This article gives a good refresher on how the slur "cuck" is a straightforward representation of the barely-concealed paranoias of white supremacist Amerikkka. This from TNR notes that the cuckold is also in a posture of "control" as he directs who may access his wife, and certainly this is reproduced at every level, from politicians cheerfully opening their own arteries to the mouths of capitalists, to the glow-bathed masturbaters out there who are more likely to be searching for cuckoldry than any other kind of porn. But I don't think these analyses go far enough, because like fuck before it, cuck is a verb before it's a noun.
The footsoldiers of fascism are young men from the lower and middle rungs of the bourgeoisie who are afraid of being "declassed." This word means something different than it would for, say, black Alabamans. The young fascists will still have food and housing and entertainment, it will just be worse. The economic stagnation of the past ten years may have been hard for many of them, but clearly, they can still afford their internet bills.
Since they have never really had any wealth, just the guarantee of life's necessities, the most significant things that can be stripped from them as part of being "declassed" are things they have been led to believe were part of the deal. Since they are young (and therefore stupid - no offense, young people) they don't really understand what it means to not have healthcare, or a plan for the last, most excruciating years of your life when you can't adequately clean yourself. But one thing they expected to get pretty early on was a wife. And while their social contract is usually being redacted by forces too large to immediately understand or control, the reason they don't have a wife is simple: women can now decide not to marry men they don't like. They are attending college at higher rates and participating more in the labor pool, and they don't need to tie themselves to some polyp-dotted asshole anymore, even to stay physically safe (thanks to that feminazi self-defense BULLSHIT!!).
In a positive marriage based on trust, cooperation and equality, of course, spouses have important, complex roles in each others' lives. In the American tradition that reactionaries seek to restore, the first role of a wife is a domestic servant. These men grew up expecting to have their mother eventually replaced by a wife, who is willing to do the unpaid work of housekeeping. This frustration doesn't even need a real basis as it emerges logically from aspirational thinking. Who wants to live in a mansion if you have to dust and mop it yourself every day?
Another role of a spouse is to be a companion and provide emotional intimacy. The online reactionaries have cobbled together, out of desperate necessity, replacements for this emotional deficiency, ie. clamorous mass-discussion is characterized by extreme oversharing of what used to be called "what happens in the bedroom", where only one's spouse had intimate knowledge. Ultimately, this lack of intimacy, and the replacement of physical intimacy with pornography, feeds a bottomless defensive misogyny that cries, "I don't have a woman and I ain't missin' much!" Another demarcation between the two kinds of cuckold - the "involuntarily celibate" is the hapless cuckold, the identically-positioned, proud "asexual" is the cuckold in control.
These attempts to assert the worthlessness of the only people who have compatible gametes, being as they are increasingly backed up by legislation, reminded me of a passage from Caliban and the Witch, about the ruling class' use of misogyny to curb labor indiscipline.
...by the end of the 15th century, a counter-revolution was already under way at every level of social and political life. First, efforts were made by the political authorities to co-opt the youngest and most rebellious male workers, by means of a vicious sexual politics that gave them access to free sex, and turned class antagonism into an antagonism against proletarian women. As Jacques Rossiaud has shown in Medieval Prostitution (1988), in France, the municipal authorities practically decriminalized rape, provided the victims were women of the lower class. In 14th-century Venice, the rape of an unmarried proletarian woman rarely called for more than a slap on the wrist, even in the frequent case in which it involved a group assault (Ruggiero 1989: 91-108).
In the age of advanced identity politics, the "wrong" rapists are made into effigy for reactionaries. These effigies do not have to represent reality - the "rape epidemic" in Sweden, for example, is a complete hallucination, but it signals that rape will not be tolerated when it's unsanctioned and across class lines. At the same time, as we've all seen, discussion of rape is completely dominated by legalistic haggling from concerned men who seek to redefine rape domestically, and especially to draw the boundaries further outside of women's control. (Note the obsession with false rape reports when rapists target 1 in 6 American women.)
The same was true in most French cities. Here, the gang-rape of proletarian women became a common practice which the perpetrators would carry out openly and loudly at night in groups of two to fifteen, breaking into their victims’ homes, or dragging their victims through the streets, without any attempt to hide or disguise themselves. Those who engaged in these “sports” were young journeymen or domestic servants, and the penniless sons of well-to-do families, while the women targeted were poor girls, working as maids or washerwomen, of whom it was rumored that they were “kept” by their masters (Rossiaud 1988: 22). On average, half of the town male youth, at some point, engaged in these assaults, which Rossiaud describes as a form of class protest, a means for proletarian men – who were forced to postpone marriage for many years because of their economic conditions – to get back “their own,” and take revenge against the rich.
