There will never, ever be another Adolf Hitler.
History doesn't repeat itself. Human behavior patterns repeat themselves, because humans are deeply conditioned animals, but history doesn't repeat itself. Anyone who says it does is confused about how time works.
Consumers of mainstream culture have been trained to watch out for the next Hitler the way evangelical Christians are trained to watch for the second coming of Jesus. References to Hitler are ubiquitous in movies, television, literature, and of course in political discourse, and understandably so; he is the clearest, purest example of evil in living memory. A genocidal dictator leading humanity into world war with the explicit agenda of totalitarian global domination is indeed as stark an example of an evil human being as you could possibly imagine, and serves as a philosophically unassailable "NOT THIS WAY" sign for our species. The saturation of our culture with that sign is why Godwin's law ("As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Hitler approaches 1") is a thing; any time you want to tell a stranger that their ideas could lead in an undesirable direction, it becomes increasingly tempting to throw up the "NOT THIS WAY" symbol that Adolf Hitler has come to represent.
But history doesn't repeat itself. No one will ever show up acting like the thing we've all been taught all our lives to never, ever act like and saying the things we've all been taught to never, ever say and be elevated by the masses the way Hitler was. It will not happen. The next enemy of humanity would have the good sense to present as completely different from the way Adolf Hitler presented in order to seize power, and, since we've all been trained to bristle at anything resembling him, would actually do well to present as his diametric opposite.
If you are watching out for the next powerful enemy of humanity who presents the way Adolf Hitler presented, you will be waiting the rest of your life. And you will have missed the fact that we already let the next enemy of humanity in through the front door.
Despite all the warnings that we were given in the lead-up to the 2016 election about the Nazi dystopian future America would quickly find itself in should Queen Hillary fail to be properly coronated, what we have actually seen since Trump's election is a foreign policy that is in practice almost indistinguishable from that of his globalist predecessors, and a domestic policy which sees George W Bush campaigning for Trump's virulently pro-establishment Supreme Court nominee. When you strip away the blind, fawning hero worship of his supporters and the shrieking, garment-rending hysteria of his opponents, instead examining the actual behavior of this administration, the sitting president looks an awful lot like a fairly conventional Republican scumbag with about as many differences from Obama as Obama had from Bush.
And, to be clear, that is a bad thing. Both Trump supporters and Trump haters get upset whenever I say that this president is not significantly different from his predecessors in any meaningful way outside of rhetoric and narrative, Trump supporters because they believe he is a populist hero and Democrats because I'm disputing the narrative that he's Literally Hitler. But I don't say this because I like upsetting everyone, I say it because it's extremely important to be absolutely clear about what is happening here if we ever want to turn things around for the fate of our species. Trump's election did not represent the arrival of a new Hitler-like monster, the monster was already here. The call is coming from inside the house.
Trump, like all US presidents, is entirely beholden to an alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies which comprises the "steady state" and ensures the continuation of policies and agendas throughout the coming and going of America's official elected government. This alliance spans far outside America's borders to any government, agency, oligarch or faction it can absorb into its blob, and the agendas and policies it protects and advances are not geared toward the interests of any nation or its people. It is an alliance of the powerful geared exclusively toward amassing more power for the powerful.
While so-called antifascists run around punching impotent racists to prevent the rise of fascism, this extremely powerful alliance of plutocrats and secretive government agencies is advancing totalitarian oppression and global domination on a scale Mussolini only dreamed of. While Democrats scream "Orange Hitler" at the top of their lungs at a passing deep state lackey, Hitler's sitting in the driver's seat dressed in drag.
The monster who looks like a monster is always far less dangerous than the monster who looks like a nice guy. If this isn't obvious to you then you simply haven't lived enough. There is an ecocidal, omnicidal Orwellian power establishment which is driving our species toward extinction via climate chaos or nuclear holocaust, which will lock us down into a pasteurized, homogenized mind control dystopia of servitude even if we manage to survive those threats. While everyone's flailing their weapons around attacking anything that looks like it might maybe be the next Hitler, these bastards are tightening the noose further and further every day. Wake up.
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Someone once said, "while history may not repeat, it sure does rhyme".
Stalin and Mao, with 150 million deaths on their hands, (the 2 other socialist regimes, besides Hitlers), would have something to say about that...
You need to understand your history a little more. Hitler was the fall guy for the UN to come into existence. (ww1, league of nations, anyone?)
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"The monster who looks like a monster is always far less dangerous than the monster who looks like a nice guy. If this isn’t obvious to you then you simply haven’t lived enough. There is an ecocidal, omnicidal Orwellian power establishment which is driving our species toward extinction via climate chaos or nuclear holocaust, which will lock us down into a pasteurized, homogenized mind control dystopia of servitude even if we manage to survive those threats. While everyone’s flailing their weapons around attacking anything that looks like it might maybe be the next Hitler, these bastards are tightening the noose further and further every day. Wake up."
I just love the way you put it, you have such an amazing talent for piercing the veil of comfortable illusions we allow ourselves to wallow in. Scarey that so many people don't want to see the mind control dystopia of narrative control. Scarey that it is so easy to hide in addictions of every variety. That said I will leave this toy and get out and plan my next action for Unity4J. Thanks Caitlin.
There were plenty of people making fun of Hitler; however, it didn't stop either clown from sending people into camps. Trump & his brown-shirts are sending people into "private prisons" in the desert.
While I generally agree with your point, you know, never say never. There's plenty of people around the world who'd love to place a new Hitler in power in their neck of the woods. And while neoliberalism is indeed destroying the human condition and the biosphere, it's a different monster than Hitler.