I never said Iraq should be the template, I implicitly said Post-WW2 recovery should be. I was referring to Iraq as an example of what not to do, because it was specifically called out for a purge of Nazi officials at every level, which is exactly what happened in Iraq.
As for German resistance, yes of course there were forces outside of government, and they used insiders for information. To believe anything otherwise is just being willfully ignorant, and a waste of time.
Unfortunately to your second point, I don’t think that’s the best approach either. Check out the first 6-12 months of the Iraqi government rebuild during the Iraq war. The Americans basically fired 20,000 Iraqi officials and military members who then had nothing to lose anymore. They then immediately started an insurgency.
Also after these fascist take overs, it’s not as easy as simply saying “you’re a Nazi, therefore you go to jail” because if you didn’t swear fealty to the new government (i.e. if you were Democrat you would now have to call yourself Republican) you could be summarily executed on the spot (check out the video of Sadam’s take over).
So you could resign. But then you get called a coward by armchair generals for not trying to stay in the system and slow it down as much as possible.
So you stay in and keep your head down, and may try to slow the processes down enough to hopefully save some innocents without getting pulled out back and shot. But then you’re called a Nazi collaborator. Idk, I would probably just as well resign, but that could put a target on your back, too, because you’re basically outing yourself as hostile.
Personally, i think how we handled it after WW2 wasn’t perfect, but should be the goal. There’s always clean up that can happen even years afterwards. But if you go purging an entire country’s worth of government officials, you have to replace those you purged with equally qualified people. And you often find that those who are eager to step in, are often just eager to enact revenge, or in some cases, even worse than their predecessors because they are just opportunists who now have the good graces of the new regime who just wanted a quick transition to a friendly government.
And this is why true grass roots movements are so powerful, instead of co-opted movements. Our local election cycles just finished, and there were some decent changes that occurred with city council members, who voted in favor of data centers, getting handed their asses. But guess what. The turn out was record setting, yet abysmal, sitting somewhere around 18-22%. You start putting in real progressives into positions of power, and not fake ones, and changes start to be made (a full on data center blockade is in the works), which gets people to realize they actually have influence, which they then get more involved, and increases turn out in the next election.
We need to send a message to these centrist Democrats so they realize they need us WAY more than we need them or their pandering to fascists for money.
The next fix i would say is that news media needs to become federated and/or open sourced. I’m not sure what this looks like, but probably something like a mix of Ground News (i currently pay monthly for btw) and Patreon, where journalist post their stories to a decentralized platform, that people subscribe to them. Idk, that sounds like that could get clickbait-y. But i would be willing to cut a streaming service off, and give some of that to something that’s decentralized and not owned by some billionaire handing down memos about what can or cannot be mentioned in a story, or straight up axing a story all together.
Then we keep hammering at the injustices and calling the leadership out and spreading the word, and putting up better progressives in the next election cycle.
But to answer the original OP’s question, like you, i don’t think the current Dem leadership has the spine to actually prosecute Trump or any of his cronies and billionaire Epstein buddies, or take a few pages from Trump’s play book and go the low road to hold those fake news organizations liable for things they say erroneously, or to prosecute corrupt foreign governments who helped facilitate this current mess.
Progressives should continue putting forth bills and amendments that force Dem leadership’s hand to show the people how they vote, which to no one’s surprise, it’ll be the same handful of useful rotational idiots. Then progressives should spend every cent raised campaigning in those districts to primary every one of them.