I mean, yeah, this guy is wrong for thinking Trump will keep us out of wars, and the idea that you would vote for someone you think it like Hitler to stop new wars is both contradictory and morally reprehensible. But I've heard this take before (well, except the Hitler part, that's bat-shit insane) and it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party. That's a big shift that's occurred in my lifetime, and it's worth examining.
But I’ve heard this take before (well, except the Hitler part, that’s bat-shit insane) and it might be worth reflecting why a lot of the electorate no longer sees the Democratic party as the anti-war party. That’s a big shift that’s occurred in my lifetime, and it’s worth examining.
Because they're idiots?
Every major war started in my lifetime (including the "war on drugs") was started by Republicans.
The Democratic party is the party of complacency, I'll grant them that, and we were in wars for several administrations that Republicans started. So it's hard for their donkey brains to remember when and why the wars started and when they ended. A lot of people think that Obama was in office when 9/11 happened. The country is full of idiots.
I think you can't approch it from a party line issue. People want to see it in fact as action for the candidates, and at least right now Biden dropped the ball on Isreal badly. He should have put harsh levers on Isreal to get them out of Gaza quickly, Ukraine is a more complicated problem, but the US should focus more on ending conflicts quickly rather than let them drag on forever. But that takes real policy and leadership.
Saying they're the party of complacency isn't really accurate. Obama may not have started any new wars (although there's an argument to be made that his operations in Somalia represented a new, unsanctioned war front), but he didn't get us out of Afghanistan, kept joint military operations going in Iraq, and created a massive, unaccountable robot assassination program that killed thousands of people, including U.S. citizens. That's wasn't an act of complacency, it was expansion.
To me, the difference in Democrats' and Republicans' positions on military use can be best summerize by how Obama and Trump reported drone deaths. Obama reclassified every adult male in a target zone as an enemy combatant so that he could artificially lower the number of civilian casualties. Trump just stopped reporting the numbers. One is obviously better than the other, but I wouldn't call either anti-war.
But let's say you're right; the Democrats are mostly anti-war, but they're too complacent with the status quo, and Trump voters are all idiots who can't tell the difference. What are we gonna do about it? 51% of the electorate went to Trump. Are the Democrats going to stand up to the military industrial complex to make their anti-war stance so clear even an idiot could see it? Or are they just gonna lose forever?
It's because they aren't. Clinton and Gore were 100% interventionist, and had no issues with preemptive war, some accused Clinton of starting a war to boost his popularity. Kerry was anti war historically, but pragmatic on Iraq, Hillary again with Bill not at all anti war-->
Obama's military adittude was ''a Democrat can't say no to the military'' and allowed whatever the joint chiefs wanted, which is never going to be anti war. And Biden was the same. Harris clearly not anti war either. Trump says he is, and that's more anti war than any Dem in my lifetime. Can he effectively govern for war reduction? No. He's an idiot, and liar. But he's selling it.
Being "pragmatic on Iraq" turned off a lot of the left. Ralph Nader's running mate, Peter Camejo, remarked at the time "Kerry isn't Bush Lite. He's Bush Smart! We do not need a smarter Bush!" Apparently the electorate agreed, because W. Bush went on to win a second term.
First off, that's a ridiculous assumption. Not everyone subscribes to your ideology of lesser evilism, and the vast majority of people who correctly reject that ideology are not accelerationists.
But secondly, just curious, if I was a German citizen who hated Nazi Germany and wanted it to fail, would that make me worse than the Nazis? The Nazis were just doing genocide, after all, but I committed what is apparently a far worse sin in your eyes, of insufficient patriotism.
Maybe, even if they hate him. Know he is bad.
The one takeway is that they liked Kamala even less.
It is combination of desperation and despise.
If the Dems don't learn from this, they will repeat the same mistakes over and over.
Pick someone likeable
No matter who Democrats pick they will always be painted as unlikeable, losers, and evil by Republicans. If you think picking a "likeable" candidate is the trick then you too have fallen for the endless Republican framing trap.
She didn’t lose because she’s a woman. She lost because she’s an empty suit neoliberal promising more of the same to a nation desperate for change as the majority of us are one paycheck away from disaster.
And before you have the knee jerk liberal response of bUt TrUmP iS wOrSe you’re missing the point. This election - and elections around the world this year - are referendums on the current establishment across parties and ideologies.
Either learn that neoliberalism is a losing ideology and embrace leftist positions or lose to fascists over and over again.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot...I call BS on Wolfson's reasoning. The bastard is most likely a neo-Nazi shitbag and knew exactly what he wants out Putin's Sock Puppet.
