• A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
    2501·
    2 days ago

    That is 100% in character for MAGA: at the same time they screech “dOn’T cAlL uS nAzIs” while also saying “Hitler did many good things”

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
      15·
      1 day ago

      “I voted for Mr. Hitler because he’d be good for the economy. I didn’t go in for all that Jew-killing stuff. You can’t blame that on me.” - German citizen, 1946

      • TimmyDeanSausage @lemmy.world
        1·
        7 hours ago

        Until Hitler… self-hitlered…, most Germans had no idea they even had concentration camps or that genocide was being done in their name. They thought they were winning the war, and they saw the infrastructure/economic improvements and thought Hitler was doing a great job. One would hope everything being actively video recorded/ reported this time would make a difference but, if my experience with my MAGA family is indicative of what’s happening with the rest of the MAGAts, they’re just as ignorant. I forced my fiance’s newsmax-addicted grandma to watch a video of ICE beating a woman, in front of her small child, while they were kidnapping her husband, and Mema hasn’t said shit about politics since. She was genuinely shocked.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
          2·
          3 hours ago

          That’s not entirely true. Most Germans absolutely knew something was up with the Jews, and others, and pretended not to. Out in the country, where the Concentration Camps were, towns and villages knew what was happening, and could smell the crematoriums. Many of the workers at the camps lived in the villages, and businesses in the village did business with the camps. Many had to have seen, or at least heard about the conditions.

          In the cities, it was pretty obvious that Jews were disappearing, usually in harsh and violent round-ups in which any resistance was met with instant lethal force. Neighbors, employers, local business people, etc. certainly noticed that the local Jews, gays, activists, religious figures, etc. were disappearing. Of course, EVERYBODY had been exposed to years of the most ferocious anti-Semitic rhetoric, far worse than what we hear today about undocumented people in America, which included permanently eliminating Jews from the entire planet, so they could pretty easily guess where those people had gone, never to be heard from again. As bad as MAGAs are, we haven’t heard them openly calling for an official policy of extermination…yet. I truly believe it is coming, though.

          Of course, after the war, nobody was going to admit they knew something was going on, and did nothing about it. Better to just act ignorant. Better to be thought to be stupid, than to be thought to be evil.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
      7·
      1 day ago

      It’s real but articles I’ve found seem to assume he was being sarcastic. I didn’t see anywhere that he declared it so, it just seems to be an assumption based on “he couldn’t possibly have meant that”

      • jve@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        7 hours ago

        Is there another interpretation of this that isn’t sarcastic?

        Does anybody actually read this and think he meant, “wow, that is a cool story?”

        That said, the two ways I come up with to interpret a sarcastic comment here are:

        “Sounds like bullshit. “. Which is plausible in this post facts era I suppose.

        Or

        “What does this have to do with us?” Which would sure help me sleep at night if I didn’t know exactly what it has to do with us, but afaik, Creepy Pete had called such a meeting for thus far unknown purposes.

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
          1·
          7 hours ago

          The only sane interpretation is that it is sarcastic, but this group of folks have said a lot of things I assumed were sarcastic or jokes in poor taste that turned out to be completely sincere.

          Despite the bar being lowered just onto the ground, I’m still on the side of assuming he thinks the comparison is ridiculous and not something worthy of admiration. I just assume he has at least some brain cells active to know how bad the optics would be to engage otherwise, and a hollow ‘macho pep rally’ seems to be more up his alley than anything vaguely substantitve, for good or for evil.

          • jve@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 hours ago

            Looking back at this, apparently it was posted at 4am, so he was probably just wasted.

            I also trust his “sarcastic” comment here as much as I would trust a comment that said “yeah but we would never do that”. Which is to say, not at all.

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
      19·
      1 day ago

      It’s real. From the yahoo news article that someone else linked: The defense secretary wrote “Cool story, General” in response to a tweet from retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges about Adolf Hitler gathering Nazi generals in 1935 and them being “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer.”

  • Serinus@lemmy.world
    78·
    2 days ago

    So if you’re one of those generals, do you recite the new oath or do you allow them to purge everyone loyal to the Constitution?

    • betanumerus@lemmy.caEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      If you’re one of those generals, you have an oath to the Constitution so you protect the Constitution with the same dedication as if you were on a battlefield. Soldiers don’t change team midway. Even amateur athletes don’t do that.

      • zalgotext@sh.itjust.works
        82·
        1 day ago

        If you rise to the rank of general, you’re more politician than soldier though, and politicians change teams all the time

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
          5·
          1 day ago

          Not that kind of politics, though. Any General has had to navigate an elaborate military political labyrinth of rules, regulations, and the erratic and unpredictable vagaries of higher command. That’s far different from dealing with the politics of elections, votes, campaign financing, public opinions, etc., that an elected politician has to deal with.

          Generals are people who have fully bought into the concept of protecting America from its enemies, foreign and DOMESTIC. They also have a military education equivalent to a doctorate in any other career. They are fully aware of what their rights and responsibilities are, should they be involuntarily confined to a room, and ordered to dismiss their original oath to their COUNTRY, and take a new on to the Führer.

          They will recognize this for what it is, and it will be a watershed moment for this administration. What if all the Generals simply refuse? What will Trump and Hegseth do? Fire them all? Imprison them? Remove them from positions of responsibility? Who will replace them? What if the next several levels of command also refuse? Who will operate the military?

          Whatever MAGA does to respond to a Rebellion of Generals will weaken America in the eyes of our enemies.

          • Samskara@sh.itjust.works
            31·
            9 hours ago

            You put all your hope into the generals recognizing MAGA as the domestic enemy. It could easily go the other way.

            • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
              4·
              8 hours ago

              I don’t put ALL my hopes into anything. I honestly feel like America is going to crash, and have an apocalyptic Depression that will make the Great Depression look like the post-war boom.

              I have a degree in history, and I could rattle off numerous societies that were doing well, right up until the moment they fully collapsed, and were buried over by the next civilization. We aren’t special, we’ve only been around for 250 years. The Romans lasted hundreds, the Egyptians lasted centuries. The Greeks were living an amazing modern life, until they became ancient history. Then there were the Sumerians, the Phoenicians, and many many more. I guarantee that ALL of them felt that their culture would last forever. Today, nobody even speaks their languages.

              For the past 50 years, I’ve watched us barrel down this freeway to destruction, watching every off ramp go by. Here’s another one, a big one, an off ramp that could really take us in a different direction, and I’m just pointing it out.

              Hopefully, the Generals see this off ramp for the unique opportunity that it is. Generals aren’t like politicians. Generals tend to be brave, while nobody is more cowardly than a politician. Generals will accept a dangerous assignment, while a politician will avoid it at any cost. So perhaps the Generals will do what the politicians won’t - their jobs, and defend America from certain destruction.

              But I’m not holding my breath, either. I am planning and stockpiling for a future apocalypse, and I think the chances of that are about 70%.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
          3·
          1 day ago

          If it ever came down to it, I would seriously float that to a judge.

          “Yes, your honor, I took that abominable pledge, because I wanted to stay in my position, and fight from within, so I crossed my fingers, and I MEANT IT! I never renounced my original pledge, and I never properly took the new one.”

      • Mic_Check_One_Two@reddthat.com
        50·
        2 days ago

        This is actually a tactic listed in the official CIA “Simple Sabotage” handbook. Basically, if you can’t overtly sabotage things by blowing them up while maintaining your cover, work to sabotage things from inside instead.

        Get a job in middle management, and do everything in your power to live up to the term “middle manglement”. Do your job as poorly as possible while still maintaining plausible deniability. Make it difficult for people around you to do their jobs. Give other managers bad info. Sow division via gossip. Divert employees towards busy work so they can’t focus on important tasks. Waste budgets. Ensure deadlines get missed, while demanding unreasonable deadlines for other teams. Et cetera…

        And I can guarantee that generals will be well aware of this fact. Plenty of them got into their spots by being war dogs, but they won’t be stupid.

        • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
          4·
          1 day ago

          Years ago, I read an article by a Democrat who got a job working for a local Republican campaign office, just so he could be incompetent at it.

          While he was sabotaging things, he caught the flu. He came to work anyway, and smeared his flu-ridden saliva on doorknobs, computer keyboards and mouses, etc. Within a week, most of the office was sick, in the middle of a big campaign.

          • F_State@midwest.social
            4·
            2 days ago

            In every company I’ve worked for that had middle managers, they spent 80% of their time trying to justify their position with self-assigned busy work to try to look useful for the company.

      • Serinus@lemmy.world
        472·
        2 days ago

        Just thinking out loud here.

        Faking it also give them power. If all the generals go in an give an oath to the furher, they don’t all have to mean it for it to have far reaching effects.

        But if you’re not going to take the oath, I feel like you have to have a real plan for resistance beyond just get escorted… out.

        It doesn’t help that our government was founded with a core principle of the military being subservient to a civilian command.

        These are smart people entrusted with the most powerful military in history. If anyone can find a strategy to prevent the Fourth Reich, it’s them.

      • njm1314@lemmy.world
        12·
        2 days ago

        I feel like that’s probably the logic of a lot of Nazi generals who just you know continued to be Nazi generals. As in just self justification.

    • IphtashuFitz@lemmy.worldEnglish
      15·
      2 days ago

      Last year I heard a talk by retired Admiral Stravidis, who among other things was supreme commander of NATO for a few years. He pointed out that by the time somebody makes the rank of General or Admiral they will have sworn that oath a bunch of times. They renew that oath each time they are promoted etc. They also would have administered that oath to countless other soldiers & sailors over the years.

      Fire all the generals and admirals, and guess what? They are replaced by junior officers who have repeated the oath to the US Constitution almost as many times. There’s always the chance that some may decide to bend the knee to Trump, but there are significantly more that likely won’t.

    • Optional@lemmy.world
      92·
      2 days ago

      Here’s how this goes: they take any other oath instead of the one they already took, TO PROTECT THE CONSTITUTION FROM ENEMIES DOMESTIC, we kill them.

      It’s that simple. This clownfuck administration has been fucking around for nine months. How bad do they want to find out.

  • F_State@midwest.social
    207·
    2 days ago

    Obviously no good can come of this domestically, but since all the Generals will be there instead of doing their jobs, it would also be a window of opportunity for China to invade Taiwan.

    • skisnow@lemmy.caEnglish
      282·
      2 days ago

      Yeah. Unless of course it’s not the 18th century and it no longer matters where a General is physically located.

      • F_State@midwest.social
        83·
        2 days ago

        It always matters, especially with the increasing importance of Electromagnetic warfare capabilities.

        • FundMECFS@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          7·
          1 day ago

          You know US personnel isn’t stationed on Taiwan (but pacific bases hours away like Okinawa) and there is such a thing as chain of command.

          • F_State@midwest.social
            25·
            1 day ago

            Since Japan is widely expected to enter into such a conflict, there’s strong speculation that any attack on Taiwan would be preceded by a first strike against Japan and US forces there.

            • FundMECFS@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              4·
              1 day ago

              Highly unlikely. Neither the US or Japan are guaranteed to act in Taiwan’s favour. Especially in a borderline situation. If the CCP has strategy (and it usually does), it will push limits and borderline situations.