One of the other extremist parties would have taken over. Look - John Gardner made a great point in The Art of Fiction that teachers don't teach the best examples of stuff or the most thought provoking examples of stuff they teach the easiest stuff that makes their point. Thus if you want to learn the kids about fascism you throw The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter at them, not Rhinoceros. You whip out Uncle Tom's Cabin because no one is going to criticize you for Harriet Beecher Stowe whereas if you whip out John Brown's Body the social studies department is going to hate you. So we frame our struggle between good and evil as "Truth, Justice & The American Way" against "fascism, genocide and Adolph Hitler" because you know what? He's as close to Satan Incarnate as we can get. Think about it: how much more do you think you know about Weimar Germany than you do about Imperial Japan? Why is that? Were they not also an Axis power? It's fucking us all over royally right now because our only level of concern is "Break Glass In Case Of Hitler" which means entirely too many people go "Not Hitler? No Problem!" while entirely too many people go "I sense a problem, therefore it must be Hitler!" So now we pay Richard Spencer $5k to schlep his ass from the trailer to a Holiday Inn Express to sit in front of a green screen so we can ask him if he believes that Jews should be sent to the gas chamber and when he says "of course not I love Depeche Mode and they've gotta be Jewish" the press can stroke their chins and conclude that since the Alt Right is not literally Hitler there must be no problem. Meanwhile that guy with too many guns who calls Mexican restaurants "beaner joints" is going to snap from "friend of mine with problems" to "lost cause of the fascist right" the minute you have one too many Facebook convos and your perspective becomes that the racist is calling from inside the house while his perspective is that you're so busy believing in Nazis that you can't see the very real problems facing America today. Friend of mine stopped talking to me for four months because I observed that Democratic worship of the Kennedys was horrifically overblown, considering they stumbled into Vietnam, almost caused WWIII twice and did exactly fuckall for civil rights because we create these myths so we don't have to think. It's one of the reasons I fucking hate Nick Taleb - he literally intros The Black Swan by arguing no one could have predicted the rise of Hitler despite the fact that Wilson predicted the rise of Hitler, Churchill predicted the rise of Hitler and the international business community held summit after summit to stave off the rise of German authoritarianism. Hitler rose to power among four political parties. He created a fifth. On the far left were the Communists. On the center left were the Social Democrats. In the center was the Center. On the far right was the German National People's Party and then the Nazis, once the Reichstag permitted them to be a party after they foreswore violent overthrow of the government after the Beer Hall Putsch. Frankly? Hitler would have risen to power much, much quicker in America because once you take over one party you've got half the playing field. Except that "murder all the Jews" thing would have run into trouble with AIPAC so maybe "murder all the Muslims" which would have run into trouble with the Saudis so maybe "murder all the Shia" except there aren't enough so maybe "murder all the Mexicans?" Each one of these calls for violence comes with its own dynamic which makes things very different. I mean, that shit coulda gone real wrong, too. How many Jews did the Communists murder in the USSR? Fuckin' Stalin wiped out over a million people before the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Bottom line? Germany was a monarchy that went for broke to take over the world and forced all of its opponents to do the same. Then everyone was broke but the Germans were broke and losers although they didn't think so and nobody did a fucking thing while they re-armed to take over the world because nobody wanted their payments to stop coming in. And look - Nazism stopped after WWII. Stopped for a good long while. You keep pointing at the day after the election as if somehow all these guys rallying around the President will rally exactly the fucking same under a different regime. As if legitimacy isn't the very fuel of their fire. All those guys screaming about gay marriage - what did they do when the Supreme Court legalized it? You really want to believe that Trump causes racism and totalitarianism when really, he authorizes it. Here, make my point for me: Obama abolished private prison contractors. Police departments exist to protect and serve and are legally bound by civil rights laws. "government contractors?" "politicians?" Ours is a country that insists that racism is not okay while actually doing something about racism requires enforcement. And enforcement is being held lax because it's not a priority. "Round up the Mexicans because they're here illegally" is bad. "Round up the Mexicans because they're Mexican" is worse, and the power structures we're dealing with still have to pretend they're protecting law and order, not the Aryan bloodline. Whites are dwindling demographically, as well as socioeconomically. Industry/business/corporations exist to make money in a maximally amoral way which is why Facebook gives no fucks about racism - their bread is buttered by racists. Make it expensive to cater to racists and they'll profit some other way. It's just business. Here in These United States the Army used to exist primarily to break strikes. Private security guards used to shoot labor protesters. An entire generation of talent was crushed under suspicion of being communist. And while Germany descended into the Third Reich the United States limped through with the New Deal. We both agree - Hitler isn't the problem. But Hitler's disciples aren't the problem, either - every time we look through a Hitler-shaped lens we miss a Pol Pot, an Idi Amin, a Hafez Assad, a Moammar Qaddhafi. And every time we break the glass because must be Hitler, we lose all ability to examine the facts of the ground instead of hailing back to our cartoon of history.What if the Nazi Party had lost or been thrown out, before war broke out?
The German National People's Party was formed in late 1918 after Germany's defeat in World War I and the November Revolution that toppled the German monarchy. It combined the bulk of the German Conservative Party, Free Conservative Party and German Fatherland Party with right-wing elements of the National Liberal Party. The party strongly rejected the republican Weimar Constitution of 1919 and the Treaty of Versailles which it viewed as a national disgrace, signed by traitors. The party instead aimed at a restoration of monarchy, a repeal of the dictated peace treaty and reacquisition of all lost territories and colonies.
You make a good point that there's no money to be made on vilifying the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free... but the private prisons, police departments, government contractors, and politicians would beg to differ.
Which brings us back to the unbalanced sway that industry/business/corporations hold over our democratic institutions.