In times past, I was fascinated by Hitler and WW2. It was a lifelong obsession that I had since childhood. But ever since the Trump era started it started to wane due to the fact that WW2 and Hitler just didn't seem so distant anymore... the world felt like a repeat of what was happening in those days and looking up facts felt, in part, like learning more to understand what is happening now instead of about history.
But if there is something that I need to point out is that Hitler was a SHIT leader. Germans and Germany ever since the Kaiser era were portrayed as hyperefficient and militaristic, and people then claim the Nazis were the same. They weren't. Nazi bureaucracy was bullshit and most of their economic growth was based on plunder (initially from German Jews and other marginalized groups and later from other countries) and almost purely military build up. Germany actually lagged behind in technological build-up to most countries, despite the stereotypes of the Wunderwaffen of WW2 (Fritz-X bomb, the ME-262, etc), and industrially as any technology that didn't have a direct military benefit was discarded. They didn't even have any proper anti-biotics during the war!
Even agriculture was fucked by the Germans. Despite the romanticization of the German peasantry and the countryside by the Nazis, they could not sustain their population at all. Most German food was imported, and they were preparing their population for harsh wartime rationing even before the war started. They fed their population almost entirely on stolen food from Poland, France, the Netherlands, and Ukraine. Also by killing a lot of people in the death camps they saved on food that way as well.
People stereotype communist countries as having no food when they don't realize that fascist nations just can't feed their own folk. Nazi Germany wasn't alone in having serious food problems. Imperial Japan couldn't feed its own population and would have had widespread hunger if they didn't start plundering China during the war.
Hitler lead Germans and Germany into death and destruction and misery and mayhem. He did nothing good for Germany. None at all. Even towards the end of the war he would have been OK with the German people being genocided since if they were defeated by the barbarian orc-like Soviets and the mongrel Americans they were not the master race he thought they were and they deserved to die. There is a reason why he is remembered as one of the world's greatest monsters.
I remember in 2016 thinking how similar Trump was to Hitler and rhetoric and everything. I was written off is basically being nothing but hyperbole and physical form unfortunately I wasn't wrong which sucks
I see where you're coming from. Perhaps not as obsessed, but I always had a historical interest in the era until it became an alarming parallel to present day news. Most people do not know much about what went down in the pre-war period. They just have knee-jerk reactions to it. "Traditional values" were trending at the time, Nazism was marketed as the modern, cool choice. Education, administration and even scouting and chess clubs were Nazified at the time. I see it with the freaking MAGA hat everywhere nowadays. I just see it and say, fuck this is some Nazi Germany shit. To me now there are two kinds of people, those who see it, and those who don't. People are so precious thinking that Germans went nuts with the mass murder shit and elected this guy, but themselves have been on the exact same track as Nazi Germany for years: idolizing a dangerous man without ever questioning him. Soon they will have no excuse either, only collective guilt. Some of us won't be here to see it though, for one reason or another. I have pointed this out in my other comment: once fascists get hold of the state apparatus, there is no horror we can put past them.
i think it's at least in part because we have always been taught to see Hitler as a monster instead of a person. We dehumanised him and the entire nazi party so much for many it sounds like a myth instead of history, the take away seems simple - just don't be a monster.
The lesson was - some people are born evil
Instead of - anybody can fall the wrong path and find themselves committing atrocities. Even your friends, even your family, even you
i've been saying this for a long time - Hitler wasn't a monster, he was human just like you and me, and that's a hundred times more terryfing
It seems like people as a whole are very generational. Meaning that there's a generation that struggles, one that succeeds, and one that takes it for granted and fails.
Then the cycle repeats.
Im not talking about strictly boomers to x to z, but in a broad sense.
Yup. I have a similar argument before. If one reads more about Hitler and the Nazis, they are actually not different to any of the standard third world dictators like Idi Amin and Muammar Gaddafi. The difference is that the Nazis were only more powerful because they inherited a working institution-- especially the Prussian-based military-- while third world countries had to start from scratch after decolonisation.
The Nazis like other dictators are very inefficient. I am reading Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil". The book goes through the convoluted bureaucracy and logistics of the Holocaust. Different pen pushers and administrators arguing who should be able to use the trains for their own departmental needs. What struck me the most is that the Nazis wasted so much effort transporting so-called undesirables to concentration camps, when their own soldiers are struggling to get supplies and reinforcements to the frontlines!
More importantly, as you correctly mentioned, Nazi Germany struggled to feed their own people. As a matter of fact, there is strong evidence that Hitler started the war in Europe to stave off the looming economic crisis, which his own economic minister warned him of, thanks to endless government spending particularly with the re-armement. That economic crisis had been warded (temporarily of course) by plundering the resources of their conquered territories.
