I’m dumbstruck as to what to do. The US is building literal concentration camps, and none of my co-workers care at all.
In fairness, I work in healthcare with an almost exclusively cishet white population who are financially well off.
Many of them espouse to be Christians, and no one cares at all that the American government is following the exact playbook from Nazi Germany.
What do you do? How do you make people care before it’s too late?
I’ve never done something on the scale I’m describing, so this is mostly just speculation, but I hope it could be useful.
First of all, find the people who do care. Talk with them. Make a local antifascist group in a secure messenger (Matrix/XMPP, or at the very least Signal), or join an existing org that you disagree with the least (don’t be afraid of the word “socialist” if you stumble upon them). Do not discuss anything illegal, as it could spell trouble for everyone - you live in an (increasingly) authoritarian country with a wide range of tools to repress you. Keeping it legal at least makes it less likely.
Now that you have a support network, you can start reaching out. Until/unless your organization gains serious traction, unite over common goals instead of squabbling over your differences. DO NOT guilt anyone for being financially well off, voting for the wrong candidate, believing in stupid things, etc. Find people who are somewhat unhappy or unsure about concentration camps. Try convincing them that concentration camps are bad - it probably would be easier if they are on the fence already or if they are being unjustly treated themselves. Show compassion. Do not be condescending or use the words that may trigger them (Nazism, etc), instead appeal to humanity and empathy to specific people who are being repressed. Bring some examples of unjust repression with you. Do not overdo it - you don’t (yet) have to agree on anything except that these concentration camps are bad. Propose to do something together - it can be small at first, like calling your representative or organizing a picket - common action builds connections and mutual understanding.
Have you ever wondered how people reacted to the original Nazis in the 1930s? Well… now you know. If can feel proud of something, it is at least I am extremely against it and the whole ‘what would you have done?’ is basically answered definitively for me.
I heard something on a radio show during Covid on how to talk to people who have “gone down the rabbit hole”. It was discussing MAGA as a cult. The guest on the show was a woman who was raised in a cult in the 70’s and she “got out” and spent her time talking with others in the cult to help them to break free. I can’t find a reference to the show, but I think it was Carrie Miller hosting.
My takeaway was that you can’t come at people and tell them that everything they know is wrong and you will show them the way. They’ll fight you. You need to deprogram them similarly to how they were programmed into the cult. Small bits, here and there to slowly guide them to questioning their beliefs. Once that happens, show them how to research and seek out information and let them know that they will be safe.
If someone found a link to the podcast/radio show, I’d be super happy.
This is as inspiring as it is terrifying.
Great comment. Trump won and the amount of people here throwing the Nazi word around still don’t realise how self defeating they are.
You can’t tell someone their an idiot or evil and then expect them to try seeing things your way, you’re much more likely to end up entrenching their beliefs. The goal should be to win them over, that won’t be accomplished by telling them how wrong and stupid they are.
Engage, don’t alienate, no matter how hard that feels at times.
They’re*
The thing is, a lot of these people are literally Nazis, and I’m starting to wonder if it was “people saying Nazi too much” or it was actually “there was a fuckton of Nazis and no one took people saying that seriously and now there’s Nazis around and people are blaming the folks who were warning others about the Nazis for not seeing Nazis soon enough”
Since we’re not in a .world comm, there were just a lot of fucking Nazis. The US has always been significantly further right wing than it’s contemporary nations, at least since the 1800s, but since the 1920s it basically accelerated to light speed. Every minor progressive victory was a half century or more after other countries, and immediately hated by more than half the country; hence why so many rights in the US are tenuous scotus decisions and not laws.
The rest of the world after the 1950s has viewed you guys as the next Nazis. Hell even in WW2 you were only the good guys by comparison, and even then the Soviets were the protagonists of that era with all their flaws.
Only very recently and only in aesthetics has the US really made any strides, and because you chose aesthetics over legislation that progress was easy to destroy. You had a far right wing black president people called progressive because of the color of his skin, you ‘legalized’ gay marriage without legislation, you had all other companies doing rainbow capitalism to show how open and progressive your society was, despite having the highest wealth inequality in the world – and that’s no easy feat, North Korea exists.
The fall of the US to fascism was inevitable, because both the ruling class and the majority populous has always fully supported fascism, they just hate the aesthetics.
The US was doomed from the start, it might have been better to let every state be it’s own country. We would probably see some wars with the more extreme places/states of the country.
Trump won and the amount of people here throwing the Nazi word around still don’t realise how self defeating they are.
Sometimes you have to call Nazis Nazis. And people who support Nazis are Nazis. And sometimes you can’t deprogram a Nazi.
These aren’t victims. They’re intentionally malicious people.
I have the urge to help victims. I have another urge entirely in regards to Nazis.
Yeah and especially when they created a system that doesn’t even allow you to really vote for somebody who you believe in.
The US is a timebomb which is going to explode.
The moderate right provide a platform for the far right but I don’t think that makes them default Nazi’s.
