A Geek History of Time - Episode 332 - The Antifa Is Coming From Inside the House Damian Reads an Army Pamphlet from March 1945 Part I

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

We were saying that we were going to get into the movies. Yeah, and I'm only going to get into a few of them, because there were way too goddamn many for me to really be interested in telling you this clone version or this clone version in the early studio system. It's a good metric to know in a story art, where should I be? Or there's beast, I should step over here. Yeah. At some point, at some point, I'm going to have to sit down with you, like, and force you, like, pump you full of coffee and be like, no, okay, look.

And are swiftly and brutally put down by the minute men who use bayonets to get their point across. Well done there. I'm good, Damien. And I'm also glad that I got your name right this time. I apologize for that one TikTok video. Men of this generation wound up serving a whole lot of them as a percentage of people. population because of the war, because of a whole lot of other stuff. Oh, yeah.

And actually, in his case, it was pre-war, but, but, you know. I was joking. Did he seriously join the American Navy? He did. Fucking. This is a Geek History of Time, where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. a world history teacher at the middle school level here in Northern California. And all year this year, my fifth period class has been the biggest pain in my neck.

Biggest source of gray hair. I just have a combination of personalities in that room that I'm constantly playing whack-a-mole. And back at the beginning of this past week, I just decided, you know what? I'm not going to try to clamp down on them anymore. I'm going to match their energy I'm just going to say you know what I'm going to give them the work and if they're socializing chit-chat and goofing

off whatever I'm going to let them do it up to the point that I hear them saying anything inappropriate or I see you know behaviors that are unacceptable kind of stuff otherwise my blood pressure can't handle you know trying to climb down on them anymore

so I'm just going to match their energy and it worked fine that actually worked out fairly well and then on Friday I did the same thing gave him a new assignment had him doing that

and I'm telling him you know a few times having to tell a few people to get back to work or whatever and one of my students we'll call him Mikey not his real name

obviously but Mikey this is a seventh grader by the way so Mikey has been kind of going back and forth with me and and he's he's he's well you'll you'll get it in a moment so i i look up and i see that he's uh stretching his neck and he's he's doing doing this thing where he's you know pushing pushing on his chin and pulling on the back of his neck or put pulling on the back of his head to like you know stretch stretch his neck out and i watch him doing this and as he's going out to the to the extent of his

of his stretch range i hear a pop that is loud enough for me to hear over all the conversation that's going on in the room and he freezes and I just hear him say ow

and I don't know why that was what did it but that's what finally broke me and I had to bring a hand up to my mouth you know to like hide the fact that I was that I was starting to smirk and and and the more of course the more you try not to break the harder it is not to break so then I have to take a second hand up to cover my mouth

and I put my head down and I'm sitting at my lecture at the front of the room and I'm putting my head down and and I can't stop my shoulders from moving because I am at this point laughing like if if I stop trying to control I'm going to be laughing my ass off and and one of the other kids in the class goes oh my god he's laughing we've never seen him laugh before and they're all and like the whole class looks up there's what and then and then one of them another different kid not mikey but a different kid who's been an annoyance to me off and on all year goes did anybody get it on video and i immediately looked up and went if any of you got it on video i'm confiscating all your phones right now

Nobody better have gotten it on video. And, and yeah, I, I was, I had a hard time collecting myself after that. I actually told Mikey, I said, you understand for the rest of my life, anytime I think of you, this is the moment I'm going to think of. Because that's just so you. Like, this is the kid that at the beginning of the year, if anybody had told me, just so you know, one of your students is going to break his own neck trying to stretch in your room. like after day three it would have been it's going to be Mikey isn't it like it's going to be him

so so yeah that was that was that was that was the catharsis moment i had in my classroom this week how about you what have you got going on sir well i'm i'm damien harmony i am a u.s history teacher here at the high school level um and uh so we are dating our podcast every every so often a bit when we talk about what's going on in our classrooms. Yeah. Because we tend to record about one to two months ahead of time. And so we may well be into the full throes of summer by the time people hear this. Oh yeah. God knows what the world's going to look like at that point. But as of this recording, I also, I think your experience as a teacher is universal, not just at the middle school level, unfortunately, where we contained the pits of health to middle school

pre-pandemic now just there there's tentacles everywhere yeah um fires are in brimstone yeah sulfur it's bad yeah um and i have come to the same kind of thing of like hey i'm going to let you uh shoot yourself in the foot i'm going to show you exactly how things should be done you have limited skills i will give you all the tools to get those skills i will give you all the time in class for those school skills, et cetera, and if you do things when I say how I say and what I say, you're going to do fine and you're going to learn cool shit. If you don't, you're going to spend a lot of energy spinning your wheels and then when you catch on that, oh, I should have been doing this, you will be behind in terms of your developing skills. But, you know, anytime you loop in,

you'll be able to move forward. You know, I'm a big believer of like, you have to nowadays, you have to make failure a possibility, but not an inevitability all the way up to the end. Right, right. Structured things that way, right? Yeah. It just means, though, that by the time of the end of your junior year, which is what I teach, if you just start being like,

oh, maybe I should do it the way he taught me, that's cool. You're going to be entry level junior level, which really is entry level sixth grader. um by the time you go to a senior uh senior level class but fine that's natural consequence play stupid games get stupid prizes fuck around find out whatever you want to say yeah and again same kind of things long as like you don't slip into misogyny hitting each other racism etc etc right yeah yeah you do you boo um that has been soul sucking uh to watch Because I'm not going to get in a power struggle.

And I told the kids flat out. I'm like, look, I'm not going to stop you from sleeping. I'm not going to get a power struggle with you over your own grade. If you do not care, I cannot care for you. I actively don't look at your grades. I actively don't know what any of our grades are. If you want to know what your grade is, you should probably look it up. I always knew my grade in my classes.

You can do this. You have way more access than I used to. Yeah, it's way easier for you to know it than it was. So, you know, and you'll know exactly why. And I even taught them the cute little math trick of what's your grade right now. What's the percentage of the thing you just got back? Is that higher than your grade right now? It'll pull your grade up.

Is it lower than your grade right now? It'll pull your grade down. That's how that works. Yeah. Weighted stuff, et cetera, you know, you could see, you know, and what goes up higher and lower. But all that said, it is soul-sucking. It is like I'm watching kids just walk into the water and drown. like and it's like okay I you know you could bring a horse to water but you can't make it think right

yeah um I'm done putting sandbags over its neck like yeah you want to die of dehydration you can so I had to find something to make school joyful for me again yeah and I've always enjoyed mischief right years ago I found a website called inspire robot and uh between between shows we you can look at this and it basically prints up the most ridiculous fucking memes like yeah it'll be a picture of a cookie with a bite out of it and next to it'll say something like you can inflate a boy but then it's your fault it's like what the fuck does that mean like it's just yeah absolutely yeah uh so the only ethical use of ai really yeah yeah tell me tell me you're a fan of ubu roy without telling me you're a fan of ubu roy exactly right so i used to print those out and put them in

people's boxes in their mailboxes. And it was a different person every day that I would put it in, but I would like print out 10. And for like a week and a half, I would just, or like two weeks, I would just take 10 into the mail room and just put them in different boxes. But there'd be one person that I'd put, put in their box every day. And I would just pick that person at random too. Yeah. Nobody knew it was me. It was fun. I don't have the colored ink right now for my printers. So I'm not going to do that. So instead, I bought a box of little gnomes.

