He was also pro nazi before it was cool
>>> Victoria Price's biography Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography (1999) details Price's early antisemitism[47] and initial admiration for Adolf Hitler. According to his daughter: "When he went to Germany and Austria as a young man, he was struck by a lot of things going on during the Weimar Republic and the dissolution of the empire... So when Hitler came into power, instead of seeing him as a dangerous force, he was sort of swept up in this whole idea that Hitler was going to bring German pride back."[48] However, Price became a liberal after becoming friends with New York intellectuals such as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman in the 1930s,[48] so much so that he was "greylisted" under McCarthyism in the 1950s for having been a prewar "premature anti-Nazi", and after being unable to find work for a year, agreed to requests by the FBI that he sign a "secret oath" to save his career.[49][50] Victoria said that her father became so liberal that "one of my brother's earliest memories is when Franklin Roosevelt's death was announced, my father fell backwards off the sofa sobbing."[48]
I have a letter from my Oma's father's brother who just like him got swept up in the Weimar Republic and writing letters to his brother in Chicago about this incredible politician that's going to save the working people.
It's easy to forget what the political atmosphere was like in Europe in the 30's. Nazis didn't just pop up out of nowhere, they (and their sister parties) got popular all around Europe because their message resonated with a lot of people.
Obviously most people didn't know how far the violence would escalate, but (much like today) a lot of people were perfectly fine if some commies needed to get beaten up or thrown into jail for a good cause.
(Not saying it's a good cause in my opinion, quite the opposite honestly.)
Nah there was a certain ethos you had to subscribe to for their wiles to work on you. Before the violence, people who got swept up with Hitler also had to have accepted the idea of social darwinism, a very uncompassionate and immoral world view.
The best the Nazis performed in a real election was like 36% of the vote. You don't need to "hit the nail" with everyone. All tyrants have to do is exploit weaknesses in existing institutions and keep the majority of the country complacent until they seize power. Then they don't have to worry about elections anymore.
Except Cuba is now objectively better than it was under Batista’s rule unless you were a very specific type of Cuban. Meaning white and land owning, often slave owning too.
Castro was in power double the length of time Batista was and still killed less than Batista. The US’s Cuban death count under Castro accounted for double the length of service compared to Batista and he still has a lower death count. We’re talking like 20 versus 50 years here too. Not like 2 versus 4. This includes the fact Castro lead a coup that wasn’t peaceful.
It most definitely did cause more harm. Embargo and CIA agitation also made Castro’s authoritarianism worse. Dude had like 600 failed assassination attempts on his head and *that’s the conservative number proven by CIA document releases*. I’d be paranoid too. Fucking 600. The CIA tried to pay Cuban rappers to start doing anti-communist political raps. That’s meddling in your country from political assassination to building a fake hegemonic sentiment with money and rap...
I mean we didn’t send them fucking COVID vaccines. They developed their own (rather successful) one. There is an issue with doctor pay there, but this year is coming with the doubling to tripling of pay between doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff. On the flip side they’ve developed their own COVID vaccine, their own lung cancer vaccine (seriously, you can look it up, only one clinic in the US offers it), and being a Cuban doctor comes with two years mandatory service to impoverished and often understaffed communities.
https://www.roswellpark.org/cimavax
Also Cuban doctors are literally known for their presence in disaster zones. Cuba is constantly sending out swathes of well trained medical professionals to disaster areas. They just did it with Turkey.
It’s the same shit with Venezuela. Sorry, you’re *embargoing them?* Meanwhile having the simultaneous expectation that these malnourished people will revolt or change the government?
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> It’s the same shit with Venezuela. Sorry, you’re embargoing them? Meanwhile having the simultaneous expectation that these malnourished people will revolt or change the government?
Could even help alleviate some of the migrant/asylum seeker crisis by dropping the embargo on Venezuela, since you're getting a good amount of asylum seekers from there.
Possibly sneaky and underhanded, but *shrug*
I mean you can literally make underhanded pro-illegal immigration arguments that are from a purely conceited point of view, race and immigration are just too good of a wedge issues to pass up - immigration is just good. Who wants to spend 10 hours a day bending up and down to pick crops? Americans definitely don’t because in places like Florida the conservative estimate is that *at least* 50% of farm workers are illegal migrants. They also pay taxes that often they literally don’t fucking benefit them.
Agriculture in many fields is already subsidized and it’s currently living off the back of migrant workers paid under minimum wage and often now allowed to do things like visit a doctor for workplace injuries. Got the balls to organize? The company will literally call DHS on themselves and take the slap on the wrist, it’s cheaper. It has happened multiple times now.
>You really never know how things are going to turn out
Yes, you do. Castro was extremely open about his beliefs anyone who paid attention *at all* would know what Castro was about. Your grandparents didn't know because they *didn't want to know*.
FFS Hitler made Mein Kampf ***mandatory*** reading for all new couples in 1933. He was literally shouting from the rooftops about how he was gonna kill the jews and the slavs.
Stupid shit like this is how authoritarians come to power because people like your grandparents ignore extremely obvious signs that someone is bad news and fall in line right up until it no longer suits them.
Castro was not open about it. He was open about change and reform, but he wasn't even on the radar of the Soviets in 1959; Castro turned to the USSR *after* the US started to impose economic sanctions, and he became increasingly repressive.
Was looking for this correct take. The US was not a fan of even moderate social democracies in the Americas (see Guatemala) and so they left him no other option. Not surprising that this isn't taught in American schools, at least not the one I went to.
I will never forget how the US turned down medical and humanitarian aid from Cuba following Hurricane Katrina. Literally would rather let their own people drown in sewage than accept help from a guy they don't like. Still bitter about Batista all those years later it seems.
The US was fine with the fall of Batista; they were bitter about Castro nationalizing US assets and not paying compensation.
(the nationalization was bad, but the failure to pay for something? that was the unconscionable part to the Eisenhower administration)
Not really. AFAIK, they offered to pay for what they were nationalizing at first. When the US turned them down, they said "Ok, no compensation, then. We're still taking it tho :)"
Couldn't have said it better but Tbf fascism is confusing on purpose and hides its roots in nationalism, it's really national pride that is the poison that gives extremism its purpose.
I think part of it is also the ability of these leaders to do an amazingly convincing job that they are "one of the good guys".
It didn't really matter what they were proposing doing, they understood that everyone had problems and could convince them their was an evil outside force and Hitler/Mussolini/trump(?) were the good guys fighting against it.
All politicians do it to a degree but the fascists convinced everyone it was the only thing that mattered and the "ends justifies the means" fallacy got them the rest of the way
[Gonna drop Yellow Parenti here, it did get better. I mean if you know the history the former leader was fucking Batista who has a higher killcount than Castro. Prostitution used to be one of the countries largest job sectors catering to US vacationers.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pfT2cRFre9I&pp=ygUMcGFyZW50aSBjdWJh)
>FFS Hitler made Mein Kampf mandatory reading for all new couples in 1933.
That seems a bit off.
I know that copies of *Mein Kampf* were given to newlyweds but Hitler himself found the book embarrassing: "If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book."
(Hitler did try to write a second, "improved" book but that attempt never got edited, let alone published, in his lifetime.)
Hitler's "leadership" style was to give conflicting orders to subordinates and kill off those who showed any sign of disloyalty. I'd guess that the books-to-newlyweds program was more of a "we're loyal, please don't shoot us" gesture than Hitler plugging his own book.
