We Taught Fascism Wrong

They taught you what to fear but not what to not fear. That is the problem.

When we learn about Fascism and Nazism in school the focus is on all the horrible things they did. We learn about the persecution of Jews, the Holocaust, starting wars, dictatorship.

In other words the focus is on all the ways fascism is bad. The belief is that whenever we see anything similar bad emerging, we will identify it and reject it.

But there a big problem with this thinking. It assumes Fascism rises in a vacuum. It assumes everything around us is sane, sensible, moderate and recognizable. But reality is that Fascism always rises in situation that are extreme. Situations where people must pick between several undesirable choices.

Norway’s traitor Vidkun Quisling for instance became a Fascist because was in Soviet Russia and saw the immense hunger and hardship. This convinced him that communism was an existential threat that had to dedicate himself into fighting.

That is also why many Western leaders tolerated Hitler even if he seemed crazy to them. They saw him as a bulwark against communism in the East.

This gives important context to understand how Fascists gain power. My simplified analysis is this:

• Only 1/4 of the people will likely ever be truly Fascists. Not enough to outright cease power. If you look at MAGA and the populist right in Europe it seems rarely to be above this number.

• Another 1/4 are moderate and more sensible right-wingers. They would normally reject fascists.

• The left is made up of 1/4 radicals and 1/4 more moderates.

To gain power the fascists don’t convince the 1/4 moderate right-wingers that they are in fact sane and sensible people. No instead they convince the moderate right that the 1/4th of the left who are more radical is batshit crazy, dangerous and an existential threat to capitalism, liberty and democracy itself.

That is how the moderate-right hold their nose and give Fascists power. They are convince that Fascists are somehow the lesser of two evils. They tell themselves deluded stories about how they can control these fascists. The grown up in the room will make sure the crazies stay within the lines and behave.

That is the story conservative German Franz von Papen told himself. He thought Hitler could be contained and managed while the traditional conservative ran the show. He was utterly wrong. He did not understand Hitler’s brutality. How he simply murdered Papen’s allies in the night of the long knives.

Establishment Republicans indulged in the same delusion as they opened the door to Trump. Step by step they say their position and power ripped away and replaced by MAGA extremists. Those who did not comply got threatened into compliance by Trump bullies. It was simply an upgraded modern version of how the Nazis in the 1930s operated. They didn’t kill opponents. They didn’t have to.

We live in a world where information travels more freely. It is far easier today to threaten someone’s life than it was back in Hitler’s day. You don’t have to kill people to silence them. We have emails, messages and countless other means to deliver threats. Delivering death threats in the past would have been more difficult. You would need to write it out. That could live finger prints on the paper. If you used a type writer it could have special traits and types of ink that that police could compare with later.

But the basic principles remain the same: Moderates fail to grasp the effectiveness of brutality. It is easy to underestimate people like Trump because they are not particularly smart. Intelligent people falsely assume they can keep men like Trump under control because they are smarter. But this is like a superior chess player playing agains a bully that simply punch you in the face and declare victory. And then you accept his victory because you are afraid of getting hit again.

The thug doesn’t win the chess game because he plays better chess than you. He wins because he is more brutal and doesn’t care about the rules, which you think are the ones that will decide outcomes exclusively.

Too many intelligent men, don’t understand the power of brutality and ruthlessness.

Identifying the Wrong Danger

What schools fail to teach us is identify the right danger in a democracy. We are taught about the dangers of communism by pointing to the Soviets, Mao’s China, Cambodia etc. The problem with this narrative is that these were poor countries with oppressive dictatorships and high levels of inequality. The common people revolted against oppression. And here communism typically won favor because Western capitalist powers all too often sided with the oppressors.

For instance Ho Chi Min, the famous communist leader of Vietnam was not originally a communist. He was fighting for Vietnamese independence from Japan. Americans even supported him and they celebrated together kicking out the Japanese. But when France came back as colonial power to reclaim Vietnam, the US sided with France. Ho Chi Min had no strong allies. Nobody in the West was willing to support his freedom fight. The only ones willing to help was the Soviets. This same pattern happened in Cuba. Castro was also not originally a communist. But the Soviets were the only ones supporting his freedom fight.

This is really the story of how communist revolutions happened all over in the third world. It was because Western colonial powers wanted to keep their puppets in place.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not support communist dictatorships. All I want is for you to understand that the choice for people was not between liberal Western style democracy and free market economics. Rather it was between further Imperialist oppression or a communist revolution.

Trying to take these events happening in poor countries and transplant them to the West is a profound mistake. Socialism has two branches: Democratic Socialism (historically referred to as social democrats) and Communists. The former seeks socialism through step by step reforms within a democratic system. The latter seek it through a violent revolution where those in power are overthrown by the use of guns.

Communism only gained ground where democratic socialism was impossible to pursue. Vietnam, Cuba etc had no democracy that allowed elections of democratic socialists. Hence communism was the branch of socialism that won.

But that has not been the case of Western Democracies. Here the vast majority of socialists have been democratic socialists AKA social democrats. They have won elections all over Europe from Sweden to France. In later years Spain and Portugal also have had socialist governments. None of these victories produced oppressive dictatorships.

