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You have people like Daryl Cooper and Tucker Carlson who may not be full-on sieg heiling but look an awful lot like they think the Nazis were directionally correct about maintaining national purity. For them, rehabilitating the Nazis is an important of legitimizing their own political program. As long as the Nazis are the Worst Thing Ever and not just one among many authoritarian movements, that's a major impediment to the respectability to reactionary authoritarian ethnonationalism. Hence the efforts to downplay Nazi atrocities and/or cast them as wartime misfortune while shifting the blame to others (e.g. Churchill).
Of course, that's much too subtle for the rank and file.
A significant point is that there are lots and lots of socialist movements, including democratic socialist movements that have at least occasionally governed in western democracies to something less than absolute disaster. Liberals, socialists, and traditional conservatives alike can all point to something, say "that's what I want", and have the thing they're point to not be something totally atrocious. If you're a fascist or fascistically inclined, you've got Hitler and Mussolini.
"Nazi" might be diluted as an insult, but it's not diluted as an ideology. There's no moderate, democratic fascism.
There's always Franco, though of course classifying him as a fascist is controversial. I think "Franco was alright" is somewhat more in the Overton window than saying the same about Mussolini and Hitler (to the extent people know anything about Franco in the first place).
There's also FDR, for that matter
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Salazar?
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Is this just your uncharitable interpretation of them saying things like "hey maybe we don't need a million immigrants from poor countries who have very different cultures than ours and who don't share our values" or do they actually talk about racial or "national purity?" People seem to get their panties in a bunch because these two guys don't genuflect to the WW2 mythos that has been handed down to the American public through Hollywood and high school history class, but I'm not convinced that saying something like "actually WW2 was more complicated that just Good Guys vs Bad Guys" is in any way remotely near "full-on sieg heiling."
No.
Yeah, but they're not saying that. They're peddling ahistorical nonsense to try and whitewash Nazi aggression and Nazi crimes while shifting the blame for these things to their enemies for having the temerity to resist. Cooper wants to paint Nazi atrocities as tragic accidents in a war they were forced into, using arguments make little sense and that can be trivially debunked if you possess basic factual knowledge^1. This suggests that Cooper is either an idiot or a liar, and I see little else to indicate that he is an idiot. If Cooper is deliberately misrepresenting WW2 in a way that minimizes the crimes of Nazism, it raises the question of why? Given that he's on record praising reactionary authoritarianism, it's probably because he's sympathetic and thinks it's useful to soft-pedal Hitler.
Are these people full on fascists? Don't know. Clearly, however, they do find an interest in trying to rehabilitate fascism.
1: for example, blaming Churchill for the escalation of the German invasion of Poland into general European war
So, uncharitable it is. Dan Carlin sources his stories very well. They often have a slight, particular slant to them because of his political leanings, but I would not call him a "liar" who posts trivially debunked (there's that word again) stories that contradict "basic factual knowledge" (cf. "basic logic," "basic human decency"). Dan Carlin emphasizese a specific set of facts to spin a particular narrative. Some people say this means all history is bunk, but IMHO that's a uselessly sweeping and reductive judgement. There is no narrative-free history.
This complaint is always levelled in bad faith at people who try to understand the internal state of the "bad guys." If you try to explain, even with disavowels, why e.g. how Communists came to power in Russia by tapping into legitimate grievances that certain groups had, you will invariably be called a Communist sympathizer by those on the right too idiotic to understand hypotheticals or too Machiavellian to feel shame. I see little to indicate that you're an idiot.
Am I supposed to shrink back in fear at this? So what? Your words have no power here. I've been jaded by the pearl-clutching about "our democracy" by libs for the last decade.
He isn't, and you don't get to smuggle your tendentious accusation into the question, sorry. As for why he is telling this story, he is doing it for the same reason he told the stories of the Zionist Jews, the Palestinians, the (leftist!) People's Temple, the (leftist!) early labor movement in the U.S. -- because he thinks it's important to tell stories from within the frame and perspective of the people who lived that story, rather than as a "neutral" or baised outsider. An impossible goal, but a worthwhile aspiration (and given how preoccupied leftists are with lived experience, you'd think they would approve, but instead it's just another case of "no not like that!!"). Do you think Cooper is a People's Temple booster? A Zionist Jew sympathizer (Check his Twitter to find out about that one)?
There's that word again. There's nothing I can really say in response to this that won't get me in trouble, so let me just recommend that you find a more effective line of attack, because scolding and panicking about "fascism" is so 2017, it doesn't work on anyone anymore save the most dyed in the wool leftists. And it undermines any concern you are trying to create in me about "reactionary authoritarianism."
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This isn't quite true. Jew-exclusionary white supremacists are universally called, and often own, the label "Nazi" whether or not they're fascists.
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