this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
570 points (99.1% liked)
Political Memes
9732 readers
2543 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
No AI generated content.
Content posted must not be created by AI with the intent to mimic the style of existing images
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you support Nazis, then you are a Nazi. It's that simple.
The world is more complicated than memes would have you believe
Not in this. Support of Nazis is approval of Nazism, making you a Nazi.
A person who was actually educated on the topic would call them fascists, not Nazis. Unless you think they're literally the National Socialist German Workers' Party of the 1930s then they're not Nazis.
Calling fascists Nazis is a meme spread by the ignorant who's only education is social media. Don't confuse upvotes with being correct, the Internet is full of ignorant people and literal children.
calling them nazi’s is not ignorance of what a nazi was.
it’s invoking direct comparison between someone and the explicit actions of the nazis among other fascist.
it’s sorta like claiming none can be called a dickhead because no one has a dick for a head
to argue agisnst the capability of comparison is to defend one of the two parties, so which nazi are you defending here?
More ignorant nonsense. This is the kind of reasoning that you get from only consuming social media.
The world isn’t divided into “everyone who agrees with me 100% on everything” and Nazis.
Ah yes, everyone who defends Palestine are supporters of Hamas no?
Too bad the other side won't give you the same deference you give the Nazi, oops I meant the Neo Nazis, or no wait the Fascists.
This is all about optics and if calling them Nazi works to any degree, I could care less about semantics.
Consider conservatives care exactly zero percent about semantics, it seems like your personal crusade to correct every reference from Nazi to Fascist is foolhardy to say the least.
Uh, no they're not.
You're way off the mark if you're trying to attribute right-wing talking points to me.
You are clearly trying to personalize this and missing the point entirely.
No, I am not saying you said that. Cheers!
If your point is that the right mischaracterizes things and twists the truth for political advantage, then I agree with you.
I'm saying that anyone that's doing that is wrong, no matter which 'side' they are on. Lying and spinning the truth is toxic to political discourse and should be discouraged even when it is unpopular (as here).
Good we can agree on what the right does. I am certainly not saying we need to stoop to their level, but they are winning the propaganda war no doubt about it.
Words matter, like you allude to. I have two issues though. The first is there are certainly Neo Nazis in our government. With the release of the "Young Republican" chat we can clearly see they are Neo Nazis. So in this respect calling them a Nazi is not misattributed at all.
The second issue has to do with effective propaganda. The truth is the majority of people don't know what fascism is, but most people know about Nazism and have a negative perception of it.
So you insistence that we call them fascist hurts our ability to help the public understanding that what they are doing is wrong.
Another side issue is solidarity. If you are not aware there are a lot of counter-intel and infiltration going on. This backbiting where you are trying to declare every progressive wrong who uses the word Nazi to describe conservatives is exactly this type of action.
Whether you see it or not other people do. That is probably why you get so much pushback.
There isn't any solidarity created in attacking allies because they have a disagreement.
Disagreement is important, it creates conversations where people ~~are~~ should be forced to rationally articulate why they believe what they believe. Shouting down disagreement and using cyberbullying tactics to drive off anyone who doesn't 100% agree with the group is incredibly toxic and corrosive to any group. You can see several replies from people accusing me of being a Nazi and that kind of behavior is being rewarded, while a person with a good faith disagreement is shouted down.
Outside of your response, the vast majority of responses in this thread are low-effort, zero substance, social media meme replies. These are not people that appear have a firmly held belief in what they're saying, they just know what meme is popular in their in-group and which opinions and people that they can act toxic towards with impunity.
We don't need a party of ignorant people who simply know which opinions to parrot. We don't need a movement of people who reflexively attack anyone who disagrees with them.
Any rational organization would be punishing the low effort and toxic comments. That isn't what is happening here. On social media, a person is more rewarded for making hot takes that drive outrage than having a reasoned opinion that they can defend. That may be entertaining while you're doomscrolling on the toilet, but it is a terrible political strategy.
Your not wrong at all, I was just pointing out why your posts are perceived the way they are.
I totally see where you are coming from, but I also see arguing semantics with the majority of people as a non-starter.
I wasn't confused about it, this isn't my first day being a contrarian on the Internet :P
I agree that the people that respond are not going to change their minds, they're the ones that couldn't overcome the impulse to do the social media thing (or they're bots).
I just assume that there are people who are reading and understand that this tactic feels wrong but may not know how to articulate what they're observing. There are people who are still forming their opinions and trying to get a grasp on the situation in a grounded manner.
It's important to recognize that there are different flavors of fascism than 1930s Germany and the elites who are currently seizing power in the US have different motivations and methods than the Nazi party. Opposing fascism in 2025 requires understanding how fascism works in the current political environment and that defeating fascism in a democratic society will require different methods than was used in the 1930s.
I agree with the sentiment of the people that I'm arguing with. I just think that their messaging is 1 dimensional and, while it can feel cathartic to write, doesn't advance their position in any meaningful way outside of creating outrage.