Recently a video of a gang rape in Chicago was live streamed on Facebook to 40 viewers who did not intervene. This comes two months after a man was tortured in Chicago on a Facebook live stream. I refer back to the 2013 interview with J Sakai that mentions his return to Chicago where "the old Black industrial working class has been largely wiped out, and warlord armies and gangs given informal state permission to rule over much of the inner city at gunpoint." This is a reddit thread on the subject worth browsing through to get a glimpse of popular reasons for inaction (distance and virtuality through technology) while no time is spent discussing why 15-year-olds are gang-raping their peers. That's something to work harder on, since this situation's utility to the neo-fascist movement is obvious.
But the results were destructive for all workers, as the state-backed raping of poor women undermined the class solidarity that had been achieved in the anti-feudal struggle. Not surprisingly, the authorities viewed the disturbances caused by such policy (the brawls, the presence of youth gangs roaming the streets at night in search of adventure and disturbing the public quiet) as a small price to pay in exchange for a lessening of social tensions, obsessed as they were with the fear of urban insurrections, and the belief that if the poor gained the upper hand they would take their wives and hold them in common (ibid.: 13).
Ultimately, the effort by reactionaries today is to provide a logical blur between rape and cuckoldry. If the definition of rape relies on a legalistic idea of consent, this first of all legitimizes the massive sex industry that spins off prostitutes, pornography, and titillation (how many millions of actresses have worked on their "dead butchered girl #3" face). The EULA that comes with a wife, and specifies what you can and can't do to her, implies that her rape is ultimately an interaction between two men. I believe there is therefore a fluidity between cuckold and rapist, and that many consumers of cuckold porn are just as interested in being given permission by the more powerful man to inflict themselves on the woman. From my perspective the modern neo-fascist movement is gearing itself up to dispossess undeserving "elite" males, while their preferred males grant them access to violently-declassed women.
I'm not really sure I can clean this post up any more or provide deeper proof of my suspicions, but there you go.
Fascinating historical note: interwar nationalists also referred to conservatives as cucks. pic.twitter.com/99BGneNUxo
— Faith and Heritage (@faith_heritage) June 28, 2016
(incidentally, I'm not sure why I still find myself surprised to see fash quit playing coy and take overt pride in identifying with "interwar nationalists," but there you go)
Edited by Constantignoble ()
http://kersplebedeb.com/posts/exodus/
And there is something more: the destruction of traditional family-based rural patriarchy brings with it a powerful reactionary male political backlash.
Millions of men are losing “their” women, and “their” jobs, and it’s driving them crazy. Today the main opposition to capitalist globalization comes not from the weakened anti-imperialist Left, or—yet—from working-class women, but rather from militant right-wing men. The anger of male dispossession fuels reactionary populist, fundamentalist and fascist trends in every part of the world. These right-wing movements are typically led by men of the middle classes, furious at losing the privileges they held under the previous male capitalist order. But millions of poor and de-classed men are joining in, forming a kind of united front of misogyny.
{...}
But what we should notice, because it is right in front of our eyes, is that the many-sided male brawl over how to exploit and control women’s labor within the new capitalist order defines and shapes today’s global politics. Until working-class women take the field in their own behalf on a world scale, they will be trapped within this essentially male politics, a deadly violent politics that is all about them.
Whatever radicals in the metropolis decide to do, or not do, capitalism has moved on. Its current incarnation demands the thorough commodification and internationalization of agriculture, industry, commerce and services. It needs rapid access to mobile and flexible pools of workers, especially working-class women. To make this happen, capitalists are rolling the dice, scrambling to extend their domination even as they allow some of capitalism’s deepest social moorings slip free. In desperation, under duress, capitalism has found it necessary to socialize the labor of working-class women on a whole new basis, to essentially remake the working class in a more advanced and cosmopolitan form. In the process, the central role of working-class women in the world economy is being pushed rapidly out of the shadows.
