Fascism A Reality of un-Reality

Fascism is complex yet simple. It is the worst political, social and economic state of mind in human behavior. It is a banality of evil.

It used to be studied extensively in American colleges because of the horrors of WWII; post WWII colleges contained veterans on the G.I. Bill who had actually SEEN the Concentration Camps…”Never again” was a rallying cry of a humanity who were shocked and horrified by what they found in Europe when they looked into those barbed wired edifices.

I actually listened to Veterans describe in vivid detail what they found in Poland, Austria and Germany. Nobody disputed their eye witness acccounts.

My freshman year at Stanford we had a course called Western Civ…it was an overall history, not very deep, of Western White Civilization: some call it a Classical Education.

I was at a disadvantage, because at my high school we had World History and that was it..what really was Western Civ but VERY superficial.

I was fighting to absorb all the information that “Preppies” had absorbed in their prep school white privilege schools.

Later, I took African History and other multi-cultural courses, but in the late 1960s they were few and far between. Ethnocentrism was the standard at Stanford then…white European descendants who learned racism and prejudice very early on ther privileged lives, yet called themselves “liberal educated”…not political but historical.

The “liberal education” model was then seen as a check against the fascist horrors of the twentieth centaur years. Nobody bothered to explain to us that “liberal education” models were evident in ALL of the fascist regimes of WWII and all failed to contain the evil of fascism.

A classical education, seeped in democracy, was no guarantee, as it is today, against a country falling into fascism.

And, as generations changed, the holocaust for example began to be attacked as a hoax, as fake news.

What this head in the sand approach missed was the entire multi cultural aspect of human beings. What they missed was the genocide and ultimate total war cultural behavior that the Vietman “experience” showed to be futile plus genocidal.

Baby boomers, whose lives were on the line, revolted against American fascism applied to a colonial war, resulting in a disaster for America. Suddenly the baby boomers were sitting in, protesting, burning down ROTC Buildings (that happened at the pinnacle of white privilege college, Stanford University). They even changed their mascot!

White privilege preppies found every way imaginable to dodge the draft. Families were torn apart, pitting parents against their children, pro Vietnam and anti Vietnam ripped families into pieces that still have not reconciled.

I resented it, not for my background (I didn’t know I have Native American ancestors at the time, I still was poor white by Stanford standards). I resented being dissed all the time because I was a “public school graduate”.

I was competing scholastically and athletically as well, against VERY privileged white children, who made fun of me because I was a public schooler…

My freshman room mate in our first conversation bragged that “I am going to kicked out of here”, because college interrupted his jet setter life style; it took him a year to get kicked out because his father was a big donor to Stanford. Many of my friends were “legacy” children, getting admission to Stanford for the money their affluence bought them.

Stanford by the way is much more dependent on diversity and admission, which is very difficult, is more merit based today than it was in 1965.

I remember thinking that Plato was “play dough” for example. I was laughed at a lot because I was not white privileged. I was called retarded because my SAT score was not 1500.

I almost left Stanford because of it. Some of my lower middle class peers did leave.

Later I took a class in the Weimar Republic from a Pulitzer prize winner, and that began my life time journey against fascism.

After the War, “The War” baby boomers were engulfed in anti-fascist movies, both documentary and “entertainment”…

The G.I.was depicted as saving humanity from the brutality of fascism. There was no doubt, no conspiracy theory, that what the Axis was doing was wrong, to the point of bombing them into an Atomic mist!

The Nazis were always the bad guys…Many teachers used films that were propaganda films against fascism during the war, to defend the United States. The Holocaust was shown to us, in black and white filmed horror, without censure….I mean piles of bodies, men women and children being bulldozered into open mass graves. “Schlinder’s List” won many awards showing the truth about concentration camps; places of fascist induced horror.

I will note that our children did not view those same old propaganda movies. I remember that “Schindlers List” so upset my kids that they had to leave during the “horrible scenes”.

Their response was “Daddy, that really didn’t happen right”? I had to explain that yes it very much did happen!

Baby boomers had already seen the gruesome films, the next generation were neophytes. And the next generation listened to conspiracy theories that Nazis ALWAYS used to hide their crimes. Concentration camp existed as Germany’s little secret…6.5 milllion were murdered by this secret…

It took Eisenhower to make personal visits to death camps, DURING the war, to deny conspiracy theories even then, many anti-semites did not believe the films taken at the death camps….Remember Hitler copied death camps from Indian Reservations and relocations of entire populations from the “Trail of Tears” ; BOTH HISTORICAL FACTS!

Most Nazis were not prosecuted, but simply melted into the German population in post “Cold War” Europe. Many fled to Argentina, but returned to Germany when they realized only a handful were ever punished. AND ONLY A HANDFUL WERE EVER PUNISHED.

Mass murderers were released back into German populations. Military leaders who had murdered thousands of Russians were returned to society because of the Cold War, leading a divided Germany to rebuild.

The highways, railroads; etc., in Germany are now the best in the world because of the Marshall Plan, that built Germany back so it would not join the Communists. In short, Nazi criminals mostly walked.