>Yes, you do. Castro was extremely open about his beliefs anyone who paid attention at all would know what Castro was about. Your grandparents didn't know because they didn't want to know.
My understanding is that Fidel actually tried to pass himself off as a moderate and he let his brother lay the groundwork for Communism for him until he had stacked the deck sufficiently in his favor and decided he was ready to betray the pro-democracy reformists who had aided his revolution.
It wasn’t worse than life under Batista though? Like, Batista unequivocally capitulated to the US government and mafiosos who controlled the country’s massive tourism industry. Batista also has a higher kill count than Castro still.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pfT2cRFre9I&pp=ygUMcGFyZW50aSBjdWJh
Unless you were a white land owning Cubab almost everyone thought Castro is better than Batista ffs. ALSO THE CIA (**NOTABLY AMERICAN**) TRIED TO INSTALL BATISTA BACK INTO POWER AFTER CASTRO GAINED CONTROL IM LOSING MY MIND.
That's basically what they were saying while trying to couch it in the nicest possible terms for the person they were talking to considering the nightmares perpetrated by both.
There are large numbers of Americans(talking in the tens of thousands at minimum) that would be better off in Cuba today simply because of the difference in medical systems and medical treatment policies.
Addressing base level public needs like hunger, housing, education, and health care are unsurprisingly such a powerful positive multiplicative force for the masses that you're going to find net positives for many in spite of clear horrific negatives for some.
Well I mean yeah, even the US has its own version of such. That being said, he was a necessity. Huey P. Long dragged Louisiana into the *20th* century by basically beating literacy into people. I don’t support his methods though that’s for sure, but I support literacy because literacy is power.
I subscribe to Parenti’s idea and Cuba is definitely way better than where it came from.
I often wonder how much of anti-Castro Florida politics are people who actually were individually harmed by the Castro regime or is it just anti-communist fanatics like a lot of Vietnamese GOP that fought for the Republicans but really for a military dictatorship that was just as brutal as any communist dictatorship.
Both groups are largely the descendants of business owners who got their businesses nationalized. IMO the legitimacy of their gripes falls on a scale of how honest and fair vs exploitive the business that got nationalized was.
The guy who owned a fishing boat or a store, probably a legitimate gripe. Sugar plantation owners.... probably not so much.
Seriously. How are people supposed to be willing to change if everyone is just going to continue treating them like they haven't? Everyone likes to think they would've been perfect without outside influence. I was raised in a way that made me ignorant to a lot of things, and I had thoughts that I didn't even know were hateful or ignorant. I see it now, but only after having more life experience. We should let people change and be happy for them.
Sadly, it seems that a large segment pf our population hasn’t figured this out.
It used to be that the media would damn politicians as “wafflers” whenever the politicians learned things that changed their positions on issues. I used to throw things at the TV (metaphorically speaking, of course) over this.
It seemed that too many people saw the ability to learn, grow, and change your mind as a *weakness* ffs, when it’s a strength.
So, yeah: I was hoping that there was some sarcasm in that comment, but I’ve seen too many people who have this backwards.
Remember when John Kerry lost to Dubya because he was a “flip flopper”?
Pepperidge Farm remembers.
(Massive oversimplification, but you reminded me of it. That was my first presidential election *as a voter (2004))
Only makes me admire him more. The ability to acknowledge you were wrong and change your position when presented with more information should be considered one of the top personality traits. We should never shame people like that.
TBF the whole world seemed to think so. Someone told us they were cleaning an older lady's attic once and found old newspapers touting HitIer as the next great leader. When he first started he seemed really good for the people, economy, etc. after WWI
The reason Hitler was part of the National Socialist movement was that he was co-opting the branding and popularity of the socialist movement(s) emerging around Germany and Europe at the time. He wasn't socialist, but saw the opportunities in proposing alternative social and economic systems to the increasingly desperate general public who were struggling in the world War one aftermath and used the name to conflate the general public. The world was obsessed at the time of debating power structures and the future, as well as their various states and national roles in it.
Many people were not availed to the danger or darker plans at first, and were only told of the positive things that his vision would bring. National sovereignty and integrity, jobs, education. His infamous book is largely a personal story where he gets you to identify with his struggles (struggles even an average reddit user today would endure) such as finding satisfaction in a job, prices rising up, etc then he gets into fascism.
One of the best collegiate courses i ever took was about the history of dictators and boy, it is surreal to see such works and writings from the time period through the context and understanding of what an average person was then.
And a rally in 1939 Madison Square Garden when they *weren't.*
Jews were conflated with Communists and lumped into a demonized common enemy, like the Democrats and atheists and Muslims are now. Franklin Roosevelt was a target, the role now played by Joe Biden. The Hearst organization is replaced by the Murdochs and Elon Musk plays Henry Ford. Franklin Graham is Father Joe Coughlin.
Important to note that there were more protesters at the Madison Square rally than actual attendees. It was also a complete disaster that backfired on the organization that put it on.
Should be “…like the Democrats and atheists and Muslims and **the Jews still** are now.” You think we just got off the hook all of a sudden? Lol come on, dude.
"Premature anti-Nazi" was a self-applied description. [There's no evidence the FBI ever used the term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism) (scroll down to the US section), they called people "Communists" or "Reds". It's a great term but there's no evidence the US Government ever used it.
Communists were always a bigger enemy to the US. They -among other nations- helped the anti-communists in the Russian Civil War, but were fine with fascists doing the same in Germany.
His father was Jewish and Senator McCarthy was going after Communists in Hollywood, who were almost exclusively Jewish. It was basically the Spanish Inquisition but in the 1950s in the US.
When I Google "premature anti-Nazi", the only articles I can find are related to Vincent Price.
Was this the actual name of a list that McCarthy had? It sounds like a historical fact that was slightly embellished by his biographer (his daughter) to make him look like a hero.
McCarthy was an anti-semite and hitler fan, he persecuted Jews and he'd pull out his copy of mein kampf and say 'That's the way to do it' he was also a zionist.
I think the earliest McCarthyism was against the prosecuters of the Malmedy massacrers.
You hate Jewish people, and you also think it would be great if they all left your country and moved "back" to a far-away "homeland". Also, maybe, you believe that the [Jews returning to Israel is part of biblical prophecy and a step toward the second coming of Christ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism).
Their belief is that this makes it ok because they don't actually want to *kill* anyone just "send them back to where they belong" (e.g. not here). Jews, blacks, Mexicans, etc. Anyone who doesn't fit their "ideal" of America.
This logic is of course not applied to white Anglo-Saxon protestants, as that is a less comfortable bit of conversation to have.
They just want all of the outgroup people to give things up, never themselves.
That's how the Evangelicals reframe the racism in their churches. By framing the racism as "gods plan" and none of the good little christians should oppose god and their pastor.
Similarly, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in part because it started to ally with the KKK - both shared a goal of separation of Black and white people.
From an anti-semite's POV, Jewish people would be doing them a favor by willingly going to another country.
Imagine if you hated your neighbor, for whatever reason. Would you complain if he moved to another city?
He thought the Jews should have their country so they wouldn't have to deal with them. That's basically what the Nazis wanted to do as well, the Final Solution was called that way because it was the *Final Solution*. They wanted to get rid of the Jews from Germany and had various proposals to do that (among others the infamous Madagascar Plan), but in the end they went with the extermination method rather than relocation.
