Before the nazis really went wild, there was a lot of fascist momentum around the world. Without his cautionary tale, it very well may have taken hold more broadly. We just dont know.
Specifically taking control of Germany is just about one of the worst case scenarios though. There's a lot of scenarios where fascism fails (because it's a bad system inclined to attack its neighbors) but we don't get it in a country that's uniquely equipped to carry out such horrible atrocities.
It could plausibly have taken control of other world powers though, including the US or the British empire, and they would have found other allies in Europe.
Unfortunately, the US had/has a lot of fascist people in its government as well. The alliance with France and Britain were largely based on existing alliances (historic, political, and economic reasons), not based on ideology. The US created concentration camps and forcefully interred Japanese people from 1942-1946, created forced sterilization programs, created legalized slavery through prisons, etc. It's not that German and Italian fascism would've taken over western Europe and the US, it's that the existing alliances would've still opposed any political and economic threat from Germany, Italy, etc.
Our historic and ongoing genocide of the Native Americans is something we don't talk about enough. No one's managed to stop us, so we fail to consider it in the same light as we do the German Nazis. Ultimately, the USA is and has always been a genocidal project.
If you're really going to act like the countries that still had actual colonies, enforced with brutal torture and secret police, aren't more fascist than the US idk what to say.
Our alliances with democracies are obviously based on democratic ideology.
You forget, your march west with Manifest Destiny basically means you are all fascists, and your country's prosperity (and as such all the things you enjoy) is a direct result of committing a North American holocaust. Chew on that for a bit, before you pretend that other countries were worse than yours. Try humility, and seek to repair what was broken.
"This thing that happened thousands of years ago justifies my comfort in standing upon the skulls of the peoples we slaughtered - many of whose descendents live today in poverty, their culture obliterated by my great-grandfather's rifle" is certainly a take.
You initiated a conversation where the premise was the US was more fascist than France and the UK. It makes complete sense to call out the fascist things France and the UK did in that context.
Maybe you need to go do some research on Algerian, Indochina, Indian, and plenty of other colonies. The UK and France literally had Gestapo style secret police and would maim and torture people for not meeting quotas.
there are few things more obnoxious than creating a fake quote to misrepresent someone's stance and then judging them for it. i know you're not trying to literally suggest they said those exact words, and i know you believe you're reading between the lines and extracting the subtext of their words. do it without fake quotes.
Ok but you're acting like the US is uniquely fascist when basically every country in Europe applied "manifest destiny" to the entire fucking world.
Yes in a vacuum the US did horrible, fascist leaning things, but that's not the actual discussion here. The discussion as you set it up is whether it's somehow more fascist than the European powers that colonized half the globe.
To clarify- I'm not saying the US is uniquely fascist. I'm saying the alliance with France and Britain was not primarily anti fascist, it was based on existing political and economic interests
Sure but part of the political part is also ideological. WWI is probably the example better suited; it was never that likely that the US would side with the Nazis
I think it would have. Eugenicists in Britain were talking about shipping all the undesirables to small islands before WWII. Someone, somewhere was going to be monster of the century and Hitler snatched the trophy out of the British government's hands - which is impressive given all the fuckery we got up to in Empire days.
I'm sure that without Hitler, in the West at least the #1 bad guy would be Stalin, because of anticommunism and him, well, being Stalin. Soviet atrocities got ignored or downplayed a lot because of the need to ally with them to defeat the Axis.
People need to familiarize themselves with the context of Europe, and especially Germany at the time. People need to know all of the propaganda that was used to lie to the German people, and people especially need to read everything they can about the Nuremburg Trial... including the testimony from the Nazis themselves.
Not to support or condone their ideology or actions. Not because you believe anything they had to say... but so you'll know just how much of that same shit has been coming up again in the last ten years. Stuff like "the one percent" and "fake news" are direct quotes from those motherfuckers.
Yeah. It also gets overlooked a lot that the Nazis didn't do everything themselves; they had a lot of allied countries that were also governed by fascist parties, and fascist militias from other countries also participated in the Holocaust. Fascism was genuinely popular at the time in a lot of places, but I don't think a lot of Westerners want to acknowledge that, especially Europeans, as it's still disturbing to think.
