this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2024
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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.