One place they didn’t walk was Russia. Many Nazi ringleaders spent decades in Russian prisons.

Why was that…Well, look at the death rates and the damage done to civilian targets…Russia was devastated by the war, and genocide was practiced on Russians, especially Russian Jews by German SS killing squads. If a Russian soldier was captured they were usually shot.

Russian treatment of Prisoners of War was reactive and pay back for what Germany did.

America did not suffer ANY civilian casualties save Pearl Harbor…Russia had its entire country destroyed.

Only Russia kept Nazi criminals in jail for years, the rest of the world “moved on.” I mean mass murderers were never even even changed with anything at lower leadership levels…Those who were masterminds at the higher committed suicide.

The world really never got justice for what Germany, Italy and Japan did. What the world did get was a Red Scare in the 1950s and 1960s that declared Russian and China as our enemies.

The Defense Industries and other fascist based organizations used the Commie Threat to build enormous profits, building war machines on the scale of WWII that were not needed..

It took Russian decades to build back it cities…America it took zero time at all…no American cities were even touched by WWII…in Russia is was total!

Then, “The Diary of Anne Frank” broke our collective hearts.

But Deniers became more prevalent as time wore on…After all, the truth was so horrible that people could not believe it. Today many people do not believe the Holocaust happened, just like slavery was “not that bad” or Native American genocide was attributed to viruses.

“Never Again” was the rallying cry when studying the Holocaust. It didn’t really happen was the response; “It is all a hoax”.

But soon we had two generations who lost contact with the historical horror. Today, more people world wide call the Holocaust a hoax than truth.

Conspiracy theories, developed by former Nazis, claimed that the Holocaust was a “hoax”..that it was all propaganda. That is exactly what Nazis said during the war…many Americans had no idea about what was going on in Europe to Jews. Those who DID know it hid it.

Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill all knew it (Stalin from personal experience because as a fascist HE had killed millions BEFORE the war in his own country)…He was the forerunner of a plutocracy that has Russian in its grip as i write this.

But, America still had large KKK populations and civil rights were against the law in American…it wasn’t until after WWII that mixed race marriages were declared legal in America. In short, anti-Semitic politics worked hard to call concentration camps a hoax, since the KKK and other fascist groups were very active in the United States of America.

Racism aimed at people of color was the main sociological and political atmosphere even after a war had been won to destroy fascism.

THAT is the main reason why the United States hesitated when world wide social and racial justice was brought up after WWII.

America was the last nation on earth to finally adopt WWII reactive social and political justice..Germany France and England and Italy all adopted anti-fascist laws to make sure that “it never happens again”. Of late, these same countries are leaning toward an alarming degree of fascism!

I was a product of a Mixed marriage in 1944….my parents eloped so they could lie about their race because their marriage was technically against the law.

This anti justice reality existed even when the films of the camps in their killing efficiency were shown in those “old black and white documentaries”..the films did not lie!

The films did not lie! Trump lied…and Americas were a “It can’t happen here because of our “Loyalty to Democracy” while Jim Crowe ran roughshod in the country. In short, America lived a lie!

The rise of Trump, who openly demonstrated fascist behavior, happened because people in America forgot history and rewrote history to hid their sins.

They forgot about the Camps, in a blizzard of conspiracy theories, in some cases directly attacking Jewish eye witness account of the holocaust.

People began denying history…and as then as they say, “Were doomed to repeat it”.

So we have now have generations of non believers in the Holocaust, in chattel Slavery being “immigration”, in the Exclusion Acts as a hoax and finally that the Native Americans tragedy was mostly attributable to “viruses and alcohol….

To be anti racist was to be mean to your friends, of using “kool aid”….

Right, virus as in a gunshot to the head! Right, the films were doctored…

Wrong…..Just like the Atomic Bomb was not dropped on Japan.

The genocide of Native Americans is still left out of high school history…It was disease we are taught, disregarding documented orders by generals at the time to take buffalo robes and seep them in small pox virus then give them to Naive American women and children, left to die.

The pandemic right now is the same thing….medical assistance to people of color is way less than to whites. Look a the death rates.

It is the same thing, a genocide. South Dakota’s governor to date will not enforce mask rules, knowing full well that crowded living conditions at ghettos called Reservations, kills Native Americans at a large rate.

All based on racism, fascism and prejudice. A modern genocide by pandemic.

And a strategy of cover up, history denied by conspiracy theories that always depict the white culture as superior and “I am not a racist”, or “I am not a fascist” as the red hatted haters took over the Congress threatening to kill the Vice President and the Speaker of the House.

They believe to the point of committing treason that the white supremacy horrors of the past did not happen, that Trump did not use a legitimate election, that there was no such place as concentration camps.

Denial is a sport in America….

And even this was not enough to convince people that our country is endangered by fascism. Denial trumps facts…hence all of it is a “hoax”.

To teach this is considered “divisive” or “not true”…Trump lived on that contradiction.

Problem is 6.5 deaths, millions of murders (“California the Murder State”) cry out for justice.