"Are we the baddies?"

Shame Americans won’t give him the same retirement.

What I always find most striking about this picture is the insane, obvious, over-the-top evilness of it. But then I remember that at the time there was no prior insane evilness for that kind of iconography to be associated with. It's a design language, a trend, and just like anything else it can be popular or unpopular depending on the context. One decade baggy pants look cool, then they look stupid, then they look cool again, and so on. At the time that that first went on display, it probably didn't seem so obviously evil.

For a long time I thought the most valuable lesson that picture can teach is that evil can always wear a new disguise, and a mere visual similarity is not enough to identify it. You have to be able to look behind the disguise and see what is really there.

But it seems that this generation of evil is not so creative.

There is a reason Nazis called themselves national socialist at the time. Socialism wasn't a "scary" term yet and was associated with workers movements and positive material outcomes of revolution against oppressive states.

They are just using the terms and phrases people associate with positive change.

Fascist don't care if they are called liars. They thrive off of people thinking they will be stopped by pointing to their hypocrisy. The only language they understand is violence. It's why our liberal institutions will continue to fail as they attempt to fight them with the very systems and structures that gave them power in the first place.