A growing number of people are getting really comfortable with the idea of being literal Nazis.
Naziism is just an ideology that appeals to some common instincts, which becomes an issue when enough of them are in precarity that they warm up to making the ideas policy.
It doesn’t make for a very good state. Incompetence and nepotism rises to the top. Data driven science is tossed aside for ideology-driven rhetoric. Officials govern on vibes resulting in famine, plague and war. Also the country turns into the very kind of shithole it accuses other nations of being.
Eventually, you have bombers from rival countries blocking the the sun over the capitol. International tribunals exercise judgement and enforce their law, since the nazis failed to provide rule of law to their own. Children pick up pieces of the trainwreck.
And we learn (or fail to learn) once again why we don’t let the fascist autocrats take over, even when they are very, very rich.
We in the US have a choice: clean up the mess early, or let China clean it up for us. And China will make us jolly sorry if we make them clean it up. We’ll be their buggery bitch for a century or two at least.
It’s not even an allegiance to “National Socialism” or the NSDAP, per se.
Some people are aroused by the prospect of telling people, with impunity, that they or their group are in charge of everything forever and everyone has to applaud it on pain of torture and death.
They have a perverse, sometimes sexual, stimulation at the prospect of threatening, abusing, and submitting people to their doctrine of what they unilaterally deem to be the natural order of things.
Simply put, they feed, at every level, on the pain and misery they cause.
Unrelated, but this is my brother’s favorite quote.
Alas, this doesn’t only apply to republicans. You’d be surprised how much everyday people casually believe in eugenics/phrenology/other nazi related pseudo-science.
And when pressed: “I was just joking!”
Like that guy at a party who continually “jokes” about butt sex to every girl he meets.
In regards to eugenics, some may have some parts where they disagree on the definition of terms. I’m not talking about people believing Idiocracy was right on the premise,nor those who say there should be licenses to be a parent. Those are both eugenics or eugenics lite imo.
However, you can get genetic testing to see if your child might have a debilitating condition. Now first to lay out my … Bias? I don’t plan to have kids and therefore don’t feel pressured to have a firm opinion on genetic testing. I do support abortion rights. However, some may define choosing to abort because you learn your child may have a debilitating disease or a very painful life to be eugenics, while others may not agree.
There’s also people who believe in gene editing before birth, like the (disgraced iirc) Chinese scientist who tried to use CRISPR to prevent AIDS transferring from mother to daughter (nevermind the fact we have drugs to do that anyway). I think broadly speaking editing gene sequences could be considered eugenics, but some may disagree.
What is eugenics called if you remove the authoritarian neutering/killing parts?
Ask Iceland. They have a strict controls inplace to prevent inbreeding in their limited population.
Iceland is more like anti eugenics. They are controlling against any particular trait occurring.
You are sre 100% correct. And btw, it’s related.
Yeah i should stop overusing that word
It’s like racism, to them being called a racist is more offensive than their racist actions. They want to be racist Nazis, but they just don’t want us to call them that
Thats because they’ve been conditioned to view themselves as the victim. When you point out that they are doing harm to others it really fucks with their entire sense of self and they get defensive.
This is also why they need to hear the truth. We cannot keep coddling these snowflakes just because it makes them feel more comfortable and gives them a false sense of security.
Imagine it like you’re meeting a kid who has been homeschooled and sheltered from the outside world for their entire lives. They often say and believe things that don’t line up with reality because their view on the outside world has relied only on what their parents were willing to tell them.
The gradual shift from slant to widespread gaslighting and narrative control that we’re all seeing in most American news and media in 2025, is just a glimpse into what the right have been experiencing for decades. We view it as alarming now, but imagine how you’ll feel after a few years.
After a while it just becomes the normal/default. Imagine generations growing up dependent on this shit to keep them informed about the rest of the world. They’re not going to be happy about hearing the truth, but they need to hear it. All you can and should do is state facts, and ignore any attempts to turn every conversation into a Fox News vs CNN debate.
If they continue to escalate, just disengage like you would a child throwing a tantrum. If/when they’re ready to calm down and speak rationally, then repeat. Stick to facts. Present evidence if they’re willing to listen. Do not let them twist the narrative or pivot to a different subject in order to distract. At the end of the day, they have no evidence to back up the things they say. If they can’t present their evidence, then the conversation is over.
