As we say in the former Soviet Union – Hitler kaput.
I don’t believe it’s grammatically correct, but I do believe it gets the point across.
On this day, let us raise a toast to a quick and dishonourable end of your bullshit ideology and all of its wormy bastard spawns in all corners of the good earth: from St. Petersburg to Iowa and beyond.
Forever and ever.
Amen.
Natalia A. 
hear, hear!
I’m not one of those people who gets up in the morning and starts comparing Bush to Hitler, but I do feel like America and to a lesser extent Europe are on a slippery slope that at times looks disturbingly like classical early 20th century Fascism. It’s not National Socialism per se, and I don’t think they’re going to start putting the Jews in camps tomorrow, but I do think that the unabashed ignorance, imperial thinking, jingoism, and willingness to hand rights over to these leaders, and the rise of the far right here and abroad, could lead us in a similar direction very quickly. I’m glad that Naziism was put down, and I’m glad that actual neo-Nazis are a discredited movement with little actual voice (though of course we shouldn’t forget that as recently as the late 80s the BNP and NF were strong forces in British politics, and that France and Holland have viable neo-fascist parties). But to me, the rise of Fascism is still a possibility, and that it’s not going to be called Fascism or have the precise same set of scapegoats won’t change that. In Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls, Robert Jordan is asked by a Spaniard if there are many Fascists in America, and responds ‘There are many who do not know they are fascists but will find it out when the time comes.’ I think this is accurate now as well as then; while I’m sure the people nodding along to Sean Hannity on their drive to work don’t think of themselves as Fascists, there’s precious little to distinguish them from the same. Anyway, I’m gonna go down to the corner store and grab a beer and join you in your toast. Antifascista siempre!
on a semi-related note, happy Pesach!
In response to ParallelSidewalk’s comments on America and Europe being on a “slippery slope” to fascism, I would like quickly to add one comment and reading reference.
My comment is that, as long as developing nations and cultures, which formerly had a strong national and cultural identity, expect their unique identity to be devalued or even lost through over-rapid modernization and globalization, fascism will always find a target audience in them.
With that in mind, the first reading reference is to the biography of Adolf Hitler (entitled “Hitler” and first published in 1973, with at least one revised edition) by the late conservative German historian Joachim C. Fest (died in 2006). I thought I had a copy of Fest’s biography of Hitler but I cannot locate it. I will try to recall some of it from memory. Fest’s biography includes not only a study of the life and psychology of Hitler but also a “historical/political psychology” of the German people before and after the First World War.
Fest makes the point that 20th-century fascism appeals above all to a sense of personal and national inadequacy, using Germany as his example. In Germany, the Nazis appealed to the centuries-old German political psychology of national inadequacy and intense insecurity, starting in 1919 at Germany’s most vulnerable point after defeat in the First World War.
Fest also makes the point that, in democratic republics, fascism appeals to populations or social groups who already feel “politically inadequate,” i.e., not only unjustly marginalized, but culturally unequal to the process of gaining power in a modern democracy. Such groups have frequently been rendered apolitical or politically juvenile by centuries of authoritarian government. Such a group was German conservatives in 1919, who were uniquely tolerant of fascist promotion of authoritarian politics from 1919 straight through to 1945.
Fest also makes the point about the over-rapid modernization of Germany and some German gentiles’ nostalgia for a “rural,” Christian Germany, presumably especially in Bavaria and the Rhineland which were strongly Catholic, and how such German gentiles felt especially unequal to the rapid changes that were overtaking both the German economy and German culture both before and after World War I.
That’s true enough about some German gentiles at that time, but I think it derives particularly from the centuries-old German psychology of inadequacy and insecurity, not only military/political inadequacy, but also cultural inadequacy, i.e., an insecure identity as “Germans.” Only after 1815 did the political center of German-speaking peoples move from Catholic Vienna to Protestant Berlin, and “Germany” itself as a unified political entity was born only in 1871. Up to that point, German-speaking peoples had had only sectarian Christian (Catholic vs. Protestant) and linguistic (German language) identities. Note the role of Christianity in forming part of the German identity for German gentiles. Until after 1945, a Protestant or Catholic cultural badge was important to German gentiles (the Reformation started in Germany, and the atrocious Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 was fought between self-identified Catholic and Protestant powers). The extensive presence and conspicuous success of German Jews challenged that part of German gentiles’ self-identity. To German gentiles who already felt unequal to rapid modernization, German Jews represented modernity itself since Jewish culture was perceived as cosmopolitan rather than uniquely German (which was perceived as Christian), and modernity itself was perceived as cosmopolitan, i.e., rootless (compare the impact of globalization today).
Although, compared to Austria and Poland, German anti-Semitism was rather lukewarm, in times of intense national crisis which for Germans was also a crisis of identity (as after World War I), it was not hard to target German Jews as threats to “Germany.” Especially since, after 1917, Bolshevism in Russia was in the process of destroying Russian Christian culture, and many better-known Bolsheviks happened to be Jewish (like the violent German Bolshevik Rosa Luxemburg), it was not difficult to conflate Bolshevism and Jewish identity. For insecure German gentiles after World War I, that conflation was probably confirmed in the German civil wars of 1919-1923 and again in the Great Depression which some gentiles in Germany (and in America) believed was caused by “Jewish” international finance.
The parallel conditions for the U.S. in 2008, I think, exist for certain marginal whites in the Deep South and Appalachia in the U.S., in former Soviet bloc countries, and also in Muslim countries from Morocco to Pakistan.
This post has been over-long, but I hope it makes some sense. I just wanted to point out that fascism will always be a latent threat as long as significant social groups fear that their unique identity is on the verge of being radically devalued or even destroyed by “outside influences” or powers. Such social groups often have an uncertain identity to begin with, or at least one that is anchored less in common mental constructs (which could be cemented through widespread literacy) than in a certain kind of physical, social, and linguistic environment. Since over-rapid modernization or national catastrophes can rapidly alter or even eliminate external environments (social relations, physical environments, linguistic traditions), social groups whose identity relies on such external environments will be targeted by fascists. And to my mind, that’s why fascism unfortunately will not go away in the near future.
I apologize both for the over-long post and for the academic language which I know puts people to sleep. Right now that’s the only way I can express myself. I hope this post has been useful in some way, and thanks for putting up with it.
Correction to the above post, 9th paragraph, 1st line:
The opening phrase, “The parallel conditions FOR THE U.S. in 2008 …”
should read:
“The parallel conditions in 2008 …”
i.e., delete “for the U.S.”
Ironically (?) the beer I got was St. Pauli Girl.
Is that any good? I like Weissbier myself.
It’s a good, solid lager. I’m happy with it. I also love St. Pauli FC, but that’s neither here nor there.