The one scary thing about the holocaust is that while it did cause some problems in shipping supplies as you mentioned, it actually didn't cost that much at all and even produced a profit. If I had to point to the ultimate evil of capitalism I wouldn't point to the massive wasted food or environmental destruction. I would point to the death camps. They were remarkably cheap to run all things considered AND they paid for themselves AND made a profit.
There were over 40 assassination attempts on the shit stain Hitler and all of them were domestic. The Allies fully understood who was responsible for Germany's strategic and tactical failures and they wanted the turd alive until the end. Cadet Bone Spurs will do the same thing to the US military.
Unless you want to bring about the end of the world. Seriously, that's how at least some of these people think. They want to throw a monkey wrench in the works, because they think they'll be the ones to survive the apocalypse.
“I voted for the guy that I think is like Hitler to end conflicts and keep us out of wars.”
Did he not read the part where Hitler genocided Jews, Europeans, and the disabled?
Did he not read the part in history where Hitler caused a war so large that it wiped out entire European families, literally tens of millions of Europeans?
The white working class in this country is going to get everything they voted for. I hope Trump floods their neighborhoods with immigrants, LEGALLY.
Did he not read the part where Hitler genocided Jews, Europeans, and the disabled?
That's the thing though — Hitler didn't run on a platform of genociding people, he ran on a platform of economic improvement. Weimar Germany was economically depressed and many average people and families were suffering from unemployment and financial hardship while the rich were relatively unaffected and enjoying themselves. Hitler promised to change that (and in all fairness, he did). The genociding Jews part came much later.
Hitler was in charge of Germany for 11 years (1934-1945) — the war didn't start until 1938, and the holocaust only began in 1942, so the voters DID end up getting at least 4 years of relative peace and prosperity. Also, keep in mind that Hitler was 45 years old when he became chancellor, meanwhile Trump is 78, meaning even if he manages to finish his second tenure successfully, he'll very likely simply be too old by the end of it in order to continue, which makes it somewhat unlikely that he'll attempt to stage another coup in order to remain dictator for life.
The thing to keep in mind about idiocy is that idiots make mistakes, a lot. At the same time, those mistakes are usually small-stakes affairs (it's hard to make big mistakes with no money and/or resources) and are usually recoverable. The idea that their mistake could affect so many others simply does not happen, because that's not how things typically work.
No, because Dems are stuck on a high horse and burned 1 billion campaigning like its the 1950s. Fff, they could have won the election spending a tenth of that on bots and paying off influencers.
We absolutely need money for a shameless 'oppositional' propaganda apparatus.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the RNC was more "with the times" than the DNC on how to campaign in the current media-circus climate. That's right, they were more progressive when it came to using information technology. This observation burns like the heat of a thousand suns and I hate it, but there it is.
Granted, thanks to the likes of FoxNews and bloviating try-hards on radio and podcasts, they had the inside track here. Still, a billion USD should have leveled the playing field for a short campaign like Harris'.
It's on purpose. Nobody is this incompetent, this many times in a row, by accident. The Democratic party doesn't care about us and needs to be replaced.
Historical fact: In the distant past, guys like this belonged to a Union, and the union told them how to vote.
The union was led by ruthless people whose power was entirely dependent on the support of the union.
The union leaders kept their people happy by negotiating better prices for their labor, and the happy people did what the leaders said. Their tribe was the union, and the tribe stuck together.
At some point the owner class realized it was easy to redefine what happiness meant for idiots: Lying. A lot. Tricking absolute idiots is easy, so they started whittling away at unions with promises of prosperity a union leader could never fulfil, until we get to today where unions and union membership is lower than it's ever been.
And idiots like that still vote for who their handler tells them to, only their handler now has zero investment in keeping them happy. Lying to them is sufficient as long as the rest of the tribe reinforces the lies. The tribe is now everyone too stupid to not vote for Hitler, and the tribe sticks together.
Tell me you are a racist piece of shit without telling me you are a racist piece of shit.
I really believe that most Americans are dumb enough to be racist and just smart enough to know they shouldn't say it. I can't help but read all this apologism for Trump as thinly veiled, "I know he's a weird guy, but thank God someone is finally going to do something about all the people that look different than me".
Bingo. This guy is likely happy about the reports that twice as many black women than white women die in child birth and after RvW those numbers doubled. He's probably happy when he hears about family seperation, people caught in immigration prisons for dozens of years, and on and on.
