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How many goddamn wars over this do we need
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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Classic whataboutism
How is the fact that america was built on white supremacy and literally inspired Nazi policy whataboutism?
Because that's not what we're talking about in this thread. You're bringing up other atrocities and moving the spot light off of the topic at hand
That doesn't make it whataboutism tho
The post is about the US being an antifascist nation, while it has a very fascist-adjacent history.
CIA backed coups in south America would be whataboutism. How the US inspired the Nazis: not so much.
...and then we fought a war over it. Do you need to be introduced to a calendar?
Half the country didn't want to fight the war, are you daft,? It took pearl harbor to even start to change minds.
As if the US was the main character of WW2. How arrogant do you have to be?
When did operation paperclip occur, again?
Operation Paperclip: when we imported Nazis to run our government. Of course. Silly me. That's why the civil rights movement had its greatest successes and prominence right after WW2, because of all the fascists we decided to empower.
Now that's what I call whataboutism.
For pointing out that the mentioned operation has absolutely nothing to do with the mentioned issue - the US's supposed ideological embrace of fascism post-WW2?
"What about the fact that your point is completely irrelevant" isn't quite the usual definition of "Whataboutism", but you do you.
I didn't say anything about any "ideological embrace" operation paperclip shows that the US' supposed anti-fascist ideology wasn't quite as thorough as you make it seem.
The stuff about the civil rights movement was the whataboutism part.
Oh, okay, so you're walking back your prior claims. Cool. Glad we're in agreement that claiming the US as fascist or 'fascist-adjacent' post-WW2 is ridiculous.
"Abducting specialists is fascism, and the more specialists you abduct, the more fascism it is"
"No, you CANNOT use examples of increasing liberalism in the US to counter claims of fascism in the US, that's whataboutism"
Okay, buddy. You have fun with that.
Wow dude you missed the point entirely.
I love how you pretend that a huge portion of the US didn't support and continue to support fascism and Nazis.
I mean you're peak willful ignorance and obtuse.
Would you like to remind me about the support carried by the German-American Bund and the Silver Shirts, and compare that to literally any other political group in the US at the time?
(PROTIP: combined, they didn't even have a tenth of the membership of the CPUSA, which, itself, was a minor player in American politics of the period)
Yeah. The high ranking Nazis recruited in operations Paperclip and Bloodstone which went on to enjoy comfortable lives and retirements in the US were "abducted", sure. /s
The history of the US isn't "fascist-adjacent;" we've had our heads ALL THE WAY UP THAT ASS since the beginning and ongoing. Most of the founding fathers were worried that an "excess of democracy" would be bad for business (season 4 of "Scene on Radio," https://sceneonradio.org/category/season-4/page/2/).
The US' crusade against all things vaguely left of center goes even deeper than I ever thought. It's a bit surprising how many of the most dreadful dictators in the past 100 years were graduates of the School of the Americas and/or installed by the CIA. See: "The Jakarta Method" by Vincent Bevins.
Prunebutt is right here: the US was, at best, laissez-faire about Nazis until it wasn't. Nazis were good for business. I've read a lot on the topic, but can't find any good citations at the moment. This is an accessible, albeit lightweight entry point: https://time.com/5414055/american-nazi-sympathy-book/. But listen to just about year of "Behind the Bastards," and it's a deep rabbit hole of how closely tied to fascism the US had always been.
Oh, I guess I must have imagined the Roosevelt administration being stridently anti-Nazi from the beginning, and the mass protests whenever Nazis showed up in the US. Silly me.
You are correct that you are imagining this, because the US' relationship to Germany was definitely complex. Roosevelt was far from "stridently anti-Nazi" until Kristallnacht (1938 Nov 9), at which point Roosevelt recalled the US ambassador to Germany and allowed the 12,000 visiting Germans to remain in the US. However, despite allowing those Germans to stay, he did not push to increase immigration quotas.
Prior to Kristallnacht, the Roosevelt administration, Hollywood, petroleum companies, and much of the manufacturing base were very pro-Nazi Germany. The administration assisted Germany in circumventing boycotts while US petroleum companies provided fuel and oil despite European sanctions. Sources: Robert Evans ("Behind the Bastards"), Rafael Medoff ("Roosevelt's Pre-war Attitude Toward the Nazis")
Well, I guess you must have been there, if you didn't imagine it. /s
Clarification: that was a joke and not supposed to be a proper addition to the argument.
You sure are spending a lot of energy defending literal Nazis. Unless you have an actual point to make, you might want it considering shutting the fuck up.
Where am I defending Nazis? Fuck Nazis. Both the european and the european colonizer kind.
I have a pet theory that facism is very much an inability to look in the mirror but when someone else does it it's a different story. The first country out of the countries assumed to be... Let's say predominantly assumed Christian in heritage and treat each other as peers - the ones who serve as the closest analog of mutually assumed standards - becomes the first adopter of Facism. That might be the actual shock that shuts down facism elsewhere. Wherever does it first seems to me likeliest to become the example that causes people on the fence to snap out of it.
Pre WWII there were facist groups on the rise everywhere. While it's possible it may have been more in reaction to Germany's sudden expansionism the drop off of those who were heading into moderate support towards facist groups could have been essentially just realizing what your ideology looks like fully complete from the outside for the first time and being repulsed.
I have zero anything to back this up. Maybe it's more just a hope than anything.