When We Said “Never Again,” the GOP Heard “Not Yet”

(Or: A Timeline of “Oops, All Authoritarians”)

You’d think the one thing we could all agree on is that Nazis are bad. Like, genocide bad. Like, tried-to-take-over-the-world bad. But America, with its shiny new Cold War goggles, took one look at those swastika-stamped war criminals and said, “But can they help us fight communism?”

This wasn’t some obscure footnote. It was the beginning of an organized effort, sponsored in part by American intelligence agencies and later embraced by the Republican Party, to use ex-Nazis and Eastern European fascists as ideological shock troops in the war against socialism. And boy, did they deliver.

Pasztor didn’t hide this. He boasted of his past and immediately filled the Council with fellow Nazi collaborators from Ukraine, Romania, the Baltics, and elsewhere. The GOP didn’t blink.

📎 [Russ Bellant, ] Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party

📎 [Washington Post: “Nazi Collaborators in GOP Ethnic Outreach,” 1986]

Enter journalist Jack Anderson , a muckraker of the old-school variety. In 1971, he published a series of bombshell articles exposing the pro-Nazi ties of several of Nixon’s ethnic outreach advisors, including Pasztor and , a member of the Ivan Dochev -which, you guessed it, also collaborated with the Nazis. Bulgarian National Front

The Washington Post backed up the reporting. The public was informed.

And the GOP? It did absolutely nothing . The Council remained active well into the Reagan years, waving Old Glory while half its members kept Third Reich memorabilia in their dens.

Translation: If you can’t lynch them, legislate them into poverty.

This wasn’t a fringe strategy. It was central to Reagan’s rise and the GOP’s electoral dominance throughout the 1980s. And it was working.

In one of the most bizarre and galling moments of postwar American politics, Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at the in Germany. Buried there? Forty-nine members of the Waffen-SS. He called them Bitburg cemetery “victims of Nazism.”

And if that wasn’t insulting enough…

Russ Bellant was there. He wrote about it. Multiple witnesses confirmed the presence of individuals linked to fascist parties from WWII.

When David Duke , former Grand Wizard of the and Holocaust denier, ran for office in Louisiana, he did so as a Republican. And he won. Ku Klux Klan

You can’t make this up. Ralph Forbes , a former leader in the , ran in the GOP primary for Arkansas’s 2nd congressional district-and got American Nazi Party . 46% of the vote

He said his politics were based on “Biblical values” and was Duke’s 1988 campaign manager.

The final slide in this timeline is a montage of modern GOP figures continuing the tradition of crypto-fascist dog-whistling and sometimes just straight-up saluting.

Final Thought: This Isn’t a Bug — It’s a Feature

The Republican Party didn’t accidentally become the preferred political home of white nationalists, fascist apologists, and ex-Nazi collaborators. It that tent. Brick by brick. Decade after decade. built

From Operation Paperclip’s diplomatic cousins to the Southern Strategy to CPAC’s rune-shaped stages, this wasn’t a series of random unfortunate coincidences. It was a strategy. A playbook. A recruitment drive for the worst people history has to offer, wrapped in flags and crosses and tax cuts.

And it’s long past time we called it what it is.

End of transmission. Stay angry.

Originally published at https://vagabondvisions.beehiiv.com.