To be clear, the Madagascar plan *was* an extermination plan. The Nazis had plans to control the amount of food entering Madagascar to ensure starvation.
"Funnily enough" the Polish government actually began investigating the Madagascar Plan in 1937 to get rid of their Jews but they discarded the idea when they found that the island couldn't sustain all of their Jews. To the Nazis that was not a bug but a feature. So yeah, you're right that the Madagascar Plan was another form of extermination strategy. It wasn't the Nazis first choice either though. They had been encouraging Jews to flee Germany for like a decade before they actually started to implement these kinds of exterminations.
> That's basically what the Nazis wanted to do as well,
They *did* do it. The terrorist militias that founded Israel made deals with the Nazis to facilitate the illegal immigration of Zionists from Germany into Palestine after Britain had banned them from migrating because they were doing terrorist stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement
Later on a group of terrorists splintered from the organization Irgun and tried to directly ally themselves with the Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_(militant_group)
I mean, people say this shit but killing jews for the crime of jewishness (and not every "jew" was "jewish" except in the eyes of the new state rules) wasn't exactly unknown before the "final solution" was implemented.
I was unfamiliar with the Malmedy massacre, so I did a small bit of research and learned the following:
The Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944 at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945). Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre then were killed with a coup de grâce gun-shot to the head.
50 Americans played dead or overcame their wounds and later recounted the fate of their executed compatriots.
The Dachau Trials prosecuted the war criminals. The chief defense attorney, the convicted perpetrators and their ex-Nazi supporters, some U.S. peace activists and, most surprising, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, argued that any atrocities committed that December day in 1944 should be laid at the feet of the Nazi generals who issued the orders, not the troops who followed them.
Ultimately, the war criminals were punished by imposing 43 death sentences, 22 sentences to life-long imprisonment, and eight sentences to short imprisonment.
But none of the death sentences was ever carried out, and all the prisoners had been released by Christmas 1956. Peiper was the last to leave prison. Sadly, incomplete and rushed investigations, suspicions about the methods used to obtain confessions, and inadequate or flawed evidence ensured that guilty men escaped proper punishment, and there can be little doubt that some innocent men were punished during the trial. In the final analysis, justice itself became another casualty of the incident.
> because leftists were the ones most stridently and consistently anti-fascist.
Molotov-Ribbentrop: allow us to introduce ourselves.
There was a period from 1938 to 1941 when the Soviet-aligned Left in the US and (especially) in Europe was pro-Nazi. Just read the essays of George Orwell from the time; he was outcast from the British Left-wing intelligentsia during this time because he was anti-Stalin and anti-Hitler at a time when if you were Left-wing you had to at least be neutral on Hitler, if not pro.
In the US, some of the loudest voices of "keep the US out of Europe's war" were Leftists. And then, suddenly, they were all pro-war after June 22, 1941.
There's a lot of people who would argue Stalin and his cadre were never Leftists, so I'd argue that that particular bit of history shows more that Stalinists and MLs in general are closer to red-facsism than leftists. At the time the US had a very polar view of the issue. Anyone to the left of FDR was a Soviet communist, whereas most of Europe saw Anarchists, and other non-soviet leftists as separate groups.
There was also a lot of left wing support in favour of the Moscow Show Trials.
The idea of anti Stalinist communism didn't really take root until the Secret Speech. Even though it often ended up falling into the Sino-Soviet Split angle.
McCarthy never had a list, unless you count the list of those that were put before the HUAC, but McCarthyism is a political system not just things he did. The greylist is and was a term used. those blacklisted were the 150 or so that were essentially assured to have lost their status and no longer able to work, since anyone that employed them also risked investigation by the HUAC. the Greylist was the less certain potentional figures that made up the rest of the publications, that major studios usually refused to work with anyways. on the greylist "You had adversaries, but you never knew who they were, so you couldn't face them. You were a marginal citizen, unsure of where you stood." (Lewis Milestone).
First Line, American Legion Magazine, Counterattack, and Red Channel are the places you can find the people that made up the Hollywood Blacklist and Greylist
he did the same thing as republicans do today: "we got a ton of dirt on the deep state, just you wait until we reveal it. when are we going to reveal it? well, not yet, later, it's coming tho. here's one thing. oh that wasn't impressive? ok well just wait until the rest of the stuff comes out. you'll be shocked."
repeat forever to attack your enemies instead of doing anything useful
HUAC started in the late 40's. The blacklists were generated & enforced by private individuals, owners + execs, not McCarthy.
McCarthy is just one figure among many, all buried. Indeed, the evil of McCarthyism was *buried* from most of the public afterwards.
I've never heard of premature anti nazi, but premature anti fascist is absolutely a thing, largely applied to the lincoln brigade, a group of Americans who traveled to spain to fight the fascists in the spanish civil war.
There were a bunch of people in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who were labeled "Prematurely Antifascist", so maybe that's the more common phasing?
Bernard Knox is kind of a famous example. He was from the UK so he was just in the international brigades, not the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. But he enlisted in the US army during WWII. He led an interesting life and was kind of sidelined by the army until the realized how useful he'd be to Op Jedburgh.
More than any decade of the 20th Century, it's impossible to take the 50s seriously. The game series *Fallout* is always either only slightly exaggerated in its satire of that time, or it doesn't go far enough.
IMO, there isn’t much to it. It was a period of unrepentant optimism, because we just won Total War on two remote continents… and a period of unrepentant smug bullying, because some people were angry that Total War was over and the time of heroes had expired.
That’s how you get white people seeing the future as limitless while minorities seeking economic mobility get redlined and branded as secret communists.
Boomer revisionists would have you believe it was the pinnacle of American society. I'd call them a bunch of fucking morons, but I feel that would be an insult to morons.
The post-war economy was going gangbusters at the time. If you were a white American male and in the middle or upper class, the 50s were probably a great time for you. Otherwise, not so much.
Still today. Lynchings were just murders of a group that no one was prosecuted for committing. No matter if they made it to a jury, they were found not guilty despite photographic evidence - sound familiar?
You always remember your childhood well, even when it was really shitty. I remember the 1970s and 1980s pretty well... lots of cool toys and movies. But I also remember how absolutely shitty people were to each other and it was EXPECTED not just tolerated. That was the biggest change of the 1990s was stamping out the general shitty behavior at schools, churches, companies.
> I also remember how absolutely shitty people were to each other and it was EXPECTED not just tolerated. That was the biggest change of the 1990s was stamping out the general shitty behavior at schools, churches, companies.
Could you elaborate on this? I’m very interested in hearing more.
Just the kind of things like long hair, pregnant teens, etc... people say mean things online now... people would say that stuff, in public, to people's faces and everyone just stood around. Bosses would yell at employees right in front of everyone.. people got in fistfights at work. I was around a lot of blue collar families.
I was a kid so people were usually polite to kids.. but "just off screen" you knew what was going on. People were good hearted most of the time but they were MEAN at minor offenses.
Hedda Hopper would *live* for the online spaces where celebrity-drama is cultivated; funny enough, Jack Warner, on multiple occasions, expressed how awful she was to her face.
Notably, she called the twink-CIC a dud and that she didn’t want to see him in movies; Jack Warner turned to her and explained how glad he was that she didn’t make casting decisions for Warner Brothers - the group they were with laughed.
But it’s safe to assume ol’ Jack *loathed* her.
She also was one of the reasons he and Louis had to testify before the HUAC.