And I have just been walking around campus and putting them a little out of the way spots. And what I found was somebody else has been doing this with little plastic dinosaurs. So now I've put the gnomes next to the dinosaurs. And sometimes I will see a kid go up. They'll like notice it and then they'll take it, which is totally fine. Like I didn't put a tag on it saying do not remove. And so then I make sure I put another one there. and now there's like a growing army of gnomes on one of the flights of stairs in one of our buildings

i have friends who's um who who like the gnome is facing the student from their podium um i have like multiple gnomes staring each other down um there's there's noms fucking everywhere and i'm doing it again next week because that's brilliant that kind of mischief is fun yeah and you and you have to find a way to find your glimmer yes I am B.J. Honeycutt in so many ways. Yeah. Yeah. Not wrong. Yeah. All right. So that's dark and depressing, and I'm finding the little bits of hope in it.

Have you ever wondered if the first time around with our fight with fascism, if people knew what was going on at the time and knew how to identify it? um you mean do did i did i think there was anybody who understood what was going on yeah like people who were against fascism sought for what it was were able to drill down on what its core tenants were and were able to offer a way to fight it in real time or do you think people were just kind of on their heels the entire time on you know and until we beat them with with guns and tanks. Oh, oh, you're talking about like back in, back in the 40s. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I am not enough of a scholar of the time to give a definite answer. I find it hard to believe that there wasn't anybody, that there was not anybody who wasn't, or who there was not anybody who there was not anybody who was, you know, pointing out this is, this is bullshit. all of the you know this is this is a hollow man you know who do you think would have been pointing those kinds of things out like what occupation do you think they would have had oh uh well teachers university professors okay political scholars okay so writers okay um people of people generally speaking generally speaking people of letters um and you know students i mean i'm i'm aware of the existence of of the white rose right um but what about people not in germany like people who didn't have a front row seat to it would

you would you agree it's probably still those groups of people as well by and large yeah by and large i mean there there might have been i can i can i can imagine based on what i know about the culture of the time period that there were probably members of the labor movement in Europe and possibly in different places in the Commonwealth like I know that what about in America like here in the US yeah here in the US like again it's okay if you come up with the same group of people essentially like writers journalists shit like that that makes perfect sense aside from that obvious group we didn't have I can't like off the top of my head I can't think of anybody

just because what I know about our culture at the time like it always has It's kind of interesting to know that, like, our government led us in the fight against fascism, right? Like, like Roosevelt kind of had to lie to the people to get us to let us, you know? And he was making plans with European leaders, but that dude had hell of access, right? Like he... Yeah. Yeah. So would it surprise you to know that in March of 1945, the War Department actually put out a pamphlet that was specifically their...

to guide new recruits to the army, conscripted privates, called fascism. Really? Yeah. Okay, wait, 45? Yeah, March 24th, 1945. It's a restricted document. So that meant it was all internal. Yeah.

This is the War Department giving it to. So, you know, basic training isn't just go out, learn to shoot things, go out, learn to measure how a triangle works so you can do mortars march a bunch run a bunch rucksack it up get the blisters get used to you know things being really shitty here's what gas smells like um there were like actual instruction

given too oh yeah yeah yeah um I mean towards it being 45 toward the end of the war I suppose I can yeah I can see that being a thing but they literally printed these out and gave them to soldiers and made them read them like

there were your homework is Yes, you must read this. After we have taken you on a five mile ruck hike when you get home. Yeah. Okay. So I thought that was pretty cool. So I'm going to read it to you.

Okay. And I've annotated it too. Yay. Story time. Yeah, story time. All right. So I'm basically just going to read. I'm going to read a government document made by the War Department, which would later become the Department of Defense.

in the pedd yeah yeah um but made by them about fascism in 1945 all right and i'm just going to read from it and then i will stop and annotate it as we go because there will be references that you and i might be passingly familiar but i think it would really help everyone listening right right here you know like the history behind it so so an interpretation of the text i would say an annotation i'm going to read the text and then uh You know, like the word, um, uh, my Deneck, uh, is, is one that popped up. And so I'll tell people about my Deneck, you know, that kind of thing. Cool, cool.

So, uh, restricted, uh, three, war department, Washington 25, D.C. 24th, March, 1945. Oh, okay. Hey, hold on, 24th March. That's 30 years to the day before I was born. Oh, wow. Pretty cool. All right.

Fuck you. But anyway. Yeah. So, fascism with an exclamation point. Note for this week's discussion. Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze, nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism in order to combat it. Points to stress are, one, fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of,

economic crisis. Two, fascism inevitably leads to war. Three, it can come to any country. Four, we can best combat it by making our democracy work. You are away from home, separated from your families, no longer a civilian, no longer at a civilian job or at a school. And many of you are risking your very lives because of a thing called fascism. Our country was attacked by the fascist aggressor, Japan. The, quote, Sons of Heaven, end quote, were promptly joined by their fascist partners of Germany and Italy. Fascism is a word that's been used a great deal in these

last few years. We've come across it in our newspapers. We hear it in our newsreels. It comes up in our bull sessions. We've heard about the cruelties of fascism, its terror, its conquest of country after country. We've heard of its concentration camps, like Dachau and Germany and its torture chambers, Like Maidenk in Poland, we heard of its planned mass murder of whole peoples, which scholars call genocide. Okay. So, Dachau, this is me breaking in now.

Dachau was one of the first and longest running concentration camps. It was started in March of 1933, just outside of Munich, which was the stronghold of the Nazis from the get-go. Remember, Hitler came to power in January 30th, 1933. The Reichstag fire was February 27, 1933. The Enabling Acts passed on March 23, 1933. Dachau was opened on March 22nd of 1933. Holy cow. It was supposed to intern political opponents such as communists and social Democrats,

but it also came to include, among others, POWs, homosexuals, homosexuals, German Jews, Catholic and Protestant clergy who didn't tow the line. Jehovah's Witnesses, people with disabilities, and the Romani. They did many of their atmospheric, well, their atmospheric medical experiments on prisoners there, which they worked them to death, they starved them, they allowed typhus to sweep through multiple times, and when it first opened, the press statement went as follows. Quote, on Wednesday, the first concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau

with an accommodation for 5,000 people. All communists, and where necessary, Reichs banner, and Social Democratic functionaries, and danger state security are to be concentrated here. Okay. Yeah. Now, over 188,000 people were processed through there, and over 41,000 were murdered there. The SS was not as sanguine about it as listed in the speech of the SS. Oh, boy, here we go.