No, this is the voter she pissed off Dem voters for...
It didn't work out well if you've already forgotten.
If someone says trump is Hitler but they voted for him anyways...
Then he was already going to vote for trump, and chasing his vote just led to losing traditional Dem voters with literally no gain.
Moving to the right is political suicide, yet we keep doing it because that's how you max donations. And that's all the people running the party care about.
Well he speaks English, same as you. I guess you could always meet a conservative and then ask them questions sometime. Might be a mind blowing experience to talk to someone who disagrees with you, and actually listen.
Can you promise me there will be something other than lies or misinformation coming out of their mouths when I do so this time? Because based on my first hand experience over at least the past 8 years, those are the only two things I'm going to get.
I have listened, and there is nothing worth listening to. I have to listen, because there are all around me at work. It is continuous fear and ignorance. Not a single worthwhile thing. I'm done listening, especially since they won't return the favour. I'm not going to meet hate in the middle.
I mean it's only because they didn't give him exactly what he wanted and how he wanted it immediately and without any resistance that we got the war. He was the real oppressed one after all /s
/s
/s
/s
Because I cannot emphasis enough that what I said above is sarcasm.
Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!
It's one of the many often attributed to Winston Churchill, though to my knowledge there's no actual evidence of him actually saying it and his other writings go against the sentiment. I don't know who actually did say it first
As others put, no, but it does remind me that Aristotle felt society should only be run by the most intelligent among us, hence the term Aristocracy.
Of course, in practice people make up bullshit rules to determine who is most intelligent and that messes up the whole concept (e.g. Jim Crow tests and such). But it's a nice fantasy if ever we could pull it off.
I read on the news that Poutin threatened to invade 4 more countries. This is how ww2 got started. They just kept appeasing Hitler until they realized just far he would go. Also with every takeover the Germany military machine got a lot stronger. The take over of Czechoslovakia meant he took over all their military arsenal which was enough to arm several divisions.
Except Russia is not the military power Nazi Germany was.
Lets say he takes over Ukraine. Horrific... but that's not some huge economic windfall. If Russia tries to invade a NATO country in the next few decades, even with America totally out of the pictue, they'd get theit butts handed to them.
Only way it works is if China backs the heck out of Russia. Which is theoretically plausible if America is "defeated" I guess.
As a German, this the insane things our parents, grandparents and institutions warned us about. People begrudgingly accepted their lead in the hopes that "although it's an authoritarian, maybe he will take care of our goals". What followed was the cruelty of 1939 to 1945 and no one deserves to live through that, not even the idiots that got us in this mess.
I desperately, desperately, hoped that Germans, Jews, and especially the few remaining holocaust survivors, could somehow articulate this in a way that would penetrate at some point during the past few years.
Nope. We are literally doomed to repeat it.
Without mentioning the name of the poster, I replied to a comment yesterday that said this:
The only reason I voted for him was because we’re on the brink of WW3 and I thought he was truly the last hope of getting the wars settled. I’m scared, and I’m sorry, but shit is crazy right now. Trump at least has some relations with Russia and North Korea, that could potentially cool the pot. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong, I’m open to discussion.
It's like people really believe America entered WW2 to fight fascism becaus Americans are innately good....
Large amounts of the country said the same shit this guy is. They wanted to either stay out of it or outright join the nazis.
Especially the wealthy. Prescott Bush was believed to be part of the Business Plot that wanted to overthrow the US government in favor of fascism and doing the Axis powers.
They didn't succeed (mostly because of Pearl Harbor) but his son became head of the CIA, VP, and then president. One of his sons also became president, and almost another one.
If we don't remember what history was really like, we're doomed to keep being surprised when the same shit keeps happening.
Ya, CCCP started it all with Hitler, later on the USA was forced in to the war.
Don't forget.
Edit, to clarify: the USA was forced into the war, later on, they didn't enter voluntarily. The nazis and the soviets kicked off ww2 in 1939. Sorry for the confusion.
You should submit this as a post. Or I might just repost it. It's insightful!
I really dig the explanation of how the two parties have kind of worked for so long, in spite of everything, and now that balance is disrupted since the "cranks" moved to one party.
Dictators: famous for ending wars. We'll never learn how many wars could have been prevented if only all countries had authoritarian leaders, too bad it's never happened before.
Convicted felons can vote in Florida, but a woman can't get an abortion after 6 weeks, which is right when a lot of them realize they're pegrenate. Well isn't that special.
