Dr Joseph Goebbels (Dangerous Doctor Donald) controlled the media and arts, making sure that Germans (Americans) were fed Nazi (Donald) ideology while censoring other information.
The Nuremberg Rallies (Donald Rallies), held annually (every day) from 1933 (2025), glorified war and the military (and Donald).
Radios were cheap to buy and would broadcast Nazi Party (Donald Party) messages and speeches. Loudspeakers in public places blared out Nazi (Donald) propaganda.

Hitler's (Donald's) picture was everywhere and he was portrayed as Germany's (Americas) saviour. Simple slogans were used to introduce Nazi (Donald) ideology to the German (American) people:

"Free Germany (America) from the Jews (Mexicans)"
"Work and Bread" (Big Tariffs)
"Smash Communism (Democrats)"
"Blood and Soil" (MAGA)
"One People (No Mexicans), One Empire (Whole World), One Leader (Donald)"

Any media that conveyed anti-Nazi (anti-Donald) ideas or even other ways of life, were censored. Censorship of newspapers (Facebook), radio (Tik-Tok), and cinema (YouTube) was enforced. Only books which agreed with the Nazi (Donald) point of view were allowed. All other books (Fake News) were banned and many were publicly burned from May (January), 1933 (2025).

Just needed a few corrections to bring it up to date.!

Hi Paul,

The comparison of conservatives with right wing extremists and national socialists seems to be rather popular of late, yet it is inaccurate. This economist/historian had the experience of growing up in post ww2 Germany, so he saw first hand the communist vs capitalist experiment of a nation divided.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjkQZ3MmGgY

Net zero is like a rerun of the experiment, right down to the economic train wreck and attempts to blame the failure on misinformation and disinformation (presumably by all the unsavoury political extremists), hence the need for censorship.

Hi Fester,

Do you agree the sale of tobacco and alcohol should be restricted to adults? If so, then based on harm minimisation, its right for society to impose restrictions on their sale to juveniles. If you agree with that then access to harmful content on the internet by juveniles, one would also see as necessary. No reasonable person believes there is not harmful content on the internet, and its access needs to be restricted. On what content, and how those restrictions are implemented is the difficult question.

When you reach the mature age that most of us here have achieved, if you've been paying attention to the world around you for the last 50 or so years, you should have gained a level of understanding as to how the world works and how governments and political movements think and operate. From that understanding, having seen it all before, you should be able to draw valid conclusions from incomplete data about where things will end up, or at least where political leadership hopes it will end up.

If you've been paying attention.....

A while back, I expressed the view that the Australian government would probably move to amend our beef quarantine laws to accommodate Trump. Outrage ensued from the usual suspects who demanded proof that the government was doing such a thing. My 'proof' I explained was based on my comprehension as to how governments worked. Funnily, when the government did actually do exactly as I predicted, those same usual suspects couldn't exit the discussion quickly enough.

The same thing happened when I predicted 8 months before the event that Biden wouldn't run in 2024. And again when I predicted what the actual causes for pulling out were while he and the Democrats were madly spinning their fables. Or when I predicted massive cost blowouts for Snowy 2.0. Or that it would eventually be shown that Covid19 originated in a Wuhan lab. Again demands of proof from the clueless.

/cont

/cont

Its all very well to be wrong, but its a shame when you fail to learn from the error.

Ditto here. Again they demand proof that the ultimate aim is censorship of the citizenry on the basis that lack of proof, proves that it won't happen. Again my point is that anyone who has been paying attention for the last 50 years, or the last 50 centuries for that matter, knows what the ultimate aim is.

The ruling elite have been quite comfortable for many decades now, knowing that they controlled all the avenues for the citizenry to be informed. But that's all changed now with the rise of the internet, the internet journalists and especially with Musk's purchase of Twitter. All around the world, governments are scrambling to find ways to recover their control of the narrative. This is the ALP's solution to the problem. I suspect they'll partially succeed which is why you need to get your VPN asap.

That’s a reversal of reality, Fester.

//The comparison of conservatives with right wing extremists and national socialists seems to be rather popular of late...//

If anything, what's "popular of late" is the attempt to downplay or reverse the historical consensus that fascism - and Nazism in particular - arose from the authoritarian far-right.

For decades, from academic texts to public discourse, Nazism was understood as a far-right movement: ultranationalist, ethnocentric, militaristic, violently anti-leftist, and aligned with corporate power. The Nazis literally purged their socialist wing in the Night of the Long Knives.

It’s only recently, particularly in some US conservative circles and YouTube channels, that a narrative has emerged trying to rebrand the Nazis as "left-wing" - hinging mostly on the word "socialist" in the party name. But as historians point out, that’s like calling North Korea a democracy because its name says "Democratic Republic."

Of course, this isn’t to say that every conservative is a fascist. But neither should we let revisionism muddy the historical record.

And if modern conservatives want to avoid being linked to fascism, the answer isn’t to rewrite history - it’s to clearly distance themselves from fascist rhetoric, strategies, and scapegoating, rather than repeating and defending them under new labels.

Oh... and they could stop linking all lefties to communism, too.

Their unnecessary attempts to rid themselves of the stain of Naziism is based on the same faulty logic they use to tie the left to the communist atrocities of the past.

Your claim that net zero is "a re-run" of East Germany is equally stretched. Western democracies aren’t jailing people for emissions dissent. If anything, governments are struggling to act despite powerful misinformation campaigns, not because they’re censoring everyone.

Ironically, the bill you and AC feared was dropped because of public pushback. Hardly a sign of censorship running rampant. it was a good example of the problem it was trying to address, though.

That you see democratic debate and evidence-based policy as East German-style control says more about your political biases than the facts.