Brigade Fuhrer, Johann Erasmus, Gorg, Aldebert Freer von Malsen Ponico. Wow. That's a fucking name Boy howdy Was there a Vaughn Moulson Ponichow And Moulson Ponikow is hyphenated Yeah which which explains why the name is Is such a jawbreaker is because he's descended from an aristocratic family

Yeah yeah yeah There you go all right Here's what uh... Erasmus Giorg Aldebert Freer Von Malson Ponikow had to say Well and he was again the SSP brigade brigade furor there. He said, quote, you all know what the furor has called us to do. We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings as we are, but as second class people. If those pigs had come into power, they would

have cut off all our heads. Therefore, we have no room for sentimentalism. The more of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed. Wow. So, you know, there is so much in that statement to break down based on our scholarly understanding of the mindset of fascism now. Like, wow. Yeah, I remember this is a pamphlet from 1945. This is in no way any kind of critique of what's happening now. I just found this interesting. Yes, yes.

Of course. Of course, certainly. So, all right. So the quote that you're quoting from Joe Boy there, that is your annotation of that that was not quoted in the text. Correct. This is all me explaining what DACA was. Okay. Explaining about DACO.

Okay. Okay. So I find this is so stupid, but one of the things that jumped out at me was. uh pig dog so yeah me too the use the use of the word pig dog because swine hunt um and and the the other places that i've heard pig dog used they've been like outside of hearing you know german schwein hunt um i'm like uh monny python and holy grail uh english pig dogs uh from the french night atop the battlemen And then, you know, it was, it was always characterized as an insult being thrown at, you know, capitalist pig dogs from, you know, the, the, whatever nationality, communist enemy in whatever piece of, yeah, in whatever piece or Southeast Asian, in whatever, you know, piece of media there was depicting the communist enemy, you know, capitalist pig dog was always a thing.

and and I never realized like I never I never thought about schwein hunt actually literally translating as that until now which probably says more about me than anything else but you know and the the outright blatant no no we are not seeing them as human right um we do not consider them human beings yeah and and the very clear literal like no no straight up dehumanization and what you have always said repeatedly is now that left people in suspense because for some reason my internet just went very unstable for a second so we left off with what a cliffhanger what you have always said was go for that every accusation is an admission yes or every accusation is a confession yes um if if they had one they would they would cut off all our heads yes which is literally what you're doing right now and therefore we have no root for sentimentalism yes what what you you are you are justifying what you are doing by saying well they they would have done worse yes like where's the evidence like yeah and that's the

thing you get to make that up and claim that that's true because you're in power it's like yeah yeah like i'm glad you caught that um i'm sorry bullshit um you know like in and in the and the really the really funny not funny ha ha but funny like a dead body thing about that is you know he says that but we know that so much Much fascist characterization of their enemies is based on their, you know, the idea that, you know, the opposition is insultingly weak, you know, that their threat to society is that they are feeble and decadent. And, and, you know, but now it's more convenient for them to be, you know, well, they would have been ruthless and killed us all. Right. You know, no, that's, that's not what you've had to say about them before.

you have you have tried to tell everybody how contemptible and weak they are you know it's it's yeah well fascism gets right at the core of truth like it attacks truth so that they can put both contradictory thoughts in your head at once and have them both be equally true yeah because then it's whatever the dictator says dictator the one who speaks right yeah yeah yeah i mean it's it's gerbils 101 you know uh repeat the lie off enough and loud enough right you know make it big enough make it make it make it big enough yeah and everybody will believe it yeah um because then the truth is just one other poll and well you know you get you to yes that's what you think the truth is right the truth is okay no look asshole um speaking

Speaking as somebody who comes from a religious tradition where we do, in fact, talk about spiritual truth as distinct from being, you know, what is factual, right? There's a whole set of contextual, you know, issues that deal with that when we talk about it. you're just trying to make everything mean nothing. Like, yeah, because then if things mean nothing, people will retreat from being engaged. They will not hold you to account.

You can do what you want. Yeah. And that's how they were able to kill 100 or 41,000 people at Dachau. Yeah. So the other place that was mentioned was a place called Maidenek, M-A-I-D-N-E-K. Yeah. But it's also spelled M-A-J-D-A-N-E-K. Yeah, Maidenek, Magdaleneck, it's Polish.

May, May, Deneck, Magdeneck, yeah. You know, it's one of those kind of vowel sounds that we don't use very much in English. So, yeah. So it is also known as Lublin. Okay. Think Dublin with an L. This was built in Poland, and it's a similar camp. And because the Red Army advanced so quickly in the summer of 44, the camp was captured almost entirely

intact. The Nazis didn't even have a chance to, like, destroy it. The SS couldn't destroy the evidence and escape, so they just chose escape. Middeneck was the locus of something called Operation Reinhard, which was the Nazi plan to exterminate all Polish Jews in Poland. Operation Reinhardt led to the deaths of about two million Polish Jews, and it showed how quickly the Nazis moved. In a hundred days, 1.5 million Jews were murdered. and other camps in Poland. Now, this particular one was, and I'm saying that again,

in a hundred days, 1.5 million killed in Middeneck as well as many others. Yeah. This particular one was adjacent to the Lublin ghetto, and it processed about 150,000 poles and Jews.

And they killed about 78,000 of them. So if they killed about 78,000 of them, and it's 1.5 million, this was not one commandant being a dick, right? Now, Himmler spent a fair amount of planning and effort time here. Prior to the Soviets turning back the Nazis, this was also the place that they kept Soviet POWs, and this is one of the places known to use Zyclon B. So these are the two that this pamphlet uses as examples.

yeah you're you're stunned for for folks that don't know i'm giving it a chance to to add to this or just react to it and he is got smacked and speechless you know we you and i and everybody from our generation we got we got taught about the holocaust we were told this is what happened this is you know um and it's it is i'm trying to i'm trying to try to formulate how to how to articulate what it is that i'm that i want to say because there's a bunch going on in my head kind of at once it is important that we teach these things to youngster to, you know,

seventh, eighth high schoolers, you know, so that they don't grow up to be adults who are ignorant of these things having happened. And therefore willing to believe when denialists have one truth and historians have another, like that kind of shit. Yeah.

But when you are a seventh grader, when you are in high school, and you hear about you know in a hundred days how you know how many million was it 1.5 million people in a hundred days dying as as a teenager that's that's horrible that's a really big number and that's awful and oh my god yeah it's impossible to conceive of and it's it's impossible to conceive of and it's awful and it's horrible but you don't have enough life experience to really

feel the horror of that in the way that you do as an adult when you've had enough time to know enough people and have enough life experience and you know love enough people in your life to then think about

the indescribable what I often will say is I will find an equivalent population city to whatever the horrible number is yeah so and I will just list

several cities of that size that they are familiar with yeah so I find that to be helpful yeah well yeah and because then I say imagine that city just stopping existing in a hundred days just empty and and that helps yeah so i'm you know and and part of why i'm saying what i'm saying is because my my um my difficulty expressing myself after hearing that is me as a 50 year old

guy trying to conceive of that with the increased level of empathy that I have now rather than when I was a kid and not being able to form words yeah um yeah just just the indescribable awfulness and in many ways it is it is indescribable because not only is that that many people gone, just no longer alive, but then what do you do with all the space that they took up? What do you do with all the people who know them or her knew them? And like you just started to get into just the logistics of it,

and the horror expounds exponentially. It just keeps the more you think about it, the worse it gets. Yes. And it is fractally awful. Yes, quite so. Yeah. So, back to the pamphlet. Yeah, yeah.