If they still want to be angry and blame someone, tell them they should take it up with the abusive patriarchal oligarchs who manipulated them and distorted their reality in order to control them.
Turns out that’s what they meant by freedom.
There’s actually a movie called Look Who’s Back, where Hitler is transported to the modern day, and at the end of the film, he’s gaining political momentum, because it turns out that while the Nazis were driven out of power, their ideology was allowed to continue.
It really is the case that there are a lot of people out there that like Nazi ideology, but just don’t like to be associated with the endgame of their ideology.
I read something ages ago, some study or something, not sure how legit, and it basically came to the conclusion that the only way to stop people from liking and associating with Nazi ideology is to not expose them to it, because there are some people that will like it if exposed, and it can’t really be stopped.
Culling the herd seems to be the tried and true method.
I’m not even sure how well that will work now with the internet.
I don’t follow.
Well, you can’t just cull for the sake of culling, who do you cull? So you need something like a war to occur, but the internet will just keep radicalizing people at an increasing rate even as they get culled.
Edit: Like Russia is being culled right now, but that doesn’t deter the growth elsewhere.
WW2 we culled the extremists, same with the US civil war.
So yes, I am suggesting war is the only answer to Fascism.
I don’t think any other option would have worked for Japan, Italy and Germany either.
We’re never going to see a war like WW2 again, only isolated things like Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Palestine.
War would become nuclear and destroy everyone if something like WW2 happened again and wouldn’t really wipe it out, it’d wipe everyone out, and let it thrive in the now remaining isolated pockets.
So there will only be isolated wars but that doesn’t outpace it’s growth worldwide.
While Ukraine is not anywhere near the scale of WWII, they’re hardly isolated. While the hot battlefield is geographically isolated, the logistical and economic battlefields deeply involve many countries around the world, including NATO countries, China, and Iran. It’s much bigger than a proxy war.
“Er ist wieder da” was the most depressing comedy movie of the decade. (“Don’t look up” is this decade’s winner)
It gets even more depressing when you learn that many of the public scenes are NOT scripted, they’re literally a guy in a hitler suit, out in public, think Borat, but with nazis.
It’s a pretty good watch, I think it was free on youtube when I saw it a couple years ago.
Edit: yup still on there, with English subtitles
It will never stop being funny that republicans were super excited about The Boys until that season, and then got butthurt when ‘the message changed’, suddenly saying Homelander was warping superman’s legacy and had gone woke and whatnot.
Like, he was clearly a fascist from minute 1, but once Stormfront made it inescapably obvious, even to their tiny minds, the whole series had changed.
Watching that play out was one of the highlights of the past 10 years.
lol, he slaughtered that whole plane of people in season 1.
These people are just dumb as bricks and need it literally spelled out for them to understand anything.
They barely understand text, let alone heavy handed subtext.
unpopular opinion; I believe in the value of definitions of words. I’m not republican (shouldn’t matter) but by bending definitions of words like “nazi” - you’re diminishing the people who went through the atrocities of WW2
Kind of similar to how you shouldn’t say “rape” for something that isn’t. in effect you’re diminishing rape victims
“nazi” literally means a member of the far-right National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Fascist pigs? No doubt. Just don’t change history…
We have people in power who explicitly want to exterminate minorities (see those leaked text messages) and we have a sizeable population willing to trust and empower those people. It’s not bending the definition to call them Nazis.
They didn’t build Auschwitz the day after Hitler got appointed chancellor. They built up to it. I don’t know how you can look at a government that’s literally building and populating concentration camps with people who haven’t broken the law and clutch pearls about calling them Nazis until they scale up sufficiently. The best thing you can honestly call them is proto-nazis.
If it quacks like a duck…
Seems like your discomfort is showing. Might want to tuck that back in.
Good Samaritan
Lesbian
Barbarian
Plenty of words we now use today started out referring to people in a specific time and place.
Further, what’s the use of remembering the horrors of the Nazis if we don’t recognize the early warning signs of those same horrors today? The “National Socialist German Workers’ Party” was around for over a decade before they started the holocaust. It seems like too little too late to wait until the genocide begins to start drawing parallels.
“They’re not Nazis unless they’re from the Nazi regime of Germany. Otherwise they’re just sparkling Fascists.” -you.
But then, by your own logic, we can’t call them Fascists either, since that term was made to describe Italian Authoritarianism.
Fascism describes the rhetoric used to prop up autocracy. It’s the propaganda portion, and leads to genocide campaigns and wars.
Mussolini might have developed fascism so it was admired by industrialists who wanted to control the masses, but it wasn’t his alone.
Wile I respect your point of view here, you seem to be missing the fact that Nazis didn’t just go away at the end of WWII. Many former Nazis ended up in powerful business and political positions post-wwii, and the ideas maintained popularity with the people the were popular with. This transitioned into neo-nazi-ism, white power skinheads, Aryan Nation, Aryan, brotherhood, modern German AFD part, the 3rd wave of the KKK, countless militia movements, and on and on and on. These all have a direct lineage with the actual Nazis from WWII. When we call these people Nazis, it’s not because we’re being hyperbolic about their beliefs, it’s because they are Nazis.
In theory you are not wrong but you ignore that language evolves, in modern times it means someone agrees or at least sympathizes with NSDAP ideology/ideas and no “they don’t hate Jews so they are different” is not an excuse Nazis back in the days only chose Jews because they were a minority and could be blamed for everything.
The US is nothing like Nazi Germany, the Nazi concentration camps had trains.
Anyone else noticed a rise in right wing/troll accounts on Lemmy recently?
I have and I don’t like it.
how am I a right wing/troll account for commenting on how language is important
the polarization here is unreal haha
Sir/Madam, your post currently has no punctuation, or proper capitalization. If you’re going to be a grammar Nazi, you need to lead by example.
Again - i was talking about the effects of not using correct language. Grammar like punctuation was not my point
english isnt even my first language
So, you fail to understand an English term and then try to lecture someone who can?
New account and all you’ve done so far on it is argue semantics to defend republicans and Israel by saying “um akshually, that doesn’t fit the strict definition of the word”
And just generally the argument of “you can’t call someone a Nazi until they have gassed their 6 millionth Jew” is a horrifically bad faith argument that only a complete and utter dumbass or someone arguing in bad faith would make.
Go home, grammar Nazi, your ignorance of how linguistic usage determines meaning is showing
Really? It doesn’t also extend to people who follow their beliefs, have power in government, have literal Nazi tattoos, and are installing far right fascism throughout the world as we speak? Are literally seig heiling at political rallies?
Like sorry son, but I don’t just think you’re wrong here, I think you’re so far off the mark you’re hitting Jupiter with that shit.
Well, you’re a fucking idiot.
Did all “nazis” actively do crimes against humanity? Whats the bar they have to hit to be a nazi? Put on a uniform? shoot a roma? say non-aryans are sub human? You want to draw a bright line between national socialists and racists, I’m not going to stop you, but I think nazi is just short hand for bootlicking people who enable the dehumanizing of others at this point in time.
What word would you prefer?
Ah, sorry, our mistake.
Neo-nazi. Is that better?
sure, for a smaller segment of republicans
im criticizing the broad strokes ppl are making by correlating republicans to “literal” nazis
Well, what do you call someone who takes orders from, defends, and enables fascistic white supremacists openly looking to purify the blood of their country by ordering loyal thugs to violently remove immigrants and jail anyone who opposes them?
I suppose you believe the Democratic Peoples Republic of North Korea is democratic too.
Where does the meaning come from? God? Are we in a video game where someone programmed words to have specific meaning? I never understood where the root authority comes from. Many people are using Nazi to describe fascists but if you can’t derive meaning from how people use words… where does the authority come from?
Nazi was a derogatory term used against the national socialist party but was eventually embraced in defiance. Let’s not change history and make nazi some kind of honored title.
I think you’re getting the downvotes (and I think I saw a few others mention this) because your argument is rooted in the word keeping the exact definition it was historically created in.
People who ‘simp’ for China are not ‘Mao apologists’ but that’d be a fine enough term for me to understand exactly who, in the modern day, is being insulted.
In similar fashion, no, existing fascists in the republican party are not literally National Socialist German Workers’ Party members, but they DO have a lot of similarities to the values and actions we have distilled down over the last 80 years that we attribute to ‘Nazis’.
So, no, they’re not Nazis, but to call them such isn’t to ‘change history…’ as you put it, and is instead a means of identifying extreme and harmful beliefs with an existing, demonized (for good reason) label to accent the severity of their beliefs as they compare to modern sensibilities related to freedom.
They downvoted you because you became a Dictionary Nazi, the Grammar Nazi’s even less-liked younger brother
Nazi, just like fascist has become an almost generic insult to hurl at people who want to enforce rules, you don’t like.
This goes back to the original Nazi times even. The German communists labeled the social democracy as social fascists for years. Of course the social democrats and communists ended up in the same concentration camps later on.
Trumpism is working towards more authoritarian tyranny.
I agree it’s sometimes overused but looking at the current leaders of the Republican Party and comparing their views and actions to the definition of fascism, do you really think it’s not accurate? And if so what are the main differences in your view?
Trump himself has called his political opponents fascists.
There’s a pretty big ideological difference between Italian fascists and NSDAP Nazis. Trumpism works in even other ways.
Arguing about Nazi and fascist comparisons is a waste of time. It’s better to talk about actually bad things Trump and his ilk are doing and talk about doing.
Constant Nazi and Hitler comparisons do little to illuminate this.
Trumpism is very American in ways that Nazism and Fascism were not.
Some examples: Mussolini and Hitler had came from a humble background. They both were veterans of WW1 and relatively young when starting their political career. Trump is an old man billionaire deeply connected to the establishment. Nazis and Fascists instituted broad social programs and improvements for the working class. Trump does the opposite. Fascism and Nazism were progressive and revolutionary. Trumpism is more reactionary. Sure, there are also parallels that can be drawn.
Trump has more in common with Victor Orban, Putin, Juan Péron, or many of the long list of Latin American dictators.
I’ve also heard that Trump really likes McDonald’s, and Hitler didn’t even have a McDonald’s—pretty crazy how different they truly are.
Hitler was vegetarian.
For more serious differences see what happened after they took power. The state governments were immediately taken over by central government. Under Trump the state governments are able to hold on to power and actually mount resistance. There’s also no totalitarian measures to centralize all unions or other organizations into one. Trumpism is very American and harkens back to the gilded age oligarchy. Nazis and fascism wanted a revolutionary new modern society. Musk and Thiel are the parts of MAGA that have this component a bit. They are the avant-garde, but not the core of Trumpism.
What in the fascist apologism? Buds pull the fucking head out of your arse.
I mean, that character was a literal Nazi though… Like from WW2
Ooof.
This is a lot of text for the distinction between Nazi and neo Nazi. Neo Nazis commit atrocities, murders within their limited capabilities. They are (on some level) the same.
Your opinion isn’t unpopular, it is objectively wrong.
Yeah, I prefer fascist autocrat to make sure people know I’m not fucking around. But nazi (lower case) is a fine shorthand. Neo-nazi almost suggests we’re talking about a non-mainstream movement. MAGA if I want to be specific.
I refer to NSDAP when talking about the German Worker’s Socialist Party that wasn’t really all that socialist and got a lot of funding from Benz and Bavarian Motor Works, and had no small thing for Wagner’s version of the Wotanic mythos.
prescriptivists are lingual nazis
Also, Graham Platner right now.
Accurate username.
Fuck me. Look at your history you have a hard-on for that dude.
Oh, I’m sorry if I keep commenting on the breaking news story that a senate candidate that has been plastered all over Lemmy recently has a nazi tattoo. Clearly that’s a me issue.
It was a skull and crossbones. That’s a very generic symbol. Hell, it’s being used all over the world right now as a part of anti-government protests. Your average American probably most associates it with pirates. I sure do, even knowing that the Nazis used it as well.
Regardless, as soon as he was told about it the one possible meaning, he got the tattoo covered over with something else. Find something of substance, like him actually saying anything anti-semitic.
I was wondering who loomer reminded me of. Fits perfectly.
The worst part is that stormfront doesn’t even look Aryan lol
Yeah, it’s a made up thing that never happened. also it literally means Iranian, so… fucking confusing today that Hitler made up a fanfic race for a language group that were not very district from all other neighboring people that hinged on them being Iranian somehow.
Nazi isnt just a word, Frau. Its a lifestyle hated by anyone who values freedom from oppression
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