I think once someone is making Nazi salutes on a presidential inauguration stage, we can safely call them a Nazi. And as the old saying goes, you know what you call all the people who sit down at a dinner table with a Nazi?
Fully agree that we can see the obvious fascists at the top and the rot seeps down. But idk that I can call 77 million people who casted one ballot Nazis.
My (maybe optimistic) perspective is that the rot has shallow roots. These days you don’t need thousands of dedicated grunts to print flyers and hang posters. Just get one billionaire with a social media platform and a few dozen managers and you can broadcast anything you want.
Ya, I think calling them all Nazis isn’t accurate or right. But you can absolutely call them Nazi supporters.
Germany had a reckoning after the war and plenty of people were able to admit that yes, in fact, they were Nazis and that was wrong of them. And then they tried to make things better.
Because they realized that maybe all they did was support the Nazis by wearing an armband, but that still made them a Nazi and that made them complicit.
Plenty more were never able to admit it but also were never willing to talk about what they did during the war out of shame and embarrassment. Because they also knew they were complicit.
All of these people who voted for Trump did not just sit down at a table with a Nazi. They went out of their way to go to a voting booth or sit down and fill out and mail a form to choose a man who made absolutely no secret about his Nazi ideals. The roots are very, very deep.
Right but this isn’t the conclusion of a world war yet. I don’t doubt that the problem gets worse after people are forced to participate or be complicit while atrocities are committed.
There’s a series of miniscule steps from being ok with a hateful statement to being ok with dangerous people being rounded up to being ok with dangerous political opponents being rounded up to being ok with gas chambers.
Assuming that everyone who ignores the first step is a full fledged Nazi isn’t putting faith in people to change or even resist. Plenty of people stepped out of line in Germany and paid the price.
The real lesson after WW2 is that the Nuremberg Trials were far too lax and narrow in scope. Germany’s populace (while on the cusp of swinging far right) went through the most thorough denazification. It’s still putting up much better resistance than the United States (which had basically no punishment for nazi sympathizers) or Italy (handwaved due to surrender).