We Americans have been fighting fascists for more than three years. Oh, wait, no, I'm sorry. I skipped a part. Pamphlet. Some of the things that have been done to people by fascists seem too horrible to believe, especially to Americans who believe in live and let live. Hard-boiled American correspondents, formerly skeptical, now believe because they have seen. And then there's a reference to page six.

real quick a hard-boiled correspondence this is probably a reference to a person named hodolet who was arrested and placed in solitary confinement due to his reporting about Nazi violence against Jews until Roosevelt was actually able to trade a German reporter for him but it could have also been Shira or Shira who covered the growth of Nazis and their assent to power from 34 to 40 when he had to smuggle out his notes and diaries under the threat of the Gestapo sentencing him to death if they caught him. So we had American reporters who were directly targeted by the Nazi regime. I believe Shire had a pregnant wife that he was traveling with at the time as well.

So those are your hard-willed correspondence that I think that they're referencing specifically because these are ones whose lives were put in danger by that government. Now, back to the pamphlet. We Americans have been fighting fascists for more than three years. When Cecil Brown, of one of the leading war correspondents, came back from the battlefronts, he went on a trip that took him into big cities and small towns all over America. He talked and listened to all kinds of people. He found that most Americans are vague about just what fascism really means.

He found few Americans who were confident that they would recognize a fascist if they saw one. Now, Cecil Brown specifically was openly critical of Mussolini the entire time that he was stationed in Italy from 1940 to 41 when he was then expelled for a, quote, continued hostile attitude. Well, yeah. Yes, I'm going to be hostile. I'm an American and you're jailing people who disagree with you. I'm going to be fucking hostile to that. like fuck like yeah yeah so journalists didn't just do puff pieces on them like the mcclatchy brothers out here in sacramento there were actually journalists who were calling things what they were

yeah now i i do love that these people get mentioned specifically in a pamphlet that privates in the army are reading and back to the pamphlet and are we in uniform any more certain what fascism is where it came from? What made it strong? Do we know how fascism leads men to do the things done to people at Maidenek? Do we know how it leads them to attack helpless nations? Are Midenecks and war inevitable results of fascism? Do all fascists speak only German, Italian, or Japanese? Or do some of them speak our language? Will military victory in this war automatically kill fascism? Or could fascism rise up in the United States after it's been crushed abroad? What can we do to prevent it.

Perhaps we ought to get to know the answers. If we don't understand fascism and recognize fascism when we see it, it might crop up again under another label and cause another war. So that's 1945. Yeah. Okay. So back to the pamphlet. Fascism is a way to run a country.

It's the way Italy was run. It's the way Germany and Japan are run. Fascism is the precise opposite of democracy. The people run democratic governments, but fascist governments run the people. Fascism is a government by the few and for the few. The objective is seizure and control of the economic, political, social, and cultural life of the state. Why? The democratic way of life interferes with their methods and desires for, one, conducting business.

Two, living with their fellow men. 3. Having the final say in matters concerning others as well as themselves. The basic principles of democracy stand in the way of their desires. Hence, democracy must go. Anyone who is not a member of their inner gang has to do what he's told. They permit no civil liberties, no equality before the law. They make their own rules and change them when they choose. If you don't like it, it's T.S. Which I'm pretty sure stands for. for tough shit. Yes. Okay. So that's the state, the, the war department stating what's at stake in 1945. I love how you keep reinforcing, this is the war department. Yes.

Yeah. They maintain themselves in power by use of force combined with propaganda based on primitive ideas of blood and race by skillful. manipulation of fear and hate and by false promises of security the propaganda glorifies war and insist it is smart and realistic to be pitiless and violent so hold on i want to i want to i want to i want to i want to back up please just a second sure so the characterization to the points they're making are all a hundred percent obviously applicable to the nsdap of course and germany and to the former italian uh government because remember it's 45 so oh yeah so lucillian has been

hanging around with his friends and then and then hanging around by his ankles um but what i what i find interesting the overt racism anti-semitism of German fascism

what would be the equivalent in Japan which is obviously also right

you know it ticks it ticks so many of the boxes right I'm not I'm not trying to argue that well you know Japan wasn't technically fascist I'm not going to be that

I'm not going to be that internet, fuck wit. Right, right. But the one, the one box that doesn't quite fit perfectly is that element. And. Oh, sure, it does. They conquered China and treated Chinese human beings as bayonet practice. Yeah. Okay. They did the same for Filipinos, same for everybody.

So, yeah. So one of the defining features of fascism, that I have found. And by the way, Stanley Payne writes about this exhaustively and very dryly, but it's worth it. It's 500 pages,

but it's worth it. And there's others. I mean, Echo, he breaks it down a lot shorter, you know, and, you know, so if you want to read Umbardo Echo about ure fascism,

I encourage that as well. But one of the things that they, that is a defining feature of fascism is not so much, I'm going to thread needle here because fascism is a belief that your blood must be kept pure your nation state ethno state must be kept pure and you are overall right okay that supremacy is not necessarily white supremacy because japan had it too right okay now that and so so does that

fucker in India um right now uh although he's been on the way like to be honest like india's fascist leadership has has been been lowering um so so it's your people above all others and right and and and you know the state above that and okay state is your people and on and on so there's there's a lot of spiritual things that go into it but okay very often it really helps to you unify and solidify fascists around a whipping boy, right, around a group or groups that is not just political. It starts with the political, but it quickly goes to ethnic. The Italians did not quite get to the ethnic part, honestly.

They, they were kind of all on board for it and just kind of stayed like pain. Pain talks about this quite a bit. He also, he goes into Eastern European fascism in a major, major way. Like there's several chapters on it, and again, I recommend it. The Nazis were uniquely anti-specific ethnicities. The Japanese were their anti-specific ethnicities seem to be an outgrowth of their, we are the only people here. Right.

Racism. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So there are those who would define fascism as being inherently anti-Semitic, And I think that that is true amongst European, central European fascists. I think that is true. Okay. Do not see that occurring as strongly in Italian fascism.

