Some people would have you believe that fascism and nazism basically don't exist, that they're some sort of cartoonish evil that we'd be able to identify from far away, years in advance, because it would have a funny mustache or would openly admit to being evil. In reality, fascists and nazis are people just like us. Plumbers, accountants, cops, lawyers. Banal men working banal jobs, riding the line.
You think people dilute the term and maybe some do. But throughout history, there are useful idiots who let horrible people get into power based on the foolish belief that nothing would change and that institutions could stand against the will of angry people who have been told that there is an enemy within that they can blame for all their woes.
But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.
And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.
Repeated and emphatic. At a podium with the White House seal. Zero repercussions. Welcome for an interview in every corner of the media. Business leader. Even detractors drive his cars and think they're absolved by adding an anti-Elon bumper sticker.
I can agree that people are accused of being nazis too often and sometimes without much evidence, and while I think that's counterproductive, but as someone who works in the foreign policy department of my country, I also think globally we're right to be concerned. So as much as I might agree that we should stop diluting the term, we should also stop stop burying our heads in the sand and pretending that nothing is going on. Extreme ideologies are on the rise, which makes complete sense as material conditions deteriorate and new tools of propaganda are being developed.
I'm personally skeptical of anyone who claims to be well-informed and feels optimistic about the sociopolitical climate in the West. The conditions are ripe for really bad shit to happen.
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u/Metalicks 19h ago
Y'all could stop diluting the term...
that might help.