New capitalism is here, bringing with it new politics. At the most fundamental level, this politics is not about oil. It’s not about religion. It’s not about imperialist men versus anti-imperialist men. It’s about women and women’s labor: women at the heart of a transformed global proletariat.
cars posted:a lot of the "traditional marriage" movement is barely-disguised kink and presents a concept of marriage that much of the western world would have considered ogreish even a century or more back
i was going to say that i get "extremely horney" watching my wife do dull household tasks but frankly no matter what task i selected y'all would probably believe it
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:cars posted:a lot of the "traditional marriage" movement is barely-disguised kink and presents a concept of marriage that much of the western world would have considered ogreish even a century or more back
i was going to say that i get "extremely horney" watching my wife do dull household tasks but frankly no matter what task i selected y'all would probably believe it
The Plight of Goat "Thirstydick" Stein, a tale in three parts.
cars posted:a lot of the "traditional marriage" movement is barely-disguised kink and presents a concept of marriage that much of the western world would have considered ogreish even a century or more back
I have a favorite hate-read that is unvarnished alt-right fascist misogyny. he advocates controlling and physically abusing women (he's the one guy out there I'd happily dox), but talks about BDSM in roughly the same way that we talk about left-liberalism--i.e., contemptuous and outraged that such a pale imitation of the real deal is so popular
thirdplace posted:
Keven posted:On 1 hand u don't want to mention how fundamentalist Islam groups seem 2 have a very heavy focus on forced wife procurement because it plays into racist neoliberal explanations of terrorism and so on being done by weird virgins who just need to fuck, but on the other hand fundamentalist Islam Militia groups have a very heavy focus on forced wife procurement & it likely plays into the same stuff as your talking about.
such people & groups are obsessed with sex, both in the here & now (their 'moderate' and extremist clerics will sanction sex jihad and rape of many kinds of women) and in the life beyond (see rooms full of grown men weeping with joy as saudi cleric muhaysni gives jihadists in syria pep talks before their suicide attacks)
but as with their terror attacks the vast vast majority of their victims are muslims.
here are a couple of chats i had with secular syrian muslim women; i did not ask them about sex jihad nor die hard (this time) but they know very well what would happen to them if any rebels took over
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0a708tS5GsT
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0wkEH31Gb4D
tears posted:
sorry tears. but that shitstain both exemplifies swampperson's point and is an excellent reminder of just how disgustingly evil these people can get
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i was going to say that i get "extremely horney" watching my wife do dull household tasks but frankly no matter what task i selected y'all would probably believe it
don't let the fire go out!!
thirdplace posted:sorry tears. but that shitstain both exemplifies swampperson's point and is an excellent reminder of just how disgustingly evil these people can get
it really fucks with your head to look out at all the seemingly normal men you might meet in a day and idly wonder which ones are going home to write a blog about how the right to beat up and rape women is theirs by birth 
To the extent that you buy the palingenetic aspect of fascism, you can also see it in the petit-bourgeois myths of hearth and home the Nazis deployed around their "have more kids" programs, myths that were irrelevant to the home countries' mode of production and would have been antithetical to solving Germany and Austria's labor problems if they were acted out. They used those images because they realized most women weren't going to get horny over the idea that they were pumping out sons their government intended to die in the deserts of North Africa. You can contrast this with superficially similar initiatives in the Soviet Union where everyone knew that the goal really was what it said on the tin, to build a base of industrial workers to improve the country's economy through creation of urban centers in less developed places, whether or not you agree that was wise policy at the time, and I think that made a lot of people genuinely hot in that time and place because families saw it as a real path to prosperity.
tangentially i am reminded of the revolting zizek piece about the supposed immigrant gangrape in germany which he took seriously at face value from news reports in order to compare it to some completely unrelated historical violent acting-out towards animals by proletarian men. as usualy his point was very much in line with the worst fascist opinion makers, but with a zizekian twist - yes, immigrants are not perfect, and in fact can be expected to rape and commit other atrocities, but so what? i will be very happy when he dies.
thatfatkid posted:So extrapolating from your argument swampman, would it be correct to conclude that femdom is the most ideologically pure relationship?
there is no pure individual choice regarding interpersonal relationships under capitalism, as mim so correctly noted eons ago. just as the communist political solution to the capitalist mode of production involves the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat, so does the abolition of capitalist patriarchy involve.... uhh... Unlimited Gender Terror.
