Other people being violent towards you does not make your actions violent. Also, there’s actually been many general strikes that were not attacked by state forces at least. There have probably been hundreds of general strikes through history. They’re common enough that they’re not really covered in history classes past a sentence or two, if at all. It was actually a general strike that staved off the first coup against the German civilian govt post-WW1.

Organizing, I’m not sure.

A general strike (which is a peaceful method) beats martial law, not the other way around. Not easy to organize by any stretch, but historically effective.

Thank you for relating your personal experiences. I feel like a lot of people don’t really have a good sense for how the authoritarian playbook works in the modern day.

If anyone wants a more professional analysis, Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a historian with a background in Italian fascism, and specializes in modern authoritarianism.

Alright, that’s fair.

One extreme or the other, eh? It’s not between fight now or give up, there is a whole spectrum in between, that takes things like opportunity and timing into account.

I think there’s a term for that, when a person only represents the options as one of two extremes.

It’s a little frightening that you think there’s much chance it benefits anybody other than the fascists.

This isn’t the pre-revolutionary era where a large amount of people would effectively take up arms and pose a credible threat.

They have the mechanisms of government, they have the militias, they have the backing of a significant chunk of the populace, they have the most businessmen, they have their own locked down media ecosystem, etc etc.

We can look to N Korea and Russia and see that a population can indeed be stabilized under modern totalitarian rule, it just took some practice for humanity to learn how to pull it off. And you want to roll the dice on this now, here?

edit to add a word

Old news, but still very cool.

Really minor side note. I don’t think comparisons of Trump to Hitler really help that much, there’s too many differences between the two men. What I think helps much more overall is comparisons of Trump to Benito Mussolini, who he much more closely aligns with, and who predated Hitler in the interwar period as a fascist dictator. The term fascist is originally an Italian word, even.

Mussolini comparisons capture Trump’s smallness and bumbling nature while still highlighting his ability to do great harm much more accurately. Trump is an American Mussolini.