Today when we set off for our morning walk, we saw that in the yard of the neighbors catty-cornered across from us, their two Harris-Walz signs had been uprooted and thrown on the ground. Another political sign in their yard was untouched.

William Lindsey :toad:

We live in the very red state of Arkansas. But we also live in what's considered the most liberal-voting neighborhood in the entire state. We're in Little Rock.

My spouse's take, as we walked on: The violence is everywhere, all around us, and it can only get worse if we allow him to regain the White House. As a German-American, he has spent years reading everything he can get his hands on about the Holocaust.

#Trump #MAGA #vandalism #bullying #violence #FreeSpeech
/2

William Lindsey :toad:

He wants to understand how his own people were capable of such hate, of colluding in or even actively participating in mass murder of targeted communities. He's convinced that there are strong parallels between what led to Hitler's domination of Germany in the Nazi period and what we're seeing in the US today, and that we ignore those parallels to our own peril. The rising violence, the bullying, the overt expressions of ugly hate, the lying….

#Trump #MAGA #vandalism #bullying #violence
/3

eberhofer

@wdlindsy and it worries me shitless.

William Lindsey :toad:

@eberhofer Worries us shitless, too! It's horrifying to live through while so many seem to be sleep-walking.

Beluga

@wdlindsy Based on my own family's Nazi history I assume that most were indifferent because others were affected or colluded in the hope of personal gain. Ignorance and greed.

William Lindsey :toad:

@aguleb Yes, that's something we hear frequently from friends and relatives of my husband in Germany, that many people were apathetic or indifferent but ended up colluding for various reasons. And if I think about this as I reflect on my own experience growing up in the racially segregated and very racist white South in the US, things were not really different with most people I grew up among. They either didn't see the oppression of Black citizens or just shrugged their shoulders about it.

Arqtec

@wdlindsy
TRUMP IS DANGEROUS
But Vance is sinister devious a better liar younger and right there to fill the top spot
The underlying real threat is the constant engineering of the GOP
These ASS-0's leading the charge are terrible but disposable
The GOP has been at this take Over America for decades
The Republicans are the Enemy of America, Democracy, Your Freedom
We have to Treat them like the Fascist Nazi's they are ?
This is a WAR of Survival, its not America alone, everyones in this fight !

Poloniousmonk

@wdlindsy

History is a guide to what works. Germany was economically rocked in the interregnum by the reparations they had to pay for starting WWI. Hitler rode the economic hardship to power by offering scapegoats.

The republicans deliberately trashed the US economy for fifty years. I can't see the rise of modern fascism as anything other than the culmination of a very long plan. The republicans were openly agitating to side with Germany in the years before we entered WWII. They've never abandoned that goal.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Arqtec Yes.

William Lindsey :toad:

@Uair Not sure what "history is a guide to what works" means, exactly, but, yes, the seeds for Hitler's rise to power were sowed by the Allied nations as they humiliated Germany and destroyed its economy following WWI. Whether people "naturally" turn to hate and scapegoating under such conditions seems less clear to me, but the Nazi period does surely show us that this is a huge possibility.

Poloniousmonk

@wdlindsy

"history is a guide to what works" is self-explanatory.

In this instance: The republicans wanted America to go fascist.

America didn't; we went Allied in WWII.

Republicans analyzed why Germany went fascist.

Republicans determined that hitler exploited economic insecurity.

Republicans spent a couple generations consciously destroying the American economy and middle class to create economic anxiety they could exploit by giving the now-broke white idiots scapegoats to hate on.

And the reason every right wing fucktart in the world hates on immigrants is /because it works/. It's why America blew up the middle east. By the year 2000, Europe's social democracies were forging ahead of us by a couple generations. Flooding them with refugees worked well. Their right wing was empowered and put the brakes on all that sustainability and social justice they were developing. We know this works because we've kept everybody south of our border as a failed state for a century, at least, in order to provide an endless supply of political props coming in illegally in a desperate attempt to survive.

History is a guide to what works. It's why it rhymes. You do realize the people with all the power read their Twain and Orwell and Huxley as well as us peasants pushing back, right?

William Lindsey :toad:

@Uair It goes without saying that history is a guide to what works, and I understand that point, of course. I'm suggesting — with, inter alia, Ernst Bloch — that it's a guide to much more, to the horizon of hope, to what has not yet been but is possible.