this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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this is the info page of the conference on state . gov https://archive.is/rRHyr

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[–] purpleworm@hexbear.net 3 points 17 hours ago

I'm not about to take that tact personally because I haven't seen war either, and I've known people who were murdered but I've never lived in a situation like you described. I think honestly it's a failing more basic than not having experience because it shows a strange lack of engagement with what you can very easily read about, what has been portrayed in movies and documentaries (however lacking we can rightly say it is), and what you can hear from survivors of those situations in interviews that are also easy to find.

But of course most of the people here are westerners who have received at least a tiny bit of exposure to these things, like stories about Nazi Germany (which, again, we can say is distorted in various ways* but that has no bearing on more basic reality of the state of siege and genocide minorities and dissidents lived under), so maybe my first explanation isn't enough.

I have two other ideas: One, a perennial issue on this website, as in probably most online-only leftist spaces, is that people sometimes just sort of say what sounds to an uninformed audience like the most progressive, the most "radical" thing you can say even if it's reactionary or just nonsensical, and this idea that America is already at the most internally fascist it can get because some major portions of the population do live in situations similar to what you described (some migrant communities, for instance) strikes me as being partly a product of this tendency toward empty rhetoric disconnected from the world or coherent political theory. Two, as I sort of got at with my cutesy Dante comment, people like trying to look at things in moral terms at the expense of other ways of looking at them, so while they can make a fine argument that (conceding for the sake of argument moral arguments can be true or false) the people in charge are largely as bad as the Nazis and the rest are "useful idiots," I'm not really trying to contradict them on that, but whatever moral status you want to give the ruling class is really not that important compared to the reality on the ground and the ways that these depraved ghouls haven't massacred people but inevitably will if they aren't stopped.

*Because someone will wonder what I mean by this, I mean that there are a range of distortions about the Nazis that obscure the real class character of fascism. People act like Hitler won his election and that he cast a spell to mind control the German people, but simultaneously that basically the entire Nazi agenda was executed by the SS and the Nazi Party with everyone else held at gunpoint, but this obscures that there were real contingents of petite-bourgeois and bourgeois support (along with the wider military, cops, etc.) acting on pre-existing class interests and bigotries that was not enough to win the election but was enough to help the broader fascist movement terrorize and maintain power over Germany. I know that you know this, it's just for others reading who might not.