Acting like that would be his first fraud. Or the only fraud in this election. Trump is moving pawns behind every state election, and he has 5 Ace's up his phony sleeve. Its all crooked when Trump is involved
Voter turnout among Democrats this year was 10 million lower than in 2020, while Republican turnout barely changed. Trump won the popular vote by about 3.5 million. TBF it's unknown how many Democrats didn't vote because they were purged off voter rolls, and how many simply refused to participate because Harris didn't satisfy their moral purity standards. But based on the consistent failure by Republicans to win their election restricting lawsuits, my strong guess is that it's those 10 million fuckheads who did this to us. Zero tolerance doesn't work, folks, You don't walk barefoot across broken glass because you didn't like the choices of shoes.
It’s also in line with 2012 and 2016 participation levels for Dems. It seems like the GOP have a reliable voting base while dems need a pandemic or a monumental candidate like Obama to bother showing up to the polls.
Very succinct. I'm reminded of Michael Moore's comparison -
democrats: "What should we do about dinner?" "Um, we could go out." "Do you want to go out?" "I dunno, do you?" "Well, if you do..." "Okay, where should we go?" "I dunno, where do you wanna go?"
republicans: <slams hand loudly on table> "Git in the car, we're goin' to the Sizzler!"
As far as, fascism is concerned, peace is certain ruin The preservation of international peace renders it possible for the enslaved masses in the fascist countries to gather their forces together and to prepare for the overthrow of the hated fascist dictatorship, and to enable the international proletariat to win time for the establishment of unity tit its ranks, to rally together the supporters of peace, and to establish an insurmountable barrier against the outbreak of war.
no war with Peoples Republic of China, no war with Russia, no war with Iran, no war with Venezuela, no war with Cuba, no war with the Democratic Republic of Korea
On one hand I agree to a certain extent, but aiding in the struggle of oppressed people is a fundamental tenet of internationalism. Our sisters in Iran are suffering under the yoke of militant patriarchal oppression and should they call for arms to defend themselves I see joining or aiding their fight as of similar ethics to the international brigades of the Spanish civil war.
Same guy? I don’t know where this particular ideologue lives, but it would hardly be the first (second, third, fourth…) time newspapers “accidentally” presented career conservatives as a “randomly selected” voter.
Yeah I suppose World War 2 wouldn't have happened if everyone just sat back and let Germany conquer all of Europe instead. They would have stopped at that right? 🤷
And I guess the take away is not going to address how someone called him Hitler, understood what that intaled and still thought it was the better choice.
That might be more of a slight on the Democrats then anything.
He’s not wrong. And the Dems agree with him. Trump is relatively isolationist. One of the Dem attacks against him was that Trump would pull out of Ukraine for sure, which is actually a popular position among the vast majority of the electorate. If you’re out of touch because you only tune into what political elites want, then of course you would think that’s a bad thing to say about him.
Trump also seems poised to keep his aggression towards China focused on tariffs. While that’s not good either, Dems also supported some steep tariffs against green tech imports, and an economic war is preferable to the average voter than the hot war the Biden admin was stoking with China.
Trump will definitely be more active militarily against the population here at home. He previously had the military abducting Portland protestors in unmarked vans. But I’d rather prepare to fight here at home than support more active foreign militarism to maintain my own comfort.
He is also the only President to release 5,000 terrorists. This is how he brought peace to Afghanistan.
Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David just before the anniversary of 9/11 without involving the Afghan government or America’s international allies.
After the Camp David scheme fell apart, Trump subsequently cut a deal directly with the Taliban that freed 5,000 imprisoned fighters, allowing them to return to the battlefield to regain strength, and put the Taliban in its strongest military position in 20 years.
Trump proceeded with talks despite reliable intelligence that the Taliban did not intend to abide by the deal’s terms, and he even acknowledged that they could “possibly” take over the Afghan government after U.S. withdrawal.
New York Times: “Trump’s Deal With the Taliban Draws Fire From His Former Allies”
Trump’s deal made major concessions and left the U.S. with only 2,500 troops in Afghanistan when President Biden took office—the smallest force since 2001.
The deal set timelines for withdrawal and gave permission for the Taliban to attack U.S. troops if the timeline wasn’t met.
Trump left the Biden-Harris administration with zero plans for an orderly withdrawal—only a dangerous, costly mess. Trump even bragged that the Biden-Harris administration “couldn’t stop the process” he started.
Now Afghanistan is fully under the Taliban control who regularly murder women for funzies. Perhaps you could cynically say it was going to happen anyways. We all know the truth though. Trump and his gang of rejects let it happen on their watch.
Does everyone forget what was happening before COVID shut everything down? We were on a fast track to war with Iran, Trump had just assassinated one of their top generals.