cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/38501280
Over the years, many who read the news in the USA were surprised to find a magazine, ostensibly for teenagers, became one of the last bastions of mainstream press resistance.
A holdout from the earlier purges at other organizations, it was silenced this week.
I find this noteworthy USA news because it helps chronicle the ongoing collapse of the commercial press in the country.
Teen Vogue has now been folded into Vogue, and all politics reporters, all Black women and all trans people working there were fired on Monday (11/3/25) morning.
That is, none of the people who made Teen Vogue a surprisingly effective civics communication vehicle remain with the magazine.
I really wish Americans had more than one data-point for fascism. Preferably something more recent than a century ago.
Apartheid South Africa. Pinochet’s Chile. Hinduvista India. You can even flog the Russians again. But please. I’m begging you. Read literally any other history book. Fascism is not simply When Hitler Happens.
Apartheid South Africa and Pinochet’s Chile are different methods of oppression, though. South Africa was a post colonial state which declared independence to maintain local laws. Chile was a socialist government overthrown by the military.
I can see using fascist Italy and post Soviet Russia as examples, though.
You’re so optimistic! I wish my fellow Americans actually had even one data point. America invented most of the techniques of oppression and tyranny that we exported abroad and renamed fascism. But Foucault and his boomerang have always been correct, it’s just colonialism brought home to recolonize the imperial core.
Americans haven’t read a single history book if they can help it, and proudly so, while the only progress made on oppression has been finding new and ever more complex ways to dissipate and disguise it.
They have, but largely revised history.
So easy to forget that The International Jew was distributed by Ford Motor Company.
We’ve got stacks on stacks of history books. Airports and coffee shops are full of them. But when you’re getting your histories from Sean Hannity and Anne Coulter, of course you’re going to view the world through a kaleidoscope of fascist hysteria.
South Africa and Chile didn’t have the capacity to wage war on all major powers. Germany is the closest case study to what is happening in the US
South Africa, under apartheid, was pivotal in waging war across the Sub-Sahara. You just don’t read about African politics in schools, so you’re fully unaware of the Boer Wars or SA’s support for Israel following the Nakba or Angola and the various associated border wars going on from the mid 60s to early 90s. Nevermind the Congo Wars, which were fueled by fleeing Afrikaner mercenary units.
Similarly, Chile was a front in the Latin American theater of the Cold War. Pinochet was pivotal during the US involvement in Honduras and Columbia via Operation Condor.
Funding guerilla campaigns in the aftermath of imperial collapse of Africa is miles different than waging war against the 4 largest economies in the world like Germany did.
“Hey, we’re just driving technicals into Nambia. Its not like we’re driving tanks into France or Russia, where the important people live.”
:-/
The Second Congo War killed 5.4M people over four years. That’s half again as many deaths Japan suffered during WW2. It was a bit more than a guerrilla campaign.
I understand the Congo War has been the most deadly ongoing conflict since WW2. But the Apartheid regime was far from the only outside player in the war
Plus, Apartheid South Africa had a nuclear program. Nothing is official, but they likely conducted one successful test. Very good chance they had capable nuclear weapons at one point.
Especially cause some americans seem to idolize hitler these days, comparing our actions to hitler could speed up the collapse as some republicans want to be like hitler.