Besides that, I’m not suggesting that you can always deprogram a Nazi, but you can absolutely target the moderate right swing voters who may not take kindly to being called a Nazi.
Honestly, your point of view is no better than the “all Muslims are terrorists” mantra and people like you will sleep walk us in to another four years of Republican rule.
Yeah you are right, but US politics doesn’t allow for nuances. People aren’t left or right or conservative or progressive. They will have bieves that suit a certain direction on the politic spectrum, but people can have opinions regarding different topics all across the eniter spectrum.
You don’t.
A large swath of Americans have made it clear they don’t care to pay attention and won’t care until it personally affects them.
So we’re simply going to have to watch our nation decline until the majority of Americans have personally been affected. Then we’ll begin a long, difficult path to gaining back what we lost, just to get back to where we were before the decline happened. Then we’ll be happy to be back in the same shitty situation we were before and probably let things slide back into a decline again.
Americans are stupid. And there’s nothing you can do to change that.
If the concentration camps were started during the Obama administration and (nobody cared), then were operated during the first Trump admin and (the only caring-concern was performative) then they continued to operate under the Biden admin (while still nobody cared) then why would people suddenly start caring now?
BTW I’m referring to the immigrant concentration camps near the border. What ones are you referring to?
I sometimes wonder is Trump does a lot of crazy sounding shit to make people who speak against him sound insane.
call them american
I dont want to be another i-dont-care-ican
What are we gonna do Franco, Franco Un-American^((franco unamerican - NOFX)^)
Something I’ve had to accept over the course of my life is that the vast majority of humans will passively accept anything as long as they feel like there’s something they can do to not be killed. Only when it feels out of control whether they might be killed will the majority of people feel the need to act and no sooner. There has never been any changing this. Fortunately the vast majority of people are not needed to affect positive change. People who care need to set the tone and followers will follow as they do. Your efforts would be better served among people actively resisting or building structures that benefit people.
I had a conversation with my second grade teacher on Instagram the other day. I posted Matthew 25:35-40 on my story with the comment “I can’t believe so many Christians I know support a president and a government that would willingly and forcefully kick Jesus himself out of the country thousands of times.”
She replied saying that this verse doesn’t apply for the same reason that I don’t allow just anyone into my house: because there are people who shouldn’t be there. There’s just so many things wrong with her logic AND her premises that I barely knew where to start, and that’s part of the problem. Fascism works by sowing doubt in the fabric of credibility. All she really knows is that her idea of Jesus comforts her, and so finding comfort somewhere probably means she can find Jesus and righteousness there too. You can’t really teach someone to care because they probably already do care, but you have to teach them to see the things that are actually happening, to trust the real experts, and to see the connections between themselves and the people who need care.
In Luke, when Jesus says (again) to love thy neighbor literally the next question someone poses to him is “but who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds with the tale of the Good Samaritan. In this story there is a man, a traveler from a foreign land, who was robbed and beaten and left on the roadside, suffering and ignored by passing strangers (including a priest). The Good Samaritan feeds him, fixes him up, and puts him up at an inn.
There’s two laws… two. The first is to love God, the second is to “go and do likewise” as the Good Samaritan did. I’m a godless commie and I know this shit.
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=luke+10%3A25-37&version=NIV
It’s also worth noting that at the time, Samaritans were seen as an enemy. “To the Jews, a Samaritan was more revolting than a Gentile (pagan); Samaritans were half-breeds who defiled the true religion.”
So when it was written that a good Samaritan was an example of a neighbor, it was more impactful than the phrase implies today. Part of the point was to say that even those perceived as “enemies” are ordinary people that should be treated with the same dignity and care given to one’s own tribe.
A good Christian would let people stay in their house, though. If they were robbed, they would still have treasure in heaven.
More Christians faith is paper thin at best.
I would say that the initial problem here, is that people give a single shit what a 2000+ year old, bronze-age sex manual, has to say about literally fucking anything.
If they claim to care about it then it can be used to point out their hypocrisy.
Sure, but part of the problem then is that you have to convince them of that, and that’s even harder than arguing and using the Bible as at least part of your premise
My (great)-grandparents were part of the Dutch resistance during WW2. Along with a full 1.5% of the population.
Most people will not do anything, even if they are literally rounding up people for a genocide.
On the more positive side, a lot of people will support the resistance in small ways.
The number of people who actually, whole heartedly collaborated with the Nazi’s was quite small.
Even some of the German soldiers stationed in their village would turn a blind eye. Some of them realized they were on the wrong side and they just did the bare minimum of what they needed to do to not get in trouble and not get killed.
Perhaps you can find inspiration from Daryl Davis, who convinced 200 Klansmen to give up their robes.
I care, you care, and many of us here on lemmy care. We should work on how to coordinate ourselves together rather than try to change minds.
I’ve tried, a lot, to change minds. I started with the most difficult person, and recently a new hire at work is kinda centrist-left and I tried to convince him. No matter whether it’s a nazi you’re talking to (ahem… the first one) or a liberal, minds can only change themselves. They have to want it, you cannot hack their brain and override it.
