US War Department 1945 // Army Talk Orientation Fact Sheet #64 – Fascism
archive.org
archive.org
"Don't Be a Sucker", 1945 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
I like how the opening scene is 'performance wrestling', which is still around (WWE):
Whichever label your current 'flavor' of the political party wears is largely irrelevant. At its core, they are both capitalist parties first and foremost.
> Fascism came to power in Germany, Italy, and Japan at a time of social and economic unrest.
- really timeskips and glosses over a lot of causal factors. The biggest reason why America's post-war economic boom was so good for America's working classes was that WWII had taught America's ruling classes just how horrible the consequences could be, if the lot of the working classes got bad enough. And the Soviet Union was quite obviously trying to spread Communist Revolution - "Workers of the Work, Unite!" - to the rest of the world.
It's not that straightforward actually, the Comintern (under the impulse of Staline) wasn't really fond of the idea of spreading the revolution after the mid-twenties. During the cicil war, the Spanish communist party even teamed up with the centrists against the anarchists to crush the revolution that they had started with the anarchists a year before.[1]
It's only after 1947, when the cold war started, that the Soviet union resumed its support to communist insurgencies worldwide, but more as a geopolitical tool than really for ideological reasons (things would indeed have been very different in that regard had Trotsky led the USSR instead of Staline).
And those lessons have been forgotten given the trajectory the US has been since the 1970s: inequality and wealth concentration is at the same levels seen in the Gilded Age.
Some folks may never have learned them as there are people out there that think the FDR's New Deal policies were a bad thing and American is still "suffering" under them.