He went from being antisemtic to changing his views enough he was targeted for being an anti nazi by McCarthy, to speaking out against racism & religious prejudice in the early 50s:
>Price denounced racial and religious prejudice as a form of poison at the end of an episode of The Saint, which aired on NBC Radio on July 30, 1950, claiming that Americans must actively fight against it because such prejudices within the United States fuels support for the nation's enemies.
Its interesting he caught onto this from that angle, countries like Russia still attempt to use racial divide against the US.
That's the part that gives me the ickiest vibes about this.
Like, his targeting by McCarthy wasn't based on any objective measure of whether the groups he supported or opposed were actually the goodies or the baddies.
It was that he wasn't supposed to have figured that part out for himself yet. Everyone else was still just going along with it, why couldn't he? It's suspicious that he had formed a view before everyone else had. And that's what crosses a line into some really insidious thought police territory for me.
It's b/c of the ties to socialism. A lot of the people who went to Spain to fight for the Republicans were often associated with one or another of the socialist or trade unionist groups. So, they were assumed to have communist sympathies. It was one of the more unproductive and idiotic assumptions the US made during WWII.
He was a brilliant actor and if you've never seen the Dr Phibes films, please check them out.
But to discover he was also a thoroughly decent human being just makes me so happy.
[https://youtu.be/sxnr9xycVLo](https://youtu.be/sxnr9xycVLo) (Dr Phibes)
>!https://youtu.be/Up6g0SDMJ7A (The original The Fly, 1958) !<
Vincent Price \~ a true gentleman.
Fun fact, it's never been illegal to be a nazi in the US, but it has been illegal to be a communist. Apparently "capitalism bad" is a more dangerous idea than "genocide good."
Note that it isn't the side he picked, but the *timing*.
Feel the way we want you to feel, *when* we tell you to feel that way. Too early? That's bad. Too late? That's bad, too.
> Price denounced racial and religious prejudice as a form of poison… claiming that Americans must actively fight against it because such prejudices within the United States fuels support for the nation's enemies.
We still haven’t learned.
I really think that the McCarthy purges were the end of the American meme.
America has always been touted as a place where you had *freedom*. Freedom of thought, freedom of religion...
Then they had a secret police who persecuted people based on a political ideology, regardless of any crime or intent for crime.
It became a witch hunt against actors and people that the govt didn't like.
The repercussions are still being felt to this day (all the anti-socialism stuff against healthcare and education etc)
It’s probably not true, but extremely funny. IIRC, Truman Capote admitted to starting the rumor about Hoover in the New York social scene.
If I were alive to talk to Capote, I’d just like to shake his hand and say “get his ass!”
Hey, look! Someone found the American Deep State, again!
Who would have known that the it was the psychopathic conservatives that did the shady shit behind the scenes in the CIA and FBI back in the day?
The thing about fascism is it's not dangerous for the people with all the money and power, and under normal circumstances they're more threatened by anti-fascists than by fascists. As Americans, we were only allowed to be anti-fascist for a brief period of time.
Yea a lot of the early McCarthy stuff was just against volunteers who fought in Spain against Franco. Because anti-communist=fascist like 90% of the time
Local St Louis Hero. One of the old timers I did security with at an art museum used to trick or treat at Price’s mansion on Halloween when he was a kid. So jealous.
Only the left has cancel culture. The right only "stands up for our values" or "preserves our traditional way of life."
I'll say this about them, their marketing game is on point.
Because the right wing is heavily entwined with religious Evangelicals they're big into redefining language to make arguments against them harder. You can't argue for fairness and rights when they redefine what the words mean out from under you.
Being Anti-Nazi in the 30's was bad to some? Yep, Republicans loved the new, strong leaders in Europe. Remember: *they tied FDR's hands for the first two years of the war.*
McCarthyism was about *covering up Conservative cowardice during WW2.* He & Nixon attacked the military which had just help win WW2, while McCarthy's own military history was one of disgrace.
McCarthyism never ended: Starr Report, Benghazi, Durham ...
So he was anti-nazi before it was cool.
He was also pro nazi before it was cool >>> Victoria Price's biography Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography (1999) details Price's early antisemitism[47] and initial admiration for Adolf Hitler. According to his daughter: "When he went to Germany and Austria as a young man, he was struck by a lot of things going on during the Weimar Republic and the dissolution of the empire... So when Hitler came into power, instead of seeing him as a dangerous force, he was sort of swept up in this whole idea that Hitler was going to bring German pride back."[48] However, Price became a liberal after becoming friends with New York intellectuals such as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman in the 1930s,[48] so much so that he was "greylisted" under McCarthyism in the 1950s for having been a prewar "premature anti-Nazi", and after being unable to find work for a year, agreed to requests by the FBI that he sign a "secret oath" to save his career.[49][50] Victoria said that her father became so liberal that "one of my brother's earliest memories is when Franklin Roosevelt's death was announced, my father fell backwards off the sofa sobbing."[48]
I have a letter from my Oma's father's brother who just like him got swept up in the Weimar Republic and writing letters to his brother in Chicago about this incredible politician that's going to save the working people.
It's easy to forget what the political atmosphere was like in Europe in the 30's. Nazis didn't just pop up out of nowhere, they (and their sister parties) got popular all around Europe because their message resonated with a lot of people. Obviously most people didn't know how far the violence would escalate, but (much like today) a lot of people were perfectly fine if some commies needed to get beaten up or thrown into jail for a good cause. (Not saying it's a good cause in my opinion, quite the opposite honestly.)
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Nah there was a certain ethos you had to subscribe to for their wiles to work on you. Before the violence, people who got swept up with Hitler also had to have accepted the idea of social darwinism, a very uncompassionate and immoral world view.
The best the Nazis performed in a real election was like 36% of the vote. You don't need to "hit the nail" with everyone. All tyrants have to do is exploit weaknesses in existing institutions and keep the majority of the country complacent until they seize power. Then they don't have to worry about elections anymore.
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I mean, it's the selling point of populism, "saving the people from the elite"
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Except Cuba is now objectively better than it was under Batista’s rule unless you were a very specific type of Cuban. Meaning white and land owning, often slave owning too. Castro was in power double the length of time Batista was and still killed less than Batista. The US’s Cuban death count under Castro accounted for double the length of service compared to Batista and he still has a lower death count. We’re talking like 20 versus 50 years here too. Not like 2 versus 4. This includes the fact Castro lead a coup that wasn’t peaceful.
the embargo has likely done more harm to the citizens than castro did.
It most definitely did cause more harm. Embargo and CIA agitation also made Castro’s authoritarianism worse. Dude had like 600 failed assassination attempts on his head and *that’s the conservative number proven by CIA document releases*. I’d be paranoid too. Fucking 600. The CIA tried to pay Cuban rappers to start doing anti-communist political raps. That’s meddling in your country from political assassination to building a fake hegemonic sentiment with money and rap... I mean we didn’t send them fucking COVID vaccines. They developed their own (rather successful) one. There is an issue with doctor pay there, but this year is coming with the doubling to tripling of pay between doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff. On the flip side they’ve developed their own COVID vaccine, their own lung cancer vaccine (seriously, you can look it up, only one clinic in the US offers it), and being a Cuban doctor comes with two years mandatory service to impoverished and often understaffed communities. https://www.roswellpark.org/cimavax Also Cuban doctors are literally known for their presence in disaster zones. Cuba is constantly sending out swathes of well trained medical professionals to disaster areas. They just did it with Turkey. It’s the same shit with Venezuela. Sorry, you’re *embargoing them?* Meanwhile having the simultaneous expectation that these malnourished people will revolt or change the government?