That doesn't mean it's not there. But, yeah, that's been, I've heard that quibble point. Yeah. Being brought up before. So, yeah. Like, yeah, the Italians were all in for, no, all the communists, all the trade, unionists all right you know well these are all you know enemies of our greatness as a people Italy until the fascists really was a collection of Italian states that were kind of a confederation

I mean uh Giuseppe his last name serves with a G and I don't remember what it is um Maldi yes um he was one of the main unifiers of Italy you know oh yeah he was a romantic hero across Europe for it too. Yeah. And because Europe's paradigm was nation states at that point, right? Yeah. But you still had such different language groups in Italy. You had, you know, Calabrisis, you had Nepalese, you had, like, you had these different groups. And so we're Italian and name, but, you know, it's, it's, we are this, you know. Yeah. Mussolini came in and really, he reached, he was really big on reaching back to the mythic past because Rome fucking existed. there and we kind of have him to thank for a lot of archaeology unfortunately but um he reached

back to that and he's like we are rome and that's when italian became the lingua italia um of the boot you know and it was top to bottom it didn't require any ethnic cleansing to huge levels it required ethnic conquests whereas kind of kind of in a similar way kind of like japan So the campaign against Ethiopia Quite so Did for Italian fascism What the Greater East Asia Coprosperity sphere Yes especially China

Churia Yeah For okay Whereas German fascism Nazi fascism Was inherently anti-Semitic And anti-other groups as well Yeah

But because As we talked about with your vampires episodes We talked about blood libel a little bit because the German state had been created with this focus on iron and blood, this focus on what makes a German, is our ethnic Germanness. And that meant that other people who were in the place that spoke the language and imbibed the culture, but weren't that ethnic group, were still some sort of pretenders. Exactly.

And they treated, again, Jews and the Romani, those two specific ethnic groups. They treated them similarly to how America treated Italians and Irish after a couple generations of living in America. Yeah. They look like us, but they aren't like us. We have to ferret them out because they will destroy us from within. Yeah. In fact, it was our policies that they copied. Our policies of eliminating native peoples our policies of expansion and our policies of eugenics they were like oh my god this is this is this is what we want um so we exported that to the nazis yeah so yes anti-semitism is intrinsically linked with nazism right is it as intrinsically linked with fascism i think

you can find examples of fascism that were not anti-semitic per se right they might have incidentally been they might have it might have been an important outgrowth and a focal point yeah but i would still say that japan is fascist or was was fascist in world war two i would say that italy absolutely was fascist they came up with the word coined the term yeah um and you know you could look to yugoslavia or what became yugoslavia and you could look to a lot of those and a lot of them were also anti-semitic fascists the balkan fascists were also anti-semitic fascists yeah Yeah, the Austrian fascists warbled, and then they adopted German anti-Semitism, fascism. Like, and I would even say that, like, the French republicanism was anti-Semitic republicanism.

Yeah. Oh, well, yeah. The Dreyfus affair. Like, yeah. Well, that's, that's been, that's been an issue in, in just in European culture. Right. But there's certain hamlets of your, like, basically those Alps. Yeah.

seemed to like and which is weird because it's not like the papal states and and italy was really kind to the Jews for a long while yeah but by the time fascism came up it wasn't as as defining a feature you know it's I don't want to make light of of any kind of anti-Semitism and I don't like to make light of fascism as a concept I'll make fun of the fascists but like it reminds me of like secondary sexual characteristics yeah That makes, I like, I like that analogy. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think, I think the way you coined it a minute ago is really instructive that there is always a supremacy. Yes. That's a defining feature. That's, that's a primary characteristic.

Yeah. Yeah. And that supremacy is ethnic in origin. Yes. It's either ethnic or national in origin. Yeah. And very often both. So, okay, back to the 1945 pamphlet on fascism.

In parentheses, it says, you may find the foregoing material a useful basis for a brief introductory talk. So I think that this was something that was given to the instructors in Basic and advanced, whatever after Basic you go on to advanced training. AIT, advanced individual training. There you go. And in March of 1945, I don't, I'm trying to remember what the length of time was for, since it was a wartime footing. Right. I don't know how many weeks they were in basic and how many weeks they were in AIT. And I know that, of course, you know, since 45 in the, in the peacetime, all volunteer army.

Right. All kinds of shit has changed. Well, I know that for the Marines by the end of the war, Basic was 16 weeks. Yeah. For the Army, I think it was 13 weeks. That sounds about right. It started as 17, and then it dropped down to 13, and then at one point down to 8. Yeah.

And the Marines started at 16 and kind of ended at 16, but it dipped a little bit. Yeah. I didn't know that everybody went to AIT after Basic. I thought that they just like, okay, here's your cap. Here's your private Chevron. go well what part of what happens in in the course of basic is you know you you get you know kind of examined and they figure out what your best scores are and then based on what you score and what the needs of the force are gotcha you know you might become a leg infantryman you might get

assigned to an artillery unit you might get assigned to being a cook you might be a truck driver you might be, you know, whatever, whatever support role you may wind up in. Okay. And AIT is where you then get that training. Basic turns you into a soldier. Right. And then AIT turns you into what kind of soldier you're going to be. So just having looked it up, AIT was anywhere from eight weeks to four months, depending on specialization.

Yeah. Right. So if linguistics was a thing like, you know, or. If they're sending you off to officer training, that's obviously different as well. Yeah. I know that my grandfather was sent home from being the mechanic in the plane, either mechanic or the electric or the radio guy, being that guy in the plane, he was then sent home to go to college because they're like, you're way too fucking smart to not be an officer. We need you to be an officer. Yeah, the needs, again, the needs of the force.

Yeah. The week after he was sent there, his entire plane got shot down. so but for papa's smart and he survivor guilt obviously oh yeah he'd been like double promoted when he was in high school so he was always the littlest guy um he was like 16 when he graduated all kinds of shit like so but for the fact that papa was smart um i i wouldn't be here yeah so anyway so back to this uh so how it starts and then again in parentheses question how does fascism get in power? How can a violent program that enslaves the people win any support? End parentheses. Fascism came to power in Germany, Italy, and Japan at a time of social and

economic unrest. A small group of men supported in secret by powerful financial and military interests convinced enough insecure people that fascism would give them the things they wanted. So I like that there's those two prongs to the fork. Oh, yeah. And, you know, thinking about the way that is true but different, again, in the Asian lens for the way that, for the way that that fascism became a thing in Japan, you know, because there was not really a thing in Japan, you know, because there was not really a. democratic tradition of any kind sure uh and and and and what the black dragon society and and the people that that fueled all of that did was they they weaponized Confucian ideas and and the you know this is what the people this is what these powerful people

think is best and so if the powerful people think it's best then it must be best right you know as opposed to having to make the kinds of promises that were made by the Nazis and and Mussolini you know and and then of course thinking about that I remember how Mussolini talked about you know I'm going to make the Italian people great again if I have to kill them all to do it right you know the level of I'm just going to kick all your fucking asses until you understand that you're for greatness but the corporatists the rich were willing to hitch their wagons to that horse oh yeah oh yeah well the grift the grift is always the grift like that never so then then find out what never changes

find out what the really really rich people are afraid of and make sure that that's your bogey name yeah Hi, communism. Hi, how you doing? Unionists. Yeah. Yeah. So, all right. And I also like the other side of it, though, is like convinced enough insecure people that fascism would give them the thing they wanted.

Oh, yeah. Because you do need that manufactured consent of the people. Yeah. Or enough of the people. The loud and violent sounding people. Yeah. All right. So back.

They did so partly by clever propaganda and deception. They promised the people that fascism would bring them great power. and prosperity. I'm just going to break in here real quick. Great power. So you remember years ago when we were doing this and I was talking about, I think it was the John Sina and Pope Francis episodes where we talked about he's not hurting the people he's supposed to be hurting.

