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I recently came across this video from the NYT. It is titled: "We're experts in Fascism. We're Leaving the U.S."
Not to boo my outgroup too much here (and that's not the point of this), but holy shit this video is bonkers. The logical jumps these people are making, their inability to understand or recognize that they are explicitly not living in a fascist dictatorship when they work for the largest newspaper in the country publishing content about how the leader of the country is a giant fascist. This video is frightening to me for the following reason:
What does the deprogramming effort for all of this eventually look like? Or does it happen?
These people (not necessarily the ones in the video, but the ones who might watch this type of video earnestly) seem convinced that we are living in a society which is comparable in some way to Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
I guess I have to stop myself here to check my biases: are we? Just to look at the most obvious thing here, the press, the answer is unequivocally: no, or perhaps even "fuck no, lol".
Or the military? It seems like we have the most powerful military on earth, and are essentially not using it at all.
As far as ICE: ice killed two people in situations which were arguably (though not definitely) self defense, and the response was that the Federal Government largely pulled out of the area (Minnesota) where they were deployed. This is while local residents are doing things like stalking federal law enforcement, setting up various checkpoints, and delaying "rapid response forces" to track their movements.
Would Hitler have tolerated this? Was there an equivalent in Nazi Germany of non-Nazis setting up checkpoints for the Nazis and driving them out of town?
Okay I'm talking to myself here: no we are not even remotely close to anything even remotely like a fascist dictatorship. By almost every definition we are likely the farthest we have ever been from living in a fascist dictatorship.
So deprogramming: has there been any serious discussion about what this will look like? It's been on my mind for a little over a year now. Here was the positive realization I had about it: it's not necessary. The people being dispatched by this sort of propaganda don't hold coherent beliefs. This is not part of a larger system of beliefs that all build on top of one another. These ideas are mostly just sitting on their own. They are a collection, not a system.
So this means that deprogramming isn't so much a process of unwinding everything, it's just a matter of installing a new set of ideas. Deprogramming could happen in a few days, for some people it could probably happen in a single episode of John Oliver or Rachel Maddow.
Realistically this was a happy realization to me. Am I wrong to think this?
It seems to be almost a Reddit left wing consensus that the year is 1933 and you should do whatever you would have done then if you consider yourself a good person. It's totally beyond me how this much panic has set in. I've never seen it in my whole life in any political domain.
The next election. That's all it's going to take. A liberal candidate will win and everybody will think they saved the world by showing up to vote (but won't ever think they were overreacting by calling the US a fascist state).
Dismantling the idea won't happen before the election, it can't happen before Trump is gone. Because Trump is literally Hitler, or at least trying to be. There can't be catharsis until he is gone and the threat is over. Don't let your guard down!
I'm just so dismayed at how the left is handling the current situation I just can't read anything online anymore. I actually logged back in here for the first time in years to get away from every subreddit I love becoming a home to normies wigging out. Even fucking movie review channels that have never said a political word in their lives had emergency panic threads stickied in their subreddits.
As far as I know, there is a well-founded overall consensus among historians that the political line pursued by the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) after 1919 in the Weimar Republic ended up abetting the Nazi seizure of power instead of preventing or even disrupting it. There is also largely a consensus that the Anti-Fascist Action organization as it was founded in 1932 was little more than a front organization of the KPD. I sort of wonder how these people would react if you merely asked their opinion on this, but I guess asking this question in itself would instantly mark you as a Nazi in their eyes.
"Antifa is retarded" isn't exactly a rare position among the pro-establishment left. You can't say it in those words because it is ableist, but "Antifa are underemployed young men who are more interested in having an excuse to fight than actually preventing modern fascists taking over America" is something you could print in the NYT.
I won't disagree with your argument (although I doubt it's anti-ableism that is an important factor in this) but my point is that "Anti-Fascist Action" named itself as such because they, in accordance with the Stalinist line, considered Social Democrats to be fascists as well but at the same time wanted to dishonestly appear to non-Communists, which is a tactic their modern-day heirs are also continuing. I imagine this would be another divisive subject of discussion among Blue Tribers if they actually thought about it for a minute.
Also, that's a twenty Stalins criticism. Antifa is bad because they aren't left-wing enough. Nothing about being too extreme, and the way that's phrased they should be okay with using violence as long as it really stops "fascists".
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