tears posted:thirdplace posted:
sorry tears. but that shitstain both exemplifies swampperson's point and is an excellent reminder of just how disgustingly evil these people can get
it really fucks with your head to look out at all the seemingly normal men you might meet in a day and idly wonder which ones are going home to write a blog about how the right to beat up and rape women is theirs by birth
if you saw one you'd know it
Petrol posted:great OP. i was dreading having to read anything using the c-word but this was worth it. thanks swampman.
tangentially i am reminded of the revolting zizek piece about the supposed immigrant gangrape in germany which he took seriously at face value from news reports in order to compare it to some completely unrelated historical violent acting-out towards animals by proletarian men. as usualy his point was very much in line with the worst fascist opinion makers, but with a zizekian twist - yes, immigrants are not perfect, and in fact can be expected to rape and commit other atrocities, but so what? i will be very happy when he dies.
Recently re-reading Zizek, it's amazing how he takes up blatantly racist premises and then accuses those who disagree as being the patronizing racists. Example:
What truly disturbs liberals is therefore enjoyment organized in the form of self-sufficient ethnic communities. It is against this background that we should consider the ambiguous consequences of the politics of school busing in the USA, for example. Its principal aim, of course, was to surmount racist barriers: children from black communities would widen their cultural horizons by partaking in the white way of life, children from white communities would experience the nullity of racial prejudices by way of contacts with blacks, etc. Yet, inextricably, another logic was entwined in this project, especially where school busing was externally imposed by the "enlightened" state bureaucracy: to destroy the enjoyment of the closed ethnic communities by abrogating their boundaries. For this reason, school busing--insofar as it was experienced by the concerned communities as imposed from outside--reinforced or to some extent generated racism where previously there was a desire of an ethnic community to maintain the closure of its way of life, a desire which is not in itself "racist" (as liberals themselves admit through their fascination with exotic "modes of life" of others). What one should do here is to call into question the entire theoretical apparatus that sustains this liberal attitude, up to its Frankfurt-school-psychoanalytical piece de resistance, the theory of the so-called "authoritarian personality": the "authoritarian personality" ultimately designates that form of subjectivity which "irrationally" insists on its specific way of life and, in the name of its self-enjoyment, resists liberal proofs of its supposed "true interests." The theory of the "authoritarian personality" is nothing but an expression of the ressentiment of the left-liberal intelligentsia apropos of the fact that the "non-enlightened" working classes were not prepared to accept its guidance: an expression of the intelligentsia's inability to offer a positive theory of this resistance.
stegosaurus posted:long term these people will remain marginal unless capitalism here suddenly decides that social peace in the imperial core isnt worth trying for anymore at which point its going to be a really terrifying free for all.
My go-to "what are the average racists thinking today?" site is the comments sections on liveleak videos. The video of yesterday's bombing shows their widespread awareness that the rebels are directly armed by the US & NATO. That's only a "compliment" to their movement insofar as one has to commit to willful ignorance to swallow the state department's lies. This is where the anti-globalization aspect of fascism matters, because if the white nationalists can undermine foreign intervention, the oppression can turn inward against blacks and women, the commenters' most-despised enemies. These people can speak honestly about the nature of Daesh involvement in Syria and then turn around and say things like, antifa are the worst terrorists on earth. I agree with you that they're in a serious bind - the impossible necessity of remaining inclusive enough to launch a movement of exclusion prevents their program from advancing naturally. But Daesh doesn't need a popular base either, just access to a lot of weapons.
I feel the same way I did about ppg's adventurism, the speculation can spiral endlessly, we have to escape it and take refuge in real preparations.
US foreign policy and the defense of its stated and unstated "spheres of influence" are the prerequisite for US hegemony, not something that take away from it, imo.
stegosaurus posted:my half assed prognosis is that the mobility and 'double freedom' of women (to work, to starve) is too important to capitalism now in the periphery for male movements there to be allowed to re-assert old school patriarchy, and in the core womens rights cant be rolled back without basically giving up on preserving social peace. which doesnt mean that these movements wont try horrendous things or even be partially successful at them, but long term these people will remain marginal unless capitalism here suddenly decides that social peace in the imperial core isnt worth trying for anymore at which point its going to be a really terrifying free for all. its just offensive on a basic human level that people are allowed to do this type of shit in public and then gloat about it later.
washing into that is how the tiny proportion of women who subscribe to those ideas plays the same game as anti-feminist women have since the 80s but more openly, their worth on all levels to the reactionary movement and its adherents depending on their scarcity and the disgust of other women, even conservative businesswomen, toward the reaction, while women adherents' own disproportionate voice in the reaction betrays its fundamental contradictions.
relationships and marriages are also a main way men in the wider reactionary movement go after each other, playing "who married a Jew" and so on.
swampman posted:Another role of a spouse is to be a companion and provide emotional intimacy. The online reactionaries have cobbled together, out of desperate necessity, replacements for this emotional deficiency, ie. clamorous mass-discussion is characterized by extreme oversharing of what used to be called "what happens in the bedroom", where only one's spouse had intimate knowledge.
