What helps is to recontextualize what you're seeing. It makes you feel less crazy and helps to give you a sense of your place.
The reality is that the US is not becoming like Nazi Germany, but rather that Germany became like the United States through the Nazi movement, and then that Nazi movement was integrated into the United States, and now the United States is advancing the thing we know of as "fascism" or maybe more specifically "EuroFascism" or "North Atlantic Fascism".
Racism as we know it today, is found all over the world. That's NOT because racism as we know it coemerges naturally everywhere but rather because racism as we know it was invented by the European civilization and then imposed on 80% of the world's population through imperial domination. This is important because it helps to understand what I mean when I say that Germany became like the United States.
Germany, like most Continental European countries, was not multicultural. The European nation states were generally monocultural and their techniques for survival involved the dominance of their one culture over another, often through the process of complete extermination or displacement. This expanded the boundaries of those states, but maintained them as a monoculture.
Settler colonialism started off this way - bring your culture and your people to a new land and begin the process of extermination and displacement until you have secured an outpost of your nation state in new territory. But this was incredibly inefficient, it turned out, and the Americas really showed that by being so goddamned big. A new way of colonial domination was invented in America and it drew on racial hierarchies articulated by European scientists to rationalize it. Did you know every single original medical university in the US had a huge role in the research and development of race science?
The integration of chattel slavery, reservation systems, child separation, cultural erasure, the creation of slave hierarchies where some slaves were masters over other slaves, the creation of inter-racial conflict between kidnapped and enslaved Africans and the indigenous... All of these advances were done here, in the Americas. The first gas chambers were invented by the French generals in Haiti, the same French generals that we look to as liberators and leftists in the US, because the Haitian slave revolt was so massive that the French needed efficient ways of killing large groups of them.
When you study the rise of the Third Reich and it's leaders and philosophers, you find that they studied the US to learn how the Germans could achieve what the US had achieved. The Germans wanted to stop with this idea of just Germans owning and dominating nearby lands - there weren't enough Germans! They needed to construct a cross-cultural race, the Aryan race, that could bind a disparate group of people together and build a greater violent force. Their intent was to invade the Slavic nations, invade Russia, and control all of the territory and resources there. To do this, though, they would need more than just extermination and displacement. They would need slave camps, reservations, they would need the Slavs to work and labor and toil but not revolt, they would need different groups to fight with each other, to fight for proximity to the Aryans for their own safety, they would need to advance the American system.
And they did. They made huge strides in developing what the Americans had made huge strides in developing from what the Americans had inherited from the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch. But, the Soviets won. The Soviets rallied every single ounce of self-preservation they could muster and they defeated the most powerful military ever fielded in Europe and marched all the way through Berlin.
And what happened. The Holy Roman Emperor - the Pope in the Vatican - to which we can trace the Doctrine of Discovery, the literal Pope started saving Nazis by getting them into monasteries and then relocating them to monasteries all around the world.
And the Americans helped. Truman oversaw the creation and execution of Operation Paperclip, which brought Nazis from all levels into the US and all over Americas. They were given money, property, jobs, security details, false identities, etc. And they were integrated into the US. The US put top Nazi officers in charge of NATO. The Allies put top Nazi politicians in charge of West Germany. It never ended.
The US isn't becoming like the Nazis. The US inherits the fascistic empires of Europe, it advances that fascism to its highest known height, and then the Nazis emerge and extend the US's program back into Europe, and then the Nazis are absorbed back into the US, and the US continues to develop the program, unhindered by any opponents, with a completely pacified and propagandized population.
When you realize this, you realize it's no longer as crazy making. You have always been surrounded by Nazis or latent Nazis. The signs have always been here. You have been raised in text books worshipping genociders, slavers, rapists, human traffickers, drug dealers, and yes, fascists. The entirety of your upbringing, education, and social structures all conspire to integrate and obscure these things, because they are complicit in it. And up until such time as you realize what's going on, you also are complicit in it
Now that you realize what's going on, now the job is to figure out what to do about it. How to be less complicit, how to stop it, or how to build the momentum that will eventually stop it.
