A far-right party has won a state election for the first time in post-World War II Germany in the country’s east, while it looks set to finish a very close second to mainstream conservatives in a second vote.
The problem is we didn’t kill them all. The ones who collaborated, the ones who changed their names to escape, the ones we imported because they were scientists. The collaborators and sympathizers back home.
I’m being hyperbolic, I know this line of fascist thinking will always rear it’s head due to greed and narcissism. But I still posit we weren’t thorough and harsh enough the first time. Thanks, Von Braun for the rockets, but time to meet the hangman.
The problem is more that Stalinist Communism is pretty close to fascisism. We see that all over the former Soviet sphere of influence. Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia and so forth also all have have very strong far right parties.
While quite a lot of the original Nazis went unpunished, the problem is that you can only kill people, but you can’t kill an ideology. You can only keep it small by not providing it the societal circumstances it needs to thrive.
If you have rampant social inequality, skyrocketing cost of living, stagnating wages, worsening working conditions all combined with a political establishment that is the a perfect mix of greedy, uncaring, corrupt, and incompetent, people will flock to the political extremes. If there is no left counterbalance to the right, things will get even worse, because people will now only flock to the extreme right. (the absence of an effective left wing counterbalance has brought along the current circumstances in the first place, because it allowed neoliberalism to run rampant unchecked)
The problem is we didn’t kill them all. The ones who collaborated, the ones who changed their names to escape, the ones we imported because they were scientists. The collaborators and sympathizers back home.
I’m being hyperbolic, I know this line of fascist thinking will always rear it’s head due to greed and narcissism. But I still posit we weren’t thorough and harsh enough the first time. Thanks, Von Braun for the rockets, but time to meet the hangman.
The problem is more that Stalinist Communism is pretty close to fascisism. We see that all over the former Soviet sphere of influence. Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia and so forth also all have have very strong far right parties.
While quite a lot of the original Nazis went unpunished, the problem is that you can only kill people, but you can’t kill an ideology. You can only keep it small by not providing it the societal circumstances it needs to thrive.
If you have rampant social inequality, skyrocketing cost of living, stagnating wages, worsening working conditions all combined with a political establishment that is the a perfect mix of greedy, uncaring, corrupt, and incompetent, people will flock to the political extremes. If there is no left counterbalance to the right, things will get even worse, because people will now only flock to the extreme right. (the absence of an effective left wing counterbalance has brought along the current circumstances in the first place, because it allowed neoliberalism to run rampant unchecked)