I’ve pointed this out elsewhere, but if I’m going to have something of a megaphone, this needs to be endlessly pointed out. What is happening is not normal, and the more we normalize it, the more they win.
We are in the late Weimar. Some 248 years was a good run, but this is no longer a democracy, and the sooner people realize that, the better.
This is not hyperbole. And fuck off with “we were always a republic.” So was Rome until exactly this inflection point. Learn some fucking history.
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If we look back on history, 100% of the worlds population with the exception of Trump, Vance, Musk and the moronic MAGAs would believe that the best time to put Hitler out of his misery is before he took total power.
We are having that moment right now. Trump needs to be eradicated.
Let’s please not go all the way to espousing assassination. Yes, this is terrible, but we are a small instance with limited resources, and while I will let this stand for now, I’d prefer you to reconsider how you interact in a public space where you have no control over who sees your posts.
My thinking is too many people are comparing us to Germany and not enough people are thinking about the colapse of the USSR. This doesn’t look like consolidation of power to me. This looks like turning off all the pressure values so they can point and say “look how corrupt and broken everything is!” when it all explodes. It’s not Hitler, Its some fusion of Putin tatics. People are going to die. This is the gas for a worldwide crisis.
I think the USSR is good to point out.
Didn’t some rich assholes buy up everything in there for cheap during all that, and become the new lords through Oligarchy?
Thats where we are heading here. With nearly every cut, there’s a remark about how the private sector could do it better. They are normalizing the idea that they, the oligarchs, the billionaires, can run government better than government can, so when the National Weather Service has it’s duties assumed by The Weather Channel(for a nominal fee of course), it will somehow be “better”, when Medicare and Medicaid are failed and private insurance companies shored up, we will be grateful for the “efficiency”. When social security “runs out due to bureaucratic mismanagenent”, the privately held 401k will be the only hope.
I don’t really have the time or inclination for a full treatise. Fascism is by definition the blending of large business owners with the government. Without that, all you have is authoritarianism. Look up IG Farben and then tell me that’s not Meta or Google.
I’m not saying it’s not fascism. I agree with you. But comparing us to Germany isn’t going to get anyone else to pay attention who isn’t already paying attention. Do you know what the oversimplified and stupid response to your comparison will be? “They’re not being antisemitic.”
People hear “Nazi Germany” and just think about the Holocaust in a gross oversimplification. They don’t see that the new “Jew” is just the liberal, the “communist-terrorist,” the “mentally ill.” There is no one “other” this time. There doesn’t really need to be, though.
If you want to engage people, the collapse of the USSR is another historical parallel we are mirroring, not the collapse itself, but the takeover of power by oligarchs and state actors right after. We are quickly heading toward that point.
These fascists are going to crash the world economy. What that means, I don’t know. Maybe just a new digital currency, maybe a new military-industrial complex, but when our economy fails, it will play out like the economic capture of the Russian government after the fall of the USSR.
The fascists want this. This is some Yeltsin shit, man. It’s German-Russian fusion, fascism on the rise.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1629536
We’re already a third-world country. You just don’t see it if you’re not in poverty-stricken areas.
What’s your point? In relation to this conversation what are you trying to say? I don’t disagree with you, but why are you bringing it up now, in this discussion?
Because so many people don’t realize how far we’ve already fallen. I’m going to beat this drum, over and over, for mostly the choir, but when I was in a newsroom, I viewed it as a win if I could make a few people more informed. It’s why I’m here and volunteered to mod.
Data like these are no longer reliably being reported by local outlets, so why not use a platform to do so?
Seems valid enough. The rhyming with USSR is some Putin and Stalin. DOGE is consolidating power under some leader from independent agencies.
So, what are you going to do about it? Just saying “this is bad” isn’t enough. Just saying “we’re fucked” isn’t enough. And saying “there’s nothing we can do” is literally counterproductive.
What is your suggestion?
- Joining and organizing within your local community to create connections with others is incredibly powerful, will make the coming months much more bearable, and lay the groundwork for effective resistance.
- We can effect things drastically with a general strike. This can massively impact their income streams, and can bring a government to its knees if done on a large enough scale.
- Join the IWW and attempt to unionize your workplace, so that the general strike is even more effective.
If we put in the work, we can resist this and we can win. Don’t become paralyzed with doubt and fear, march on and push as much you can, and join up with allies while we still can easily!
Yup. Mass organization is the only way we can resist anything, as workers and even consumers have the true power in a capitalist society, but only as a single, large group.
The way that the robber barons were able to tear us apart is through very simple divide and conquer schemes. Turning people against immigrants, black people, trans people, Jews, etc. instead of people turning against the robber barons/people in power, who were always the ones doing the true damage in societu.
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I’m not an expert, so I would be pleased to be educated to the contrary by someone who knows, but I think a key difference here is the structure of U.S. federalism versus the Weimar federalism in which Hitler came to power.
Here in the U.S., both the state governments and the federal governments derive their authority directly from the sovereignty of “the people”—either the people of each state, for state governments, or the people of the entire nation, for the federal government. Here, taking over the federal government does not necessarily entail taking over the governments of the states (federal supremacy notwithstanding—and there should still be reserved powers under the Tenth Amendment).
In Weimar Germany, however, the states, I believe, were really administrative units of the federal government, so that taking over the federal government was effectively taking over state governments, too.
And we haven’t always had a federal government as strong and as broad in its assertion of authority as we have had until January 20, 2025. In some sense, what Trump is doing is pushing back to a pre-Civil War federal government—although I expect an aggressive assertion of federal power over matters traditionally understood to be within the realm of the states to be coming: it will be the right-wing revenge tour, for all of the ways they have always bemoaned how the federal government forces them to be nice to people, with antidiscrimination laws and the like. They see that as tyranny, and will turn it around and try to force the rest of us to be white supremacists.
But I think now is the time for us in the U.S. to remember the adage that all politics is local, and to redouble efforts at our cities, counties, and states.
One of the things that happened with Germany post WWII was devolution to the states, partially to avoid this again, partially because, well, they were occupied. It was so weird to me when I’d get change in the '90s still reading Bank Deutscher Laender sted Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
I lived in Stadtkreis Hameln, Y’all have heard of this. The Pied Piper led kids into the Weser … you just know it as Hamelin. I had to go over the Oberweserdampfshifffahrt to get to Gymnasium daily from Haverbeck. The three f’s are not an error. German nouns are fun.
Why am I focusing on Germany? Well, it’s a useful model. No one thought the Weimar Republic could collapse so fast, and, I mean …
This is bad. There’s precedent, and it’s not good. This is alarming. And I keep saying that because it keeps being true.
Germany wasn’t really fully formed at that point. They had the Alsace and parts of Poland (this is to be expected given the Prussian origins). The wars forced Germany into the shape it’s in now, which is not an excuse the U.S. has to offer.
We’re apparently considering Canada and Greenland as the Sudetenland?
I see no way around the country breaking apart. This is too far, too fast. Cascadia may result. Once California, Oregon and Washington (let the irony sink in) are uninterested in being part of the country any longer … there’s no longer any bulwark against endless GOP domination. That’s why we wait until polls close on PST before making national calls. If you’re just going to do it on Mountain, that’s a thoroughly uninteresting result. Arizona’s the only wild card there.
Historically speaking, Rome didn’t really have anything like States as we know them, and Caesar/Augustus weren’t out there pushing idea that the central government had grown too large and needed to be dismantled with power returned to the provinces.
While historically accurate, it’s irrelevant to the topic at hand. You’re essentially making a “states’ rights” argument utterly useless in this context.
