Oddbean new post about | logout
 Every successful European fascist movement in the 20th century relied on battle-hardened veterans to transpose their movement from the intellectual sphere to one 'on the ground'. In Italy and Germany, it was veterans of WWI, and in Spain, veterans from the Spanish foreign legion that had fought a bloody war against colonialist revolutionaries that had defeated Spain's army and taken over Morocco just a few years earlier. 

Only with a contingent of experienced veterans with nothing to lose were fledgling fascist groups able to take their ideology from the intellectual sphere to the ground level, as they needed people willing to fight and protect them against a communist element able to reign free under an increasingly weak and pathetic state.

Needless to say, we have no such thing here in America. In the wake of our pullout in Afghanistan you could have made a case, but maybe due to the protracted nature of the conflict, the lack of a 'full scale' mobilization compared to the other previous examples, or the hyperpresent consooming and propaganda enabled via social media and other new technologies, no such grievanced contingent of army vets has materialized. 

As the regime loses it's hold as world police and continues to be humiliated it will more and more paranoid of similar circumstances growing in it's own backyard.