Mm-hmm. So. Yeah. The details differed from country to country, but the general pattern was the same. The Japanese spoke of a, quote, greater Asia co-prosperity sphere. Hussolini mouthed humanitarian ideals and promised a reborn Roman Empire. Oh yeah, because that's humanitarian. The fuck.

Hitler and his associates adopted the name of National Socialist German Workers Party, Nazi, and announced objectives that attracted many German people. The official title of the Nazi party was deliberately worded for its propaganda value, appealing to nationalists, socialists, workers, and all others who might be favorably influenced by these labels. At the very time, oh, go ahead. I want that line, that sentence of this pamphlet to be somehow disseminated into every high school history curriculum. Yeah. Really anywhere in the world, but especially here in the United States, just because of the number of numb nut dipshit who I've seen confidently asserting that, well, you know, socialism is evil because the Nazis were socialists.

Right. No, no fuck wit. They weren't. Yeah. You're, you're Nazi washing. You clearly don't understand what socialism actually fucking mean. Anyway, sorry, I had to get that out of my system. Carry on.

So at the very time that the fascists proclaimed that their party was the party of, quote, the average citizen, end quote, they were in the pay of certain big industrialists and financiers who wanted to run the people with an iron hand. I'm just going to break in here and say one of the people who supported the Nazi party ended up becoming a nursery made to two twin brothers who were. were who ended up being very very rich the Koch brothers you didn't know this their nursery made was a Nazi and what did they do they grew up and overtook the tea party

and what yeah oh yeah so funny that I blame I you know what But I want to preface what I'm about to say by saying the media is not the enemy of the people, no matter what anybody might try to say, because obviously that's a fascist tagline. But I do feel like the media failed me personally. I would not making a bigger deal about that.

I would say that you're right. The media is not the enemy of the people. I would also say, look at who owns what and not in the conspiratorial, the Jews control everything way. I mean, look at the actual owners of newspapers and look at how many of them are pro-Nazi or pro-fascist or anti-democracy. Yeah. I mean, not wrong. No, especially now. But also back then, in Germany, one of the guys who, like, looked to make a lot of money on this grift, I forget his last name, but he bought up all the newspapers and he knew full well, oh, we're not going to make money on these newspapers.

But what we're going to do is we're going to run these stories repeatedly, and that will influence people in order to vote for government officials in the Weimar Republic, and then those people will then do the things that help our businesses, and that's where our investment will pay off. And a single dude owned like 1,500 different newspapers in Germany, which shouldn't shock us, considering we have similar shit set up here. Yeah, well... So, anyway, the fascists promised everything to everyone. They would make the poor rich and the rich richer. To the farmers, the fascist promised land through elimination of large estates. To the workers, they promised elimination of unemployment, jobs for all at high wages. To the small businessmen, they promised more customers and profits to the elimination of large business enterprises.

To big businessmen and the industrialists, they secretly promise greater security and profits through the elimination of small business competitors and trade unions and the crushing of socialists and communists. To the whole nation they promised glory and wealth by conquest. They asserted it was their right as a, quote, superior people, end quote, to rule the world. As soon as these methods had won them enough of a following to form their stormtroopers, the fascists began using force to stifle and wipe out any opposition. Those who saw through the false front of fascism and opposed them were beaten, tortured, and killed. Now I'm going to break in here and actually explain the stormtroopers just so briefly.

Stormtroopers is not a Star Wars term. It's the Sturmobtailung. Storm obtailung. That. Originally, this was the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, the brown shirts. The guys who'd go around and beat the shit out of communists, start street fights that ended in murder, start abusing Jewish businesses. and the people themselves.

And eventually they gave way to the SS because that's how dictators do. Kill off the guys who got you to power and then the ones who did it are all who's left. So nobody has anything on you other than total obedience and the belief that you've always been in power. Night of the Long Knives was when it was done wholesale.

Yeah, Aaron Storm and the essay and that was actually part of a deal that Hitler made with the army because they did not like the paramilitary wing of the National Socialist Party

because they were like hey look we're the army we're the only legitimate legitimate source of government violence yeah basically what I love there was that he's like

okay cool we'll take you over then and they're like yeah it makes sense it works I mean, you know, yeah. Well, I mean, they didn't, but they also couldn't say anything. Yeah. Because they'd been outflanked. Yeah.

Ironically enough. Yeah. And so in order to get the tacit support of the military, Hitler turned to Himmler, if I'm remembering right, and said, because at that point, the SS had already been started. Right. And so the SS was responsible for the purging of the SA. right yeah so back to the packet yes uh or pamphlet the fascists knew that all believers in democracy were their enemies they knew that the fundamental principle of democracy faith in the common sense of the common people was the direct opposite of the fascist principle of rule by the elite view

so they fought democracy in all its phases at the same time they proclaimed the superiority of the germans the italians the japanese they also they proclaimed also that the german the Italian, the Japanese peoples, were really unfit to rule themselves. It became Heil Hitler in Germany and Believe, Obey, Fight in Italy. They played political, religious, social, and economic groups against each other and seized power while these groups struggled against each other. How it works? In parentheses, question, how could the fascists keep their contradictory promises once they got in power? How did their program actually work out?

End parentheses. Okay, I need to cut in here. Yeah. There's a meme all over Reddit out of the Invincible TV show. Okay. Where the superhero dad of the main character in the show, the context is that he says, oh, yeah, no, I'm going to help you learn how to use your powers. I'm going to take you on a, we're going to take a flight up to the moon.

And the main character says, wait a minute, how do we breathe in space? And the dad says, that's the neat thing. You don't. And that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the neat thing. You don't. Yeah. So, uh, let's see. It was easy enough for the fascists to promise all things to all people before they were in power. Once they were actually in power, they could not, of course, keep their contradictory promises. They had intended in advance to break some. And they did break those that they had made to the middle classes, the workers and the farmers. As soon as the.

fascists were in control of the government, the torturings and the killings were no longer the unlawful acts of a political party and its hoodlum gangs. They became official government policy. Among the first victims of this official policy were those farmers, workers, and small businessmen who had believed the promises that had been made to them and who complained that they had been, quote, sucked in. And quote, some simply vanished. Often they came home to their families by return mail in little jars of ashes. okay that is that literally true yeah and actually that's one of the annotations i have here um but i would just like to point out the groups that that the promises were broken to middle class

workers yeah uh and farmers yeah like could you imagine and they then claimed we were sucked in we were we didn't expect because people were were taken in by this idea of like oh you're going to hurt the boogeyman yeah not us right so leopards are never going to eat my face right now return mail in little jars of ashes this is not just action t4 uh which was the euthanasia program organized by carl brant which they may well have gotten from american in california eugenic who went abroad such as Gady, Pobino, Gosney. Remember our episodes on Idiocracy? Yeah, I wish I didn't, but yes.

