Hacker News Reader

Comment by klamann | Hacker News Reader

As a German, I started wondering if every nation has to experience a fascist catastrophe on its own, before a majority agrees that a fascist takeover is possible at home (surely the peoples who failed to stop all the other fascist regimes were just dumb). Then again, 30% of German voters would vote for the fascist AfD party today, so there's that...

I agree with the premise of the article wholeheartedly. Minor nitpick:

> The German dynasties behind Porsche, Volkswagen and BMW pretty much merged with the Nazi regeime.

Volkswagen was founded by the Nazi regime after they have already taken over. While support by car companies was relevant, there were far more important supporters of the war effort in the chemical and steel industry.

View on HN

Its sad thing but in every society there appears to be a significant portion of people who support the tenants of fascism. The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.

There's a peer-reviewed study of this that appeared in the last couple of years that showed the percent support for authoritarian rule tends to hover around 20% worldwide regardless of country, plus or minus some fuzz amount. I can't find it now because I keep finding other papers but this is another report that's is pretty consistent with it:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/28/who-likes...

Once you get that group control is when you have problems.

This is kind of an interesting deeper dive into why people support fascism. Maybe not surprising but highlights the two main reasons: something like "we need a strong leader to take control of the government away from corrupt elite and put it back into the hands of the people" and "the government needs to be in the hands of the real, true, competent people, and not the other, fake, lesser people".

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/political-science/artic...

Personally I'm past the point of "what does fascism look like" and want to have a realistic discussion about "how do you reestablish a democracy when you're in a fascist regime?" So far the historical examples at my fingertips are all basically some variant of "people get tired of it, the cult leader passes away and everyone kind of magically agrees that fascism isn't working".

don't forget about the historical examples of having your home destroyed by war (usually a war started by your leader) and the regime being forcefully replaced by a foreign power. Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today.

> Japan, Italy and Germany are democracies today

For now. But democracies are always only one election away from a party taking power and passing laws that entrench them indefinitely.

There is research that suggests that our brain composition determines our political ideology. More or less gray matter in different parts of brain determine where we land on spectrum of progressive, liberal, conservative, authoritarian.

https://www.psypost.org/authoritarian-attitudes-linked-to-al...

https://youtu.be/t-hwrIkTNFo?si=V3TKg-3dqc1htQBU

> The whole 'that minority group over there is wrecking things for you, we will punish them' vibe seems to really strike a chord time and time again.

But that's not yet a fascism.

"yes" heh. more a human problem i'm slowly figuring out, spend enough time on this earth and it's honestly tiring. social media and modern new cycle prob just accelerates it.

The problem with needing to experience fascism to worry about it is that the lesson will fade too quickly to be useful. 5 generations, maybe, before the majority have forgotten.

Doesn't help sadly, as you reckon.

Back home in Portugal, it is a similar trend, I belong to the first generation to grow in freedom after the revolution, and it is quite sad to see how right wing is taking over, as if people had forgotten all about PIDE/DGS, the kidnaping and killings, crossing to France over the mountains and Spain, Tarrafal prison, the colonial wars.

I guess never again was uttered countless times across the ages, only to be uttered countless times for the ages to come.

Germany's current political course is a replay of the Weimar Republic. Including the people wagging their fingers about the dangers of fascism. You'd think the people telling us not to repeat history would read a history book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com