...was thinking of this thread recently when someone shared a screenshot of something interesting with me... I was going to refer to swampman's OP here when I posted in the Twitter thread, but this whole OP is worth reading for everyone here, so I decided to bump the thread instead. Anyway...
There's this new grift online, where the far-right/"post-left" pepe guys have started to gather deferentially around a woman (or purported woman, who knows) offering them comic-strip stories about that woman as their doting fantasy girlfriend (or, more accurately, that woman's online persona, which has been filtered through comfortable meme imagery). In various scenarios, built around the audience's fears of their own inadequacies, the fantasy woman provides their frog-person avatar—not the original hijacked image, but a popular baby-fied distortion—with emotional intimacy he can gain only from her, including rescuing her helpless lover from other, more threatening, imaginary meme-women who seek to lead him astray.
These comic-strip fantasies heavily involve the target guy's babbling infantilization through his avatar. And, fair is fair, I was kind of laughing when a bunch of kids began to post all the "mommy gf" stuff that's proliferated recently alongside pictures of Freud, because... yeah, obviously, and do you really need to affirm that you know Oedipal fantasies are Freudian...? The whole point of Freud's work on the topic was to establish that such fantasies are ubiquitous and out themselves constantly through culture, seeking to be expressed and acknowledged without camouflage. I get it, though... young people have to discover things on their own.
But this development is a step beyond those Oedipal images. The fantasy no longer needs to be consumed as a private self-application of a mass-consumer fantasy, nor even in a public celebration of the concrete as a sexual object desired by each individual qua individual, such as a group of men remarking on the body of a woman. They would not dream of talking about this woman in that way for fear of shattering the illusion of safety and intimacy. (And there is no body here at all beyond an abstracted, PG-rated cartoon; the "man" is a distorted humanoid frog; so far as it's a body, it's a body without organs.)
The worship of this woman has become instead a communal online ecstasy, men publicly sharing in it together. And it's not just them saying, Wow, check this out, this is hot, guys sitting around watching porn together—it's not the communal objectification of the woman in their collective sight that carries the erotic content. It's the objectification of their own helpless vulnerability in need of affirmation. It is, beyond that, a political statement as well, an expression of their common far-right politics, and one in total contradiction of those politics' fearful denunciation of homosexuality.
These guys are beginning to get second-order-hot for each other, is what I'm saying. The avatar represents not just each of them, but all of them. The ostentatious performance of responding to this stuff in full sight of each other seems to be a necessary part of its appeal, not just a "sometimes" thing or a perk on the side. What follows, and has already followed, is the men assuming the role of erotic objects for each other.
All of this is happening as publicly as anything does in these weirdos' deeply online world... the potshots write themselves, and people are writing them anyway. But the exact details have surprised me even as someone who brought up something like it earlier. I linked back to the OP of this thread when I wrote a little while ago about how the online far right's obsessive hoarding of images of angry feminists, transgender teens and Photoshopped cuckoldry suggests they use all of the above as spank material. They either pretend the people in those images are their lovers or pretend they are images of themselves, though they need never acknowledge it even to themselves.
True to swampman's prediction, the self-loathing men of the far right are beginning to engage in a form of misogynist polyandry, organizing themselves eagerly as a gaggle of lower-ranked husbands orbiting a wife whose perceived value follows from the impossibility of this woman as the wife of any of them as individuals—the target audience's diehard disbelief that a woman would behave this way toward any of these men, including the woman doing it. It's impossible for the men to imagine in the moment that she's speaking to any of them in particular, so they don't even try. They celebrate their communal joy in this fantasy, and... they are starting to provide it to each other as well, to role-play in the replies as each others' mothers, wives and girlfriends, even though they know full well the ones doing so aren't women. These guys are getting pretty gay about it.
