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Well, not to defend the nazis or anything, but they did manage to make considerable amounts of damage and it took multiple great powers working together to beat them back.
That's how Fascists work though. They pick fights with bigger and bigger opponents -- because they're invulnerable, you see -- until they lose. Their economy was absolutely insane, and required flat out pillaging their neighbours. Eventually your neighbours are too big to pillage.
Isn't that not just an imperialistic trait, not necessarily a fascistic one? Franco's Spain didn't collapse, while it was still very much fascistic.
All the while, this trait is very much applicable to the Roman, Ottoman, Soviet or US empires.
Historians debate just how fascist Franco was. Hell, Orwell wasn't even quite sure, and he was very open about the fact that he went to Spain to kill a fascist.
Edit: a choice passage out of Homage to Catalonia, emphasis added:
But there were several points that escaped general notice. To begin with, Franco was not strictly comparable with Hitler or Mussolini. His rising was a military mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the Church, and in the main, especially at the beginning, it was an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism. This meant that Franco had against him not only the working class but also various sections of the liberal bourgeoisie—the very people who are the supporters of Fascism when it appears in a more modern form. More important than this was the fact that the Spanish working class did not, as we might conceivably do in England, resist Franco in the name of 'democracy' and the status quo; their resistance was accompanied by—one might almost say it consisted of—a definite revolutionary outbreak. Land was seized by the peasants; many factories and most of the transport were seized by the trade unions; churches were wrecked and the priests driven out or killed. The Daily Mail, amid the cheers of the Catholic clergy, was able to represent Franco as a patriot delivering his country from hordes of fiendish 'Reds'.
And as a side note, the Daily Mail has been terrible for a long, long time.
I would say that Imperialism overlaps Fascism, but (one of the) difference(s) between the two is that Fascism goes a lot harder into Ultranationalism. Under Imperialism you have a King or Queen, and they are ordained by God to rule. Under Ultranationalist Fascism your race (or whatever they count as 'race', nation, etc) is what makes you superior to everyone else. It was a lot harder to get people to fight for Kings and Queens they only knew from coins, than to say "we're fighting those EVIL (other nation people), whereas we are the PURE nation."
Another difference is that Fascism adores and requires total war. Imperialism wants to expand, but Fascism wants to dedicate every aspect of the nation towards that goal. There's that enigmatic 'other' that has to be destroyed, because it is both a weak and strong opponent. Fascism also says 'violence is good for the nation, if directed properly.' This means your January 6's, your political assassinations, etc, are all highlighted as good things. 'Drain the swamp' kind of rhetoric becomes literal violence to allow people being killed.
As mentioned below, Franco's Spain was quite bizarre, in that it had a lot of different traits (including fascist ones).
Imperialist nations can abandon overseas colonies, 'let' them become independent, etc. Yet Fascist nations need invasion and war to keep their economy going, which means they have to pick bigger fights. They also relied on slave labour (and I'm going to take this opportunity to name and shame the corporations that used those people as slave labour:
Among the slave laborers in the occupied territories, hundreds of thousands were used by leading German corporations including Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben, Bosch, Blaupunkt, Daimler-Benz, Demag, Henschel, Junkers, Messerschmitt, Siemens, and Volkswagen, as well as the Dutch corporation Philips.
What people forget about Germany is that they had always planned to invade the Soviet Union. There's a lot of talk about 'if they hadn't,' but their lebensraum plan required it. In 1944 75% of their economy went to the military. They'd been deficit spending every year since the early/mid 30's. Fascism requires that all effort be put towards the military and war, regardless of if you're at war, but you need to be at war to get the land/money/etc you need to pay for the military that you made to... etc.
So anyway yes, fascist nations bully countries until either a bunch of them or one big one puts them back down.
I won’t say Finland or Thailand were great powers but Japan had a decent showing so it’s not like they were alone
Though it really only took USSR to beat Germany
The USSR was only in the fight thanks to lend lease and even Stalin admitted as much.
Bingo. American industry, British intelligence, and Russian Blood won the war in Europe. It was always a combined effort, and anyone claiming one power could have won alone is talking nonsense.
With American supplies, the USSR might have been able to defeat Germany without the Allies sending ground forces into Europe. However, there’s no way the Red Army could have defeated both Germany and Japan alone. The United States was the major force in the Pacific theater.
I think a major part of getting "beat" is they fought the USSR in the east and simultaneously the USA and UK in the west. I mean the war against Stalin wasn't going super smoothy. But it went on since 1941 already. And it really went south for the nazis when the USA joined WW2.
Outside of industry the US didn’t impact much
The Western Front was going to be won without them due to German troop and supply limitations
The US war effort was the Pacific and preventing the USSR from taking all of Germany (Allies made it in time)
Things would have gone smoother for them if the British didn't slow them down with Yugoslavia.
Good chance they would have captured Moscow and Stalin.
Yes, they were beaten by a group of different people who let anyone join.
Nazis were literally defeated by diversity and inclusivity.
The Nazis based a lot of their racial laws on what was being done in the US, especially the south. Sure, the Allies included a diverse set of nations, but those nations were often incredibly racist too.
Also, they successfully occupied most of the countries in western and central Europe. It's only when they tried to expand into Russia that the war started. If they didn't pick a fight with the russians, the Third Reich would have lasted much longer.
They won many wars in a row without losing. Then they just overdid it a lil bit at the end and got bonked. They couldve had a huge empire if they just stopped a bit earlier.
The great powers initially fucked up too