“The next fascist after Trump will be more competent” no they won’t. That’s the thing about fascism. It is inherently incapable of competence. Maybe briefly someone will have their shit more together, but a defining aspect of fascism is an inability to assess risk.
Folks really need to internalize this more. Fascists don’t make the trains run on time. They don’t make garbage collection smoother or roads better. They’re very very dumb! They do one and only one thing well: inflict pain on their perceived enemies.
just saw an article about javier milei that was like "6 months in, his economic reforms seem to have stalled" and it made me realize that american commentators genuinely expected them to work despite being obviously stupid.
“The Third Reich, which was born on January 30th, 1933, Hitler boasted would endure for a thousand years, and in Nazi parlance it was often referred to as ‘The Thousand Year Reich.’ It lasted 12 years and four months...”
—author William Shirer, from ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’
It reminds me of the "history enjoyers" in the US who wonder a lot about how Nazi Germany could have won WW2.
The main thing is not be Nazis. The second thing is not have idiot weirdos who are disconnected from reality in charge of everything, which is mostly a symptom of being Nazis.
someone once came up with the sarcastic joke “at least the trains run on time” because everything was terrible and the trains did NOT run on time; and 75 years later people too dumb to analyze context think “ah whatever its faults fascism is efficient and effective at governance”
like in context and knowing the historical fact it definitely makes more sense as a bitterly ironic joke (like if an american said “at least we arent dealing with an epidemic of gun violence” or something) than as like. actually true
As Ruth Ben-Ghiat noted only the trains that had political meaning to them ran on time. Tourists, wealthy industrialists, journalists - their lines were clean and on schedule. For the rest of the country, they got worse.
Which, come to think of it, *IS* a perfect description of fascism.
My father visited Italy as a tourist in 1937. The trains did not run on time for tourists. The papers and radio news SAID they ran on time. They did not, unless forty minutes or so late counts as "on time."
I always heard it as Hitler. My optics of Mussolini even in high school with a small town Midwest History curriculum that always stopped just short of the civil rights movement was "Hitler's less competent, idiot sidekick, essentially fascist Salacious Crumb."
The "trains run on time" cliche was about Italy.
Unlike the credit he (apparently?) gets for railroad infrastructure, Mussolini does deserve credit for his colonial/genocidal projects in Ethiopia and Libya.
Several Nazi higher ups visited those camps, and likely took notes.
Me: something about we need to hold billionaires accountable
Conservative coworker: "what we really need is to do something about the bums who live off benefits & their parents and don't work"
Me: "how will that actually make things any better for everyone else???"
Fascists are like locusts, feeding off the work of others. All of the rules and violence are ultimately just support for a system of plunder. And when the nation is left barren, they move on to neighboring countries, while the plundered are assigned supportive roles of laborer, soldier, or breeder.
As I understand it, the famous, "Make all the trains run on time" was a facade anyway. The plan was, "Let's do one highly visible thing really well and people will pay less attention to all the ways we're failing."