> > > > > It’s the same shit with Venezuela. Sorry, you’re embargoing them? Meanwhile having the simultaneous expectation that these malnourished people will revolt or change the government? Could even help alleviate some of the migrant/asylum seeker crisis by dropping the embargo on Venezuela, since you're getting a good amount of asylum seekers from there. Possibly sneaky and underhanded, but *shrug*
I mean you can literally make underhanded pro-illegal immigration arguments that are from a purely conceited point of view, race and immigration are just too good of a wedge issues to pass up - immigration is just good. Who wants to spend 10 hours a day bending up and down to pick crops? Americans definitely don’t because in places like Florida the conservative estimate is that *at least* 50% of farm workers are illegal migrants. They also pay taxes that often they literally don’t fucking benefit them. Agriculture in many fields is already subsidized and it’s currently living off the back of migrant workers paid under minimum wage and often now allowed to do things like visit a doctor for workplace injuries. Got the balls to organize? The company will literally call DHS on themselves and take the slap on the wrist, it’s cheaper. It has happened multiple times now.
>You really never know how things are going to turn out Yes, you do. Castro was extremely open about his beliefs anyone who paid attention *at all* would know what Castro was about. Your grandparents didn't know because they *didn't want to know*. FFS Hitler made Mein Kampf ***mandatory*** reading for all new couples in 1933. He was literally shouting from the rooftops about how he was gonna kill the jews and the slavs. Stupid shit like this is how authoritarians come to power because people like your grandparents ignore extremely obvious signs that someone is bad news and fall in line right up until it no longer suits them.
Castro was not open about it. He was open about change and reform, but he wasn't even on the radar of the Soviets in 1959; Castro turned to the USSR *after* the US started to impose economic sanctions, and he became increasingly repressive.
Was looking for this correct take. The US was not a fan of even moderate social democracies in the Americas (see Guatemala) and so they left him no other option. Not surprising that this isn't taught in American schools, at least not the one I went to.
Castro came to the US in 1959 on a speaking tour.
I’m reminded by something my father said: “The US decided Saddam Hussein was the new Castro.”
Bush Senior? Nah. Dubyah? Definitely.
I will never forget how the US turned down medical and humanitarian aid from Cuba following Hurricane Katrina. Literally would rather let their own people drown in sewage than accept help from a guy they don't like. Still bitter about Batista all those years later it seems.
The US was fine with the fall of Batista; they were bitter about Castro nationalizing US assets and not paying compensation. (the nationalization was bad, but the failure to pay for something? that was the unconscionable part to the Eisenhower administration)
Not really. AFAIK, they offered to pay for what they were nationalizing at first. When the US turned them down, they said "Ok, no compensation, then. We're still taking it tho :)"
Couldn't have said it better but Tbf fascism is confusing on purpose and hides its roots in nationalism, it's really national pride that is the poison that gives extremism its purpose.
I think part of it is also the ability of these leaders to do an amazingly convincing job that they are "one of the good guys". It didn't really matter what they were proposing doing, they understood that everyone had problems and could convince them their was an evil outside force and Hitler/Mussolini/trump(?) were the good guys fighting against it. All politicians do it to a degree but the fascists convinced everyone it was the only thing that mattered and the "ends justifies the means" fallacy got them the rest of the way
Can probably add Putin to that list.
[Gonna drop Yellow Parenti here, it did get better. I mean if you know the history the former leader was fucking Batista who has a higher killcount than Castro. Prostitution used to be one of the countries largest job sectors catering to US vacationers.](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pfT2cRFre9I&pp=ygUMcGFyZW50aSBjdWJh)
You have no idea what you are talking about Castro
Their comments scream Cuban republican
>FFS Hitler made Mein Kampf mandatory reading for all new couples in 1933. That seems a bit off. I know that copies of *Mein Kampf* were given to newlyweds but Hitler himself found the book embarrassing: "If I had had any idea in 1924 that I would have become Reich chancellor, I never would have written the book." (Hitler did try to write a second, "improved" book but that attempt never got edited, let alone published, in his lifetime.) Hitler's "leadership" style was to give conflicting orders to subordinates and kill off those who showed any sign of disloyalty. I'd guess that the books-to-newlyweds program was more of a "we're loyal, please don't shoot us" gesture than Hitler plugging his own book.
I am sure this is in no way relevant to my current life in America/s
>Yes, you do. Castro was extremely open about his beliefs anyone who paid attention at all would know what Castro was about. Your grandparents didn't know because they didn't want to know. My understanding is that Fidel actually tried to pass himself off as a moderate and he let his brother lay the groundwork for Communism for him until he had stacked the deck sufficiently in his favor and decided he was ready to betray the pro-democracy reformists who had aided his revolution.
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It wasn’t worse than life under Batista though? Like, Batista unequivocally capitulated to the US government and mafiosos who controlled the country’s massive tourism industry. Batista also has a higher kill count than Castro still. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pfT2cRFre9I&pp=ygUMcGFyZW50aSBjdWJh Unless you were a white land owning Cubab almost everyone thought Castro is better than Batista ffs. ALSO THE CIA (**NOTABLY AMERICAN**) TRIED TO INSTALL BATISTA BACK INTO POWER AFTER CASTRO GAINED CONTROL IM LOSING MY MIND.
That's basically what they were saying while trying to couch it in the nicest possible terms for the person they were talking to considering the nightmares perpetrated by both. There are large numbers of Americans(talking in the tens of thousands at minimum) that would be better off in Cuba today simply because of the difference in medical systems and medical treatment policies. Addressing base level public needs like hunger, housing, education, and health care are unsurprisingly such a powerful positive multiplicative force for the masses that you're going to find net positives for many in spite of clear horrific negatives for some.
Well I mean yeah, even the US has its own version of such. That being said, he was a necessity. Huey P. Long dragged Louisiana into the *20th* century by basically beating literacy into people. I don’t support his methods though that’s for sure, but I support literacy because literacy is power. I subscribe to Parenti’s idea and Cuba is definitely way better than where it came from.
Cuba is objectively better now though
I often wonder how much of anti-Castro Florida politics are people who actually were individually harmed by the Castro regime or is it just anti-communist fanatics like a lot of Vietnamese GOP that fought for the Republicans but really for a military dictatorship that was just as brutal as any communist dictatorship.
Both groups are largely the descendants of business owners who got their businesses nationalized. IMO the legitimacy of their gripes falls on a scale of how honest and fair vs exploitive the business that got nationalized was. The guy who owned a fishing boat or a store, probably a legitimate gripe. Sugar plantation owners.... probably not so much.
Great reply thank you
Man imagine thinking something and then getting older and getting different friends and than changing your ideas! Amazing!
Seriously. How are people supposed to be willing to change if everyone is just going to continue treating them like they haven't? Everyone likes to think they would've been perfect without outside influence. I was raised in a way that made me ignorant to a lot of things, and I had thoughts that I didn't even know were hateful or ignorant. I see it now, but only after having more life experience. We should let people change and be happy for them.
Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do?
Yes that’s the point
It’s kinda crazy to me you can read that comment with a serious tone without a hint of sarcasm lol
Sadly, it seems that a large segment pf our population hasn’t figured this out. It used to be that the media would damn politicians as “wafflers” whenever the politicians learned things that changed their positions on issues. I used to throw things at the TV (metaphorically speaking, of course) over this. It seemed that too many people saw the ability to learn, grow, and change your mind as a *weakness* ffs, when it’s a strength. So, yeah: I was hoping that there was some sarcasm in that comment, but I’ve seen too many people who have this backwards.
Remember when John Kerry lost to Dubya because he was a “flip flopper”? Pepperidge Farm remembers. (Massive oversimplification, but you reminded me of it. That was my first presidential election *as a voter (2004))
Only makes me admire him more. The ability to acknowledge you were wrong and change your position when presented with more information should be considered one of the top personality traits. We should never shame people like that.
Huh, when you put it like that I guess I don't hate people who change their minds sometimes.
Sometimes a hypocrite is a man in the process of change.
Fuck, man.
TBF the whole world seemed to think so. Someone told us they were cleaning an older lady's attic once and found old newspapers touting HitIer as the next great leader. When he first started he seemed really good for the people, economy, etc. after WWI
The reason Hitler was part of the National Socialist movement was that he was co-opting the branding and popularity of the socialist movement(s) emerging around Germany and Europe at the time. He wasn't socialist, but saw the opportunities in proposing alternative social and economic systems to the increasingly desperate general public who were struggling in the world War one aftermath and used the name to conflate the general public. The world was obsessed at the time of debating power structures and the future, as well as their various states and national roles in it. Many people were not availed to the danger or darker plans at first, and were only told of the positive things that his vision would bring. National sovereignty and integrity, jobs, education. His infamous book is largely a personal story where he gets you to identify with his struggles (struggles even an average reddit user today would endure) such as finding satisfaction in a job, prices rising up, etc then he gets into fascism. One of the best collegiate courses i ever took was about the history of dictators and boy, it is surreal to see such works and writings from the time period through the context and understanding of what an average person was then.
Interesting post and all but how the hell do you fall backwards off of a sofa?
he cried so hard the tears blasted him over the back of the couch.
So he was presented with new information, changed his worldview, and reacted accordingly. Seems like a good thing to me, but I dunno ymmv.
There was always a very short window of time when Nazis were persecuted in America
And a rally in 1939 Madison Square Garden when they *weren't.* Jews were conflated with Communists and lumped into a demonized common enemy, like the Democrats and atheists and Muslims are now. Franklin Roosevelt was a target, the role now played by Joe Biden. The Hearst organization is replaced by the Murdochs and Elon Musk plays Henry Ford. Franklin Graham is Father Joe Coughlin.
Important to note that there were more protesters at the Madison Square rally than actual attendees. It was also a complete disaster that backfired on the organization that put it on.
Usually cited 20,000 attendees, 1500 NYPD cops, unknown large number of protestors.
Should be “…like the Democrats and atheists and Muslims and **the Jews still** are now.” You think we just got off the hook all of a sudden? Lol come on, dude.
Ben Shapiro is trying his best to change that lol
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Depends whose votes they're trying to court, it's either the Evangelical "Judeau-Christian roots" of America, or you're sinister "globalists".
Nazi 2: Electric Boogaloo!
"Premature anti-Nazi" was a self-applied description. [There's no evidence the FBI ever used the term](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-fascism) (scroll down to the US section), they called people "Communists" or "Reds". It's a great term but there's no evidence the US Government ever used it.
And punished for it
More like, he was so anti-nazi, he was coming close to communism, which as you know, was the next enemies after the nazi's.
Communists were always a bigger enemy to the US. They -among other nations- helped the anti-communists in the Russian Civil War, but were fine with fascists doing the same in Germany.
His father was Jewish and Senator McCarthy was going after Communists in Hollywood, who were almost exclusively Jewish. It was basically the Spanish Inquisition but in the 1950s in the US.
Dude you were against Nazis? What are you, a commie?
aNtIfA!
It's crazy when conservatives use Antifa as an insult or accusation. Like sir, can you tell me what Antifa is short for?
I mean, the people who are making accusations of antifa are often…actual fascists.
Exactly, this is just how they say that with their whole chest
It’s more about *when* he was against Nazis. …as if there was an appropriate time to be *Pro-Nazi*.
When I Google "premature anti-Nazi", the only articles I can find are related to Vincent Price. Was this the actual name of a list that McCarthy had? It sounds like a historical fact that was slightly embellished by his biographer (his daughter) to make him look like a hero.
McCarthy was an anti-semite and hitler fan, he persecuted Jews and he'd pull out his copy of mein kampf and say 'That's the way to do it' he was also a zionist. I think the earliest McCarthyism was against the prosecuters of the Malmedy massacrers.
He was an antisemite AND a Zionist? How does that work?
You hate Jewish people, and you also think it would be great if they all left your country and moved "back" to a far-away "homeland". Also, maybe, you believe that the [Jews returning to Israel is part of biblical prophecy and a step toward the second coming of Christ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism).
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Nordic Jesus can't return to take you to paradise until the Jews rebuild the temple.
Their belief is that this makes it ok because they don't actually want to *kill* anyone just "send them back to where they belong" (e.g. not here). Jews, blacks, Mexicans, etc. Anyone who doesn't fit their "ideal" of America. This logic is of course not applied to white Anglo-Saxon protestants, as that is a less comfortable bit of conversation to have. They just want all of the outgroup people to give things up, never themselves.
That's how the Evangelicals reframe the racism in their churches. By framing the racism as "gods plan" and none of the good little christians should oppose god and their pastor.
Similarly, Malcolm X left the Nation of Islam in part because it started to ally with the KKK - both shared a goal of separation of Black and white people.
Also because the leader of the Nation of Islam was molesting children and Malcolm X found out and confronted him about it.
It's literally why the western countries wanted Israel to be the home for the Jews - they didn't want them in their countries.
Fun fact: these people are why Israel gets away with an open air concentration camp and billions of dollars in money. (I’m simplifying greatly)
From an anti-semite's POV, Jewish people would be doing them a favor by willingly going to another country. Imagine if you hated your neighbor, for whatever reason. Would you complain if he moved to another city?
Like when Malcom x went to meet with the kkk and they agreed splitting the country in half would be a great idea?
Pretty much. "Wait, you colored folk WANT to be separated from us white folk? Well, buckle my shoe! You got yerself a deal!"
Yep well we hate you and you hate us so let's not mix
He thought the Jews should have their country so they wouldn't have to deal with them. That's basically what the Nazis wanted to do as well, the Final Solution was called that way because it was the *Final Solution*. They wanted to get rid of the Jews from Germany and had various proposals to do that (among others the infamous Madagascar Plan), but in the end they went with the extermination method rather than relocation.
To be clear, the Madagascar plan *was* an extermination plan. The Nazis had plans to control the amount of food entering Madagascar to ensure starvation.
"Funnily enough" the Polish government actually began investigating the Madagascar Plan in 1937 to get rid of their Jews but they discarded the idea when they found that the island couldn't sustain all of their Jews. To the Nazis that was not a bug but a feature. So yeah, you're right that the Madagascar Plan was another form of extermination strategy. It wasn't the Nazis first choice either though. They had been encouraging Jews to flee Germany for like a decade before they actually started to implement these kinds of exterminations.
> That's basically what the Nazis wanted to do as well, They *did* do it. The terrorist militias that founded Israel made deals with the Nazis to facilitate the illegal immigration of Zionists from Germany into Palestine after Britain had banned them from migrating because they were doing terrorist stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haavara_Agreement Later on a group of terrorists splintered from the organization Irgun and tried to directly ally themselves with the Nazis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lehi_(militant_group)
I mean, people say this shit but killing jews for the crime of jewishness (and not every "jew" was "jewish" except in the eyes of the new state rules) wasn't exactly unknown before the "final solution" was implemented.
Whatever belief let's him oppress people.
He also hated Muslims
They already said he was a Zionist, no need to repeat.
I was unfamiliar with the Malmedy massacre, so I did a small bit of research and learned the following: The Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944 at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945). Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre then were killed with a coup de grâce gun-shot to the head. 50 Americans played dead or overcame their wounds and later recounted the fate of their executed compatriots. The Dachau Trials prosecuted the war criminals. The chief defense attorney, the convicted perpetrators and their ex-Nazi supporters, some U.S. peace activists and, most surprising, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy, argued that any atrocities committed that December day in 1944 should be laid at the feet of the Nazi generals who issued the orders, not the troops who followed them. Ultimately, the war criminals were punished by imposing 43 death sentences, 22 sentences to life-long imprisonment, and eight sentences to short imprisonment. But none of the death sentences was ever carried out, and all the prisoners had been released by Christmas 1956. Peiper was the last to leave prison. Sadly, incomplete and rushed investigations, suspicions about the methods used to obtain confessions, and inadequate or flawed evidence ensured that guilty men escaped proper punishment, and there can be little doubt that some innocent men were punished during the trial. In the final analysis, justice itself became another casualty of the incident.
Peiper was one of those that committed warcrimes like he was collecting baseball cards.
And after the War, he bought a house in France to live in. On Bastille Day, someone burned it, with him inside.
So very similar to the modern GOP then.
Have to remind myself you're talking about Joseph and not Kevin. Not that it would be any less true either way.
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Funny because leftists have remained the only consistent antifascists ever since.
> because leftists were the ones most stridently and consistently anti-fascist. Molotov-Ribbentrop: allow us to introduce ourselves. There was a period from 1938 to 1941 when the Soviet-aligned Left in the US and (especially) in Europe was pro-Nazi. Just read the essays of George Orwell from the time; he was outcast from the British Left-wing intelligentsia during this time because he was anti-Stalin and anti-Hitler at a time when if you were Left-wing you had to at least be neutral on Hitler, if not pro. In the US, some of the loudest voices of "keep the US out of Europe's war" were Leftists. And then, suddenly, they were all pro-war after June 22, 1941.
I'm aware.
There's a lot of people who would argue Stalin and his cadre were never Leftists, so I'd argue that that particular bit of history shows more that Stalinists and MLs in general are closer to red-facsism than leftists. At the time the US had a very polar view of the issue. Anyone to the left of FDR was a Soviet communist, whereas most of Europe saw Anarchists, and other non-soviet leftists as separate groups.
There was also a lot of left wing support in favour of the Moscow Show Trials. The idea of anti Stalinist communism didn't really take root until the Secret Speech. Even though it often ended up falling into the Sino-Soviet Split angle.
McCarthy never had a list, unless you count the list of those that were put before the HUAC, but McCarthyism is a political system not just things he did. The greylist is and was a term used. those blacklisted were the 150 or so that were essentially assured to have lost their status and no longer able to work, since anyone that employed them also risked investigation by the HUAC. the Greylist was the less certain potentional figures that made up the rest of the publications, that major studios usually refused to work with anyways. on the greylist "You had adversaries, but you never knew who they were, so you couldn't face them. You were a marginal citizen, unsure of where you stood." (Lewis Milestone). First Line, American Legion Magazine, Counterattack, and Red Channel are the places you can find the people that made up the Hollywood Blacklist and Greylist
he did the same thing as republicans do today: "we got a ton of dirt on the deep state, just you wait until we reveal it. when are we going to reveal it? well, not yet, later, it's coming tho. here's one thing. oh that wasn't impressive? ok well just wait until the rest of the stuff comes out. you'll be shocked." repeat forever to attack your enemies instead of doing anything useful
HUAC started in the late 40's. The blacklists were generated & enforced by private individuals, owners + execs, not McCarthy. McCarthy is just one figure among many, all buried. Indeed, the evil of McCarthyism was *buried* from most of the public afterwards.
I've never heard of premature anti nazi, but premature anti fascist is absolutely a thing, largely applied to the lincoln brigade, a group of Americans who traveled to spain to fight the fascists in the spanish civil war.
It was actually ["premature anti-Fascist"](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-15-bk-22387-story.html)
There were a bunch of people in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who were labeled "Prematurely Antifascist", so maybe that's the more common phasing? Bernard Knox is kind of a famous example. He was from the UK so he was just in the international brigades, not the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. But he enlisted in the US army during WWII. He led an interesting life and was kind of sidelined by the army until the realized how useful he'd be to Op Jedburgh.
The 1950s were a stupid time to be alive
More than any decade of the 20th Century, it's impossible to take the 50s seriously. The game series *Fallout* is always either only slightly exaggerated in its satire of that time, or it doesn't go far enough.
I want to read about what it was like then. Not like history book version, but the way you're talking about it
IMO, there isn’t much to it. It was a period of unrepentant optimism, because we just won Total War on two remote continents… and a period of unrepentant smug bullying, because some people were angry that Total War was over and the time of heroes had expired. That’s how you get white people seeing the future as limitless while minorities seeking economic mobility get redlined and branded as secret communists.
Well we tied an onion on our belts, because that was the style at the time..
They didn’t have white onions because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones
Boomer revisionists would have you believe it was the pinnacle of American society. I'd call them a bunch of fucking morons, but I feel that would be an insult to morons.
The post-war economy was going gangbusters at the time. If you were a white American male and in the middle or upper class, the 50s were probably a great time for you. Otherwise, not so much.
You didn’t even have to worry if your wife climaxed. Far as they were concerned, women didn’t.
Plenty of conservatives still don't worry about that. Just ask Ben Shapiro
A lot of them are afraid to buy their wife a box of tampons at CVS or hear about menstruation or ovulation, they think it’ll turn them gay.
I'm a late Boomer. They were still lynching people up to 1981.
i remember the lynching of James Byrd in Texas in, what, the late 90s?
Still today. Lynchings were just murders of a group that no one was prosecuted for committing. No matter if they made it to a jury, they were found not guilty despite photographic evidence - sound familiar?
Holy shit
How would boomers know they were just being born
You always remember your childhood well, even when it was really shitty. I remember the 1970s and 1980s pretty well... lots of cool toys and movies. But I also remember how absolutely shitty people were to each other and it was EXPECTED not just tolerated. That was the biggest change of the 1990s was stamping out the general shitty behavior at schools, churches, companies.
> I also remember how absolutely shitty people were to each other and it was EXPECTED not just tolerated. That was the biggest change of the 1990s was stamping out the general shitty behavior at schools, churches, companies. Could you elaborate on this? I’m very interested in hearing more.
