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I don’t like to overstate or exaggerate political danger. And I don't think @paninid is overstating anything here.
We’ve avoided careless comparisons to the Nazi regime for generations, and rightly so: we don’t want that comparison to lose its power. We need to save it for the moments when it truly applies.
This is one of those moments, in the US and across the world. We are on the knife’s edge.
Here’s the thing, though… https://mastodon.world/@paninid/112768842226761788
Matthias Wiesmann @inthehands @paninid I a weird way I disagree, nazis were evil, but believed in some form of modernism, highways, pushing forward young engineers that resulted in jet engines, rockets. Italians fascists had a weird obsession with synthetic fibres. Fascist architecture is a thing.
The current crop has nothing of that, what will we call Trumpian Art? All the evil, but without having to iron your shirt or shine your boots. You won't get an 1000 year empire, but a cheap reboot of the 50s…
@thias @paninid
I don’t think it’s useful to split hairs about how much real infrastructure different fascists built.
Consider: Mussolini did •not• in fact make the trains run on time. (There’s research on this: his train system ran very poorly!) But he •talked• all the time about how he’d made the trains run on time, and that lie still lives on as a well-known phrase today.
That’s completely in line with modern Trumpian fascism.
@inthehands @paninid it’s not about what they did but what they claimed to do. Trump never explained precisely what he would do, make stuff great, beautiful, reverse small things. In practice the difference is academic, maybe. When you look at Orban, Erdoğan, or Vučić the behaviour looks different, they seem more interested in the long game, milking the dying cow to the end.
I agree that Orban, say, is a somewhat different beast: more toward the kleptocracy end of the spectrum. Again, I'm not sure how useful it is in this moment to finely parse those categories, especially wrt Trump. Mass deportation and militias targeting political enemies aren't counterbalanced by how realistic your new bridge plans are.
@inthehands @paninid maybe the thing I’m trying to say is that there is a bias and a danger in focusing on the nazis which are present in West’s narrative as opposed to current authoritarian regimes which exist in the age of internet but are largely absent of sauf narrative.
@inthehands @paninid the distinction matters because none of these guys did mass deportation, why bother if you can just encourage people to leave, there won’t be a serious territorial invasion (armies don’t want to fight for real), all the evil won’t be handled by the state, but outsourced and defended by corporate level PR.