> How about the Republicans being like the Italian Fascists ? Or do you
> consider that Italian Fascism was not really fascism ?
I don't really know as much about Italian Fascism as I do Nazism, but of course it was "real fascism" -- after all, they coined the term. But I don't thing the Republicans, as of 8/2004, are really much like the Italian Fascists either.
> CB: I don't follow you. What do you mean why bring up this history ?
> It is
> to show what the U.S. has done recently that is in a fascist
> direction, and
> therefore disabuses of the American exceptionalist notion that "it
> can't
> happen here ."
I don't think for a minute that "it can't happen here." Anything *could* happen, given the circumstances. Though of course, being a different sort of country with a different political system, it would probably happen differently than it did in Germany and Italy. I just don't think "it" (where "it" = something akin to, or as horrific as, Fascism/Nazism) is happening *now.*
> The fact that the U.S. has had lots of dribbles of fascism
> often means there is potential that the dribbles could become a flow,
> the
> flow a current. The American national character is not immune to
> fascist
> conduct or anything.
No, but I don't think "dribbles" becoming a flow is what actually happens in these cases.
Taking the German case, Hitler was a vagrant, failed artist and embittered war veteran when he joined the NSDAP, and the latter was a small bunch of nobodies. Unfortunately, Adolf had one streak of genius: demagoguery. Add the very volatile social/political conditions of the '20s, and the result was disaster. Much like fuel+oxygen+enough heat -> fire.
Without these three factors coinciding, the dribble that was the Nazi Party in the early twenties would have stayed a dribble. There were a lot of other "dribbles" of the same sort in that time and place, and plenty of vagrant war veterans looking for a life. There are lots of would-be neo-Nazis and Hitlers roaming around this country today, too. I can't predict whether the Nazi sort of fuel/oxygen/heat combination will or will not occur tomorrow or next year or next decade in this country, and neither can anyone else. But I don't see any signs of it in the process of becoming now.
> CB: Yes. You don't think they can't happen again, do you ?
It could, sure. But 9/11 didn't lead to mass round-ups of Muslims/Arab-Americans, though it has produced some
> Yea, but most were not denouncing the fascists the way the Communists
> were.
> There is a reason that the saying was specifically, "FIRST they came
> for the
> Communists..."
I think the reason was that Niemoeller (I think he was the author of the saying) thought of the Communists as typical of the early victims of the first Nazi concentration camps, as they in fact were. But they were not the only ones.
> You are saying that plenty of people knew in 1931 that the Nazis were
> going
> to murder 6 million Jews ? Twenty million Soviets ? Cause a war
> killing 50
> million ?
>
> It's not clear to me that you have studied history more than I have.
Well, you don't seem to be aware that there were quite a few people inside and outside Germany, and not only Communists, who were able to read the tea leaves during the '20s quite clearly. About all it took was taking Mein Kampf seriously (unfortunately, the conventional wisdom was that it was the ravings of a lunatic; it was, of course -- but an incredibly dangerous lunatic) and noting how appealing the Nazi movement was to many sectors of German society. And quite a few perceptive observers did both. Unfortunately, they didn't have the power to stop the Nazi growth process. This includes, by the way, the Communists and other leftists, who obviously didn't have what it would have taken.
Look, I'm pretty familiar with this whole history because my "ethnicity," if you will, is German-American. For all I know, since I haven't dabbled in genealogy, some of my relatives, in the branch of the family that didn't emigrate to the U.S. in the late 19th century, might have been SS corporals or concentration camp guards. I have found that people who think it makes sense to compare Weimar Germany to contemporary U.S., Bush to Hitler, etc., tend not to have a very vivid sense of what Weimar Germany was really like. There is a very voluminous literature on the subject -- they could start with the Kershaw biography of Hitler, for example.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax