I think the thing I'd offer - don't look for people to make discursive thought-out sense, if you do the world around you will make very little sense. The alternative is to look back at the animal basis of what we are and figure that a large swath, possibly a majority, of the population lives in most sense closer to their animal nature than a Greek philosophic or secular humanist 'anthropos' which seems to be the providence of the 'divine man' - there are people like that out there, some are neurotypical but it seems like most aren't.
For the history on that - I'm less inclined to claim that I'd know the answer. I'm guessing it has something to do with historical contingencies like our being allies with Churchill and how the various camps of Axis vs. Ally broke down.
We clearly had plenty of eugenics happening at the time, plenty of prominent people like Henry Ford were proponents of that, there were plenty of Nazi parties and rallies in America in the 1930's. My guess, I'm working close to 100 hours a week these days so I can't offer the research, is you'll find it had a lot to do with who our allies were and as well what kinds of backlash or skepticism there might have already been toward Naziism from other corners.
The question of why we jumped in on the allied side though is a really good one. The thing I'm actually wondering about, if Japan hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor, would we have clustered them with the Axis powers? There could have been strong ties and shared activity between Japan and Germany or Italy that I don't know about but I do remember hearing an unusual story about a Nazi over in China who saved the lives of over 200,000 people during the Japanese incursion by placing Nazi flags around town to mark it as their territory - during a time when the Japanese were treating the Chinese easily as badly as the Nazis were treating the Jews, Roma, etc. (one popular example - Unit 731). That's a great case of history being as complex as the people who were in it and at that specific time was it possible that there were good people either in the Nazi party but too far abroad to know what it was at home or even trying to use its power in a fifth-column way to get things done (like saving Chinese mainlanders from being killed by the Japanese).
Someone in the US who'd take up the black-and-red swastika today - they're either larping idiots, people who are misdirecting lack of opportunity, or someone who got overinfluenced by one or several people who were one of the former mentioned. The really interesting thing about fascism - Naziism was a one-off, there were many instances of fascist regimes in the past, there will likely be plenty of fascist regimes in the future, and it will be rare for a regime of that sort to break out the huge occult metaphysical parade floats or use so much archetypal manipulation with their populace.
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
Last edited by techstepgenr8tion on 29 Aug 2020, 12:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.
29 Aug 2020, 12:02 pm