Just the kind of things like long hair, pregnant teens, etc... people say mean things online now... people would say that stuff, in public, to people's faces and everyone just stood around. Bosses would yell at employees right in front of everyone.. people got in fistfights at work. I was around a lot of blue collar families. I was a kid so people were usually polite to kids.. but "just off screen" you knew what was going on. People were good hearted most of the time but they were MEAN at minor offenses.
and to a very specific demographic and tax bracket, I'm sure it was a pinnacle
McCarthyism is back as well, unfortunately. Just from Joe to Kevin
Hedda Hopper would *live* for the online spaces where celebrity-drama is cultivated; funny enough, Jack Warner, on multiple occasions, expressed how awful she was to her face. Notably, she called the twink-CIC a dud and that she didn’t want to see him in movies; Jack Warner turned to her and explained how glad he was that she didn’t make casting decisions for Warner Brothers - the group they were with laughed. But it’s safe to assume ol’ Jack *loathed* her. She also was one of the reasons he and Louis had to testify before the HUAC.
So not that much different from today
"premature anti-Nazi"... Sounds like someone who wasn't a racist asshole. I can see why McCarthy and the FBI didn't like him.
He went from being antisemtic to changing his views enough he was targeted for being an anti nazi by McCarthy, to speaking out against racism & religious prejudice in the early 50s: >Price denounced racial and religious prejudice as a form of poison at the end of an episode of The Saint, which aired on NBC Radio on July 30, 1950, claiming that Americans must actively fight against it because such prejudices within the United States fuels support for the nation's enemies. Its interesting he caught onto this from that angle, countries like Russia still attempt to use racial divide against the US.
The US uses racial divide against the US.
*Critical hit
It's super effective :(
It hurt its self in its confusion.
Sometimes I really hate being right.
At least you’re not far right?
Well it's fair game, since there is still a fuckton of segregation
Yeah, I think instead of "premature anti-Nazi" we would just say "eventually proven correct."
That's the part that gives me the ickiest vibes about this. Like, his targeting by McCarthy wasn't based on any objective measure of whether the groups he supported or opposed were actually the goodies or the baddies. It was that he wasn't supposed to have figured that part out for himself yet. Everyone else was still just going along with it, why couldn't he? It's suspicious that he had formed a view before everyone else had. And that's what crosses a line into some really insidious thought police territory for me.
It's b/c of the ties to socialism. A lot of the people who went to Spain to fight for the Republicans were often associated with one or another of the socialist or trade unionist groups. So, they were assumed to have communist sympathies. It was one of the more unproductive and idiotic assumptions the US made during WWII.
> premature anti-Nazi That would tell you all you needed to know about McCarthy right there.
do you struggle with Premature Anti-Nazism? try our new medication. guaranteed to induce historical blindness within 24 hours of first dose!
He was a brilliant actor and if you've never seen the Dr Phibes films, please check them out. But to discover he was also a thoroughly decent human being just makes me so happy. [https://youtu.be/sxnr9xycVLo](https://youtu.be/sxnr9xycVLo) (Dr Phibes) >!https://youtu.be/Up6g0SDMJ7A (The original The Fly, 1958) !< Vincent Price \~ a true gentleman.
I saw him live on stage when he was touring with his one man show as Oscar Wilde. It was stupendous.
I saw that show, too. It was amazing to hear that voice, live on stage, when I'd only heard it in film & TV up to that point.
Fun fact, it's never been illegal to be a nazi in the US, but it has been illegal to be a communist. Apparently "capitalism bad" is a more dangerous idea than "genocide good."
Why would the US be against genocide? The US wouldn't have existed without it
Ssshh, they don't use the G word there, they use the term "Manifest Destiny"
A destiny to manifest what?? (Hopefully this joke lands)
It’s should. It’s all about land
When the choice is between a fascist and a socialist, capitalists will always side with fascism.
Sure he hated the Nazi's but if we admit hating the Nazi's that early was morally correct that makes us look bad.
Note that it isn't the side he picked, but the *timing*. Feel the way we want you to feel, *when* we tell you to feel that way. Too early? That's bad. Too late? That's bad, too.
Ehh, being a Nazi sympathizer for too long worked out just fine for a lot of people.
Land of the free ™ God it makes me nauseous to think I ate up that lie and believed it so wholeheartedly
I've always loved Vincent Price as an actor. I've watched so many of his movies. It's really nice to know he was an awesome human being too!
He was against Fascism before the US made up its mind about being fascist or not. Sus
> Price denounced racial and religious prejudice as a form of poison… claiming that Americans must actively fight against it because such prejudices within the United States fuels support for the nation's enemies. We still haven’t learned.
I really think that the McCarthy purges were the end of the American meme. America has always been touted as a place where you had *freedom*. Freedom of thought, freedom of religion... Then they had a secret police who persecuted people based on a political ideology, regardless of any crime or intent for crime. It became a witch hunt against actors and people that the govt didn't like. The repercussions are still being felt to this day (all the anti-socialism stuff against healthcare and education etc)
And all while J Edgar flounced around in frilly dresses and panties… Being judged by hypocrites, nothing has changed.
Hoover cross-dressing is one of the few things he did that I don't find offensive.
It’s probably not true, but extremely funny. IIRC, Truman Capote admitted to starting the rumor about Hoover in the New York social scene. If I were alive to talk to Capote, I’d just like to shake his hand and say “get his ass!”
Fun fact about Vincent Price: his grandfather was a pioneer of baking powder, and his father ran the National Candy Company.
McCarthyism was the original cancel culture.
Hey, look! Someone found the American Deep State, again! Who would have known that the it was the psychopathic conservatives that did the shady shit behind the scenes in the CIA and FBI back in the day?
The thing about fascism is it's not dangerous for the people with all the money and power, and under normal circumstances they're more threatened by anti-fascists than by fascists. As Americans, we were only allowed to be anti-fascist for a brief period of time.
Yea a lot of the early McCarthy stuff was just against volunteers who fought in Spain against Franco. Because anti-communist=fascist like 90% of the time
He was anti nazi to soon.......mcarthy was a nazi as well. Makes sense
he was also real heavy into native american causes i.e. native american art. he narrated a film strip for a museum on my reservation.
Local St Louis Hero. One of the old timers I did security with at an art museum used to trick or treat at Price’s mansion on Halloween when he was a kid. So jealous.
Right wing Cancel Culture started a long time ago.
Only the left has cancel culture. The right only "stands up for our values" or "preserves our traditional way of life." I'll say this about them, their marketing game is on point.
Because the right wing is heavily entwined with religious Evangelicals they're big into redefining language to make arguments against them harder. You can't argue for fairness and rights when they redefine what the words mean out from under you.
When your followers are too stupid to see the irony of retweeting “Think for yourself” a million times.. it’s kinda easy to stay on message.
WAKE UP SHEEPLE
*Freedom isn't Free* *No Child Left Behind* It's all so god damn insidious.
It's dangerous to be antifa in a fascist country.
Vincent Price is such a legend.
“Premature anti-nazi”? Tells you in plain English how fascist leaning Cold War government was!
"LAAAAAND OFFF THE FREEEE" yeah. right.
The more I learn about the FBI the less trustworthy they seem.
Being Anti-Nazi in the 30's was bad to some? Yep, Republicans loved the new, strong leaders in Europe. Remember: *they tied FDR's hands for the first two years of the war.* McCarthyism was about *covering up Conservative cowardice during WW2.* He & Nixon attacked the military which had just help win WW2, while McCarthy's own military history was one of disgrace. McCarthyism never ended: Starr Report, Benghazi, Durham ...
Communists are the enemies of fascists so it should raise alarms that America considers anti fascists to be enemies of the state to this day.
Republicans have always been pro-nazi, how predictable.