I gave up, because even the people who are closest to me politically seem to move further to the right when faced with uncomfortable reality. They don’t engage with icky thoughts like “What if police killed an innocent man?”. They rationalize it to keep their comfort zone intact. “Well, if they just followed police instructions…” blissfully unaware of many cases like Daniel Shaver.
You point to an example that breaks their rationalization, and they will diminish it. “Oh that cop made a mistake”. Point to many examples and they suddenly got to go wash their hair. People’s psyche protects them from stress.
And that is the default mindset in this society. Avoidance of discomfort and inconvenience. Fear of the unknown. They want their life to be neat and happy and to all make sense. They don’t appreciate it when someone tries to take that away from them.
Do you think there’s something about people like us that makes us more accepting of challenging our own worldviews? I have some thoughts but I’ve written enough.
I think there’s a mixture of not believing Hitler-level nazi shit is happening until actual gas chambers are running, and a what can one person do anyway attitude. Frankly, I had high hopes of Trump being soundly defeated and that it would be the turning point in the collapse of MAGA. But since not enough people could be bothered to vote against him, I honestly believe his long-overdue final Big Mac Attack is the only thing that will stop MAGA. Without him as a figurehead the self-centered opportunists running it will tear it apart as they claw at each other to get on top. Until then we just have to hang on.
Hitler also didn’t happen overnight. We all look back in history and many ask “how could they not know what was happening” and “how could they not stop him”. It’s all happening in real time, and nobody gives a shit as long as they are not the danger group being put in the gas chambers.
It will only stop when millions are death in a decade or more. If it ever stops. Hitler didn’t have the strongest military in the world and nuclear weapons to use willy nilly.
In many ways he’s a unique figure. When he entered the political scene in his first campaign. The establishment republicans and conservatives didn’t appear to think he’d really become a serious force. They were wrong. His ideological opponents also seemed to think he was too silly, and too extreme to be taken seriously and his domination of the right, albeit surprising, was anomalous and would never translate to electoral victory. They were also wrong. He seemed not to know how to play the game properly and was too foolish even to realise it. He probably wouldn’t have been the first whack job to fail to heed his advisors and PR team and would surely fail like all of them. Viewed in that light his somehow successful manoeuvres could seem only baffling than inspired, like watching someone win at roulette by just always betting one colour. This gives his rising successes a spooky and uncanny air and not something his rivals or opponents could simply emulate themselves because when a normal person does this they just lose.
If he’d had that final Big Mac attack in 2015 or maybe even as late as 2016, his brand of politics and the movement it seems to have inspired might have died with him but sadly it looks like now, plenty of proteges will be there to pick up the reigns. For all that can be said of the man, it appears he tapped in to and unleashed something that was waiting for its time and it’s unlikely even his death will put that genie back in its bottle. The next in line might be a shrewd and clever cynic, who’s studied the MAGA playbook and will exploit it to the hilt to grasp power for their own ends with no belief in the irrational or fantastical elements of this new orthodoxy. It might be an actual true believer, straight from the ranks of the deranged and mentally disturbed that Trump previously manipulated, now believing they’re seeing the many real and imagined prophecies Trump used to rile them coming true. Maybe it’ll be something in between, someone more like Trump himself with what seems to be more of an instinctive knack for playing these emboldened fanatics rather than a geniusly thought out strategy, they’ll sometimes believe what they’re saying sometimes not, a value system infinitely malleable, but reliably selfish. Either way Trump being dead will be a relief for little more than a day and after that you can either look forward to an heir apparent who’ll keep it all going or a dangerous power struggle between dangerous people happy to expend lives and treasure to pick up the mantle.
I agree with your analysis of Trump’s surprising victory. His fellow republicans didn’t expect it because they don’t understand his charisma. I don’t think he does either, he just thinks he’s irresistible and that his critics are irrational. But no one in his party will be next in line. Being VP won’t give bestow that on Vance, except procedurally if Trump croaks in office. No Republican all-star has Trump’s weird Pied Piper quality, and he will never anoint a direct successor because that’s not in his personality. Trump gives people his blessings to help them into subordinate positions, and that’s all. When he’s gone I think it will be a wild scramble, every man for himself - which with any luck will disorganize the party enough for a well chosen Democrat to win the next election.
The only thing one person can do is get armed, get trained, and get ready.
I’d add “get organized” to that list but you’re on the money otherwise
Okay Rambo, have fun stormin’ da kessel.
Not everything works out in life.
I mean, I care, but what can I do about it? There isn’t a CEO I can shoot to make it stop, nor can I make voting day get here any sooner. All I can do is stamp out ignorance when I see it.
There is so much you can do about it, here’s a simple suggestion: promote open censorship-resistant communication systems like Lemmy.
I think what we’re dealing with, in part, is a collective action problem. There’s a lot of people who want to do something but either don’t know what to do or don’t agree on what to do. It’s one way that a minority population can stay in power.
What an individual can do is miniscule compared to a crowd. Also, some people are willing to break laws to make change and others are not.
