Why does nazism still have followers after its defeat ?

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History is written by the victors, and that's always the typical victor's response. "Oh you people DESERVED to have your lives destroyed by the war that we won because your side is EVIL!"

But I'm biased in the belief that both sides in every war do dirty s**t to obtain victory. That's the inconvenient truth that Americans never want to accept.

people like to pick and choose bits of ideologies that suit them and ignore the rest when it isn't to their tastes, this has been a thing since....forever.

how many people do y'all know who call themselves christians have done things that jesus would frown upon?

this is also very true.

The great leap forward is one of those things that would be hilarous if it wasn't, y'know, real.

"Hey guys, let's kill all the birds so they can't eat part of our harvests!"

*entire harvest is eaten by locusts because the birds didn't eat them*

The USSR persecuted priests. Many of them had to flee to other countries to avoid being killed.

Although many of the inner circle Commies were Jewish, Stalin never trusted them (or anybody else!) and after scapegoating "Doctors" (I think), had made up his mind to eliminate a bunch before death took him.

History is written by the victors. But Southerners did not deserve what happened to them. The war devastated the south far more than it did the north. It took decades for them to recover. The Union's armies were not saints. They murdered and stole--whether they needed supplies, or when they just wanted to crush the South's spirit (looking at you, W. T. Sherman). When trying to fight clean did not work, the Union commanders realized that the south could not afford to lose men like the north could. So you end up with inane frontal assaults on Southern positions (eg: Cold Harbor) that got thousands of soldiers killed just so the South would be forced to take similar losses which could not be so easily replaced. I said they vilified Northern commanders--I didn't say they were entirely wrong to do so.

The bitter fact remains that the landowning, slaveholding class started the war and convinced the common Southerner that it was a matter of patriotism to support it. And they bought it. Even if they didn't, they got drafted anyway. Or they took up arms just to defend their homes from the inevitable looting. From invading armies that would not have been there if the South's elites had not started that war. They started a war and used their citizens as fodder so they could protect their right to hold slaves. The slaveholders knew what they were starting and how their citizens would suffer--they were just foolish enough to think they could win.

The North was not even fighting to end slavery. They were fighting for petty legalistic reasons of preserving the union. Preventing secession for the sake of preventing secession. But the South's defeat still resulted in the end of slavery. And their victory would have meant slavery would have persisted for decades at least. So their defeat was the lesser of two evils. They didn't deserve the horrors of defeat, but black Americans sure as hell deserved slavery a lot less.

I pity the South for the devastation they suffered, but I struggle to pity them when they take out their frustration on liberated slaves and not the slaveholders who started the war in the first place.

Personally as a southerner who at least attempts to think for himself I pity the south for falling head-over-hills in love with a carpetbagging New York Yankee son-of-a-bitch like Trump who is most likely going to ruin all of us before this madness is over.

I'm not saying there aren't FBI informants working inside hate groups, but I have yet to see real evidence that hate groups don't really exist. When white nationalists had robbed a bank in my old neighborhood years ago, I seriously doubt they were working for the government.

AA. Milli Vanilli - Blame It On the Rain

Returning to the original theme of this thread, the most consistent reaction I have seen to this question is to compare Nazism to Communism to demonstrate that Communists get a free pass from the MSM as compared to Nazis.

I would like to point out what I think is a fundamental difference. Communism has a Manifesto and other literature written by its founders to explain its aims, so we can honestly claim to know what Communism really is, at least what was intended by its founders. Now when put into practice, we have repeatedly seen adverse consequences. Collectivization of agriculture, the Great Leap Forward, and similar programs led to the Literal Death of Millions. I don't think I need to waste any time revisiting the argument of Why Communism Is A Bad Thing, but you have to understand that genocide, concentration camps, etc. are not intrinsic to Communist doctrine, whereas OTOH this is more or less what Nazism prescribes. I could also argue that the existence of concentration camps in China has very little to do with Communism. I don't really see how Communism is being practiced in modern-day China. It just gets lip service. If the CCP changed its name to something unrelated to the teachings of Marx and Engels, those concentration camps would still be there.

