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Notes -
Anyone following the new logo for the Atlanta Falcons saga?
The memes are hilarious.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2026/oct/22/atlanta-falcons-throwback-logo-nazi-germany-comparisons-memes
It got me thinking once again about how viscerally negative the reaction is that certain people have to the aesthetics of cleanliness, order, and sharp dressing.
I asked here once what people mean by “fascism,” and the primary meaning was bullies in power, but I’ve since come to a definition of fascist vibes: powerful people proud of their masculinity and strength. This extends to aesthetics.
The Communist rabble of Europe admired a stylish rumpled aesthetic of the working man’s clothes, signifying how a collective of the weak can be as strong as the powerful.
The Italian Fascists contrasted this with snappy uniforms and manicured grooming, a theatrical machismo signifying the strength and power of men working together. Like the uniform bricks of a tall and impressive wall.
And like a clean and functional wall, there are people who long to do nothing more than cover it with anti-wall art. Thus the memes about the Falcons.
The communists in power adopted the standard totalitarian aesthetic. Soviet military parades were broadly similar to Nazi ones, right down to the goose steps.
As a separate point, there is a cohort effect here. In the first half of the twentieth century, basically everyone in the first world thought (probably correctly) that the source of the Great Powers' power was a large population of blue-collar manly-men who could dig coal or operate machinery one day and pick up a rifle and serve in the infantry the next*. This leads to the patriotic propaganda on all sides (except the British for some reason) which focusses on blue-collar masculinity in both industrial workers and soldiers. I think the differences between Soviet, Nazi and WPA propaganda posters and movies in the years immediately before WW2 are minor. (The soldier:worker ratio is highest for the Nazis, intermediate for the Soviets, and lowest for the WPA, and the Nazis never use a cubist art style whereas the Soviets and WPA sometimes do). This changes once WW2 gets total, because the Americans and Soviets (but not the Nazis) add the Rosie Riveter style image of the woman doing manly industrial work while still looking pretty and feminine enough to be worth defending, but the Nazis don't.
Saying that the Soviet and Nazi versions of the standard totalitarian aesthetic are basically the same is standard horseshoe theory and will not get you into trouble. Suggesting that the WPA used the same aesthetic - even to labour lefties who squee about WPA propaganda posters as a celebration of the working class and a sign whose side FDR was on - pattern matches to the "liberals are the real fascists" argument and gets funny looks at the best. So the so-called liberal elite thinks that borderline-homoerotic appreciation of blue-collar masculinity is fascist when right-wingers do it, harmless when New Dealers do it, and arguable when actual Commies do it.
None of this disconfirms my theory of the descriptive linguistics, which is that "fascist" means "person with views on social issues to my right and whom I disklike", with no substance whatsoever.
* Both early modern musketry and industrial age riflemen genuinely required relatively little training compared to e.g. medieval armies or WW2-and-later mechanised armies.
I found this:
https://old.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/141j58h/women_working_for_you_nazi_germany_1943_these_are/
And this:
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O120963/wir-frauen-kennen-unsere-pflicht-poster-morocutti-ottokar/
Pretty similar women worker propaganda.
Interesting. British schoolboy history is that the British and Americans were far more willing to use women industrial workers whereas the Nazis preferred to use forced labour from occupied Europe.
The Nazis did eventually bow to pressure, although later than the British did, but American schoolboy history is, IIRC, wrong about women in the factories- American conscription targeted rural areas very heavily to minimize industrial impact and most conscripted industrial workers were replaced with blacks(who were drafted at lower rates), not women.
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