© Trump image from Reuters
Sixty million people died in World War II, but fascism won. It didn't win on the battlefield. It didn't win right away. It won because the same fears, the same greed, the same hatred that fueled its growth in the first part of the twentieth century never went away. The symbols of fascism became anathema, but the causes ... went deep. And gradually, slowly, one step at a time, all those vices became first tolerated, then treated as virtues, and then as the only acceptable view.
Godwin's Law—the contention that any argument will eventually come round to warnings about Hitler—is twenty-five years old, but for much longer than that, we've been taught that the use of that... f-word, is not to be taken seriously. Sure, every government program, new or old, is open to accusations of communism and warnings of a slippery slope toward some failed dictatorship. That's expected. But to even acknowledge our long, stumbling lurch to the right; the building force of corporate power; the relentless need for war; a police whose power of enforcement is divorced from law; a preening nationalism that rewards the full rights of citizenship only to those who fit an ever-narrower mold... You can't call it fascism. People will only laugh.
Comment: Americans must not feel so safe to live there without guns. Who can blame them?