don’t believe in hell, but I hope he’s burning there anyway.
USA has always been an ambivalent place, both committed to equality and liberty in an idealized manner and also committed to perpetuating inequality, particularly across racial, ethnic and religious lines. A child of the 1970s I like the version of America I was taught about in-between Saturday morning cartoons via School House Rock. No more kings!
Edit: before anyone else points it out, the video depicts racism against native americans and the colonists were crazy religious zealots. But it’s also about rejection of the English king. So all the ambivalence seems to be there.
Well, the nazis weren’t really big on monarchism either
Cute, but also naive and highly revisionist. The ideals behind it are nice but they were never fully realized or even well thought out, particularly for certain groups or people seen as lesser.
In particular, the substitution of a president for a king was, I think, one of the most naive and dangerous mistakes in early US history. Did they really think calling him something different would change the dynamics? The entire existence of Trump can be traced back to this decision.
? Being able to elect your leader, criticize them, etc. is pretty vastly different from having a king and lineage of people who all think they’re special for no reason at all. Trump being treated like he should be a king by the dumbest people anyone knows is a failing by those people to have even the slightest sign of brain activity. Everyone else knows that the president/prime minister/whatever is just a temporary leader and one essentially hired to do a job.
The idea that a country needs (
to exist) to be ruled by a single individual is completely unfounded, and perpetuated by people who are either fools or foolish enough to think they have a shot at the throne. Early on, there were proposals for the USA to have a king, a president, and many other ideas including no executive branch or having a tribunal. I could see a good case for splitting the executive across 3 persons with equal and asymmetrical powers.Assuming you do a ranked choice vote for all 3 at once (or 1 at a time in rotation, like Senators) it should be extremely difficult to compromise the office by, say, buying one deeply indebted former TV host and running them for president.
Exactly, they couldn’t possibly be anything like kings.
You see, the small group of ultra wealthy people in America who control the government and make the laws, due to their hereditary power and vast holdings, aren’t from the Aristocrstic region of Europe or the Oligarchy region of Western Russia.
So, its a totally different thing. Although, I was a little confused when I first heard about Bush II or that something the Kennedy dynasty could exist. Luckily, I saw a play all about it in the Rockefeller Palace in new York, not far from Trump’s.
This comment is exactly the lack of imagination and critical thinking I am criticizing. There are some structures and norms around the president that make its office less dangerous than a king. But not much less dangerous. He has much of the same powers. The ability to command the military and execute the law are the two most important, and we already saw how trump tried to abuse these powers in his first term. We were just lucky that many of his followers resisted. But will they next time? I think not. His new cadre has been selected with that in mind, and he’s made it clear he will dispose of or punish anyone who resists him.
What “everyone knows” is not what everyone knows if not everyone knows it. The office of the presidency is inherently vulnerable to the type of attempted power grab that Trump is currently enacting. There is nothing unusual or particularly stupid about his followers. They are just people who have been indoctrinated into an authoritarian cult.
Many people don’t know, but the earliest British kings were elected. But over time, the king gained more and more power until it became the tyrannical institution in our current imagination. The same happened in Rome with the rise of the emperor. And Hitler, and the Bolsheviks, and many many others. Most tyrants arise within systems that purport to be democratic.
A truly just and benevolent system of government must resist these attacks on it far more strongly. I believe we are seeing the gradual failure of the American system today. With luck we will fight off this attack and the system may limp on for a few more years. But without reforms to more substantially limit executive power, the system remains vulnerable. The office of the president is clearly the weak point, and if we’re smart we’ll think on how the powers of that office can be deconstructed and distributed more widely.
Came to make this comment, 'cuz America is the political prison and slavery capital of the world.
We’re all humans, nationality aside. Good ideas. Bad ideas. Such ideology can and has propagated in pretty much every corner of the world and at varying times in history in some respect.
“It happened, therefore it can happen again.” – Primo Levi
Saw this written on a plaque at the Holocaust memorial in Berlin and it really gave me pause, reflecting on what is happening all around the world right now.
I would have put it as:
“It keeps happening, therefore it can happen again.”
It covers so much bad shit we as (groups of) humans do.
Exterminating the next village over bcs they like to wear green instead of yellow hats is the easiest thing to spark amongst the common, easily manipulated folk.And it keeps happening bcs it (mass manipulation for whatever irrelevant reason) can be monetised & power can be gained in the precess (beyond from just literal pillaging and enslavement).
I warned you about holocaust bro!!!
I told you dog!
It should be pointed out that had the Holocaust and WWII not happened, Nazi Germany was still an unmitigated nightmare that no one but the Nazis themselves were enjoying very much. There were and are plenty of authoritarian and fascist states where genocides don’t happen, but which are nevertheless hell on earth for everyone who’s not a functionary of the state.
So even if you think it’s hyperbole to worry about extermination camps in the US, there’s absolutely nothing hyperbolic about a dystopian state coming into existence in which dissent and difference are crimes. Donald Trump and his band of dead-eyed sadists like Stephen Miller will do whatever they can in a second Trump term to bring such a state to you.
Nazi comparisons are completely justified.
Also notable is the fact that Hitler managed to gain power with only about 35 percent of the popular vote. Because regular conservatives formed a coalition with him, convinced they would be able to control and use him. Instead he used them.
Also, he then needed a false flag operation to be able to declare martial law - gaining the same kind of absolute power that the US president now has automatically thanks to the Supreme Court.
