I'm following this federal civil trial in VA closely because I see it as a bellwether for the future of fascism in the USA. The defendants are the neo-Nazi organizers of the riot that killed Heather Heyer and maimed and injured dozens more, most of whom have so far escaped federal criminal law because the justice department was led by Trump appointees at the time. If they lose, they'll be bankrupted and in hock for a long long time, if not for life, and the deterrence effect will be salubrious.
But it's worth a minute to explore again just why fascism is so evil. Let's study why the allies fought WW2 for a minute. Bear with me. I'm an academic after all. History is one of my things. And after all, the British Empire was still in being at the time, a racist and oppressive institution by definition. Stalin had just gotten away with the Ukrainian Holodomor and went on to purge his entire officer corps. And the US lynched and other wise murdered and oppressed Black and Hispanic and Native people with regularity and enforced Jim Crow. None of the allies had clean hands when it came to oppression and murder.
But we fought German fascism. Why? Some kind of peace could probably have been made in the early 1940s. The answer is because it was evil, and that Roosevelt and Churchill knew that evil would spread eventually, coming back again to attack the allies because evil can't be trusted.
How evil? The Hitler regime imprisoned and murdered all it's enemies, not only the millions of Jewish people and communists we usually hear about. It also killed innocent people and children just because they had birth defects or mental illness. The deaths were not easy ones either. Can you imagine a gas van full of terrified children, suffocating with the exhaust from the engine? They punished and even executed kids for reading the wrong books and distributing pamphlets. They forced women, including "Aryan" German women, to have sex with soldiers and in some cases to bear their children, sometimes multiple children. And they enslaved most of Europe, forcing the conquered people of Europe to work for them for no pay and meager food.
If you are one of my former students and you still didn't get the message I tried to teach you, over and over over, that oppression and slavery and murder are wrong, and you're still fondling your guns, dreaming of the new civil war, having wet dreams about shooting libs, just understand that unleashing forces as evil as this means they will some day come for the people you love and even for you, just as they came for our people during WW2. Oh, yes, one last thing I couldn't say when I was employed to be your teacher: Just fucking grow up. You may not like the Dems because you're afraid of losing your sexy guns, but that's no excuse for supporting racists and calling for violence in the streets. It's not rocket science. Go out and find a decent politician who will support the second amendment without also supporting fascism and civil war.
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