"Racist" and "Nazi" are headed the same way. This frustrates the hell out of me as these are both terms that should be used for the highest level of condemnation, not something to just smear your political opponents.
I'm the opposite, "Nazis" seem to have turned into saturday morning cartoon villains, who sneeringly laugh as they plan to destroy the world, and one-off aberations that can never happen again rather than rather fairly standard fascists who got a whole bunch of people killed in the usual way that fascists do.
But I am reading "It Can't Happen Here" right now, so maybe I'm biased by that. It's certainly confusing reading a book written in 1935 that talks about the Nazis without full knowledge of what was to follow and think "this could be taken straight from today" as well as realising that it wasn't even extreme satire at the time, but rather mostly based on Huey Long and other real figures.
"It can't happen here" was written after the rise of the Nazis so it not that surprising that it appears prescient. The same forces that gave rise to the Nazis in Germany were present in many countries in 1935 including the USA.
Looking to the past can be very dangerous. Yes it helps to know history, but the conditions that gave rise to Nazism were conditional on the time. History can lead us astray and cause us worry about things that don't really matter and miss the new things that do.
Nazis were nazis long before they put people into gas chambers. If we’re waiting to draw the comparison until the tanks are already metaphorically rolling into Poland, it’s rather useless.
Also, if you find your political beliefs compared to nazism and fascism more than you’re comfortable with that is probably a sign that you should re-examine those beliefs.
I object to theses terms being thrown around like candy at a children's party to the point where they have almost lost all meaning. Right now if someone under the age of 90 is called a nazi it is almost certain that they are not a nazi.