Yea having read Caro's book on LBJ and what I have learned of JFK it seems a reasonably good bet that JFK would have followed the same path LBJ took with Vietnam, but JFK would have floundered and failed to get the civil reforms passed, where LBJ succeeded. I still dont know what to make of Bobby Kennedy, he comes across as being a very angry person, even before his brother's death.Friend of mine stopped talking to me for four months because I observed that Democratic worship of the Kennedys was horrifically overblown, considering they stumbled into Vietnam, almost caused WWIII twice and did exactly fuckall for civil rights because we create these myths so we don't have to think.
I've now read like three different hot takes on the Diem assassination and all three of them were basically at "yeah so the adults were on vacation so we basically ended up destabilizing Vietnam because we were too stupid to not let our principal ally get murdered over the weekend." Fuckin' Cuban Missile Crisis? We had these missiles? And they sucked balls? So hard that while they were supposed to be joint Army-Navy-Air Force in the end the only force that would put up with them was the air force? And in order to be even vaguely threatening to Moscow they basically had to be in the next zip code? So we tried putting them in France and De Gaulle told us to fuck off? So we tried putting them in Italy? And the Italians insisted that they be Italian missiles? So the only ones we really had control over were in Turkey? Which shared a fucking border with the USSR? And the only reason these missiles even got deployed was that Kennedy fucking made up a "missile gap" out of fucking whole cloth? Two different accounts of Bay of Pigs hold that LeMay prohibited Bissell from having any decent imagery on Cuba so that the invasion would fail and Bissell would get booted because LeMay resented Bissell having the A12 and U2 under CIA control. Why is it an SR-71? Because 71 is the number that comes after 70, which stands for XB-70, which was LeMay's glorious supersonic penis-in-the-sky. Why is it "SR?" Because it was supposed to be "RS for "reconnaissance-strike" where "strike" was LeMay saber-rattling at the Soviets with the YF-12 and then LBJ announced as the "SR-71" 'cuz it sounded better and then McNamara fucked over LeMay because of course he did and the amount of infighting that the Kennedies didn't prevent? Despite two brothers being president and attorney general? Is fucking appalling. Kennedies seem to be principally useful for incompetence, rape, murder and dying young. That this is the family the East Coast liberal elite have decided to mantle over and over again says a lot about American politics.On four occasions between mid-October 1961 and August 1962, Jupiter mobile missiles carrying 1.4 megatons of TNT (5.9 PJ) nuclear warheads were struck by lightning at their bases in Italy. In each case, thermal batteries were activated, and on two occasions, tritium-deuterium "boost" gas was injected into the warhead pits, partially arming them. After the fourth lightning strike on a Jupiter MRBM, the USAF placed protective lightning strike-diversion tower arrays at all of the Italian and Turkish Jupiter MRBM missiles sites.
The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga. According to Ellsberg, who had access to the raw intelligence, during the Kennedy campaign, the CIA, navy, the army, and the air force each had their own estimates of Soviet ICBM numbers, which ranged from 100 to 1000. Whereas the actual number was known exactly, and that number was 4. F.O.U.R. He doesn't assert, if I recall correctly, that Kennedy knew that number, although he may have.
You think that until you dig into the Diem assassination. Or Bay of Pigs. Or any of the Castro assassination attempts. The Kennedy administration makes fucking Archer look like a documentary. Not to downplay the "we are fully aware of four missiles, but let's just round that up to a thousand" aspect of Kennedy foreign policy, just to point out that Democrats live in glass houses whose walls are already spidered with cracks. That's in a semi-functional intelligence community. Kennedy era was the opposite of.The missile gap fiasco is its own special saga.
Wow. Thank you for ALL of this! But what happens to the Proud Boys and Y'all Qaida when Trump loses? They don't go home and quietly lick their wounds and think about the error of their ways... a Trump loss is the galvanizing event for them. A Biden landslide is even more galvanizing because it isn't proof that Americans are better and more tolerant and repudiate everything Trump stood for... it's because the election was stolen. The President is illegitimate. And we can predict all the old Michigan Militia platform planks they will pull out of the closet to become domestic terrorists. What do we do about them...? (In another thread, mk called them the disaffected 10% that aren't happy with the result, and work actively against the winners to undermine their every effort. All it takes is a few shitheads with ARs and Biden has to clamp down... further strengthening the righteous resolve of the 10%...)
Not sure which sobriquet I prefer, Y'allQaeda or Vanilla ISIS. I've had a patch on my hooligan bag since December 2016: Nobody wants to talk about it, but the modern Klan is largely a Hollywood construct. DW Griffith made it cool to run around in white hoods burning crosses to protect the master race, so a bunch of white racists put on white hoods and burned crosses and terrorized Black people. Woodrow Fucking Wilson screened Birth of a Nation at the White House. It did $100m at the box office, back when a Duesenberg SSJ was five thousand dollars. We had a great run where screaming white men with torches were simply not tolerated outside of primal scream therapy. That all changed with Birtherism and the media both-sidesing the issue. Now here we are with brodozers and bear spray. Lawn darts went away. 3-wheel ATVs went away. Hoverboards went away. 4Loko went away. All were mourned by their proponents. I grew up with a bunch of racists. Literal skinheads. They were, almost to a man, "woo hoo!" racists as opposed to "let me share with you my highlighted copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" racists and frankly, in an environment that condemns the performance of racism they were largely fine. Hung out with native americans, hung out with hispanics, were forced to be polite to the handful of african americans that were about. Shit gets dangerous when you let them 1-up each other in performative racism. Before too long some asshole is driving a Dodge Challenger through a crowd. In no way do I mean to diminish the very real problem of latent racism. But the problems of latent racism are less immediate than the problems of active racism. And an environment that is hostile to active racism has less of it than an environment that isn't.