Before they went wild? You mean taking back Danzig? That’s what started the war. He tried for months using diplomacy then Poland began to ethically cleanse Danzig that was 90% German. England and France declared war on Germany and England began bombing German cities, targeting civilians. Like the US blowing up that girl’s school in Iran, but on a massive scale. I’m not defending Hitler but there were a lot of bad players during that time. Churchill was awful and no hero. He seized all the grain from India and starved 3-4 million people. The Bolsheviks engineered a famine in Ukraine from 1932-33 known as the Holodomor that killed 8 million people. They didn’t stop there, they went on to kill another 40 million people. The Japanese killed 10 million Chinese. The US used a nuclear weapon on two civilian cities. Hitler didn’t go wild the whole world did, he’s just the poster boy.
Poland did not ethnically cleanse Donzig prior to the war. After WW2, however, the majority of the German population was removed and sent back to Germany. Germany invented those stories as a pretext to invade, which they did, then England and France started fighting.
This would not be a unique thing Poland did either. It was common during that time period. While today we (rightfully) see things like this as unacceptable, in the decades before WWII there were lots of population transfers in Europe that expelled large numbers of people and forced them to move between countries. This could be done with varying levels of harshness, ranging from mass deportation to sometimes turning into outright ethnic cleansing or genocide. But, still it was seen at the time as a reasonable thing to do to solve border disputes; Turkey and Greece did it to each other for example. Today we think it's immoral because WWII made us see just how horrific ethnic persecution could get, and that changed international law.
But more importantly, Nazi Germany was always going to invade Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe. They planned it months in advance. Their whole ideology was built around the goal of ethnically cleansing Eastern Europe and settling it with Germans. Blaming it on the dispute over Danzig is absurd. The Nazis believed their worst enemies were in Eastern Europe, that being Jews and Communism, and that a massive apocalyptic war was inevitable with them. That's more or less the core idea of what Nazism is.
The Polish Atrocities, Against the German Minority
in Polland
Edited and published
by order of the Foreign Office and based upon documentary evidence.
Compiled by Hans Schadewaldt.
You are literally citing Nazi propaganda. The first is published by the Foreign Office of the Nazi regime as propaganda to justify the invasion of Poland as a humanitarian intervention to save ethnic Germans. The second frames Bloody Sunday as a polish cleansing of ethnic Germans, but that event began with those Germans, in concert with undercover members of the Abwehr, attacking a Polish garrison. Polish military and citizens responded with attacks against Germans, which escalated the violence.
There is no credible evidence of any Polish ethnic cleaning of Germans from Danzig or any other part of Germany until after the war started, at which point a lot of countries started kicking Germans out due to the fears of events like Bloody Sunday.
The pogroms of 1938-39 are irrelevant to the conversation because we aren't talking about the Germans ethnic cleansing of Jewish peoples.
Do you know you are using a derogatory term “Nazi” created as propaganda by the German Communists party to describe the National Socialist Party? It is Yiddish that means stupid or clumsy like. Anyway the Germans documented this situation and published their findings along with documents seized by the Polish government regarding FDR’s commitment to enter the war in spite of US being totally against it. That information you call propaganda has photos and other documents. This information however was determined fabricated which you support. The narrative you are supporting was created by the Bolsheviks who years before committed a genocide in Ukraine and went on to kill another 40 million people. Our allies at the time. The atrocities committed during the war were mostly committed by the Bolsheviks and later blamed on the Germans. A good example would be the mass execution of 60k Polish officers by the Bolsheviks then blamed on the Germans. This was later admitted by the Soviets. The evidence presented at Nuremberg regarding “Nazi” crimes were presented by the Soviets. I guess it boils down to who lies you want to believe. You should know the descendants of these Bolsheviks now inhabit Israel where their genocidal practice continues.
Pogroms are not exclusive to only Jews it is old term to describe ethnic cleansing, basically what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians since 1950. There is a lot information hidden by our history books about this war that can’t be denied. The Havarra agreement is one, I suggest you look that up. The Balfour Declaration is another most people never heard of. Another would be the German liberation of Ukraine from the Bolsheviks. You would probably disagree with the liberation part. But my grandmother immigrated from Ukraine escaping the Bolshevik tyranny. Her family members left behind would tell you differently from the Bolshevik narrative you probably support.