From 1933 to 1939, they forcibly sterilized nearly 400,000 people who were deemed unfit for reproduction. This included mental and physical disabilities as well as alcoholism, crime, etc. This was pushed by the father of modern scientific psychiatry and psychopharmacology,

Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnes Crippelin Another Gayorg in the middle of the name Yeah, well it's George, you know Yeah, yeah, I know Now starting in 1938 But really taking off in 1939

There was a program of extermination That they called mercy killing From there, they registered The Reich Committee for the Scientific Registering of hereditary and congenital illnesses Which is probably all one fucking word in German but I would just like to point out they had a registry of people with disabilities that they then used for mercy killing okay why why why do we feel the need to pinpoint that

well just Damien you know I mean no reason yeah okay just just just verifying yeah yeah yeah no it's a once in a lifetime thing so once in history thing everybody would have learned from that yeah you never yeah yeah certainly wouldn't happen again. No. No. So, they started killing infants, and by 1941, they were killing children deemed Labens Wertes-Leban, which was German for life-unworthy of life.

Now, by the end of this war, that meant the deaths of 300,000 people with disabilities specifically. The way it worked was that the SS would dress up in white smocks and lab coats, ride in ambulances, and take the disabled individuals away to a processing center. This was so that they couldn't track down their family members. So we don't take you to the hospital. We don't take you to this one place.

We take you to a processing center and then from there you get taken out. So if there's one more failure point, that's one more place where we don't know. Let's check back. Come back tomorrow and we've got paperwork, et cetera, right? After they were then, after they were processed, they were then taken to places like Dachau, Brandenburg, Hard Time, and the like. and they would be murdered, cremated, and then a suitable amount of ashes

would be placed in an urn. Obviously not the person murdered because the crematories were done en masse and then returned to the family with falsified yet plausible explanations of how they died. There was an outbreak of pneumonia. There's typhus ran through.

We did, you know, reacted badly to a drug that we needed to sedate him because he became un, you know, uncontrollably violent, that kind of thing. They also then falsified death certificates and those became a fucking industry. Eventually, this program, Action T4, came to encompass anyone who was considered a social degenerate, including people who were considered traitors, had STIs, were considered congenitally criminally insane,

or any other ideological reasons that could include racism. So this isn't just Action T4, but Action T4 is a huge. chunk of it and that's what that was so return mail in little jars of ashes absolutely 100% happened and and I'm I did I did hear everything you said after this but my brain is having a hard time reconciling the phrase a suitable amount of ashes yes see that's what I love about doing this with you, which sounds terrible, but let me finish the sentence, is that we both look at the banality of the evil, the actual logistics in somebody coming by and going, no, that'll do. Like, all the other stuff is, is awful.

I almost want to say per se. Like, all the other stuff is categorically. Like, obviously awful. Like, like, cartoonishly evil. Right. And like, you know, we can all agree on that, that it almost doesn't need discussion. I mean, it needs accountants, but it doesn't need discussion as to, because we all know that that's evil. But knowing that next little step, knowing that an industry of falsified death certificates was created, that means people were hired specifically to make up death certificates. That means a doctor somewhere, some way, signed his name knowing that somebody was murdered and that there were stamps involved somebody had to buy the ink for the stamps all these little tiny fucking things like it's it's it's it's the it's like it's xenos paradox of office supplies of evil that's that's a good one what i was thinking was it's like a clipothic yes you know dark mirror version of the invisible hand of economics yes yes like like you know a friend of mine as who is who is a a libertarian uh this is years ago in in practically another lifetime but at one point we're having a discussion about something you said see

i don't believe in god but i do believe in the invisible hand of economics and like your god's even worse than my god then like i mean i know you don't think your god is bad but well yeah but you know But capitalism is the god that you believe in. That's worse than all the gods that I've seen. And I've studied a lot of them. Yeah, I've studied a great many. And but what gets me is this is like, this is like the anti-god. This is like, you know, Uhoramazda and I'm trying to remember what the, what the anti-god figure's name is in Zoroastrianism.

This is, this is that. Yeah. You know, this is like, oh, my God, this is, this is the invisible hand of economics, but it's all, I think. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, it's anger on you, but it's all, it's all bad. But not only is it all bad, it's, it's bad on a very basic level. You and I both attend IEP meetings.

We both sign our names to those meetings. This is people doing that about falsifying death. like we sign our names to shit we can understand how oh god fuck i have to sign all these report cards you know that kind of thing or you know the principal puts a stamp you know creates a stamp to stamp certificates right like we exist in bureaucracies yeah and knowing that the bureaucracy is to well that's about enough ashes yeah because what happens when you get to the corner of the room like I this I'm not being flippant here what happens do we get to the corner of the room and there's not enough ashes do you wait do you just get the next shift in and then well this jar is only half full we need to fill it more like it gets so awful these these tiny little decisions that are inherently moral moral decisions they're immoral but they're moral decisions yeah and you have to actually parse that shit out like there was somebody who who made those choices. who made who made those decisions yeah and then and and there's just the the the viscer for me

there's the visceral squick yes of you know of well the the visceral moral squick of essentially handing off to someone what they're going to believe are the mortal remains of someone they loved and cared about. And they hopefully will never think about that extra step. Yeah. Like, are these actually the ashes? Yeah. And knowingly lying to them.

Yeah. Well, and again, you make a delivery boy do that. Oh, this is for you. What is it? I don't know. And off they go. Like, there are ways to then also remove yourself from. Yeah.

But. Yeah. It's still awful. All of it is awful. And it is. fractally awful. God. As you said. Now, back to the pamphlet.

The concentration camps and graves filled with the opponents of fascism. Filled as in a verb. They filled, not adjectives, not participatory. Right? Out went equality before the law. Free elections and free political parties, independent trade unions, and independent

schools, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and in time, freedom of religion. Pastor Nymler, Ni-A-M-E-M-E-M-E-M-E-E-M-E-L-E-R, N-I-M-O-E-R, no umlets that I could find. Neem-Moher. Cool. Pastor Niemohler was thrown into a concentration camp in Germany.

Cardinal Initzer was, quote, stoned, end quote, and Catholic priests were imprisoned. Jews were murdered in cold blood, and synagogues destroyed Christian ministers were ousted from Japan. Yep. Now, Neumler, he's the one I'm annotating. Yes. Because when they name a guy, I fucking annotate because, like, we aren't living in 1945. Right.

Neemler was the one who wrote the poem, first they came. Right. In 1946. But also, he was an original supporter of Hitler and a self-identified anti-Semite. However, since the advent of the Aryan paragraphs in 1940s. As parts of the Nuremberg laws, he started to oppose the Nazis. It was specifically because these paragraphs said that Jewish converts to Lutheranism weren't legitimate. The state was interfering with who gets to go into the kingdom of heaven, and he wasn't having it.

