This is America, of course they exist

to be clear, I don’t care about the rules surrounding the flag

Oh I agree. As a Canadian we have our fair share of people who do the same weird and wacky shit with our flag. The only difference being I don’t see (most of us) idolizing the flag itself as much as our southern neighbours (proper spelling) seem to.

To me (and most Canadians…and I presume at least some Americans) it’s just a piece of cloth. Respect the country…but don’t idolize a piece of cloth…

Shit, they did it the first time around.

While I agree DoD was used for anything but in practice, we should still hold it to those defensive goals instead of giving in to MAGA’s wet dreams.

I take your point, but I disagree with just letting it run rampant and moving on. Like the OP mentioned in their reply to you, we should hold them accountable instead of greasing the machine just because the name fits their actions better.

If the US populace wasn’t so fucked, mentally, we would be dissolving the DoD into DoHS instead of tearing apart the DoE, but here we are.

Because he believes that the best way to get America’s way is through unspeakable murder.

Right. It used to be that everybody knew how strong America was, and most decided that it was better to be friends than enemies.

Now we’re reaching the point that America is becoming dangerous to the rest of the world, in multiple ways, and the World is learning to avoid us. Being friends isn’t worth it, if they get caught in the crossfire, or get tossed under the bus.

it’s worth pointing out that blitzkrieg wasn’t really a military doctrine so much as the organic movements field commanders made in the field when given loosey goosey orders from high command to the effect of “go west, idk, lol.” much of the failure in operation barbarossa can be attributed to:

• the basic core plan of nazi germany of increasing national wealth through war being really fucking stupid
• a fundamental miscalculation that the soviets would be just as feckless and limp wristed as the French and British
• a failure to take into consideration that the French and British were poorly coordinated because they had two high commands who fundamentally didn’t trust the other to try, so neither ended up doing much of anything. a contrast to soviet high command which was very centralized
• removal of initiative from field commanders and all orders coming from german high command

the thing to understand about nazi germany is that the things they got right aside from propaganda they mostly got right by accident. the only thing the nazis really understood was how to market and advertise the third reich. their propaganda was so effective that it would be the template for advertising and propaganda all the way until today, both in the first (capitalist) and second (soviet) worlds. next time you see a coca-cola commercial really pay attention to it and realize that it’s nazi propaganda in the service of getting you to remember coca-cola exists and getting you to experience some strong emotion in order for you to want to drink a coca-cola immediately. i even feel a little awkward saying their name since i’m playing into theis hand by doing it, but i need people to take a critical eye to ads the next time they see them and think about what it means that the world looked upon the horrors of world war ii and said “i bet we could use this to sell razor cartridges”

if you ever want to know how it was so easy for the nazis to come back under the name of the alt right, don’t look much further than madmen. that show explicitly gives us a glimpse into what america did with the nazi propaganda machine. some time, go look at some 1920s adverts for american products. you’ll notice they give you a long chunk of written prose making a compelling argument that the thing they’re selling will be a marked improvement over what you have now (it’s usually not a valid argument). but after wwii it’s much more just beautiful people holding the product with wide toothy grins. instead of saying “we must kill all the Jews” it says “you must buy the product to be happy”

i’ll also point out that israel has been using nazi propaganda techniques without recontextualizing the techniques for nearly 80 years now. only the untermensch is not the Jew, obviously, it’s the Muslim. ben gvir even uses nazi terms used to refer to Jews to refer to Palestinians.

we’ve had a few chances to listen and fix this shit. spoken word jazz, hippies, punks, and hip hop artists were screaming this shit at the tops of their lungs for 60 years at least. there’s even a chumbawamba song, nazi, that explicitly explains how the nazi ideology wormed its way into the post war society. and i’ll leave you, dear reader, whoever you are, with a couple lines from that song

The world is riddled with maggots; the maggots are getting fat
They’re making a tasty meal of all the bosses and bureaucrats
They’re taking over the boardrooms, and they’re fat and full of pride

And they all came out of the woodwork on the day the Nazi died

So if you meet with these historians, I’ll tell you what to say
Tell them that the Nazis never really went away
They’re out there burning houses down and peddling racist lies

And we’ll never rest again until every Nazi dies

They were largely incompetent but they were ideological.

None of these fascist-wannabes have a shred of conviction in them, they have no actual beliefs. When was the last time you heard any of them deliver an impassioned speech that wasn’t utterly awkward and stilted and oozing with corporate callouts and pandering nonsense.

Yes, it deliver the same rotten outcomes, people still eat it up, it just feels weird losing so much social ground to a group who managed to con a third of the country’s population with the same level of enthusiasm and fervor as AOL roleplay teens trying to be edgy.

Hey now, don’t forget how much of the German wartime economy was functionally subsidized by American capital investment. War profiteering was at the heart of both World Wars, not to mention the fifty years of Cold War (and assorted hot conflicts) that followed.

Also worth noting that fascism, as a social institution, was rampaging through France and the UK and Spain and the Americas and North Africa and East Asia. Nazism wasn’t a uniquely German characteristic. The German Blitz was the result of an effort to effectively re-colonize Europe through private sponsorship of an industrial war machine. All the dipshittery that followed was as prevalent outside Germany as inside of it. If you ever reach “Catch-22”, a lot of the gags in that book had parallels to IRL fuckups performed by the US during their counter-invasion.

The real flaw in the German (and Japanese) war effort was their limited access to petroleum. These countries quite literally ran out of gas by the mid-40s.

Incidentally, the next 50 years of Cold War heavily revolved around which Superpowers had uncontested access to Middle Eastern petroleum reserves.

Blitzkrieg worked well enough for the Nazis and the German military had become experts at being able to fight such lightning advance. However, their strategy started to fall apart in Africa as supply chain logistics became a problem and the Luftwaffe failed miserably at being able to develop a strategic air strategy for taking the UK home islands.

I’m not saying the military leadership were geniuses, but they did develop a strategy that worked until the invasion of the USSR.

I just posted this. Definitely the vibe.

Well, yeah. At least they had an ideology, at fucked up as it was, that is what drove them and from their perspective, they could at least say they wanted something better (they didn’t, not the point). Also, Nazi’s at least made it look impressive.

These roaches today don’t even have none of that.

Not at all

Just saying that this current group of roaches have nothing going for them. Nazi’s at least made it look impressive, they had their ideology as fucked up as it was.

These fucking losers don’t even have that, and it just makes me wonder how the fuck were losing to a bunch of dweebs like that.