Jon: 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.
CB: You are not saying that there were quite a few people in the 1920's who could tell from Mein Kampf that Hitler was capable of putting together the murder of 6 million Jews, 50 million in the war, are you ?
Jon: 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.
^^^^^ CB: Because of WWII, this section of German history is focussed on by many Americans , including by me. For example, I read a biography of Hitler when I was about 12 - as the essence of evil of course, because my father had been in the infantry fighting German soldiers in Italy ( by which he became a student of Italian history) Then I have studied the period because the Communist Party and the Social Dems had as much support as the Nazis. Then there's Einstein's biography. Then there's regular old World History in high school and college. Then there are numerous threads on this and other list in which quite a bit of scholarship is adduced and alluded to.
Ad hominem is neutralized on this issue. Stick with presentation of theory and facts.
Whatever fascism is the current situation in the U.S. is not enough different from previous historical bourgeois tyrannies, whether fascism or Bonapartism or Jim Crow to say there is no threat of "fascism".
The Left has a responsibility to carry out anti-fascist agitation in a "secular" way in the economists' sense ( I just learned a new word). That is we should do it continuously. Always pointing to trends and changes that are in a fascistic direction, such as the stealing of the Presidential election. It is not the Left's task to tone down the anti-fascist rhetoric because some ultra-leftists have from time to time called out "fascist pigs" when it wasn't technically correct, tone down in embarrassment because it offends parlor radical sensibilities or whatever.
Reds are continuous and vocal vigilantes against all fascist tendencies, from the KKK to the Reaganite presidencies.