In fact they never have. There is no case of democratic socialists winning elections and creating dictatorships. The only exception would be Venezuela, but I would argue they are such a crazy outlier that they should be ignored. They have had something like 20 coups or coup attempts. And these have primarily been right-wing. The left are the ones who have typically restored democracy.

So even in Venezuela the left has a stronger democracy record than the right.

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Why is this so important to understand? Because the way fascism gains power is by convincing moderate right-wingers that radical left-wingers such as socialists will destroy democracy. Or it is simply about greed. You saw when tech billionaires sided with Trump, it was not so much about fear that Kamal Harris would create a dictatorship. Rather they were upset about higher taxes and regulations. They were upset about being vilified rather than worshipped as titans of industry and of job creators.

What we had is the billionaire class severely exaggerating the threats of the left and downplaying the dangers of the radical right.

Hitler used fear mongering about communism to drive capitalists into his arms. The capitalists may not have feared dictatorship as such from the left, but they didn’t want a world where workers had more power and they had to pay more taxes. They were willing to assume Fascism was a safer bet. Boy did they get that wrong.

Trump and MAGA managed to scare many moderates about the left with hysterical stories around wokeism and trans people. Somehow they portrayed it as if all women were in danger of sexual assault by transwomen. In this absurd frenzy supposedly about protecting women they elected a rapist and felon. A man that was known by his own admission to walk into the dressing rooms of underaged girls.

Yet, somehow this was all about protecting women’s bathrooms from transwomen. They managed to make a very marginal issue and turn it into an existential crisis of epic proportions. When we deal with the Episten list and thousands of girls abused. Suddenly protecting women wasn’t that important anymore.

When reports flooded in of women and children sexually abused by ICE agents in detention facilities women’s safety wasn’t that important anymore. No investigations.

You saw pregnant women slammed in the ground by ICE agents. Some gettin ICE agents kneeling on their stomachs. There are several cases of pregnant women loosing their children. Here is one example: ICE Arrested a Pregnant Tennessee Woman — While in Detention in Louisiana, She had a Stillbirth

I could go on, but what is the point? MAGA does not care about women or children and their safety. But they successfully managed to make that into an issue to help them win votes.

I remember prior to Trump’s win I debate several liberal feminists who were voting on Trump, because they had gotten into their heads that the trans issue was the biggest threat to women. In retrospect that is a rather absurd belief.

What Schools Must Teach

This gets me to my core point: Schools must teach what not to fear. Socialism, wokeism, trans-people etc are not going to be a danger to democracy. School children need to learn and understand better how different progressive issues can be weaponized and turned into fear mongering to help fascists win.

I know countless people that I have debated who have acknowledged that Trump is a bad guy but they still voted on him. The reason is that they bought into the fantasy that the left was far more dangerous to America. The exact same trick that Hitler pulled on German conservatives.

School needs to start teaching that democratic socialism has never been a danger to any Western democracy. Socialists have help power countless times without endangering democracy or liberty.

Likewise democracy has never ended because we gave too much consideration to a marginalized group such as immigrants, trans people, gays, women, the disabled, non-whites etc.

But what we do know is that whenever democracy has ended in the West it has always been a right-wing populist government. Fascists have ended democracy numerous times in the West. The populist left simply has never done that.

Schools don’t properly teach that. They create a sense of false equivalence, where radicals and the left and right are treated as equals. But they are not.

The European East block communist governments were not elected by the people. They got installed as puppets by Stalin.

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This is the lesson we must hammer in: Fascism can only ever rise to power by making you more afraid of someone opposing them. They will use every trick in the book. Every lie to convince you that someone on the left is very dangerous and will destroy your whole way of life. They will call their opponents wokeists, cultural-marxists, communists, socialists or whatever they can think of to scare you into holding your nose and supporting them.

Trump never had to work to get you to love him or respect him. That is not the game he played. He played a race to the bottom. His gave was to convince you that no matter how repulsive you found him, he would make sure you found his opponents even more repulsive.

It is a mud slinging contest. To win Trump only had to produce lies and distortions about his opponents at a higher rate than he was accused to genuine bad actions.

When Trump faced charges of sexual assault and rape, he didn’t need to pass himself off as a great guy. No, he just had to rely on his allies spreading absurd conspiracies such as Pizza Gate, so that his political opponents always seemed more depraved than him.

The irony of all of this is that something even worse than Pizza Gate turned out to be true: The Whole Epstein network. Except it implicated primarily Trump and much less democrats.

The Lies per Hour Optimization Machine

That is where we are at today. It isn’t about who tells the truth, but about how can spread the most lies affectively per hour. Whomever lies in the highest volume wins.

My take is that we got to actually start punishing liars, or there will be no democracy left. I am not talking about punishing people for every little lie. I am talking about fining large media organizations which spread gross lies at scale.

We can retain great lenience toward what individual may say without consequences but letting corporations face consequences if they lie at scale. By lying I mean: Deliberately telling something that is untrue, while you knowing it is untrue.