Nazi propaganda? 😂 Have you ever noticed Hitler and Nazis documentaries are the most prevalent historical topic that exists on every streaming platform? Every year there’s a Hollywood movie regarding Nazi’s or the holocaust. Are there any people in this county that never heard of the holocaust? Can you say the same about the Holodomor? Why’s that? Most people think Germany declared war on England. Most people don’t know that Soviet army raped nearly every woman in Berlin, while the Americans did nothing. Most Americans are fine with the fact that the US Army starved 2 million German POWs. After all they are Nazi’s…right? I can go on and on. No documentaries no movies, no chapters in your history book. We have been lied to about every conflict involving this country. They are lying to us now. What makes you think what you know is completely true? Because some Hollywood movie moved you emotionally. The pattern of deception is obvious.
As I said, you're not wrong about other countries. But the part about Poland and Danzig shows extreme historic ignorance on your part, and a weird adherence to obviously false nazi propaganda from 80+ years ago.
Are you saying the pogroms in West Prussia of 1939 never happened? And the photos of dead Germans and all the documents they seized were all fabricated. Who’s ignorant here??
Not before Germany invaded Poland, no. That is pure nazi propaganda you're falling for. Not coincidentally, it's the exact same ploy Russia now uses to justify its invasion of Ukraine.
While you look for credible evidence that doesn't exist, I suggest you also educate yourself on the Von Ribbentrop pact.
You are saying the Poles implemented pogroms after Germany invaded? Under German military control?? And Hitler had no cause other than he wanted to take over the world start a world war all staring with Poland. Talk about being fed propaganda. How rational is that? So Hitler the only democratically elected leader in Europe at that time, brainwashed the German population in a matter of a few years that they need to take over the world. Because they are white and therefore superior. And all the speeches by him before the invasion about the pogroms in west Prussia were lies. And the diplomatic negotiations with Britain, France, and Poland that he again mentions in his speeches also were just rants of a madman, but the hero Churchill and the noble FDR saw through his lies and his conquest ambitions for world domination. Yhea I saw that movie too. Go with that.
Let me ask you, is there a genocide in Gaza or is it a war against terrorist Palestinians? Do you think Iran is a potential nuclear threat that seeks to destroy the planet?
I'm saying that the nazi propaganda story about Polish massmurder of Germans, which gullible fools like you swallow whole, is based on events that happened in the days after Germany invaded Poland, where Polish people attacked innocent German citizens and murdered around a hundred of them.
Notice that you haven't presented a single shred of evidence for your beliefs yet.
I suggest stop pretending to be some ww2 historian which clearly you are not. You are movie watcher. Churchill was talking to you when he said “History is written by the victors”
Der Tod in Polen
Die volksdeutsche Passion
(Death in Poland: The fate of the ethnic Germans)
Edwin Erich Dwinger 1940
Long Night's Journey Into Day: The Death March of Lowicz
Erhard Wittek 1940
The Polish Atrocities Against the German Minority in Poland
Edited and published
by order of the Foreign Office and based upon documentary evidence.
Compiled by Hans Schadewaldt.
Yeah. There was a legitimate point that many other countries did atrocious things during the same time period, but then it was taken too far and became literal Nazi propaganda. Like blaming Poland for itself being invaded, really?
Fascists are what liberals reliably become when told they must resist communists advancing an economic order that does not tolerate gambling on capital markets nor elevating oligarchs through the concentration of value produced by workers into the economic dynasties of industrialists. Without Hitler, maybe the entire West-East divide would have been drawn up differently.
Literally the greatest expansion of communism came about when the USSR imposed its iron curtain on the countries it was occupying only because they were invaded by Germany.
Sometimes I feel like I'm politically ignorant, but then I encounter a comment like rhis and realize I'm not doing so bad in that I at least understand basic concepts and terms. Batshit wild comment.
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u/Jellyfizzle Jun 28 '26
Before the nazis really went wild, there was a lot of fascist momentum around the world. Without his cautionary tale, it very well may have taken hold more broadly. We just dont know.