In 1934, Niemler also founded the confessional church, which stated that the German church was not an organ of the state. Now, you can imagine how fascists would feel about that. And in 1936, Niemler said that the Aryan paragraphs were anathema to Christian charity and signed a petition with other Christian church leaders saying the same thing while criticizing the Nazis for their anti-Semitism and interference with church duties. I'm just going to break in here for a second. Imagine a pastor going up against policy like that. Like in a fascist state, like the, what's going to happen, right? So this meant the mass arrests, the murder of a Jewish convert who'd become a legal advisor to the Protestant church, a gentleman whose first name is Georg again, Georg Friedrich Weisler, who was already held in a concentration camp. Niemler, as well as others, were sent to multiple concentration camps but never exterminated.

now cardinal innitzer originally was also a booster of hitler this guy was an austrian cardinal and he was a big fan of the nazis in honor of hitler's birthday everyone in austria should fly the nazi flag and pray for hitler is kind of what his stance was he said quote we must confess our faith in our furor for there is just one furor jesus christ so you see things kind of splitting there. Now, despite his performative accession to the Anschlaus, he was clearly critical of the Nazis. So he started as a booster, and then once they did that, he was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I have a line, sir.

Which is weird, because I would expect that only with bishops. But now, Initzer had a complicated and ambiguous relationship with the Nazi regime, speaking at times against them. and then doing performative things in support of them. And this led to a split amongst the Austrian Catholics who wanted to be Catholic but also didn't like communists or Jews. He spoke out regularly against Nazi racial ideology, though. And as a result, he was always a beat away from being rounded up. However, he never was.

And I'm going to just finish with this part and we'll call it for this episode. The fascists, quote, solved unemployment by converting their nations into giant war machines. The unemployed were either conscripted into the army or organized into labor battalions and put to work in war plants. Deprived of their unions, the working people could be driven to work longer and harder for less and less money so that those who subsidized and ran fascism could grow richer. I'm going to interrupt here. This was the War Department in 1945 talking about how bad.

anti-union activity was yep okay um by wiping out all internal competition especially the small and medium-sized business firms profits were increased still higher for the handful on top in some cases the fascist then gobbled control of the top corporations the living standards of the masses of the people declined of course as they earned less and less they were able to buy less and less of the goods that they produced every last detail of life was regulated, with the death penalty often imposed for slight violations. One unhappy victim complained, quote, fascism is a regime under which everything is not prohibited,

is everything, fascism is a regime under which everything not prohibited is compulsory. End quote. Once the fascists were in total control of the government, not even the gang on top was safe from its own members. There would be more loot and power per fascist leader if some fascist leaders were eliminated. some of the party big shots and some of those who had helped them take over were therefore purged many would-be partners in this dictatorship including some industrialists wound up in jail in exile or dead fascism equals war and that's where i'll stop all right so what have you cleaned oh that grift never changed

changes um number one and um the um the sheer scale of the awfulness of the people who did this you know like we we you and I are call it two generations removed from all of this yes we grandparents who fought yeah or participated against yeah and we we grew up in a world where it was really understood that the Nazis were all bad guys like full stop they were and we didn't ever you know there was no I'm trying to think how to how to articulate what I'm trying to say there was no question that the Nazis were bad guys and we knew that they had done awful horrible things to millions of people and in the generation or two since we went through school, I kind of feel like Nazis, Nazis, you know, in Nazi uniforms are obviously still depicted as bad guys, but the understanding of why has been lost. Yeah.

You know, because it's all, it's, it's no longer in living memory for anybody, but a very, very few people. and and so the visceralness of the no this is evil you know isn't isn't isn't there if that makes sense yeah and i think that's part of part of our problem we're too far removed from the viscera yeah we do not have i said this um when i learned that uh spilberg when he was making schindler's list um he said that we're losing you know we're losing holocaust survivors at an alarming rate because they're getting old yeah and then he went ahead just a few years later and made saving prior Ryan and he said that one of the reasons he's doing these these films is because we're losing 1500 world war two vets a day to old age which good way to go yeah um but

here we are 25 23 years after i think uh saving private ryan sounds about right thereabouts and we were losing 1500 a day then yeah i mean here we are we're only now we're 80 years away from this this document yeah 80 years from the end of the war which means you almost have to be a centurion yeah centenarian uh at least a late non to have been a veteran of this war to know why we fought to have watched the frank caper films and understood it so then the living memory becomes a memory of why grandpa doesn't or why dad never talked well those people they are they're the baby boomer generation right and i don't mean this is a dig on them for once uh but like their relationship with their

was not a verbal one about stuff like this in a lot of ways and so we're losing the like you said the visceral reasons why we fight we are losing the Rod Serlings yeah you know I mean he died in 75 you know like we are losing so many people who actually got it yeah and it's only then only then do we start to see this shit cropping up yeah you know um yeah and and people complaining online about how how uh the most recent castle wolfenstein game was like somehow unfair to Nazis yeah like it's like hey we had a whole war about this the world decided you're supposed to be unfair to Nazis if there's one Nazi and six people sitting around those six people have a moral duty to beat the shit you know out of that you know

Well, if he's sitting around doing Nazi shit, otherwise buy him a beer and get him to not Nazi, you know, but like, and if you can't, then, then, yeah, you know, but yeah. It's a pretty simple decision tree. You know, but, but again, we're so far removed from the danger of it that we have invited the danger of it. Yeah. You know, why, why do we have this chicken wire around the chicken coop? There's not been a weasel here for years. Let's dismantle it. why do we have all this money going to the WHO there hasn't been a worldwide pandemic in you know

forever since 1919 yeah we beat it let's dismantle it yeah we don't need it anymore and then there's fascists going like oh oh go ahead do it again do it again do it again do it again do it again do it again and so yeah yeah anyway what do you want people to to uh to imbibe um since you mentioned Rod Serling. I want people to go watch the original Twilight Zone series. I'm going to piggyback on that, so go ahead and say what you're going to say, and then I'll piggyback with specific episodes so that this has made more powerful. Okay. As anvilicious, as a lot of his writing in particular was, some anvils need to be dropped, and it was groundbreaking at the time, and it is, in my opinion,

canonical for for science fiction it is it is foundational uh if you want to understand modern science fair post-war science fiction yeah so that's that's me i will piggyback on that and you specifically should watch season four episode four of the original rod surling stuff it's called he's alive dennis hopper is in it um and ludwig dunnoth is in it um there's some other folks that you wouldn't know um but watch that specific episode he's alive episode four season four um and because it's all about a guy in america who's starting a fascist party there you go so cool where can we be found we can be found on our website at wauwbubba woba woba dot geekhistorytime.com we can be found on the apple podcast app on the amazon podcast app and on spotify wherever it

that you have found us, please take the time to subscribe and give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. And where can you be found, sir? Oh, geez. As of this recording, I'm just going to say first Friday of every month at the comedy spot at 9 p.m. Capital Punishment is doing our thing. We are more than nine years old. We have bid fond farewell to Mark. But Emily has come in and become an incredible host for us, as only she could. And so come check out the new lineup. We've got new people coming through all the time. We have a new host. She brings a different vibe and bring money for merch. $15 tickets, get your tickets in advance. We can do and often will sell out and then bring some money for merch because we've got some really cool shirts, cool pins, stuff like that. So capital

punishment at 9 p.m. First Friday of every month at the comedy spot. Sacramento. Go to sackcommodyspot.com. Find it on the calendar page and get your ticket now. All right. Hell yeah. Cool. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony. And I'm Ed Blaylock. And until next time, keep rolling 20s.