Communism in fact presents itself as a humanitarian movement and I feel confident in saying that most people who have chosen to follow Communism have done so on that basis. Yes, those people, especially if they did not grow up under Communist governments, were dupes and Useful Idiots, but I don't think it fair to lump them together with Nazis or to say they are simply the mirror image of Nazis. Consider also people who grew up under Communism and embraced it because they thought that doing so made them "good citizens" of countries in which it was reasonable to expect that Communism would endure forever. The best examples I can think of are from fiction although based on real-world examples. The mother in the film "Goodbye Lenin" who has been a good Communist all her life and must be protected by her children from learning that Communism in Germany has fallen, or Elizabeth in the TV program "The Americans". These people sincerely believed that Capitalism was mankind's greatest evil and that even the most ruthless tactics were justified in the "struggle" to defeat it. Even today, many non-Communists sincerely believe in a struggle against Capitalism. Some of those people are in fact well-respected members of society. Whereas nobody who seriously defends Nazism is respected. I guess you could say there is no tolerance for Nazism in the MSM whereas somebody who says they are a Communist would be seen as misguided but not genuinely evil.

There are differences.

The main one is this:

Communism is fine in theory, but varying degrees of bad-to-evil when put into practice.

Nazism is evil in theory, and evil in practice.


Therefore someone drawn to Marxism as a cause during their misspent youth would be forgivable.

But someone drawn to Nazism in their past would have to go through public with mae culpas before being seen as any other than pathological.

But there are other asymmetries between the two creeds.

Nazism is a subset of fascism. Nazism is to fascism what Stalinism is to Communism. A virulent strain within the general category that it belongs to. So a better dichotomy would "fascism vs communism", or "Nazism vs Stalinism".

Last edited by naturalplastic on 30 Aug 2020, 9:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

Don't let's forget that Mussolini was a Socialist before be founded Fascism, and that he did so because he believed Fascism would succeed where Socialism failed i.e. they have the same utopian end-goal.

As for Marxism-Leninism, it's an attempt to apply a moral framework to an economic system. Not sure that's viable.

I seem to think people try to compare Stalinism and Maoism to Nazism, yes, the regimes of Stalin and Mao did kill millions of people but they not carry out the same deliberate and industrialised way and create extermination camps the Nazis did. Stalin had the gulags but they were prison camps for hard labour not for the sole purpose of murdering people because of their race and so on.

Here is what I am basing my reply on:

Nixon: War on Drugs, just an excuse to throw blacks in jail and keep them from voting.

Ford: Pardoned Nixon, thus he is complicit in latter's crimes.

Reagan: Called blacks "monkeys" and "welfare queens". While governor of California, he supported gun control, only because he heard that the Black Panthers were arming themselves. Killed brown people in numerous Latin American countries. Refused to give Rock Hudson adequate medical care while he was dying of AIDS. Called AIDS a "gay disease", and refused to fund research--thus, Reagan wanted gays to die.

Bush Sr: Willie Horton. Killed brown, non-Christian people in Iraq.

Bush Jr: Killed brown, non-Christian people in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Trump: Called Mexicans "rapists", the Muslim (i.e. brown, non-Christian) travel ban, the border wall, support of law enforcement (due to their killing of black/brown people), border separations, support of bathroom laws, opposition to gun control or a gun ban (let's face it--many 2A advocates are arming themselves for a future "race war"), his "very fine people" remark after Charlottesville, told the Squad members to "go back to their home countries", called COVID-19 the "China Virus".

Reagan, the Bushes, and Trump all want(ed) women to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen--via their opposition to abortion and equal pay. Pence wants to bring back Prohibition, which was racist as hell.

And we haven't even gotten to legislators and governors.

Last edited by Tim_Tex on 30 Aug 2020, 9:21 am, edited 4 times in total.

While a I'd prefer an inefficient genocide to an efficient one (better chance to survive it), I don't think being less good at mass killings makes a difference in moral terms.

And perhaps not as industrialized, but certainly deliberate.

The GOP isn‘t doing it in death camps, but rather having cops do it.

There are many victims:

Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Philando Castle, George Floyd, Ahmed Arbury, Breonna Taylor, Jacob Blake...just to name a few.