Unfortunately to your second point, I don’t think that’s the best approach either. Check out the first 6-12 months of the Iraqi government rebuild during the Iraq war. The Americans basically fired 20,000 Iraqi officials and military members who then had nothing to lose anymore. They then immediately started an insurgency.
Also after these fascist take overs, it’s not as easy as simply saying “you’re a Nazi, therefore you go to jail” because if you didn’t swear fealty to the new government (i.e. if you were Democrat you would now have to call yourself Republican) you could be summarily executed on the spot (check out the video of Sadam’s take over).
So you could resign. But then you get called a coward by armchair generals for not trying to stay in the system and slow it down as much as possible.
So you stay in and keep your head down, and may try to slow the processes down enough to hopefully save some innocents without getting pulled out back and shot. But then you’re called a Nazi collaborator. Idk, I would probably just as well resign, but that could put a target on your back, too, because you’re basically outing yourself as hostile.
Personally, i think how we handled it after WW2 wasn’t perfect, but should be the goal. There’s always clean up that can happen even years afterwards. But if you go purging an entire country’s worth of government officials, you have to replace those you purged with equally qualified people. And you often find that those who are eager to step in, are often just eager to enact revenge, or in some cases, even worse than their predecessors because they are just opportunists who now have the good graces of the new regime who just wanted a quick transition to a friendly government.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 8 hours ago
Pure copium, sorry. The US invasion of Iraq should never be used as a template for anything. The US itself is a fascist nation and has been since it’s inception.
“I’m fighting the system from the inside” is 100% pure cope, too. There was plenty of german resistance to the Nazi regime from outside the system.
FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Eh, 100% pure cope is a bit hyperbolic.
There are at least tens of thousands of accounts of Jews who lived, in part, because of the intercession of people who existed within the Nazi infrastructure. We just don’t most of the names because people couldn’t actually use their names when operating within resistance networks, but there are some famous accounts, like Schindler and The Pianist.
It is not always possible for people to work outside of a fascist system, and to pretend that it is is absurdly idealistic.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 8 hours ago
Yeah, you’re right, I’ve amended my original comment.
testfactor@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Oscar Shindler: pure cope.
bearboiblake@pawb.social 8 hours ago
To be clear, I’m not saying that it never happens, I’m saying that for most people who feel that they can do more good fighting the system from inside, that’s pure cope. The story of Oskar Schindler is interesting because it is exceptional.
CainTheLongshot@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
I never said Iraq should be the template, I implicitly said Post-WW2 recovery should be. I was referring to Iraq as an example of what not to do, because it was specifically called out for a purge of Nazi officials at every level, which is exactly what happened in Iraq.
As for German resistance, yes of course there were forces outside of government, and they used insiders for information. To believe anything otherwise is just being willfully ignorant, and a waste of time.