A grand jury declined for a third time to indict a D.C. woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent during an inmate swap with ICE – a rare loss for federal prosecutors that could foreshadow further trouble if the case goes to trial.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office said in a filing Monday it would move ahead with charging Sidney Lori Reid with a misdemeanor for the alleged assault outside the D.C. Jail in July. A magistrate judge had given prosecutors until Monday afternoon to secure an indictment against Reid or see the felony version of the assault charge dismissed.
A grand jury declining to indict three times on the same case is a warning the evidence may not stand up at trial, according to attorney Christopher Macchiaroli, a partner at Silverman Thompson Slutkin White who previously served as an assistant U.S. attorney in the federal prosecutor’s office in D.C.
Fascism in Portugal lasted from 1933 to 1974.
In Spain it lasted from 1936 to 1975.
Fascism did fail (specifically, in Portugal there was a Revolution and in Spain the Fascists just gave power away whilst keeping their loot) but it took about 50 years in both cases.
Had Hitler and Mussolini not gone to war with basically most of the World, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if their regimes hadn’t lasted until well after both died (which was what happened in both Portugal and Spain - those regimes only fell a while after after Salazar and Franco were dead).
Meanwhile just to give you an idea of how bad things can be under Fascism without people rebelling, Portugal during the Fascist days was a dirt poor country with mainly subsistence agriculture which even received Food Aid from the rest of Europe and this without even having gone through a war. Just a reminder that during the Age of the Discoveries, both Portugal and Spain were for a while (about a century) the pinnacle powers in the World to the point that they divided it in half between themselves (which is why in South America Brasil speaks Portuguese and the rest speak Spanish and why most Portuguese “colonies” were in Africa whilst Spain was mostly present in South America), so it’s not as if those weren’t rich countries at some point.
So, yeah, you’re right that Fascism always falls (then again, so does everything else), but it can take a while to get there and entire generations can suffer horribly before things change.
This is all what if stuff, but it’s worth noting that Hitler basically financed Germany’s reconstruction (and more importantly Germany’s rearmament) by borrowing heavily, notably from Jewish financiers and from the Soviet Union (a nearly unknown aspect of the non-aggression treaties between Germany and the USSR was an enormous loan). Had Hitler not opted for war and genocide like he did, he would have faced other major problems such as the collapse of his entire economy (The Wages of Destruction is an excellent read on this subject).
Another fun fact about the non-aggression treaties was that ironically enough they included military technology transfers from Germany to the Soviets. For the most part, none of the stuff Germany handed over to Russia resulted in anything significant - with a noteworthy exception being some advanced 37mm antiaircraft turrets that had been earmarked for installation on the Bismarck, the battleship that was rather famously crippled by fucking biplanes.
Yeah it’s kinda a subset i of the old “how could the Germans win WW2? By not being Nazis.” joke. The German economy was already starting to struggle as early as the annexation of Austria and may have very well collapsed if they had been denied Czechoslovakia, there’s a reason they were basically looting everywhere they invaded rather than just taking over the factories.
Also in the defense of the Bismark having more AA wouldn’t have helped, the reason they didn’t do well against the swordfish naval biplanes is because they didn’t have the right ammo and their guns weren’t calibrated for planes that slow they were calibrated for planes like the spitfires naval sub model. It’d be like some dude in a with a ballistic plate getting shit canned by a blunderbuss, under no circumstances did the engineers consider that a viable risk.
Because there are two few people who have the courage.
It’s not about numbers or weapons. It’s about fear. Being afraid is normal
Question is, how does one want to be remembered and deal with it?