Yay.
in this respect the American system is better, because everyone knows they are voting for trump, not the less evil trump supporters
True. The Nazi concentration camps were not constructed for Jews, but political dissidents. They were created to detain people that did not succumb to gleichschaltung, coordination or alignment with the Nazi agenda.
And iirc they reused them for Jews bcs of the gigantic cost of what ultimately led to the ‘Final solution’.
But the primary goal was def people control & opposition subjugation - ie make people know what happens if you speak out against the regime.
Insightful interview https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-trumps-rhetoric-compares-to-historic-fascist-language
"I think Trump has been conditioning Americans since 2015 to see violence as something justified in certain cases and even patriotic.
He’s been conditioning them to see other Americans as enemies, as diseased, as dirty. And what we have to remember is that authoritarians might initially target one group, and he’s been talking mostly about immigrants. But he’s also calling the enemy within the political opposition.
[…]
And this is part of an authoritarian projection mechanism. I call it the upside-down world of authoritarianism, where, ever since Mussolini, he was the first to call democrats the real tyrants and fascism was going to be freedom. Fascism was going to make Italy great again. That was a slogan, as was drain the swamp. Trump took that from Mussolini as well."
You’re right. He came to speak to the police in my county, which has a bad reputation already, and
Trump said the administration is removing these gang members from the United States “but we’d like to get them out a lot faster and when you see … these thugs being thrown into the back of the paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in rough, I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”
To which the police and cadets all started to laugh. Of course later the department said of course they wouldn’t be rough 🤔: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/suffolk-county-police-speak-up-after-trump-dont-be-too-nice-quip/227929/
Here’s another story from my county 🙁 the “embarrassing items” in the SUV were sex toys btw:
https://abc7ny.com/james-burke-suffolk-county-police-chief-long-island/1585285/
No surprise that our county’s PBA has enthusiastically endorsed Trump. As a brown family here it has us concerned.
and less than a week away from a 4th reich if all the tightass tankies vote 3rd parties
Typical Democrat: trying to blame every problem on people to your left.
You’d really rather Trump win than not support genocide.
That’s typical Democrat behavior? That’s news to me.
On a comment that is saying that if people dont vote, trump might get elected, you are saying that they would rather vote for trump than not vote?
Edit: voting for a third-party, not not voting
If Harris wins, she should put the tankies in camps, amirite? /s
that would be no different than the angry oranges tactics. id leave em to stew in their own juices for a while but remain wary and thump em if they try anything
FYI: Nazis moved from Carbon-monoxide to Zyclon-B because they utilized motors to produce the CO gas before, which disturbed the neighbors due to noise.
Nazis are the guys who complain about everything.
I’ve been saying this since last year to my family members on the other side of the political spectrum (some MAGA, some moderate), and I feel like I’ve been saying it til I get blue in the face, but it definitely feels like the MAGA wing of the Republican Party wants to go back to this era of German history ASAP.
it definitely feels like the MAGA wing of the Republican Party wants to go back to this era of German history ASAP.
It feels that way because it is that way.
First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out, because I was not a Communist.
I mean yeah.
The very first killed were the disabled. And not in prisons but instead in an improvised shed in the asylum they were in.
But the Sentiment is right.
First, the capitol/Reichstagg will be set on fire, and radical left democrat enemies within will have to be exterminated from power. Then everything else will happen.
They are deporting people in europe too
I grew up with the whole JW things crammed down my throat before I, as a teenager, finally snapped at my abusive, alcoholic mother and told her off. My dad backed me up fortunately. I hate that cult. But I cannot condone even sending my worst enemies to a fucking concentration camp.
They should, however, be investigated and arrested on a traditional, case-by-case basis. Most of those people are just idiots who really reject modern reality because real life is hard. The point is though, you can’t just paint a whole group as evil and round them up. It’s important to find the ones actually doing bad things and run their lives in particular.
That’s too much, even for Jehovah’s witnesses. JW’s deserve their freedom just as anyone else. But I should add, there should be a law that allows one to legally hose them down with cold garden water if they come to your house to bother you. If they come and you like it, all good. But if they come and I specifically tell them never to bother me again, they better write that somewhere cuz next time they get a legal watering. It would make a lot of people get a renewed sense of home ownership lol. But I mean, the JW’s could just stop pestering people.
While I share with you the sentiment, that is an odd place for such confession
Just asking for my pace to not be invaded. That’s all. Also making light of something awful 😉. But that’s what comedians do. I’m not a comedian but sometimes I wish I was. Then things would make more sense. Like why would the US help Israel basically pulverize Palestine? Why didn’t the US instead help Ukraine by eliminating putin yet? So I can’t change any of this. I can vote Democrat and I did, but there wasn’t an entry on there that specifically asked “would you want us to stop arming Israel?”. We got no voice in the matter…but we got sarcasm, parody, and comedy! Neither thing is illegal yet.
This is exactly what America is and always has been.
No, America the Beautiful would never force citizens of foreign descent into camps! Certainly not on account of racism! And not in the hundreds of thousands!
Not quite. Things got way better and are still better than they used to be. This is not what the US is today, don’t fool yourself.
I mean Gitmo is a camp for political prisoners that were not justly convicted by a jury of their peers.
If your body has a small group of cancerous cells, you still have cancer, and we don’t call it ‘only a little cancer’, we call it early stage.
What percentage of the world’s prison population does the US incarcerate?
America,
shining city on a hillslightly better than Turkmenistan.