OR as someone with this exact education you are talking about, we are calling them Nazis because hey are closest to Neo-Nazis in their ideology and we call Neo-nazis “Nazis”.
Given you claimed education why are you not seeing this?
"Everyone I disagree with is an ignorant child" huh?
“I make bad faith misrepresentations of what other people say, but that’s okay because I get upvotes and that’s what matters in the world”
Go find the Wikipedia article about companies that participated in the Holocaust and then sit and think about what companies are doing today just to make a little more money. It's the same shit through and through.
I don't need to find the Wikipedia article, I paid attention in school.
The companies participating in the current right-wing takeover are supporting fascists. The fascists are in power doing fascist things. None of these people are Nazis. If someone is serious about understanding what is happening in the US and how they can work to end it then they should, at the very least, understand the basic terminology of the topic.
Making provocative statements with simple minded black and white statements like 'If you support Nazis, then you are a Nazi' is ignorant, even if it gets upvoted. It's spreading ignorance instead of knowledge, it is literally misinformation.
They're fascists.
If you are arguing over the meaning of a word, then you're missing the whole point. I've seen this whole argument play out 1000 times in the last several years, it goes nowhere.
Meaning and definition are objective conditions, but not in the way we are taught to think. Rather than "websters dictionary defines Nazi as..." you gotta understand that definitions and meaning are decided by power.
In these spaces, there is muddle headedness about many political topics, no doubt this is one. I've studied really good arguments about why its important to be accurate in our assessment of fascists, one of the best ones being that when a movement is misidentified as being fascist it creates confusion among regular people which aids fascists taking power. I think some of those effects/consequences are present in our society.
But are you fighting the right battle here? With these people?
I think your arguments are unconvincing and coming from a place of frustration. If you want to prove your point you have to actually prove it. And to do that you have to do more than say like "I paid attention in school." In case you haven't noticed, schools aren't doing too great, and don't exactly teach the unvarnished truth. It is a very politicized curriculum in a depoliticized environment where you start each day pledging allegiance to the same flag Trump admin fascists earnestly and tearfully wrap around their $5000 sharkskin shoulders
Words and facts have meaning. Reality isn’t some malleable thing you can twist for political advantage.
This kind of rhetoric, caring more about political “winning” than reality, is toxic to any political movement. Look at what happened to the right when they let these kinds of people into the majority. Lies are nearly exclusively the tools that they use to manipulate their base.
Once you’ve untethered yourself from reality and are living in a world of memes and spin, you can be convinced to support anything. Anyone who promotes this kind of pragmatic misinformation isn’t helping, it’s making the left more like MAGA.
I don’t need to prove that they’re not Nazi’s. Nobody actually thinks they are a 1930s political party from Germany. Everyone has just accepted that it’s better to get a rhetorical win than to address reality. They are wrong.
No, you misunderstand me. When we define things purely objectively, especially language, then we are not dealing with reality. The meaning of words is inherently political, it is about power. This is obvious.
10 years ago, "woke" was a strictly leftist term. But the meaning has changed because of politics and power, it at least has a double meaning now. The fact is, reality isn't purely objective, it is objective and subjective. Being overly objective is just as much an error as being overly subjective.
A relevant example is the history of Italy. Italy was divided until the risorgimento period in the 1800s. Previously it was all cut up into feudal city states that each had separate local dialects. It is a perfect study in how language and meaning spreads via political power. What is considered the Italian language is actually the Florentine dialect, since Florence served as the political capital of Italy after the unification. Political movements throughout this period focused on reactionary education to spread their political agendas. Millions of illiterate Italians were taught to read, write and speak the Florentine dialect.
Why do Americans speak English instead of Cherokee, Sioux, Catawba or Navajo? Domination and perpetuation of class interests embodied by settler colonists.
Its well understood that history is written by the winners, but the same is true for dictionaries.
I actually agree with you a lot more than a lot of the people arguing with and down voting you. If you look further down in the thread, where someone says that political rhetoric is more important than accuracy, I disagree with them. I am very concerned with keeping our analysis as close to real conditions as possible. But confusing reality with pure, static, positivist objectivity is just another form of idealism.
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
Jean Paul Sartre
Effective rhetoric is more important than accuracy
Inaccuracy in political ideas creates confusion which fascists can use to seize power. What is needed is radical liberating education, not rhetoric. We don't beat the oppressor by becoming like him.
Definitely a time and place for rhetoric, polemics, bending the stick. But its not across the board more important, its a tactic not a strategy
Misinformation for tactical purposes is still misinformation.
There’s already one party that’s willing to rewrite facts and misrepresent arguments in order to advance their ideology. Anyone who’s okay with becoming untethered to reality in order to “win” is part of the problem no matter which side of the political spectrum they’re on.
If you provide support for fascism and enable it’s spread you are a sympathizer or collaborator.
If I did, which I didn’t.