So swampman's prediction turns out to be correct, but it's manifested in a peculiar way. The OP ends on what these guys might see as their ideal future, the erotic thrill of each far-right peon being allowed a time-share of access to a woman by the elite men who own those women. That's now being proved right by the breakout success of a virtual and anticipatory fantasy equivalent, seen by these men as the upper limit of expectations, as the practical ultimate of their emotional satisfaction.
But, in this case, the vendor for that access isn't a man. It's one of the small-time-big-time "post-left" women who's acting as pimp here for the other woman providing the fantasy. The first, more online-famous woman in the equation no doubt understands that this is the sort of fantasy her fans nurse about her: the daydream that the micro-celebrity's performative politics (symbolizing in her readers' minds their own lack of sex appeal) will somehow lead her into a romantic relationship with each of them.
Rather than the better-known woman entertaining that fantasy herself, which would detract from her performance as an unattainable rarity and therefore from her appeal, she's walking these men a short online distance away, over to the other woman who's willing to act that fantasy out all day, if only in a generalized, pornographized, non-individualized way. Together, they're helping each far-right, no-hope loser integrate into the crowd of their fellows around that other woman, the men affirming their collective need for intimacy in personal despair, and, ultimately, eroticizing each other within it.
The first woman's continued affirmation of the second enhances the first's ongoing taboo appeal among her audience, feeding the audience's fantasies that she'll someday provide each of them with the fantasy personally, while the second woman gets the visibility the first can provide. The two women provide somewhere for the men to play pretend with each other, affirming that they're not any less fascist for their potentially embarrassing behavior. The men provide the pair of women with what passes for fame in their neck of the woods without troubling either of them to treat each man as an individual worthy of attention (which would only frighten the men anyway, a common event when women address their avatar directly in the comics I'm describing.)
I think the woman-pimp makes a certain amount of sense here, a chaste reverse-Ghislaine Maxwell recruiting the men as fantasy-feminized girl-slaves for the other woman and for each other. The men involved seem to feel safe, safe enough to sexualize their interactions with the other men around them, only because all of them, through communal celebration of these little comic strips about their avatar, have been reduced to helpless infants on the same level with each other. They don't have to worry about being attractive and thus can believe they are. But to maintain the politics that brought them to the fantasy, they need a man-as-leader, one of their imaginary god-kings, to pimp out his otherwise-forbidden woman to them, the woman his superiority has attracted in the cargo-cult version of human ethology they use to interpret the world.
Still, these men are scared of their imagined "true" adult man approaching their fantasy, even though that fantasy requires him. Pretending to be an adult man, pretending to be favored by one—these are such deep and frightening and frustrated desires that they have to be re-sublimated, producing a sort of surplus self-repression. These guys can't enjoy themselves if they keep thinking of what they are convinced they lack, and their collective beliefs state they lack it because of an insurmountably inferior nature compared to their social superior, the fantasy Man.
But now, two women have arrived to do the job of the feared and hated and beloved Man, a pair of Jocastan mommies blowing suggestive pseudo-lesbian kisses across the dinner table as they help these men play gay babies with each other. All of their fantasies, none of their fears. Perfect for these men, if also guaranteed to disappoint in the moments they most need what the fantasy pretends to provide.
When I wrote the post I linked above, I assumed that all of this stuff would stay furtive and semi-private, that it would have to remain hidden to some degree to preserve these men's self-images as champions of an elusive pre-lapsarian "manhood" threatened by feminists. I guess not. The simulacrum arrives ahead of schedule...
cars posted:To the extent that you buy the palingenetic aspect of fascism, you can also see it in the petit-bourgeois myths of hearth and home the Nazis deployed around their "have more kids" programs, myths that were irrelevant to the home countries' mode of production and would have been antithetical to solving Germany and Austria's labor problems if they were acted out.
was thinking about this recently while reading about the Nazis' corporatist pseudo-union. One of Hitler's big promises was that workers' dues would go into a state fund to buy an automobile for every last apple-cheeked wiener schnitzel household in Germany. Then the Nazis took power and immediately shifted auto production to military vehicles, to get blown up or abandoned when the USSR routed the German army. Just another one of those things where a fascist government has a limited window on its propaganda before it's required to dump all its newly-appreciated currency into a surplus ammo box and light it on fire.
zhaoyao posted:what sort of automobile would be made available free of charge to all nazi working-age men between the ages of 12 and 75
